Head Space

by Andrew Vaillencourt

  Jean’s heart sank. Two weeks of marauding or smuggling felt like a lot of risk. He did not see any other choice. “I’ll see you there, Captain.”

  The line went dead and Jean looked up to the three junkies. “Well, you guys delivered. So I guess it’s my turn.” He held out a hand. “Give me those inhalers.”

  The trio stared blankly, inhalers clutched in possessive fists. Jean sighed. “You want a fix? Pass ‘em over, you idiots.”

  The sandy-haired man extended a tremulous hand and gingerly put his inhaler in Jean’s.

  “Come on, guys, I need them all to make this work.”

  Slowly the other two surrendered their devices. With practiced motions, Jean quickly disassembled each of them down to their constituent parts. He narrated as he worked.

  “You see, when pushers fill these up, they have to prime them right or the diaphragm bursts. After the last puff, the expansion chamber stays primed so the next guy filling doesn’t have to re-prime, get me?”

  It was painfully clear that his audience did not. He shrugged and went on.

  “It’s primed with a full hit, you see. So even though you re-treads think you’re empty, you still got three full puffs between the bunch of you. You just gotta know how to get to ‘em.” He looked to the group. “Any of you guys got enough creds for a drink? This will work better with some grain alcohol.”

  Between them all, they had enough money to cajole a half-ounce of high-proof liquor from a neighboring table. Jean then bled two of the expansion chambers into the empty reservoir canister of the third. Then he topped off the canister with the alcohol. He sealed it and pumped up the pressure manually. When he was satisfied, he held up the inhaler and addressed the junkies.

  “Okay, squaddies. This thing has three full hits in it. It’s cut with alcohol so it’s going to sting like fuck-all, but you’ll get your blaze on all the same.” The six eyes glaring back at him were yawning chasms of pure hunger. Jean hoped they were listening. “When you go to get these refilled, you tell whatever asshole you buy from you want to be primed with nitro, before he fills with blaze. That way you’ll get the whole canister’s worth.”

  His audience vibrated with poorly suppressed avarice, and Jean knew he had led them on as far as was prudent. “You kids play nice, now.” He dropped the inhaler to the table and stood up. As expected, the junkies fell on it like a school of piranhas.

  He watched the frenzied scramble as each fumbled to get the inhaler against cracked lips. Sandy-hair won and took the first hit with gusto. He had not even finished his puff before the second man shoved the woman out of the way and tore the canister away from his companion. He sucked wind like a bellows for his hit and looked for a moment like he would take the last puff as well. Recognizing an opportunity when he saw it, Jean’s hand shot out and snatched the inhaler away. His foot slid across the deck and swept the chair from underneath the man, sending the junkie to the floor with a wet thump.

  Thwarted, the downed man seemed content to sit on the metal deck and let the blaze do its thing. The woman, wide-eyed and terrified looked to Jean and the inhaler in his hand. Jean watched her eyes bounce as her brain calculated her chances of fighting the blaze away from him. When the obvious conclusion was reached, she plead with piquant despair. “You said you were square! No jones!”

  Jean leered down at her. Her hair fell across her face and her shirt had been torn askew revealing much of her right breast. She followed his eyes downward, then looked back up with the same paper-thin smile Jean had seen on a hundred other strung-out women. He held out his empty hand to help her up. “Oh, I ain’t on a jones. But I got thirty hours to kill and no way to pass the time.”

  Her eyes stared hungrily at the inhaler in Jean’s fist, then she took the offered hand to stand up. On her feet, she slid an arm around his waist and slithered up against him. “You wanna party?” It was hopeful, a plea, a bargain offered.

  Jean accepted. “Hell yeah I wanna party.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Roland Tankowicz did not experience fear the same way most people did.

  There were two main reasons for this. The first reason had a lot to do with the sheer volume of danger and violence that had permeated his life from his formative years and into his current middle age. He had been in more firefights, raids, battles, street fights, gang wars, and clandestine operations than he cared to count. Under the best of circumstances, he might experience a sort of tactical apprehension. When things got really bad, he might venture into ‘mildly concerned’ territory.

