Moral and Orbital Decay

by J. S. Morin

  # # #

  The bottom on the Spacey Jim’s takeout box was covered in animal fluids. Some of it had dripped from the chickens that had once been butchered and left inside. The rest came from Rai Kub’s stomach. The bouncing, swinging motion of his prison and the foul, carnivorous reek of every surface were more than his guts could bear.

  “Please?” he shouted weakly. “Have mercy on me.”

  There was no thought of bargaining. Well, maybe small, short-lived ones. Betraying Mort’s son wasn’t even within his powers. Certainly, he expected no fair treatment afterward from humans who would perform such an act on a living creature. He could only be grateful in retrospect that Mr. Gologlex couldn’t use magic of that sort to make his life as a zoo exhibit that much more humiliating.

  The bag handles parted, letting in blurry light. Rai Kub imagined that he could see out through the overhead glass of the station’s concourses, barely about to make out the fuzzy outline of a planet, before a face appeared above him.

  “Quiet,” the voice whispered, echoing weirdly through the plastic lid. “You’ve got one job, and that’s to shut up and wait to play your part in this.”

  “I am badly ill,” Rai Kub complained.

  “Get him something to drink,” the other voice grumbled.

  The bag settled down and kept still. Bracing himself against the gummy sidewall of the carton, Rai Kub took a shallow breath to steady his nerves without upsetting his stomach too badly.

  The lid popped open. If Rai Kub had been an athlete, he might have tried jumping up to grab the edge and haul himself over. Instead, he ran the three steps across to the far side of the carton and threw himself against the wall, hoping to topple it.

  The carton tipped. It was overbalanced. As it fell onto its side, a gigantic hand caught it and set the carton upright.

  “Stop that,” the first voice warned.

  There was a hiss of released pressure. The end of a plastic bottle loomed overhead. Rai Kub shielded his head as a torrent of black, carbonated liquid poured in. It sizzled without heat. Bubbles the size of Rai Kub’s palm burst all around him. The sugary beverage got into his eyes, his ears, his mouth. Not that it tasted bad, but it was just inescapable.

  The soda pop poured in until it was knee high with a foam that reached to his waist before settling back down.

  “Drink up.”

  “You’re monsters,” Rai Kub scolded them as the lid came down.

  Before it sealed, the lid moved aside. The face looked away as if it were watching for anyone looking his way. “At least we’re human. Whatever you are, you speak English well enough, but you’re just a xeno. Xenos need to watch who they keep as friends. Cedric The Brown is the reason you’re in there, not us. We’re just doing our job. If you had a job like this one, you’d look for any edge you could find, too.”

  “I’m a good person. I would never take a job that made me do this,” Rai Kub protested.

  Then he remembered Howie Carter. Rai Kub had been the first one to stuff the poor human into a footlocker, then into the ship’s airlock. Carl had been giving the orders, but Rai Kub could have refused. Carter had just been a thief, or at least an employer of thieves. Rai Kub was helping a renegade wizard on the run.

  Whose crime was worse?

  “Can I ride in a pocket, at least?” Rai Kub asked. “I’m too small to get anywhere on my own. This carton might be the death of me.”

  “Merlin’s sake, Chester. You don’t want to kill him.”

  “Fine,” Chester grumbled. Rai Kub had a hard time keeping his two captors straight until they used names. “But I’m cleaning him up first.”

  Moments later, Rai Kub was under the hand-dryer in one of the station’s washrooms after a cursory rinse under a faucet. While the cleaning process had involved more rough handling than he would have liked, for the drying he merely stood on Chester’s hand, twisting and rotating for the jet of arid wind to remove the worst of the moisture from his skin and clothes. While there was a stickiness that no amount of plain water would fix, at least he was drying out.

  Then, without warning or preamble, Chester removed Rai Kub from beneath the dryer and deposited him in the breast pocket of his coat.

  # # #

  Outside the quaintly (but misleadingly) named Dogger’s Shack, Esper found herself in a gathering of five while the rest of her companions could only perceive four among their number.

  “Just tell him,” Mort snapped. “You’re splitting up. Just an elbow to the ribs and a sly word on the side. Even if you won’t admit it to Abbot and Costello there, just let Cedric know his old man is all right.”

