Bad Timing

by Rebecca Levene

  "What the hell was that?" Enigma said. She looked around the chamber, frowning. "And just where the hell are we?"

  Johnny glanced around, too. Everywhere he looked he could see mining equipment, hard hats, vast conveyor belts and the well-oiled drills. And everywhere shards of a strange, rainbow-coloured rock that could only be raw chronite. "I'm guessing the chronite mine," Johnny said.

  "Oh, so that's why you brought us here," Jo said, sounding relieved. "We thought you were running away from O'Blarney."

  "I didn't run, I was pushed."

  "Oh yeah, who by?" Enigma asked sceptically.

  "That girl you just saw," Johnny replied irritably, "must have thought she was saving my life," he said, thinking out loud.

  "Why would she do that?" Jo said.

  "Reckons she's in love with me," Johnny said uncomfortably.

  The others all looked at him unbelievingly, even Min Qi Man. One-Eyed Jack laughed. "Best excuse for turning tail I ever heard."

  Johnny shrugged. "Believe what you want - makes no odds to me." He turned away from them and began scanning the chamber for exits. There was one on the far side, the massive cage of a lift. With any luck, it might lead all the way to the surface. Johnny strode towards it, leaving it up to the others whether they followed him or not. After a moment, they all did. Johnny smiled grimly. They thought he was a coward and still followed him around like puppies.

  "You said it was O'Blarney running the chronite mine," Enigma said. "Are you saying we've found his base?"

  "Only one way to find out," Johnny said, stepping up to the lift and wrenching open the heavy mesh door of the cage. He nodded into the lift cage and, after only a moment's hesitation, the other Strontium Dogs walked in.

  He waited till they were all inside, then stepped up to the doorway, blocking their exit. At the look in his eyes, all but One-Eyed Jack took a small step back.

  "What's wrong?" Jo asked tremulously.

  "What's wrong is," Johnny said, "my partner's missing, the Blimp's been poisoned, and someone here did it."

  If he was expecting a flash of guilt from any of the other Strontium Dogs, he didn't get one. Jo looked shocked, Enigma dubious. Min Qi Man was as expressionless as usual.

  Only One-Eyed Jack looked like he believed Johnny. "Yeah, I've been thinking the same thing."

  Johnny kept his face expressionless. "Really?"

  Enigma frowned. "Seems to me it's obvious who the traitor is. I mean, who stayed behind to be with O'Blarney?"

  But One-Eyed Jack shook his head. "Nope, Middenface isn't the type. I reckon he stayed to take care of the Blimp. If anyone betrayed us, it was that Red girl. She must have put the poison in the food, then left before she could get caught in the act."

  Jo turned to Johnny. "Is that really what you think? I thought Durham Red was a friend of yours."

  Johnny shook his head. "Durham's not... she's not a friend. But she's not a traitor either. See, the thing is, I don't think whoever poisoned the Blimp meant to poison just her, I think they meant to poison all of us. Leave us all defenceless when O'Blarney attacked."

  He left it hanging in the air, waiting for them to figure it out. After a moment, Jo said hesitantly, "So what are you saying? Are you saying it wasn't any of us after all?"

  Johnny shook his head and - without being too obvious about it - dropped his right hand to blaster level. As he did, he knelt and picked up a small lump of rock in his right. "I'm saying whoever did it didn't expect there to be any witnesses left." He rose slowly to his feet, never taking his eyes off the others for a second. "Which meant whoever did it didn't bother to cover their tracks. Right?" And, with a quick flick of his wrist, he flung the stone in his hand at One-Eyed Jack.

  The other mutant was too startled to respond in time. The stone cut into his cheek, drawing a thin stream of blood. "What the hell are you-?" One-Eyed Jack began.

  Then he saw the drawn blaster in Johnny's hand, pointed straight at his chest.

  The other mutants backed away, leaving a clear space around One-Eyed Jack. Their eyes flicked between him and Johnny, nervous and undecided.

  "Funny, isn't it," Johnny said, his voice hard and very cold, "how a man with one eye in the future didn't see that one coming."