  The second reason fear struggled for a foothold in his psyche was that his brain was home to a few million tiny robots that constantly monitored his stress hormones and neural activity to make sure that his nine-hundred-and-forty-pound techno-organic body did not suddenly come under the control of a man in the throes of mortal terror. Things like Roland Tankowicz were far too dangerous for a panic attack or a temper tantrum.

  The man Roland found waiting for him back at his office, however, had no such protections from the crippling encroachment of abject horror. He was small and stooped, with a weaselly face and the physique of a man who spent far too many hours at his desk terminal. His hands twitched, clasping and unclasping as he stood in front of Roland’s oversized desk stammering his missive into the impassive face of Dockside’s most famous bruiser.

  “So you see, Corporal,” the man started talking in a high voice. Roland imagined he was trying to sound commanding by increasing his volume. Unfortunately, squeaking louder only made him sound shriller and more agitated. “UEDF and the Expeditionary Force have discovered some intelligence that requires your intervention.”

  “Requires?” Roland let the word drag on. He layered it with both sarcasm and incredulity, packaging the two syllables in a neatly wrapped box of pure scorn. “The Expeditionary Force and the UEDF don’t get to ‘require’ anything of me. It’s part of my discharge agreement. You know, the one where I get left alone forever because you bastards turned me into a murderous zombie.”

  The man held his ground, fear notwithstanding. “Well, yes. It’s also the agreement where you agreed to keep your origins and capabilities a state secret. We think we have afforded you quite a bit of latitude on that issue up to this point.”

  “I haven’t been talking in my sleep, if that’s what you are implying,” Roland replied evenly. “If you are wondering how word about me gets around, well, maybe you should have gotten the good Doctor Ribiero to sign those agreements, too. Or done a better job protecting him from corporate thugs out to steal his inventions. But then again, he agreed not to have you all charged with war crimes, too. I guess you should probably let that one slide, huh?”

  “I am aware of the precarious nature of the impasse between yourself and the UEDF, Corporal Tankowicz. I am not here to threaten you or blackmail you.”

  Roland leaned back in his chair, drawing agonized creaks from the metal. “But you are here to ‘require’ me?”

  The man seemed to grow more confident, as if the conversation was more interesting than the obvious danger of his surroundings. “I said the intelligence required your attention. Not the UEDF. I am sharing this as a courtesy.”

  “I’ve been on the receiving end of UEDF courtesy before, Jimmy. Not a good experience for anyone involved.”

  The droopy man flinched slightly at being called ‘Jimmy,’ but he held his peace. Undaunted, he barreled ahead. “Just read the file, Corporal.”

  “Summarize it.” Roland was in the mood to be intractable.

  “Someone stole Rooker’s body.”

  Finally, the slouching analyst felt he had gained the upper hand. Roland’s face twitched, his jaw tensing as teeth ground together. His dark brown eyes, already deeply sunken under heavy brows, narrowed to the point of disappearing altogether.

  “You lost Rooker’s body?”

  “No. Somebody stole it.”

  Roland rose slowly from his desk. The analyst knew all the figures intimately, but the
corporal’s seven-and-a-half-feet of height appeared far larger in person than it did on a stat sheet. The looming cyborg’s voice rolled over James like a frigid tide. “Let’s forget for a moment that the body in question is a top-secret cyborg armature, and that it contains technology that does not belong to you and has been banned by the Planetary Council. Let’s also ignore the fact that you had responsibility for securing what is in fact a very dangerous weapons system. Instead, let’s deal with what is really bothering me first.” Roland paused to take a deep cleansing breath.

