by Mike Luoma
What else can he do? And where is he?
Is he here on Mars?
How does he get in my head?
And what time is it?
The tech reader sits on the floor next to BC. He picks it up to check the time. Still early. Six AM. Things will be stirring soon.
BC stops. He tries to “listen” with his mind for the voice.
Hello?
No answer?
Good.
BC creates a mental picture in his mind of two large lead doors. He thinks of the feel, the shape of the attack against him, and how it was done, and thinks that into a lock on his mental doors. Somehow, it feels right.
Let’s see if that will hold back any new mental onslaught.
I thought my mind was my exclusive domain. Now I’m suddenly forced to reckon with someone else trespassing in here? What the fuck?
Where is he coming from?
BC stretches out, cautiously emerging from beneath the desk. The office is still empty. BC sits down in the chair.
Won’t this be a picture? AL-Salid walks into his office and here I am. God, though, my brain hurts!
BC sits and waits. He rubs his temples. And then he falls asleep in the chair. He wakes up with Al-Salid standing over him.
“Wake up, I said!” Al-Salid says in a loud voice.
“Huh? Unh,” BC tries to answer as he wakes up.
“I would like to say you’ve surprised me, Campion, but that is not the case. I was, uh… informed that I would find you here this morning,” Al-Salid tells BC.
Informed? How?
“So much for my surprise,” BC answers.
“It does not…” Al-Salid begins. He stops. A puzzled look crosses his face, as if he’s lost his place. “I do not…” he starts, and stops again, again looking confused. Then his countenance clears. He glares down at BC, a wild look in his eyes.
There’s something strange about him, something weird going on behind his eyes! I hope he’s okay.
“Look,” BC begins, “Al-Salid, we agreed to meet after we each met the Eldred, to pool our information! Don’t you remember? I told you’d I’d come incognito, so we could keep it a secret for the time being, because we can’t trust the usual channels. It’s important enough that I had to come myself,”
BC says.
“You have nothing to tell me,” Al-Salid says to him.
What?
“But…” BC tries. “What did they do to you? Al-Salid, you’re not yourself! Did the Eldred do something to…”
“Guards!” Al-Salid shouts.
Two guards come running in, rifles at ready.
Oh. Great.
“Deal with this Trespasser!” Al-Salid commands.
“Al-Salid! What is this? I’m the Pope!” BC protests.
“I see no pope! I see a pretender, at best, and a cold blooded killer at worst!” Al-Salid growls at him. “I see a fish once way out of his depth and now way out of water! High and dry.”
“Al-Salid, we have mutual enemies! We need to band together!”
“So you claim,” Al-Salid says. “I say that’s no longer the case! We no longer have any need to deal with you and your lies! Take him away!” Al-Salid shouts.
The guards grab BC by the arms, one on each side, and lift him up out of the chair. They drag him out of Al-Salid’s office.
“Al-Salid!” BC shouts as they drag him off. “You said we should meet in secret to discuss our people’s future, to combat the sickness, the plague, together! There is so much I need to talk with you about!”
BC stops shouting as the office door closes behind him. He stops resisting his guards and stumbles along between them as they escort him out of the building and down the front steps. A small cart pulls up. They load BC unceremoniously into the back.
The cart whisks BC over to the elevator bank, where another pair of guards “helps” him out of the cart and onto his feet. BC is shuffled off into the elevator and down four levels, and finally into a holding cell somewhere in the UIN security center. He has a vague idea of where he is, although he didn’t spend too much time going over the plans of prison cells.
He paces back and forth in the small, six foot by four-foot cell.
This sucks! I HATE BEING CAGED! Hate how claustrophobic I feel!
BC is left alone, cooling his heels, for what seems like hours.
Great, this is working out perfectly. Just fucking wonderful. I knew he’d be surprised, but that was not the reception I expected! I thought he’d be receptive, at least hear me out. He was entirely different the last time we spoke. We talked about this! What could the Eldred have done to him?