  Esper needed a way to reply silently without losing consciousness. A quick nap and she could spend hours yelling at him in private. For now, she was stuck on the receiving end of a conversation she didn’t want to be having.

  Roddy clapped his hands in imitation of Carl. “OK, people. Let’s have a plan this time.”

  A knot of spacers in the travel corridor caused pedestrian traffic to flow around him.

  “Time’s trickling down the hourglass road. Let him know I’m here,” Mort pleaded. He stood blocking Esper’s view of Roddy, practically intersecting Carl as he stood to one side.

  “Carl, take twinkle-spells and check the boutique district,” Roddy said.

  Their captain gave a tipsy nod and a thumbs up. “Wilco, buddy. If our rhino’s trying on diamond tiaras or floral bonnets, we’ll find him.”

  “Esper’s got bodyguard duty on this one, because where I’m taking her, she’s going to be as much use as a turtle-neck sweater on ssentuadi,” Roddy said with a self-satisfied nod.

  “Where’s that?” Esper asked.

  “Who cares?” Mort asked. “Cedric. Right there. Tall, handsome fellow by your left elbow. Recently lost a father. If anything happens to either one of you, I want him to know he’s not the heir to the family legacy quite yet.”

  “Station systems,” Roddy said. “I was thinking about it. Consider that every time we see someone do magic around here, the power cuts out or one of the station’s systems go haywire. Well, if Rai Kub’s too big to miss, and everyone’s missing him, maybe we aren’t looking in the right places. Maybe those Convo’ boys ran into trouble with him. We can check any places magic’s been used by the system error logs. Plus, if we keep in regular contact on comms, we can keep up on any instances of wizardry as they happen.”

  “Well, we should get going,” Esper said quickly, looking away from Cedric. Her traitorous eyes lingered on him from her peripheral vision.

  # # #

  Roddy tottered along with a good buzz. The only part of him that didn’t feel great was a nagging voice that told him it wouldn’t last. He hadn’t brought a to-go drink from Dogger’s Shack, and Esper wasn’t likely to take kindly to the suggestion that she go fetch him one.

  “Where are we headed?” she asked.

  Roddy had already told her once, but maybe it was time to get a little more specific. He pulled out his datapad and checked for likely locations for a communications junction or terminal node. That wasn’t the sort of stuff a station published for public consumption on its welcome splash in the omni. However, as an experienced mechanic, Roddy knew from the general layout where that sort of thing would have to run. It was almost negative-space artistry, inferring where things had to be based on where the map said they weren’t.

  “First spot we’re going to check is right here,” Roddy told her, tapping the back of one finger against the datapad as he turned it for her to see. It was a spot just off one of the main concourses, right by a bank of public computer terminals. If there wasn’t maintenance access on the far side of that wall, the station’s mechanics would have formed a picket line.

  “OK,” Esper said with a shrug. She probably would have been fine if Roddy had told her it was a ten-minute walk and left it at that. “Hey, all this being around Cedric has me thinking about Mort. You got any embarrassing stories about him? You know, for old time’s
sake?”

  Roddy’s feet kept him on course, but his head swiveled back to look up at Esper. Was she playing a joke on him or something? Since when did she care about Mort stories? After that whole weird apprenticeship in Mort’s dreams, Roddy’d gotten the impression that she was sick to death of hearing about him.

  Then again, maybe seeing the kid version was making her a little nostalgic. Human women were, if possible, harder to figure out than laaku.

  With a shrug, Roddy ran a spoon around the inside of his memories, scraping the bottom for misadventures that Esper wouldn’t have already heard about. “OK. Let’s try this one. There was this one time where Mort vaporized one of our techs.”

  “Vaporized?” Esper echoed incredulously. “You can’t mean literally.… What’s the punch line?”

  Roddy pantomimed placing a hand on the Holy Bible. “Swear before He, Him, and the Other Guy. We’d picked up this crack data tech, maybe better than Yomin. He was a game programmer who got tired of corporate life and turned outlaw. Guy was a laugh riot to have around. Always ready with a practical joke. Well, you know that thermal scanner I’ve got?”

