by Greco, J. I.
Loy groaned and batted Rikki’s paw away. “What happened?”
“Situation’s all taken care of, rookie,” Hackenthrush said from his commander’s chair, his feet up on the manual maneuvering jet control console. “Go back to sleep.”
Loy let Rikki help her sit up. She rubbed her temples with her fingertips and glanced around the bridge, then at the main CRT, showing an external video feed of the scavenger ship looming over 8724, a docking tube connecting both ships. “You let her go, didn’t you?” she asked Hackenthrush.
Hackenthrush snorted powdered tequila off the back of his hand. “It seemed like the easiest thing to do. Besides, we’re still locked out of the command systems.”
Loy’s eyes narrowed. “What kind of cop are you?”
Hackenthrush shrugged, and licked the back of his hand. “The kind they stick out in the middle of nowhere to keep out of trouble. And believe you me, I’m gonna have a word with HQ about this. Sector’s getting way too busy for my tastes. You ask me, it’s in everybody’s best interest to reassign me somewhere quieter.”
“No argument here,” Loy said. She turned to Rikki. “Okay. He’s an idiot... but you could have done something.”
“Oh, no,” Rikki said. “I leave that kinda thing to you cops.”
Loy’s eyes went wide. “What?”
“Finally, something Miss Top-Five-Percentile doesn’t know,” Hackenthrush said. “Rikki’s not a cop.”
“But he’s wearing a uniform,” Loy said.
“I like the way it makes my ass look,” Rikki said.
“You’re not a cop?” Loy asked.
“Oh, hell no,” Hackenthrush said. “He’s just kinda… renting a room.”
“Renting a room?” Loy asked.
“I needed some extra cash, and we had the spare cabin.” Hackenthrush snapped his fingers at Rikki. “Which reminds me, rent’s due Tuesday.”
“Umm, yeah, about that,” Rikki said, “my bead-necklace mail order business hasn’t taken off as quickly as I thought it would, so I’m a little short this–”
“Idiots, the both of you.” Loy grabbed her service raygun off the floor and stood up. “You two do what you want. I’m going after our prisoner. Gonna arrest that robot and everybody on that ship, while I’m at it, too.” She holstered her raygun and tilted her head up. “8724, situation report.”
“That won’t do any good,” Hackenthrush said. “Miss Swartzbaum locked her down, remember?”
“No, it’s okay,” 8724 said. “I’m back.”
“You’re unlocked?” Hackenthrush asked.
“Seems that way.”
“Well, that was lucky,” Rikki said.
“Not luck,” 8724 said. “Miss Swartzbaum sent a remote release trigger when she boarded the scavenger vessel. And a message.”
“What’s the message?” Loy asked.
“It reads, ‘For your own sake, mind your own business and let it go. And thanks for the sandwich.’”
“That sounds downright odd,” Rikki noted.
“Doesn’t matter.” Loy wheeled the hatch in the floor open. “You coming, Lieutenant Detective?”
Hackenthrush raised an eyebrow at her. “I suppose you wouldn’t want to just let the ship go, and when they’re at a safe distance, radio in and report the incident so some other slobs deal can with tracking them down while we relax and have a nice game of cribbage?”
“No,” Loy said as she stepped onto the access ladder and started down.
“You know, you are really just sucking the fun out of being a cop, rookie.”
SEVEN
The utility robot’s three eyes dimmed to black and the single eye in the cylindrical robot body lit up, the transfer complete.
“Oh, that feels much better,” Igon said, back in his old body. The two robot bodies lay next to each other on the deck in front of Feh’s engineering nest-station, a coiled data cable strung between them. “But it’s not in here.”
“What’s wrong?” Feh asked from his nest-station. “You said your former shell had the data.”
“She must have transferred it, the lying bitch.” Igon pulled the data cable from the socket in the base of his skull and sat up. “We’re seriously going to have to deal with that if this relationship’s gonna last.”
“No data, no deal, robot,” Feh reminded him.
“Relax.” Igon hopped up on all six legs and skittered away into the field of junk piles. “I’ll find it.”