He looked so strange, something weird about his eyes, and the way he seemed lost a couple of times.
BC’s head throbs.
No! Headache? No. What, then?
YOU! YOU ARE…
The shouting voice echoes in BC’s head again.
Gotta shut him up! Shut him out, somehow!
He thinks about the lead doors he sealed in his mind before, pictures them shutting once again, and the voice stops and goes away.
Hmmm.
A headache begins to pound at his temples. BC tries to think it away. Stop! It’s like someone banging on the doors of my skull, pounding to get in! Keep Out! Makes me tired. So draining.
BC pulls a cot down from the wall of the cell and lies down. He drifts off to an uneasy sleep.
Chapter Twenty-Two
A voice calls to BC in his dream. Or is it a dream?
“BC! BC!” A whispered voice calls his name.
“BC!”
He stirs, begins to wake up, and tries to sit up.
“BC!”
A little louder this time.
“Wha? Where are you?” BC asks.
I recognize that voice… who is it?
“Over here,” the voice says in a hoarse whisper, coming from over by the cell door. BC gets up and goes over to the door. The door of the holding cell is solid gray. There’s no way to see outside.
“Down here, BC!” BC hears the voice call from the foot of the door. He bends over, and kneels down at the base of the door. A small metal slot is cut out of the door’s base so that food trays can slide through. BC looks through the slot and sees two big brown eyes in a dark face. I know those eyes! But there’s no way!
“BC! You sorry fuck! It’s me, Fiza!” she whispers as loud as she can. Fiza?
Here?
How in hell…
“Fiza!?” BC answers.
“No time for questions, BC! I’m getting you out of here!”
There’s a loud “click”, and the door opens.
“Come on!” She says, waving him out of the cell.
This can’t be real! I must still be asleep, dreaming in the cell.
“Will you come on!” Fiza says, still whispering, but urgent. “I’m not supposed to be here! Let’s move it!” She heads back down the row of cells towards the exit. BC follows her out of the cell rows, and then out past four guards slumped over in chairs in an outer office. Fiza puts an electronic key back in the hand of one of the slumped over guards.
“Gas,” she tells him, answering his unasked question. “They never knew what hit them! I scrambled the secure cams just before I hit them with it. With any luck, it’ll look as if you just walked out of the cell on your own and disappeared.” She looks around the office, picks up a bundle of cloth from the floor.
“We’ve got about fifteen minutes. Here, put that on.”
She hands him the bundle.
BC is still trying to digest the situation. He takes the bundle from her, staring at her in a semi-daze. Fiza? How the fuck did she get here? Not dead. Not whoring on Wentworth Station. Not her usual clothing style, either.
Fiza is wearing a traditional burka, covering her from head to toe. All BC can see are her eyes.
“BC! Wake up! Put that thing on, quick!”
The bundle she handed BC is a burka like her own. BC throws it on over his tech sui
t. He looks out the eye slit at Fiza.
“You’re beautiful,” she jokes. “I’m getting you out of here through the women’s section. Follow me. And try to act a little feminine.”
“How? In this thing?” BC protests.
“I don’t know,” she says. “Slouch a little. C’mon, hurry up.”
BC doesn’t move.
“What?” she asks him.
“Is that really you under there, Fiza?”
She sighs. She lifts off the top of the berka’s veil so BC can see her face. She’s darker than BC has ever seen her, and her hair is dyed deep, ebony black.
“Aside from some cosmetic changes so I can blend in better, it’s all me,” she says. She pulls the veil back on over her head. “Satisfied?”
It’s her, alright.
“Fiza, how…” he starts, but she stops him with a wave of her arm.
“Not now, BC. I don’t have the time to explain. Neither do you. We don’t have time. The security surveillance cams will only be scrambled for another minute or so.”
She sets off down the hallway and BC scrambles to follow behind her. The eye slit of his burka keeps slipping up on him, blinding him.