  “The little pistol one?”

  Roddy chuckled. “Funny you mention the shape. You see, Joshua thought so too, and when he borrowed it—supposedly to check the shower settings—he pointed it at Mort like an old highway bandit.”

  Esper covered her hand with her mouth.

  Roddy cackled. “Funniest thing was, he wouldn’t admit he did it. Blanked half the ship’s systems and tried to play it off like it was my fault the ship was on the fritz. Like we weren’t going to notice Josh was missing.”

  Esper continued acting aghast. “What happened?”

  “Whaddaya mean? We found him—Josh that is—under a rug in the cargo hold. Damned idiot wizard thought he could literally sweep a murder under the rug. Well, Carl couldn’t exactly kick Mort off the ship or nothing. We were ass-deep in the astral with no way back up without him. Carl cut off his share of the beer for two days until we needed him to get us to real space.”

  “Don’t you have any stories about Mort that aren’t horrifying? I was really hoping for the sort of embarrassing tales you couldn’t tell when he was still with us.”

  Roddy gave the matter some thought. Mort usually ended up killing someone when he was having a bad day. That was just how the mind of a renegade wizard was programmed. He snapped his fingers. “Got one. There was a time we were on Gethos Minor. It was shore leave for everyone, and there was a laaku holo festival in the same little artsy town that housed the local wizard conclave. Well, Mort and I were standing around the shuttle depot, looking to book passage back to our landing site. I pretended to head to the washroom while Mort figured out what shuttle we needed. Instead, I doubled back and watched for almost half an hour as he argued with a talking travel-assist kiosk.”

  Esper and Roddy shared a laugh.

  “Most restrained I’d ever seen him,” Roddy said. “If that thing had been human, Mort would have fried him where he stood. But he just refused to lose an argument with the thing. We missed our shuttle and had to take the next one. I think I saved a recording I took on my datapad.”

  “Can I see?” Esper asked eagerly.

  “Love to show ya,” Roddy replied. “But here we are.”

  They ducked through an “authorized personnel only” door with a tiny helping of wizardly persuasion before Roddy cut Esper off. On the far side of that door, Esper turned into a liability for anything else he planned on doing.

  “You just keep watch,” Roddy said. “Anyone comes by, stall them long enough for me to unplug and find a place to hide.”

  “Can do,” Esper replied with a smug grin on her face.

  Roddy settled in, hand itching to pop the top on a beer to speed the work. Instead, he popped access panels and bypassed the basic level of infrastructure security that the station had in place.

  So far, so good.

  That was as far as Roddy got. Upon plugging his datapad into the system interface, he was met with a rock wall of data protection. He couldn’t log in. He couldn’t bypass it. If it wouldn’t have set off alarms all across the station, Roddy would have cut the core out of the housing and dragged it back to the Mobius.

  Instead, Roddy got on the comm. “Yomin. It’s Roddy. Callin’ in the big guns. I’ve got a data problem. I hear you know a thing or two about getting into systems.”

  # # #

  Yomin zipped up the jacket, obscuring Archie’s robotic exterior from view. He was kitted out from A to Z in bulky, form-blurring clothing. The robot stood passively, arms held slightly out to his sides in the manner of a tailor’s victim or a bride on the morning of her wedding day.

  “Wouldn’t you rather just have me stay here on relay?” Archie asked sullenly. “I mean, all this trouble, and I’m going to end up standing out like a mule in a flock of birds.”

  “You’re overestimating how much attention people pay strangers,” Yomin insisted. Her datalens scanned for exposed metallic parts. She tugged down one of Archie’s sleeves. “You’ll fit in just fine. Remember, we’re on the lookout for a nearly three-meter-tall rhinoceros with a voice that triggers seismographs. You’ll practically be a chameleon by comparison.”

  “Maybe we should hook up my voice modulator, just in case,” Archie hedged. “What if someone talks to me?”

  “You’ve got a non-quarantine-grade respiratory virus,” Yomin countered. “You’re wearing the EV helm for a custom viral filter.”

  “That… actually sounds reasonable.” The robot sounded disappointed.