Igon weaved his way through the field, hop-skipping down the narrow footpath between junk piles. Forty piles in, he came to a thirty foot high stack of power inverter segments and reactor shielding panels. Dag was waiting there, beam autorifle trained on Cortez, sitting with her back against the junk pile. Her legs were bound together by loops of wire around her knees, and her right arm was held immobile against her side by more wire. Her left arm was free, but her robomechanical arm was no longer attached, revealing a smooth stump just below her elbow. The stump was capped by a bio-mechanical interface socket.
“You’re really trying my patience, Gladys dear,” Igon said as he approached her. He tapped a claw against the side of his head. “The data’s not in here.”
“It’s not?” Cortez smiled up at him. “Oh, that’s right. I moved it.”
“Moved it where?”
“It’s in the toaster.”
“It’s in the what?”
“There’s a toaster in the cop ship’s mess. You know, one of those fancy models with a built-in seven-core CPU and fuzzy logic, and even with all that it still can’t quite toast evenly on medium. But it had just enough memory for the data.”
“I’m supposed to believe that?”
“Believe what you want, it’s the truth.”
“Let’s just do some fact-checking, okay?” Igon clicked a claw at Dag.
Dag stepped forward, taking a thick stunstick off his belt and handing it to Igon. Igon powered it on, sliding the output level all the way to full, and without preamble shoved its sparking end into Cortez’s side, just below her floating ribs.
Cortez screamed and fell over to on side. Between convulsions, she managed to spit out, “Hey… that… tickles.”
Igon shut the stunstick off. “We could have avoided this. But you had to reject my offer of a permanent partnership, didn’t you?”
Cortez smirked through the lingering pain and her gasps for air. “And let’s not forget I blew you up. Don’t know which I enjoyed more–”
Igon again shoved the prod into her side.
She writhed spastically. And gagged out through gritted teeth: “That… thing… got… a… higher… setting?”
“I think she’s enjoying it,” Dag said. “Is she supposed to enjoy it?”
“I will never understand biologicals,” Igon said, switching the stunstick off. He handed it to Dag and crouched down in front of Cortez. “I don’t want to kill you, Gladys. Just tell me where the data is – where it really is – and this can all be over.”
“Told you,” Cortez said, her cheek against the hold’s deck, a line of drool oozing out of her trembling mouth. “The toaster.”
“Now I believe you.” Igon glanced back at Dag. “We still docked?”
Dag heaved his shell in a shrug. “Probably. Didn’t hear us detach.”
“Watch her.” Igon stood and pranced off for the airlock.
“Hey, at least leave the stunstick!” Cortez called after him. As soon as the robot was out of site, she sat up and grinned at Dag. “Man, never thought he’d leave. How you doing?”
“So,” Junior Officer Loy asked 8724 as she spun the airlock’s wheel and pulled the inner hatch open, “you wanna explain why you were taking orders from a psychopathic master criminal?”
“I’m not at liberty to say.”
Loy glanced up at the intercom speaker in the ceiling. “Great. So we should just assume you’ve been compromised and can no longer be trusted?”
“There has been no compromise,” 8724 answered
. “My security protocols are still in place. My internal diagnostic routines have twice confirmed my database hash tables show no sign of tampering.”
“Exactly what you’d say if you’d been compromised.”
“True. But I assure you, I have not. Ninety-eight percent of my systems are once again at your complete disposal.”
“Only ninety-eight percent? What about the other two percent?”
“I’m not at liberty to say.”
“Of course,” Loy said with an exasperated sigh.
“These things never fit right,” Lieutenant Detective Hackenthrush said as he and Rikki rounded the corridor, Hackenthrush fighting the straps of his standard-issue body armor vest.
“Helps to have it on the right way,” Loy said.
“I told you you had it on backwards,” Rikki said. He was wearing two body-armor vests, one over the other, an autorifle strapped to his back.
“And upside down,” Loy noted.
Hackenthrush pulled his vest off and spun it around. He stared at it, unsure. “They really need to tell people how to wear these things. I’m not Maud’Dib.”
Loy pointed at the tag inside the vest’s collar, with instructions. Hackenthrush harrumphed and slipped the vest on. “We’re not late for the party, unfortunately?”
