Hardshellz

by Morris Kenyon

CHAPTER 4. TAKING CHARGE.

  For a moment, I thought I'd been shot as the gavel fell. I'd done it! I'd won! One hundred thousand commission coming my way.

  Julianna jumped up and squealed with delight. Would a gynoid feel such a level of emotion? Or was she merely displaying an excellent simulation? When she hugged me a moment later, all such thoughts vanished. Who cares when she pressed her perfect body tight against mine? There were cheers from those members of the audience carried away by all the excitement. Julianna planted a kiss on my lips before stepping back.

  Çrámerr stood and, gripping my elbow, shook my hand. "Well done – at the end of the day you actioned the challenge." Sure, whatever that meant.

  As the auctioneer readied Lot sixteen, Julianna and I edged out of our row of seats and made our way up to the front of the room where we were greeted by one of her assistants. One man even wolf-whistled at Julianna as she passed by, her dress clinging gracefully to her figure. Like the auctioneer, her assistant wore a well-tailored business suit in pastel mauve. To be honest, the assistant looked like a younger clone of the auctioneer herself. Perhaps she was – or maybe she was merely flattering the senior woman's style in an attempt for promotion.

  We completed various e-forms and Julianna transferred over eighty-six million to the auction house. Eighty-six, I hear you say? Thought you'd only bid sixty-six. That's true, but when you add in the auction's commission, planetary sales tax, Multi World Council's galactic sales tax, insurance and various other fees, the sum soon ramped up, as Çrámerr might say.

  Julianna grinned hugely. "He'll be so pleased. Thank you," she said before kissing me again. I could get used to this. I'm not sure why she was so enthusiastic as any fool could have bid on Sava's behalf. However, now came the real part of my assignment – guarding the shell and keeping it safe from harm.

  I watched as robots crated the shell with millimetric exactitude and sealed it with the auction house's logo. The robots placed it on a hover-sled and then stood by waiting for further orders. I assumed Sava had fixed up storage for his purchase. Norin entered the room. Now there was a man who was as cold as those metallic robots lined up against the wall. Not trusting either myself or the robots, he scrutinised the crate before stepping back, apparently satisfied.

  Stepping over to him I asked where his boss wanted the shell storing. Norin forwarded an instaflash telling me Sava had arranged for it to be stored in a bonded warehouse's vaults overnight and then it would be shipped off to his estates on Khabarovsk the following day. Naturally, I would be staying with it in the warehouse, just in case all the metres-thick, titanium plated walls, arrays of electronic alarms, CCTV, well trained Security Officers and all the rest of it wasn't good enough.

  Robots placed the crate onto an anti-grav sled and loaded it up onto a pantechnicon. I climbed into the back so I could keep an eye on it throughout and make sure nobody pulled the old switcheroo trick. More than one buyer has found that, when they eagerly opened their crate at journey's end, what was inside wasn't worth a bean.

  It was only a short journey to the space-port and Norin handled the paperwork at customs. Then we hung a left and were at the warehouse's entrance. It would do as the place looked secure, surrounded as it was by fences – the inner one advertised as being electrified, savage bear-dogs (another genetically modified monster, in case you were wondering), thick walls, forests of CCTV cameras and platoons of guards, both human and robot. The crate was unloaded and taken down to an underground storage room. The door was at least two metres-thick. It would take a laser hours to burn through.

  Norin supervised the crate's installation and then stepped back, satisfied that all was in order. Julianna looked around and then gave me a kiss.

  "Goodnight, Vic," she murmured. "Pleasant dreams."

  And then the door swung closed, leaving me locked in with the shell while they returned to their jobs of guarding and pleasuring Sava. That kiss confused me. Gynoids are programmed to serve their owner – but you know how it is. The more intelligent a droid is the more they develop their own personality. And I wasn't even sure that Julianna was a gynoid. She could just as easily be a woman – in which case all bets were off.

  Thinking about Julianna, I took a superstim pill to keep me on high alert during the night and then ate a concentrated meal pill. All the nutrients you need in a convenient capsule form. Not as good as that banquet I'd enjoyed last night but it keeps you alive. That done, I decided to log onto the Galactoweb and catch up on the news.

  Dunk and dunk again. I couldn't log on. The walls were so thick and I was underground so I couldn't get a signal. The most boring night of my life loomed. I'd rarely been without the Galactoweb – who has these days, except on some back-to-nature colonies? – and the experience wasn't good. I couldn't even close my eyes and rest as the vault was brilliantly lit and I had taken that superstim which made me hyper-alert. I paced up and down like a caged predator and cursed.

  Pressing the intercom, I spoke to one of the security guys up in the control room. "Hey – can you leave me something to do?" I asked.

  The guy – a true sadist if there ever was one – chuckled. "Sorry, amigo, no can do. The door's on a time lock so no way can we open it until eight when it's time to load your cargo onto the spaceship. Sorry." He chuckled again, enjoying my plight. "Have a nice night." I heard a click as he signed off.

  I punched the door but only succeeded in hurting my fist. Nothing for it. I sat down on a plastic chair that had been provided and reviewed my memories, glad for once that I hadn't deleted them when I last backed them up.

  After I'd rescued that tycoon's son, Âgustin, from the Krillaz, I'd earned a hundred thousand Hydrans and spent a large wedge of them on the sybaritic pleasures of Las Sirte. Hoo boy! Well, I had to blast those nightmare memories of Hancox 1 from my mind, didn't I? I enjoyed reliving those memories in full, technicolour vision but it wasn't as much fun as living them the first time around.