  There was a knock at Yomin’s door, and Amy opened it before Yomin could invite her to enter. “How’s the prep? We almost good to go here?”

  “You wanna play dress-up with Steely Man here?” Yomin asked, stepping aside with a flourish. “Be my guest.”

  Amy crinkled her nose. “I never played with dolls. Especially not big, whiny, know-it-all dolls.”

  “Well, most kids’ dolls these days are a lot more biologically sound than Archie,” Yomin countered. “This one won’t try to wet itself, at least.”

  “Would that gain me a reprieve from this indignity?” Archie asked with a glimmer of hope.

  “If you blow a coolant line on purpose, I’m letting you seize up,” Yomin warned.

  “He looks good,” Amy said with a shrug.

  Yomin grunted as she picked up the helmet to Carl’s EV suit. “Don’t go giving him a swelled head. I’ve still gotta fit this on him.”

  “If Carl can fit an ego into that thing, anyone can get it on,” Amy shot back with a smirk.

  Yomin finished up Archie’s attire by hooking up Carl’s EV helm to a miniature projector that would make it appear as if a human were inside the helm, instead of a robot, while still allowing Archie to see where he was going.

  “Let’s make ions,” Yomin said, slinging a pack with her computer gear over one shoulder.

  Archie fell in behind her as she headed for the cargo bay. “Doesn’t seem fair. You get to walk around showing yourself to every Ron, Chip, and Barry on this floating hot dog stand. I’m bundled up like a three-year-old playing in a snow park.”

  “You know, I have a remote shut-off to that voice modulator of yours…”

  Archie made a wordless grumbling noise that might have been a harrumph if he still had lungs.

  The robot kept quiet as they made their way through the station holding hands. Passing as a couple kept off a lot of stray looks. It was one thing staring at the weirdo wearing an EV helm in an environmentally controlled space station. It was an entirely different matter gawking at a guy when his girlfriend was staring you down.

  Yomin had the station map displaying real-time on her datalens. There were no impediments along their way to Roddy’s hack site. After briefly strolling by while a station security guard wandered past, she and Archie doubled back and ducked inside while no one was watching.

  “Took you long enough,” Roddy muttered, scramb
ling aside.

  Yomin crouched down and looked at the sorry excuse for a computer hooked up to the station terminal. “Get outta here with this toy.” She yanked out the data lines and tossed the datapad in the laaku’s direction.

  In under a minute, she had Archie connected to the system.

  # # #

  Esper wasn’t needed anymore, and the little alcove Roddy had discovered was cramped with four people. She was just in the way. Rather than remain useless, Esper decided to go hunting for Carl and Cedric.

  “Carl can keep a secret good as anyone,” Mort advised along the way.

  Now Esper remembered why cramped plus a laaku mechanic was preferable to solitude.

  “No, he can’t,” Esper whispered back, drawing a curious glance from an off-duty shuttle pilot from TransStar Orbital as he passed her in the opposite direction. “Carl’s a bigger gossip than the Celebri-News hosts.”

  “Not when it matters,” Mort replied. “Kept my secret right up until it bit us all in the eyeballs. Kept your ‘death’ under wraps, too, I might remind you. I think you can trust him in front of Cedric.”

  “Maybe, just maybe, have you thought that I don’t need Carl scheming to find you a body to snatch?” Esper muttered, shielding her mouth as if from a fake yawn. She gave a nod to a pair of Noodle-O-Rama patrons sharing a bowl of pad thai outside the shop front as they looked her way.

  Esper quickened her pace. She was never going to catch up if she meandered. Mort’s nagging was distracting her and slowing her down.

  “I can teach you how to lock your mental prisoners away,” Mort offered.

  Mid-stride, Esper stumbled. Checking for unwanted attention that might have been drawn to her slip, she ducked aside and sat down in a public omni terminal. “Say that again.”

  “You let me out of here,” Mort offered. “And I’ll show you how to keep little inconveniences like me from ever happening again.”

  “Mordecai,” Esper said formally. “I regret to inform you that as a member in iffy standing with the One Church, necromancy goes against everything I believe in. Death is a one-way door for mankind.”