BC ends up piling into Fiza as she comes to a stop.
“What are you doing?” she asks as she disentangles from him.
“I can’t see!” BC protests. “The slit’s too high or something!”
She takes his hand and pulls him along.
“Just hold on to my hand. I’ll lead.”
She pulls him along down the corridor. BC can’t see a thing. He tries to keep his balance, tries not to trip or lunge into anything as he careens along behind Fiza.
“In here,” he hears her say, and she yanks him sideways through a doorway. They stop short. A man with a gruff voice asks Fiza a question in Arabic. Fiza answers him back in Arabic. She elbows BC and whispers, “Bow!”
BC nods his head, and then nearly falls to the floor as Fiza yanks him down lower.
“Lower!” she whispers. BC tries to comply. Fiza and the man continue their exchange in Arabic. Fiza’s tone of voice is all deprecation and sweetness. The man’s gruff voice sounds angry, accusatory. Hope we’re not in trouble!
BC can’t understand. He stays down, huddling in his darkness until Fiza grabs hold of his arm and raises him up with a yank.
“Come on,” she tells him, “We’re almost there.”
She talks as she pulls him along. “That was one of Al-Salid’s ‘advisors’. He wanted to see you, have a good look at you! I had to tell him you were on the fucking rag, ‘unclean!’ just so he’d leave us alone,”
Fiza tells BC. “In his twisted mind, that makes you unclean. He didn’t need to see you after I told them that.”
“Great,” BC says, “just great.”
Fiza laughs, “Hey! You don’t have to act like it really IS you’re time of the month! Okay, quiet, now.”
BC hears women’s voices as they round another corner. The floor beneath his feet changes from hard plastic to soft carpeting. Fiza stops him, and leans in to whisper to him.
“Okay. We’ve just entered the women’s section. No men are allowed in here. We usually take off our veils in here, but we can’t have you do that now, can we?” she asks rhetorically. “We’ll need to move through quickly, as if on an errand, so that we can stay veiled and try to avoid questions. Hold onto my hand and try not to trip. Let’s go!”
She pulls him along quickly behind her as they cruise through the women’s section. He hears a few grumbles as they pass through, mostly from women trying to avoid getting trampled by the two of them. BC hears Fiza toss off what sound like quick pleasantries in Arabic as they fly through the section. I wonder what these women would think if they knew the Pope was passing through here in disguise?
Man, I cannot see anything! This kinda sucks!
They reach what BC assumes to be another set of pressure doors. Fiza opens them and pulls BC
through. The doors close behind him.
“Okay, BC, you can take off the veil,” she tells him. BC lifts the top of the burka up and off his head. He looks around. They’re in a storage area filled with old maintenance robots.
“That was a close call back there! One of Al-Salid’s top men,” Fiza tells him, “That’s why you had to bow lower. You did okay though, BC,” she says. “You did okay.”
“Thanks, I guess,” BC says to her. He listens for a second. “I don’t hear any alarms, yet. Guess we are okay.”
“Those prison cell guards won’t sound the alarm right away, not until they have some explanation for how they fell asleep and you disappeared. They’ll even send out their own search teams first, before they tell the proper authorities.
“They don’t want to be responsible for your escape, so they’ll try to recapture you themselves first. It’s a whole stupid-fucking ‘honor’ thing. They don’t want to lose face,” she explains. She laughs. “The best part? None of those guards can come into the women’s area without authorization, so this is the one place they can’t look for you!”
Fiza takes her veil off. BC can’t help but stare at her newly dark complexion and hair. Fiza notices and smiles.
“Like what you see?” she teases him. “Oooh, I’m getting ogled by the fuckin’ Pope!” she laughs.
“More like I can’t believe what I see,” BC admits.
“Yeah, the dye jobs were really good, first rate, better than what I could do for myself the last time. I have to look the part.” She pauses, remembering that BC once doubted her story about hiding out on Mars. “I was here before, too,” she insists. “Now do you fuckin’ believe me, you shit?” she asks, pouting at him.