“No. And where do you think you’re going?” Loy asked Rikki. “Appreciate the gesture but you’re staying here, civilian.”
“Well, if you insist,” Rikki said, quickly spinning around and heading back towards the ladder. “See you when you get back. I’ll have tea waiting–”
Hackenthrush grabbed Rikki by the collar. “Not so fast. I need someone to hide behind.”
Rikki sneered at him. “You are so getting fragged the second you turn your back.”
Hackenthrush took the autorifle from Rikki and smirked at Loy. “You still sure you want to do this?”
“I’m sure,” Loy said. “You ready?”
“I had a good half of a fifth of powdered gin while we were in the armory, so, yep, ready as I’ll ever be.” Hackenthrush tightened the last vest strap. “What do you have in mind?”
Loy turned her back to the hatchway and rested her hand on the butt of her holstered service raygun. “Plan’s straightforward and by the book. We board. We announce our presence. We subdue the crew, arrest everybody, secure the ship, and call in the–”
Loy stopped mid-sentence, her face screwing up in pain. She convulsed, her arms flailing, her legs failing. After a moment, she dropped unconscious to the deck.
Igon stood in the open airlock hatchway behind her, sparking stunstick in his claw.
While Hackenthrush and Rikki stared dumbfounded, Igon hopped over Loy’s prone body and shoved his way between them. “Where’s the mess?”
“Ummm….” Hackenthrush stammered.
The robot pranced up the corridor. “Never mind, I’ll find it myself.”
Hackenthrush and Rikki looked at each other, then back at the unconscious Loy, and then back at Igon, disappearing around the curve of the corridor. Rikki gave Hackenthrush a questioning look and Hackenthrush shrugged, then started up the corridor after Igon.
“Um, excuse me,” Hackenthrush called after the robot, “you’re under arrest?”
Cortez whistled.
Atop the pile of inverters and shielding panels, the holoflat on her robomechanical forearm’s palm lit up.
EMERGENCY SIGNAL ACKNOWLEDGED. INITIATING LIMITED BATTERY-POWERED AUTONOMOUS MODE.
The forearm shook itself awake, the wrist flexing, the fingers stretching, and jauntily hopped down the pile, using its fingers to jump from inverter to panel to inverter and down to the deck next to her.
Crouched a few feet away, Dag scratched idly at the mold growing over his crotch. He watched as Cortez twisted around to wag her stump at the robomechanical forearm. The forearm swung around and offered its plug end to Cortez. Cortez slipped her stump inside. A click, and the forearm locked itself in place, its holoflat flashing: BIO-INTERFACE RE-ESTABLISHED. AUTONOMOUS MODE CANCELED. SWITCHING TO HOST BIOMETRIC POWER FEED.
Dag lifted the autorifle, pointing its bent barrel at Cortez. “I don’t think I should have let you do that.”
Cortez flexed her robomechanical fingers in front of her face. “Tell you what, you don’t tell anybody you did, I won’t tell anybody that gun couldn’t fire if you set a match to it.”
“Agreed.” Dag set the autorifle aside. He pointed at Cortez’s robomechanical arm. “That’s a useful tool.”
“Comes in handy, yeah.” She pressed both sides of her robomechanical wrist simultaneously and a centimeter-long laser scalpel popped out of its index finger. She began carefully slicing the short red laser through the wires holding her right arm snug against her torso.
Dag fitfully scratched away at another tuft of mold under his arm. “How’d you lose the original?”
“Didn’t. It’s in a freezer back home.” The wires fell around her waist and Cortez plucked them off, then she set to work slicing through the wires around her knees. “That’s some pretty nasty shell rot you got going there.”
“It’s too dry out here,” Dag said. “Rather be home. Cold swamps, warm family, but have to make a living, you know?”
Cortez tapped an inquiry into the underside of her robomechanical arm. “That how you hooked up with Igon? Scavenging?”
“We found him in a debris field,” Dag said. “Inside a computer core. Should have left it alone.”
ROCKETSHIP CONTROL (PARTIAL) RELAY: BOOTY ONE DATA PACKAGE INTACT IN SHIP’S BRAIN SECONDARY MEMORY; 100 % DATA INTEGRITY.