  "I was distracted," One-Eyed Jack said, but his voice lacked conviction. Johnny knew the man knew that he was caught. Which meant he was the most dangerous he'd ever been.

  Johnny didn't let his gun waver even a millimetre from its target. "Yeah, that's possible. I guess it must be pretty distracting, pretending to be someone you're not." He let that sink in, then added, "All I want to know is, when did you replace the real One-Eyed Jack? On the journey here, or before we even met Delater?"

  One-Eyed Jack glared at Johnny. Then he relaxed, and smiled. "On the journey here," he said. His voice sounded different. More precise, and softer than it had been. "One-Eyed Jack's ship is the fastest in the Doghouse. He got here in plenty of time for me pull the switch, and you never knew a thing about it."

  Jo let out a small squeal of shock. Johnny, despite himself, flicked his eyes over to her for a fraction of a second.

  It was all the imposter calling himself One-Eyed Jack needed. He flung himself forwards, grabbed Enigma and pushed her violently towards Johnny, then slapped his hand down hard on the control panel of the lift. There was a squeak of protesting machinery and the lift shot upwards, leaving Enigma clinging desperately to the half-open door and Johnny on the ground below.

  18 / UNMASKED

  Johnny didn't have any time to think about it. He grasped the short-range teleport at his belt and pushed the controls to send him up as far as it could.

  It almost wasn't far enough.

  He popped into the air three metres above the ground and just below the bottom of the lift. He lashed his arm out, but only the fingers of his right hand were able to grasp the bottom of the cage. The teleport device fell away to smash on the floor below. The lift continued accelerating upwards, nearly jerking his arm out of his socket. For a heart-stopping moment, he could feel his grip slipping. The ground was twenty metres below him, and getting further away by the second. He clawed his fingers desperately around the thin wire of the cage. It felt like the metal was cutting his fingers in half, chopping them off at the joints. But, somehow, he held on.

  Damn it! he thought. This lift is for the natives, it's moving at their speed.

  To either side of Johnny, the chronite walls of the lift shaft streaked by in an eye-bending multi-coloured blur. Accompanying the motion was the long drawn-out scream of Enigma, as she swung from the still-open door. In the cage itself, the other Strontium Dogs had been thrown to the floor by the sudden motion. They remained pinned there by the immense G-force. A few centimetres from Johnny's hand he could see Jo's terrified face pressed hard against the wire mesh. Her eyes stared beseechingly into his. To one side of her, another eye stared into Johnny's with a different expression altogether. It was One-Eyed Jack, and as Johnny watched he began to creep his hand towards the blaster hanging at his waist.

  Gritting his teeth against the pain, Johnny held on grimly with his right hand and, fighting against gravity every millimetre of the way, began to pull his other arm towards the cage.

  As soon as she made it through the door, Durham Red realised why Bad Boy O'Blarney hadn't bothered defending the outside of his base. He didn't need to, the inside was a death-trap.

  Luckily, she'd expected some sort of automatic defence to spring into action as soon as she forced open the door, so as she slipped through, she dropped and rolled, narrowly avoiding the two tensile steel spears which thudded into the door behind her. She remained where she was, lying on her stomach to one side of the door, to regain her breath and take stock of the situation.

  This side door, she found, had let her into a narrow corridor, lined along the walls with head sculptures of O'Blarney and of a woman she vaguely recognised but couldn't immediately place. The floor was a simple tiled affair in a black-and-w
hite check. It looked strangely unmarked, as if not many people ever came this way. But it didn't look dangerous.

  Keen to get on with things, to find O'Blarney before he realised she was there, she clambered to her feet and prepared to head down the corridor. Her left foot landed on one of the black tiles.

  Only her super-sensitive hearing saved her. She heard the muted click of something triggering and flung herself back and down.

  Shrapnel from the blast thudded into her chest, a shower of horribly sharp fragments. It was stopped by the thick body armour she wore there. If she'd remained directly above the tile, the explosion would have ripped her legs to shreds. She couldn't contain a shudder as she picked the twisted metal carefully out of her breastplate. Then, after a moment more to collect herself, she climbed carefully to her feet, and retrieved her gun from where it had skidded out of her hands.

