by John Zakour
“They’re not my friends.”
The Gladians let loose more angry whistles.
“Oh be quiet,” she yelled back at them. The Gladians shrugged and backed away. “And as for you,” she said, turning back to me, “Excuse me for not sharing every detail of my life, but you shouldn’t throw stones, Mr. Glass House because you’ve kept more secrets from me than a lesbian vampire politician.”
“Lesbian vampire politician?”
“I brought you here because I thought that you might want to, oh, I don’t know, save the earth or something! But if that’s too much to ask, then just forget it. I’ll call Sidney Whoop instead.”
“Oh, that’s just great. Blame earth’s destruction on me now,” I said. “You know, I think you’ve always wanted me to fail.”
“Wanted you to fail? How can you say that?” she said.
“You have tried to undermine me my entire life. Nothing I did was ever good enough for you.”
“Where is this coming from?”
“Forget it,” I said. “We don’t have time now. I have two hours to save the world, remember?”
“No. You can’t just blurt out something like that and run away,” she said. “The Gladians will stop their countdown for a few nanos,” (the Gladians let out another few whistles of protest at this but Mom stopped them with a glare). “Tell me, Buttlebug, what have I ever done to you to that was so terrible?”
“Asked and answered, Mom. How many times in my life have I asked you not to call me that?”
“Are we back to that now? I’m sorry, okay. How many times do I have to say it?”
“Seriously, do you know how embarrassing it was to have you call me that in front of my friends? At baseball games? In front of my prom date?”
“She thought it was cute.”
“Cute was not the vibe I was going for on prom night, Mom.”
“Oh, well, don’t blame that on me,” she said. “She would have kissed you if you had shaved like I told you.”
“Gates, Mom,” I said, with my head in my hands. “This is exactly what I mean.”
“Fine,” she said, “I’m sorry that you find the name so insulting.”
“It’s not insulting. It’s demeaning.”
“Demeaning then.”
“It sounds like a name you’d give a pet fish,” I said. “I mean, who does that?”
“My father,” she said, a little too loudly, “that’s who.”
I looked at her and I think the Gladians did a double-take as well because they let out soft low whistles that sort of sputtered at the end. Mom seemed to realize this and she tried to compose herself a little.
“That was your grandfather’s nickname for me when I was young,” she said. “It’s Arabic. It means hero. Sort of anyway. The actual word is Batalla for a girl. Batal is for a boy. He slurred it a little but to “buttle” and we added the “bug” because it was cute, I guess. It was a little joke between us. Anyway, that’s what he called me.”
“You never told me that,” I said.
“He would use it when he was proud of me,” Mom continued. “When I won the spelling bee or when I got an A on a test. When I graduated from college. ‘Way to go, Buttlebug, you did it!’ It always meant a lot to me when he called me that so I just assumed it would mean a lot to you as well. My mistake, I guess.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “You never told me that. You never told me any of that.”
She pulled a tissue from her pocket and wiped her nose.
“You’re right,” she said. “I never told you. It was just one more thing I never told you and I ruined everything because of it.”
“You didn’t ruin everything.”
“Of course I did. I was never there for you when you needed me. I ignored your feelings and I never told you about my illegal relationship with an advanced alien race.”
“Well, that third thing is kind of a big one,” I said. “But I know you meant well, Mom. I guess you’ve always meant well.”
I hugged her gently and felt her trying to hold back tears. The Gladians behind us let out a low whistle, which I assumed translated into “awwwww,” but I couldn’t be sure.
“Can the Gladians port me inside the Oblivion?”
She wiped her eyes and shook her head, no. “Not unless we had a homing device inside to get an exact location. The best we can do is put you right outside. You’ll have to find your own way in.”
“And I have two hours, right?”
She nodded and attached a tiny pin to the lapel of my jacket.
“This is a signal device,” she said. “Tap it when you’ve neutralized Foraa. The Gladians will need to confirm that she’s no longer a danger before backing off but they’ll wait for confirmation before the crashing the ship. Do you understand?”
“Got it. Can they port me back from here?”
She nodded and stepped back to join the Gladians.
“Why me, Mom?” I asked, adjusting my coat. “Of all the people you could have trusted with this information, of all the people you could have called for this, why did you choose me?”
She wiped her eyes quickly and smiled, ever-so-slightly.
“Because you’re my son, Zach,” she said. “And I know that there isn’t anyone else in the world who can do what you do. You’re my Buttlebug.”
Despite it all, I couldn’t help but smile.
“You’re damn right I am,” I said.
The Gladians activated the teleport beam and I was bathed again in white light as the device hummed to life.
One of the Gladians turned to Mom. “The boy has no patience,” it said in a whistle-like voice. “Much anger in him, like his father. He is not ready.”
“Hush, he’ll be fine,” Mom said.
“I’m still here, you know,” I yelled.
“That boy is your last hope.”
“No,” Mom replied in a serious voice barely above a whisper. “There is another.”
“Really?” the Gladian asked.
Mom cracked a smile and waved to me. “No, I’m just kidding,” she said. “He’s our last hope.”