  “Charlie Rooker was one of the finest men I’ve ever known. He was my friend, and he died trying to escape being a slave to the UEDF.” His voice had taken on a quietly dangerous tone. It was not Roland’s rage suddenly making James very nervous. It was his conviction. “You owed Charlie a debt you could never repay, and you LOST HIS GODDAMN BODY?” Roland roared the last part, and James stepped back reflexively. “You couldn’t even grant him the dignity of a peaceful death?” Enormous deltoids convulsed, and thick black hands pressed through the groaning desktop. The surface buckled like Styrofoam and Roland’s desk collapsed into a bent pile of debris with a sharp crack.

  “That man served for eighteen years before you turned him into a monster! Fifteen campaigns he survived, only to die when you guys shut off his life support. A million enemies couldn’t take him down, but you fucks did it with a bit of software because he didn’t want to kill some civilians.”

  “I was six years old when that happened, Corporal,” James interjected, trying to head off the rant before a thousand pounds of enraged war machine ground him into a greasy ball of meat jelly and bone powder.

  This seemed to calm the giant only somewhat. Rather than twisting the head from the apprehensive analyst’s shoulders, a petulant flick of a thick arm sent the crumpled remains of the desk tumbling into the wall with a suitably terrifying crash. Roland sat back on his exposed chair with a weary grunt. “Right.” It was a dejected riposte, his rage being thwarted by the target’s lack of direct culpability. “When did you lose it?”

  “It was stolen shortly after your operation at the Corpus Mundi Facility...”

  “And you are only now telling me? It’s been three goddamn years, James.”

  “And what do you suppose we would say? You had just found out that Johnson and Fox were actively trying to duplicate the Golem project and they had kidnapped the only person left who knew how to build one. You are not exactly known for your forbearance and reasoned approach to conflict resolution. Your exit from UEDF service has many of us in government service rather skittish.”

  “When I escaped the prison cell they built for me under a mountain, you mean?”

  “Yes,” James replied evenly. “Killing sixty-one people in the process.” Then he continued. “The theft was covered up because the political situation concerning the Golem project is still far too precarious. The whole affair had been wrapped up and closed out for decades. If anyone found out that one of the prototypes had gone missing...”

  “It was a man, you little prick. A good man.”

  “With all due respect, Corporal, at that point it was not. Lieutenant Rooker’s organics had been removed and interred with full military honors. His remains are still at rest in the Tomb of Global Protectors with the rest of Earth’s military heroes.” The narrow face tilted in Roland’s direction. “That was one of your conditions for silence, if I recall. Anyway, if any of the principals discovered a Golem armature was missing, the fallout would have rendered all the work of covering it up moot.”

  “So the Lead armature has been missing for three goddamn years, and I’m just hearing about it now? Why even tell me at this point? It’s not like I’m any less predisposed toward killing you.”

  “Because we think someone is using it again. Someone who wants your armature very badly.”

  “Mine? Why mine?”

  “The Lead armature was stolen after Lieutenant Rooker had been removed from it. We believe they want one with intact organic components.”

  “They want Doc Ribiero’s synthetic nervous system and nanobots.”

  “Precisely. The Golem armatures were state-of-the-art thirty years ago, but modern R&D has made great strides since then. Corpus Mundi’s Better Man was just as well-developed as any Golem, and better in some ways. Your body is impressive, but modern technology is rapidly meeting or exceeding your physical specs.” James fixed Roland with an even stare. “Their last crop of prototypes seemed more than capable of giving you trouble.”

  Roland had to concede the truth of that. “That’s true, but without the Doc’s special ‘bots they’ll never integrate the prosthetics as well as a Golem.”

  “Correct. It’s why they haven’t been able to bring you down yet. We believe they want what is in your brain, Corporal, and they may not need it alive or whole to accomplish that.”

  “Well then, I guess you were right, after all. This does require my attention.”

  “We thought you might see things our way.”

  A thick brow rose, and Roland’s beady right eye fixed James with a threatening glare. “I most certainly do not see things your way, Jimmy. Don’t ever get to thinking you and I will ever see things the same way. You want to know what I see? I see a narrow-backed analyst sent on a suicide mission to tell me something your superiors figure is going to piss me off. Do you truly understand how I got out? How I got my discharge?”