  She looked back at the tiled floor. The tile which had exploded beneath her was black. Which suggested that O'Blarney - with a robot's binary neatness - had mined the black tiles and left a clear path through the whites.

  She had her foot poised to step onto the first white tile when it occurred to her that as well as being a robot, O'Blarney was also a deranged psychopath. He'd probably mined all the tiles.

  She stepped back from the floor again, took a spare ration pack from her backpack and threw it carefully on to the first white tile. There was an instant of stillness - then the pack was blown apart in a shower of sparks.

  Red smiled grimly and looked around the spartan antechamber for more things to throw.

  Middenface was woken by the sound of an explosion. For a confused moment, he thought they were still fighting O'Blarney and made to grab his weapon, to rejoin the fray.

  Then he realised two things. Firstly, the explosion didn't sound quite right. It had the slight tinny quality of a recording. And secondly, he couldn't grab his weapon, couldn't move at all, because someone had tied him down against a hard, cold surface. His mind, for some reason, thought of an operating table, although operating tables weren't usually tilted at a forty-five degree angle like this one. This must be something else.

  At that point, memory returned in an unwelcome flood. O'Blarney had caught him. It was O'Blarney who had tied him up and who was no doubt going to perform something like an operation, but infinitely more painful, on this hard forty-five degree surface.

  Middenface realised instantly that O'Blarney was somewhere in the room with him. He couldn't have said how he knew. Just some sixth sense that Strontium Dogs developed over the years telling them when an enemy was near. He kept his eyes carefully closed, not wanting to let the robot know that he had regained consciousness.

  But O'Blarney must have had some sixth sense of his own. "Nice to see you're back from the land of nod, Mr McNulty," he said.

  Sighing, Middenface opened his eyes. The robot was standing little more than an arm's length away from him, not even looking at him. Instead, he was facing a bank of screens. The one he seemed to be gazing at intently showed nothing but a black-and-white checked pattern. Then something small flew across the checked pattern and the whole screen flared white as the sound of another explosion echoed through the room.

  O'Blarney turned away from the screens, shrugging. "Oh well, some you win..." His smooth silver face twisted into an unpleasant expression. "She's made it through the first room. Let's see how she copes with the next ten."

  Middenface slipped his eyes away from O'Blarney to scan his surroundings, looking for weapons, escape routes, anything that would help him out of his current situation. The room he was in was clearly O'Blarney's control centre. Beside the wall of monitors, there was another, equally large, filled with instruments, dials and read-outs.

  But the place also seemed to be some sort of laboratory. The smooth silver walls were hung with various gleaming instruments that might have been medical devices or torture implements, or both. They were also lined with shelves and shelves of jars. Many contained the remains of organs and limbs, some recognisably human. There were also cages containing live animals, some looking half-starved, others as if O'Blarney had begun to vivisect them, then grown bored halfway through the operation. Peeled back flesh revealed glossy red musculature while lidless eyes stared at Middenface with numb hopelessness. The largest cage was covered, so that it was impossible to see what it contained, but a low, ominous groaning came from inside. Over everything hung a sickening smell of antiseptic and blood.

  "So, what do you think of my gaff?" O'Blarney asked.

  "I dinnae like the colour scheme," Middenface replied with studied nonchalance. He could see now that he was being held down by a series of metal bands over his arms, legs and chest. He pulled experimentally against them, but they didn't budge a millimetre.

  O'Blarney saw what he was doing and smiled. "If you want to get out, you'll have to do me a little favour first."

  "Aye?" Middenface said cautiously.

  O'Blarney came closer. "Yeah. I need you to get on the dog and bone and tell my old mucker Chick that I've shuffled off this mortal, know what I'm saying?"

  Middenface frowned. "And just why should I do that?"

  O'Blarney shrugged and pressed a small button on the instrument panel beside him. There was a low buzzing sound, and the black drapes hanging over the last cage pulled back.

  Inside, was Rose. She sat up, head in hands, moaning with pain.