I started to laugh as the teleport beam kicked in and sent me back to earth.
“Good one, Mom.”
“Boss?”
The darkness lifted, as did the silence and I awoke on the ground in an alley behind the Oblivion. I was damp from the rain and my back felt like the doormat at the entrance to a fat farm.
“Boss, can you hear me?”
“I hear you, HARV,” I said, sitting up gently. “What happened?”
“You got lucky,” HARV said. “The trajectory of your fall and the wind at that height took you back toward the building rather than straight down to the pavement.”
“It what?”
“You hit the sloped portion of the building, about fifteen stories up and slid to the ground. Your armor was maxed so it managed to absorb the majority of the impact.”
“I fell?” I said, still dazed, “I actually fell?”
“It’s called gravity, boss. Not a new concept.”
“But?”
And for a nano I was confused and afraid, fearful that I had dreamed the entire scene with my Mom. I suppose that I should have been relieved. After all, that would mean that there wasn’t a space ship in orbit waiting to obliterate the city. But instead I was disappointed.
“I was off-line for a while,” HARV said. “I guess the interface was affected by the power surge from the armor but everything seems to be working fine now.”
“Speak for yourself,” I groaned as I painfully climbed to my feet. “Where’s Tony?”
“I don’t know,” HARV said. “I lost him when we fell from the building. Should we search for him?”
I shook my head. “There’s no time. We need to get inside and stop Foraa.”
“How do you know she’s inside?” HARV asked.
“What?”
I stared at the lightless building and felt the wind and misty rain in my fac
e. I pulled the collar of my coat closed around my neck to guard against the chill.
“How do you know she’s inside the casino?”
As I touched the coat collar, my fingers brushed against something hard on the lapel. I looked down and saw the tiny signal device that Mom had pinned to my jacket. I rubbed it gently between my fingers and smiled.
“Trust me,” I said. “She’s in there.”
51
Fat Elvis went back to his post at the main entrance to the Oblivion, limping, soaking wet and seriously angry. Another bouncer, this one a tall black man with a thick neck, met him at the door.
“Where’d you go?” the new bouncer asked. “I had to leave my station at the bar.”
“We had a situation. Two guys came looking for Foraa.”
“Did you get them?”
“We got ‘em. One guy’s up on the roof. The other guy fell.”
“He fell?”
“Yeah, we’re gonna need a street-cleaner. Look, cover the door for me for another couple nanos, okay.”
“Man, I gotta get back to the bar.”
“Look at me dude? I can’t work the door like this? Just let me get cleaned up a little.”
The bouncer stared at fat Elvis for a long nano. His eyes showed annoyance, anger, and maybe something else.
“Okay,” he said at last, “but make it fast.”
He stepped aside and fat Elvis stepped into the casino.
“Thank you, thank you very much.”
“Oh, and by the way, Steve?” the bouncer called.
Fat Elvis stopped and turned toward his friend. “Yeah?”
The bouncer pulled a blaster from his coat. “Your name is James.”
“DOS,” I said, as the holographic disguise melted away. “And here I thought you were as stupid as the rest of them.”
I dropped to the floor as the bouncer fired. The blast went over my head and blew apart a portion of the wall behind me. I scrambled to my feet and, staying low, charged the guy head on. I hit him in the mid-section like a bull against a slow, fat matador and sent him through the open door and out into the street. We crashed through the velvet rope and onto the wet pavement.
“You know, for a b-level casino, this place sure is hard to get into,” I said.
The bouncer grabbed me by the underarms and heaved me over his head. I rolled to my feet and popped into a crouch just in time to see him swing his big booted foot toward me. He caught me hard in the shoulder and I fell back to the ground.
“That’s because you’re a c-level punk,” he said.
He pulled me off the ground with his tree trunk of an arm and hit me in the face with a ham-sized fist. I fell back to the pavement again, counting the stars I was seeing and taking inventory of my teeth.
“You ready to quit now, punk?” the bouncer said, “or did your mother raise a boy too stupid to know when he’s beat.”
I slowly lifted myself to my knees and looked up to face him.
“What did you say about my mother?” I snarled.
The bouncer smiled and sauntered toward me. “I said, your mother’s so stupid she once got run over by a parked hovercraft.”
He kicked me in the face. I staggered, but stayed on my knees at first. Then I turned to face him again and slowly, painfully, got to my feet.
“Well, your mother’s so stupid,” I said, “she needs a tutor to read lips.”
The bouncer smiled and took a menacing step toward me.
“Your mother’s so fat,” he said, “she has to iron her pants on the driveway.”
He hit me twice more in the face, a left and then a right. I staggered back a few more steps but stayed on my feet.
“And your mother is so fat,” I groaned, “her blood type is Rocky Road.”
The bouncer smiled, grabbed me by the coat collar and pulled his sledgehammer fist back for one more haymaker to my nose.