  James shifted his weight from foot to foot. It was a furtive and nervous tic. “Doctor Ribiero disabled the fail-safe and you escaped your quarters at Teton...”

  “Don Ribiero broke into a locked facility with a caged monster and risked his life to shut down that piece of firmware. And they were not ‘quarters.’ That was a prison cell.”

  “It was hardly a cell, Corporal...”

  Roland ignored the equivocation. “Then I tore the door off and fought my way to the surface with my empty hands. As you already pointed out, I killed sixty-one people that day, Jimmy. People just like you. I’ve killed a lot of people in my time, and a lot of my kills still haunt me.” Roland paused to make sure the little man was listening. “Nobody from that day makes the list.”

  “And you went on to kill a three-star general and two members of the UEDF Chiefs of Staff.” The man did not seem sure if bringing this up was a good idea, but it was his nature to be the smartest person in the room, and he could not stop himself. “I have read the incident report, Corporal. Those people would have been court-martialed, anyway. You saved them from lengthy prison sentences is all.”

  “Lucky them. Are you getting the point yet or do I need to spell it out?”

  “Yes. I see your point. You want me to feel like you will kill me so I will be suitably terrified. You can rest assured that you are quite scary and that I understand the risky nature of my situation. But we both know that killing me only makes your life more difficult. I have made a very thorough study of you, Corporal. You are many things, but stupid or impulsive are not among them.”

  “Lucky you. On to the next question, then. Why haven’t you simply sent the UEDF to bring me down? If I’m dead, whoever has Rooker’s body loses the thing they want. You guys could gravity-bomb this office from orbit and solve your problem any time you want to.”

  “There are those in our office who have suggested it. But much of the council leadership is more concerned about the destabilizing effect that might have on the Dockside region. Your enemies are counting on this to prevent just such an action. There has been a concerted campaign to destabilize this region of late, and the factions engaging in this behavior have gone to great lengths to ensure that your presence is the only thing keeping the economics of Dockside attractive to the powerful corporate interests that might interfere here.”

  Roland for once looked surprised. “It’s The Brokerage, isn’t it? They’ve been harassing the docks so you guys won’t put me down? We never really figured out what their angle was. Christ that’s clever. They broke The Combin
e over it, for crying out loud.” The big bald head shook. “The Doc’s nanobots can’t be that valuable, can they?”

  “On that front we simply do not know. As impressive as a functioning Golem can be, the effort seems disproportionate to the actual value.” He tilted his head in Roland’s direction. “No offense intended.”

  “None taken. If it is really all about me, then there has to be more going on than just some thirty-five-year-old biotech.”

  “We agree. The Brokerage’s activity in Dockside has been an anomaly for some time now. We believe it started when your presence was made known to them in that ‘Better Man’ business a few years ago. They were heavily invested in Corpus Mundi and Doctor Johnson’s new armature, yet they seemed happy to move on to acquiring you once it became obvious a functional Golem was still alive. After that, they have been meddling in Dockside underworld stability to hide their true motivation.” James scratched the bridge of his nose and cast an inquisitive glance Roland’s way. “Do you remember the mess on Venus? With those OmniCorp operatives?”

  “No way...” Roland started. James actually smiled.

  “Yes. OmniCorp is a Brokerage front. Those three were smuggled into the Colander because The Brokerage arranged for you to go there. They manipulated the Red Hats into starting that fight.”

  “How? How could they...?”

  “A man named Robert Robertson was Lincoln Hardesty’s handler. He made sure that Hardesty would need Richardson dead. He also assumed they would fail.”

  Roland snarled, “I know Bob. Were you aware he’s an android?”

  James nodded. “We had suspicions. He is blind to scanners, though.”

  “I hit him with a tight beam scan pulse at close range when we were bashing the shit out of each other a few weeks back. Got a decent look at his innards. He scans like Golem tech but no organics. Pure AI.”