  "Oh," said O'Blarney, "It's up to you, obviously. But imagine exactly what I'm going to do with your bird if you don't."

  Slowly, agonisingly, Johnny pulled himself hand over hand across the bottom of the cage. Above him, One-Eyed Jack had also managed to lever himself upright, and slowly - but not as slowly as Johnny - he crawled over the floor towards him.

  Desperately, Johnny swung out his left arm. The fingers brushed the edge of the cage, but failed to grasp anything and his arm was dragged back down by the relentless acceleration. He gritted his teeth and tried again. And again.

  On the fourth try, he managed to grip onto the edge of the doorway. Before he could lose momentum, he released his right arm swung it forward. The tips of his fingers brushed the inside edge of the doorway. Desperately, he clung on. Above him, Enigma was hanging onto the doorframe for dear life. She saw Johnny and her mouth opened and shut as she shouted something out to him, but her words were snatched away by the rushing air.

  Johnny didn't have the energy to work it out. All his effort, all his concentration, was focussed on levering himself up, pulling himself almost by force of will alone towards the doorway of the lift and safety.

  Then One-Eyed Jack reached him. His booted foot rose up, and crashed down directly onto Johnny's unprotected fingers.

  Red was prepared for the worst now; adrenaline had flooded her system in a jittery rush. She felt sharp, fully alive, like the world was suddenly in better focus and all her senses were on high alert.

  Despite this, she couldn't figure out what was wrong with the next room, where the trap was. She hesitated in the doorway, sniffing the air, but there was nothing to smell: not the slight hint of dynamite that she had been able to detect in the previous room once she knew to search for it, no whiff of O'Blarney's distinctive machine smell, nothing. Maybe it was because of the strange structure of the place. The whole place, the walls, the floor, the delicate chairs and tables scattered throughout it looked like they were made of glass. In other circumstances, she might have found it pretty. Now it looked ominous, as blank and featureless as an architect's line drawing of a room.

  She carefully threw a small fragment of flooring from the previous room ahead of her. It landed on the floor without anything - explosive or otherwise - happening. She wasn't surprised. O'Blarney wouldn't set the same trap twice.

  She was about to step into the room when it caught her eye, a slight twinkling at the edge of her vision. If she hadn't been so keyed-up she might not have noticed it. But now she looked, she could see it more clearly. A white rime of frost on the small
fragment of tile she had thrown into the room.

  She put her foot carefully back down on her side of the doorway. Delicately, she took a corner of her sleeve, and poked it through the doorway.

  When she brought it back, it was frozen solid. She flicked her thumb against it. The cloth snapped cleanly in two. The temperature in the room must be near absolute zero.

  Now that she looked, she could see them, the small force field generators in the sides of the door that kept the air of the two rooms separate, but would no doubt allow a person through.

  She stepped back further, took out a small fusion grenade, and threw it in. As she expected, the force field at the door protected her from the blast. So she was able to watch as the heat from the blast penetrated the furniture, the floor and the walls. Slowly, they all softened, warped - melted.

  Soon, the room was simply a silver-walled chamber with a thin layer of water sloshing across its floor. Red smiled and stepped forward.

  The walls of Rose's cage were linked to an electric generator. When O'Blarney flipped a switch beside him, they briefly sparked a vicious blue and Rose screamed in agony.

  After that, Middenface did exactly as O'Blarney told him.

  He set his face in a carefully happy expression and, as O'Blarney held the camera of the vid-com in front of him, he told Chick that the mission had been successful, and although there had been some losses, O'Blarney was dead. Chick asked where the body was, if they'd kept O'Blarney's head as he'd instructed, and Middenface - following an offscreen nod from O'Blarney - said yes. Then Chick smiled, told Middenface he'd been waiting in orbit for this news and that he'd land shortly, and then the screen went blank.

  "Middenface, you shouldn't have," Rose said. "When Chick gets here and finds out you lied he'll kill us all."

  "Oh, I don't think so," O'Blarney said smoothly. He stopped for a moment, ostentatiously studying the Blimp. Then he turned to Middenface. "You know, I don't get what you see in her."