“What are you doing here?” he asks.
“Saving your sorry ass,” she says.
“How?”
“Wentworth needed someone here, deep undercover. He pressed me into service. Made me an offer I couldn’t refuse,” she says, her eyes growing distant. Her attention snaps back to BC. “Good thing for you I was here!”
“You’re working for Wentworth?” he asks her, still not sure what to believe.
“Not much choice there! You know that,” she says.
“I thought you were…” he pauses.
I thought you were a sex slave working for Wentworth.
“I thought…” he stammers.
“What the fuck?” Fiza berates him. “Spit it out, BC!”
“I thought… you were, um, dead. For a while,” he says.
“That’s part of my cover!” she tells him, rolling her eyes since she needs to explain her “cover” to BC.
“Wentworth made it look like I died. That made me an untraceable agent! But come on, he did tell you I was still alive, didn’t he? He said he did.”
“Sure, he did, in a way,” BC admits, “but I didn’t necessarily believe him! Plus he, uh… he also said you were working all drugged up as a sex slave on his station.”
“Huh,” she says. “Well, that was the alternative he offered me. Motherfucker! Made it hard to refuse, ya know?
“Guess he wanted me so deep undercover he even hid me from you!” She laughs. “But! When he heard you were coming here, he got in touch and asked me to keep an eye on you.
“Good thing I did, huh?!”
“Al-Salid… He wasn’t himself,” BC says.
It was like he didn’t remember talking with me at all!
“There’s talk of this already in the women’s quarters,” Fiza tells him. “Al-Salid left last week on a mysterious trip. Not long after he returned, a new advisor suddenly just appeared at his side, with no explanation.
“But now this new advisor has Al-Salid’s ear, and some say his mind, too… Man, these people are fuckin’ superstitious, BC, you should hear ‘em talk! But you never learned Arabic, didya?
“Guess I’ve got that one up on you!”
BC is preoccupied, thinking.
How am I gonna hide out until my ship comes back? As a woman?
&nbs
p; “My ship isn’t due back for another six days,” BC tells her. “What am I supposed to do, hide in here? How long until there’s authorization for them to search here?”
“It’ll probably take them about two hours to give up on their own searching, before they contact the higher ups. They’ll be in here soon after that,” Fiza tells him. “Don’t worry. Wentworth has a ship coming for you! He sent it when I told him they’d thrown you in a holding cell,” Fiza says. She points to a door in the wall to the right. “There’s an airlock just outside this supply room. Wentworth’s ship will meet you outside that airlock in about an hour.
“Hold on a sec.”
Fiza looks around the room, moves some half-assembled maintenance bots out of her way, and then drags a black crate out into the open.
“There’s an emergency EVAC suit in here,” she says, kicking the crate. “It doesn’t have a lot of oh-two, just about fifteen minutes worth, but that should be enough to get you on the ship. Just don’t go out there too early, huh?”
She looks around the room.
“Where’s a clock?”
She finds a clock readout on one of the door’s control boxes.
“Good. Exactly one hour from now, by this clock, duck out through that door, then through the airlock on your left. Once outside the airlock, Wentworth’s ship will land and meet you. Getcha outta here!”
She stops and stares at him.
“What?” he asks, finally.
“Oh, shit, BC!” she cries. She flings her arms around him and hugs him tight. “I miss you, you stupid shit!” She pulls back a little, looks up at him, right in the eyes, and then kisses him – quick, fast and passionate.
She pulls away and turns to go.
“What about you, now?” BC asks her. “Are you going to be okay?”
She turns back to him.
“You know me! I’ll be fine!” she says. She throws her burka back on, up and over her head.
“Good luck, BC,” she says. “I’ll see you again. Promise.”
She ducks out the double doors they’d come in through and leaves BC standing alone in the storage room.