  Then, after I got through them, I thought some more about Julianna. I still wasn't sure whether she was truly hi-man or gynoid but it didn't matter. Either way, she belonged to Sava and no way was I taking her from him. I've done some foolish things in my time but getting on the wrong side of a Russian oligarch would be beyond stupid. Those guys don't mess about. With their wealth – and connections – if they want you dead, then you're dead. End of. And they don't stop there. They go for your family and friends as well.

  It was just as well I'd been fitted with a bionic bladder sometime in the past as there were no facilities in the vault. As you can picture, it was merely a titanium lined room with CCTV cameras fitted high on the ceiling and thigh-thick bars locking the door. All that was in it was myself and one large crate.

  So I sat down and slumped in a corner and waited. And waited. And waited.

  Eight in the morning announced itself when those girder thick bars retracted into the walls and the door swung open. Norin stood there together with an anti-grav sled, a blue-uniformed Security Officer who was stifling a yawn and two brushed steel robots that looked at me with their flashing yellow eyes. If I didn't know better, I would have thought those metallic creatures were laughing at me. Instead, they extended a variety of grapplers and carefully loaded the crate onto the sled and escorted it out the room.

  Norin looked at me with contempt as I struggled upright and flexed my back. I heard a few creaks and I thought I should make an appointment with my doctor to sort out another course of anti ageing medication. Don't worry about it now but I'll cover anti-ageing in another story. Basically, if you can afford it, and it doesn't come cheap, human life spans have been greatly extended.

  Anyway, I stood up and followed the little procession out of the vault, along a corridor, turned right, then into an elevator that took us to the first floor. There we came to a loading bay and the pantechnicon which had brought us here. A bank official stood waiting and more e-forms were signed acknowledging transfer. The robots loaded it into the back of the pante
chnicon and then we lifted off and drove away, heading through the downtown flight lanes of Verrassa.

  Not that I got to see much as I was locked in the back with the crate and the robots. However, I could tell that the journey was smooth and trouble free as the pantechnicon glided along without being disturbed. The sunlight hit my eyes when the back opened and I saw we were in the space-port next to a freight shuttle. It was painted a vivid lime green and if I hadn't already worked out who it belonged to from that colour scheme then its logo, Economou interplanetary Logistics, Inc., gave the game away.

  Economou are a big multi-world outfit shipping outfit and I know one of their top execs. You're ahead of me here – it's your friend and mine, Luis Çrámerr. Looking around, I half expected to see him networking or interfacing or whatever the management buzz-word of the week is but there was no sign of him. Still more e-forms were filled in – in triplicate, no doubt, customs cleared and then the robots took the crate up the cargo ramp and inside.

  Norin looked at me pointedly and I followed the crate up the ramp and then made my way to the passenger seating area where more CCTV cameras ensured I could monitor the crate every second of the journey. Did I mention that I was getting heartily sick of the sight of that box and felt I knew the crate's appearance like I know the back of my hand?

  I sat and waited until the shuttle was fully loaded – which took a couple of hours – and then it blasted off, soaring up into the stratosphere and beyond entering the blackness of outer space. Accessing the shuttle's external cameras I watched as the main starship came into view. The shuttle looped around the starship as if to give us all the best possible view before entering the massive cargo bay from the side.

  Like the starship which brought me to Batavia VII, this was another converted hardshell asteroid. But it was even larger being over two kilometres long and 750 metres thick at its widest. But like most asteroids, it was a knobbly, cratered object. Lights twinkled over much of its surface and white hot sunlight reflected off projecting wings, antennae, rockets, weaponry and all the other stuff you expect to see on the outside of a spacecraft.

  Did I mention that a broad, lime-green stripe ran down the centre of the ship and its name – President Perseus P. Porter – also in lime-green, was highlighted by the stern?

  Our transport entered the cargo bay and a corridor snaked out from the side and docked with the shuttle's airlock. There was a brief hiss as the atmospheres equalised and then we were good to go. Knowing my place in the grand scheme of things, I walked back to the shuttle's cargo area and hung about the crate.

  Eventually, the ship's robots got around to collecting the crate and took it to the giant star-craft's hold. These weren't beautifully polished constructs of brushed steel and chrome but looked like they'd worked from one end of the Orion Arm and back again. They were scuffed and battered and one even had traces of rust around an old welding seam. A nasty grating sound came as it adjusted one of it's work-arms.

  Safely secured in a locked hold, I was free to go. Nobody expected me to sit locked in a hold for the entire duration of the journey to Khabarovsk. At least, I hoped they didn't because they'd be disappointed.

  There wasn't much cargo to take on board. Batavia VII doesn't export much – fishing trophies mostly – so it was mostly passengers on the first stage of their journeys home. Many of them were returning to Rööthersphere – a highly developed industrial world. Rööthersphere itself is a high-G world and the dense atmosphere and high gravity makes its inhabitants shorter and squat, low to the ground but generally stronger than the average. Even through my translator program, their blue-collar tones were still noticeable as the men bragged about how many fish they'd caught while the women compared shopping malls.

  I sighed as I thought how I'd be stuck with them for the two weeks it would take the President Porter to reach Rööthersphere. I'd almost rather be locked in that hold with only the crate for company. Almost. However, there were compensations. The women were all glammed up, even on their journey home, and had beautifully tanned arms and legs and weren't worried about showing a little leg, even if their thighs could politely be called 'chunky'.

  Perhaps there was something up with me but I couldn't be bothered. A few of them tried flirting with me, one last fling before returning to the concrete charms (I'm being ironic here) of their home world.

  Instead, I was thinking of one hi-man female, or possibly gynoid – who could tell? Either way, she had got under my skin and caused an itch I couldn't scratch. So I was thinking of Julianna and how beautiful she was when – to my very great surprise – there she was coming down one of the passenger corridors.

  For the second time in my life that clunking sound was caused by my jaw slamming onto the floor.