“You have no idea.” Cortez smiled at her palm holoflat as she read the report. She tapped a key to clear the display and looked over at Dag. “He make you some kind of deal?”
“We somehow sell the data you’re carrying, we get two percent – four, now, for taking on the cops. That and we get your life boat to salvage.”
“Life boat’s from a rental ship,” Cortez said. “Insurance company has salvage rights.”
Dag bleated. “Damn him.”
“You still have the data core you found Igon in?”
“Of course. ”
“Good,” Cortez said, standing up. She rubbed her hands together and stretched the kinks out of her neck and shoulders. “Now, what you say to ten percent and a year’s supply of shell-rot cream?”
“Feh! Vei!” Dag shouted towards the back of the hold. “I think we’ve got a new partner!”
Five minutes after being stunned into unconsciousness, Loy still lay sprawled out on the deck in front of 8724’s airlock where she had collapsed.
“Junior Officer Loy?”
8724’s voice broke through her sleep. “What happened?” she asked, lifting her head and looking around. No surprise, Hackenthrush and Rikki were nowhere to be seen.
“We were boarded by a short robot, who attacked you with a stun device.”
Beside her, the airlock hatch started to close. “Wait, what are you doing?”
“The scavenger ship is undocking. I must close the hatch to avoid decompression.”
Loy forced herself to her hands and knees. “Tube still connected?”
“At the moment.”
“Keep it that way as long as you can,” Loy said. Fighting a strong desire to go back to sleep, she threw herself through the hatchway into the airlock just as the hatch closed.
EIGHT
In 8724’s mess, Igon was a whirlwind of limbs up on the kitchenette counter, ransacking the storage lockers, tossing out plates, cups, boxes and cans of food. “What does a toaster even look like?” he asked himself.
“Excuse me...” Lieutenant Detective Hackenthrush said from the mess’ hatchway.
Igon grabbed a plastic box of cereal and hopped down off the counter. He marched up to Hackenthrush and shoved the box up at him. “Is this the toaster?”
“Umm…” Rikki peeked over Hackenthrush’s shoulder down at the robot. “No… it’s Fruit Crunchies.”
/> Igon let out a shrill electronic growl of frustration and threw the box of cereal up at Hackenthrush, hitting him good and square in the chin. Hackenthrush instantly went out like a light, collapsing to the deck.
Igon leaped up onto the unconscious Hackenthrush’s chest and held the sparking stunstick an inch from Rikki’s shaking knees. “Where’s the toaster, furry?”
Rikki jabbed a finger towards the shiny metal toaster-oven on the counter. “There. It’s there.”
Snorting, Igon jumped off Hackenthrush and hopped back up onto the kitchenette counter. He took the toaster in his claws and spun it around to look at it from every angle. “You see a data port? I don’t see a port.”
“Ummm,” Rikki said, “it’s a toaster. Toasters... don’t have ports.”
On the floor, Hackenthrush shook himself awake, rubbing his chin. “Well, not the kind the DUPES can afford.”
Igon let out a low-pitch white-noise scream and angrily chucked the toaster away. It hit Hackenthrush in the head just as he was sitting up, knocking his toupee off and Hackenthrush himself back into unconsciousness.
“That bitch lied,” Igon said. “Again! What are the odds?” From somewhere above them came a sharp clank. Igon spun around to point his big yellow glowing eye at Rikki. “What’s that?”
“Ummmm,” Rikki said, “sounds like a ship undocking, maybe?”
“Blerg!” Igon said, and hopped down off the kitchenette counter.
Rikki stepped in front of the robot as he skittered for the hatchway. He held up his hands. “Not so fast–”
Without stopping, Igon jammed the sparking stunstick into Rikki’s ankle – sending Rikki, yelping like a baby, to the floor in spasms – and marched out of the mess, muttering obscenities to himself.
As the Exalted Refuse slowly pulled away from Patrol Rocketship 8724, Junior Officer Loy stood in the scavenger ship’s airlock her ears popping from the difference in pressure as it finished cycling. The air around her cold and dry, she swallowed, squared her shoulders and raised her service raygun in front of her.