“Yeah? Well your mother’s so ugly she…”
He threw the punch, but it never reached my face. My arm flashed upward and I caught his fist in the palm of my hand. A look of confusion swept the bouncer’s face as I smiled and gave him a roundhouse kick to the stomach and then a spinning back-kick to the head that was so smooth, I could almost hear the Bruce Lee soundtrack in the background. The bouncer’s eyes bugged out of their sockets and he crumpled to the ground like a wicker chair beneath a sumo.
“And your mother’s so ugly, they named her after Uranus.”
“Why do you always have to resort to bathroom humor in these situations?” HARV sighed as his hologram appeared beside me.
“Shut up, HARV. You’re killing the moment,” I said. “But thanks for running that combat routine again.”
“I didn’t run the routine.”
“You didn’t?”
“You told me it was morally wrong so I deleted it from your memory.”
I smiled and adjusted my coat.
“Cool.”
I picked the bouncer’s head up off the ground, popped my gun into hand and gave him a good long look at the business end.
“Where is Foraa?” I asked.
“Don’t know,” he said, in a voice an octave higher than before.
I stuck the barrel into his mouth and rattled it around against his teeth.
“Hey buddy, do you know how to drink a blaster martini?” I asked. “Through a long metal straw, one shot at a time. Guaranteed to blow your mind.”
“You’re in danger of exceeding the pun limit,” HARV said.
“Wait, I got one more.”
HARV folded his arms and sighed. “Fine, go ahead.”
“It’s your just desserts.”
“Ugh!”
I shook my head and turned back to the bouncer, his mouth still full of gun barrel. “I’ll say it once more. Where is Foraa?”
He said nothing and the two of us locked eyes for a long, hard nano.
“Oh, for Gates, sake,” a familiar voice said from behind me, “are your brains filled with anything other than testosterone?”
I turned and saw Ona. She was dressed in a tight black pantsuit with a long black coat. Her hair danced gently in the breeze and the skin of her face glistened in the rainy mist.
“What are you doing here?” I asked.
“Speeding things along,” she said, kneeling beside me. She took my hand and pulled my gun out of the bouncer’s mouth. “I’m sorry, but the gun in the mouth is just too psycho-sexual. People will talk.”
“Ona, we don’t have time.”
She silenced me with a gesture, then brushed her long fingers gently across the bouncers cheek. He smiled widely and his eyes rolled back in his head.
“Where is Foraa?” she asked.
“Main ballroom,” he replied without hesitation. “Follow the hallway. Through the double doors at the end.”
“Thank you,” she said. “You can go to sleep now.”
The bouncer closed his eyes and fell asleep there on the pavement. Ona turned to me and smiled.
“Now wasn’t that easier?”
“This isn’t a game,” I said.
The smile disappeared from her face. “I know,” she said. “I have to confess, Zach, I haven’t been totally honest with you.”
“That’s an understatement.”
“But I’m here to help set things right,” she said.
“Good. Because there’s a DOS-load of right-setting to be done.”
“I know. And I’m ready for it.”
“Okay then. But there’s one rule from here on out.”
“What’s that?”
“You do every thing I say. You follow my lead, every flaming step of the way. You got that?”
She smiled and nodded. “I’ll think about it.”
“DOS,” I said to myself.
We both stood up and entered the casino.
52
Ona, HARV and I strode quickly down the hallway toward the main ballroom, three warriors off to battle. Actually, I’m sure we looked more
like a super-model, a hologram and a ragged PI, but we felt like warriors and that’s what counted.
“I’d suspected for some time now that Foraa was up to something,” Ona said as we walked. “I’d been hearing a lot of strange things.”
“Like what?”
“Her cash flow had increased for one. She was getting sizable donations from her ‘friends and followers.’ There were equipment purchases as well.”
“What kind of equipment?”
“Material for scientific research, a lot of heavy construction equipment and raw materials. That’s what worried me. “
“That’s why you set the dinner up,” I said.
“I wanted her near me. I thought maybe I could figure out what she was up to. Maybe I could…”
“Read her mind?”
“Yes. But then the murder occurred and I thought that perhaps I’d been wrong. Maybe it wasn’t Foraa after all.”
“She played you.”
“Yes,” Ona said, with some difficulty.
“Did you know she was a psi?” I asked.
Ona shook her head, no. “I’ve known of my own psionic abilities for only a short while. I assumed that Foraa was still unaware of hers.”
“It’s quite evident that your sister has known about her psionic abilities for some time, Ms. Thompson,” HARV said, “as evidenced by her skillful and large scale use of them.”
“Contact the Vegas Police, HARV. Tell them there’s an emergency at the Oblivion.”
“The department is fully under Ms. Thompson’s control. Remember?”
“Get the Frisco police then.”
“They’ve already declined to intercede.”
“Then get me the cops from New Reno or New Carson City or New Indian Springs. I don’t care.”
“They won’t be able to get here in time,” Ona said calmly. “You know that don’t you?”
I knew it. I just didn’t want to admit it.
“Fine. We’ll do this ourselves.”
We reached the doorway to the main ballroom. It was thick, ornately sculpted faux wood, double wide and, like everything else in the casino, painted one shade lighter than “black hole.”
“HARV, what other entrances are there to this room?”
HARV flashed holographic blueprints on the wall.
