by RJ
“Unbelievable,” the mutant said in excitement. “Can this thing move faster?”
“It’s not necessary, we’re almost there! They don’t come outside, on the surface!” the guide shouted.
“They?! Are there more of these things?!”
That terrified look of Hyam’s was telling everything by itself. As for JB, he found himself lost in between two ways of action. To press that worm against the wall and make him talk, or to follow him, counting on this one knowing what he was doing. While his brain was going through processing, the right hand of the ranger’s went on doing its job. The next second the skinny man’s face was brutally crushed against the glass, leaving a webbing of cracks under it. The blood that came out had a pale rosy color, not human at all.
“What da fuck are you?” JB asked with anger.
“I’m a human! A human!” Hyam rushed to calm the opponent down. “It’s because of the adaptation procedure. I swear!”
“Just because of the temperature? Bullshit!”
“Not only the temperature… Stay here for a few weeks and you’ll get it.”
“No, thanks. You, Hyam, receive all the visitors, right?” JB returned to his original mission.
“Yes! Yes! I do,” suffering from the pain, he answered.
“What have you done with the government agent that was sent here?”
“What agent?”
Considering all the lies, JB wasn’t sure whether he should trust Hyam or not. So he wanted to test him for truth again. The mutant pulled him off from the wall and lifted up with the left hand. Then he fixed the guy in a position above the hole in the floor, where the climbing monster was seen through.
“I’ll give you one last chance! If you lie to me again, you’ll be talking to him!” the ranger nodded at the hatch. “Two weeks ago, a ranger came here. Edward Cody. What have you done to him?”
“That trader?” Hyam sounded scared like never before. “Yes, he was here… At first he tried to sell us some weird frogs for experiments. But when the team got rid of him, he stuffed his ship with the protvirre algae and flew away. He even had threatened us with a lawsuit before he got away… Said that he had the contacts in court or something…”
Now it sounded like the truth. JB knew Ranger Cody, and Hyam’s story was very similar to his own impression of the man. Yet, still being unsure of what to do with that disgusting person: to drop him down to the beast, or to let him live, JB stood there frozen. The process made him lose track of time and he didn’t notice at first that the capsule reached its destination. The door opened.
A familiar voice sounded around, which brought JB back to consciousness.
“Ranger, JB!” Skyman shouted. “Let the man go, ranger!”
The weakened body of the man dropped down on the floor after all. He stayed lying there, powerless.
JB walked out of the elevator. He appeared in another hallway, on the higher level. As soon as he walked forward, four rahtiong soldiers rushed to pass by him. They were armed with flamethrowers and equipped with a heavy battle suits.
The next second a rattle of destruction rolled through the hallway. The mutant looked back. The monster reached their level and attacked the capsule from the bottom. It got squashed instantly. And just as the beast started to take away parts of the wall to get out of the shaft, the soldiers used the fire against it. Soon the nearest space of the shaft turned into crematoria, which produced dust out of not only the monster but poor Hyam as well.
After giving a short cynical look at that picture, JB turned back to his old comrades. There were five persons in front of him. They wore those thermal suits which were missing from that closet.
“Skyman…” the ranger said to the colonel. “And here we have…” he looked over others. “Your posse…”
“I didn’t expect to see you here, JB,” the colonel said.
A sly smirk came out as it was ought to.
“So you’ve come here from Rigel to look at the flowers?”
The agents' team exchanged looks. The ranger checked out his communicator on the left wrist to see if there were any critical updates. He didn’t seem to be interested in those agents at all. At least, he sure made an impression of it.
“Come along, JB. Let’s have a talk,” leaving behind that fake pretense, Josh tried to start that conversation over.
“Okay,” the ranger agreed casually.
Those people JB knew once from the island had changed over the years. They were soldiers now, serving at the Galaxy Union's army. The difference in age between JB and Eugene and Fred wasn’t that obvious now. They were grown-up, virile men. And JB’s features mostly stayed the same, due to his long life ability. El and Tina were even further away from those young, naive girls that the mutant used to know. This meeting wasn’t a surprise for the big guy, but he still couldn’t see what kind of feelings it did call out inside of him. The arrival was too saturated already to look at things soberly for now.
The group led him somewhere, he went along. Not saying anything to anyone, he was silently waiting, taking the time to study them. Skyman was in the lead, along with the Chief of Security. It looked like Josh was the one giving instructions.
Those last hours’ events and the information gained from Hyam had brought some clarity into the situation. The previous impression proved itself wrong. It was time to come up with a new one. In his mind, JB went through everything from the very beginning. New details were taken into account, and the priorities were set in place. At the same time his gloved hand was playfully turning from side to side a small silver bracelet-key, which he had taken off Hyam’s wrist before getting out of the elevator.
Let’s try it one more time…
Fact 1: Edward Cody wasn’t an agent after all. I still don’t know who that agent is.
Fact 2: this place is not a reservation of any kind, not a plant garden either.
Fact 3: Skyman knows far more than I do, far more than an officer with his clearance is supposed to know.
Fact 4: they need something from me, they wouldn’t reveal themselves otherwise.
The question: should I kill the guards and then make them talk or give them a chance to tell me everything at will?
When coming to one of the station’s restrooms the guards stayed outside, leaving the agents alone with the ranger in that humble chamber. JB checked the communicator once again, nothing new there. It could mean one of two things: either there were no data servers around on his way there, or his instruments weren’t as good as he thought.
While agents were setting up their equipment, which there was quite a bit of, and taking off those thermal suits, JB walked around the room. He got to the soda machine to get a couple cans of juice and with the refreshments returned to his observation.
El and Tina set up a whole analytical center in just a few minutes. There were several digital terminals, lots of memory blocks and a few screens. The most interesting parts to the ranger were those exact memory towers. JB had recognized them from the first sight. And it completely changed his attitude towards them. The picture finally started clearing up for him.
“JB?” Skyman turned to the ranger standing alone. “Shall we?”
The colonel gestured at two armchairs inviting the pilot to sit in one of them. Now the agents were in those traditional blue-white colors of the official uniform. JB sat on the spot that he was offered. Josh took the armchair in front of him. Fred and Eugene were located right behind their chief. Skyman used the seat’s side panel to activate a chess table projection, which grew out of the floor between them. Two other separate screen projections were created for each player as well.
“Care to play?” Josh offered.
“Sure. Why not?” JB replied with half-sleepy voice.
The standard forty-two-figures chess layout appeared on the mail field. And also each player was given twelve extra figures at his personal disposal that were displayed on those individual screens of the players.
The first th
ing JB did was reprogram his extra screen to hide the transparency view from the opponent. That seemed quite unusual to all three of them.
“Why have you done that, JB?” Skyman asked ironically smiling. “We have equal replacement sets…”
“Well, you know what they say about old dogs…” the ranger winked.
The game began…
The first match was going on for about ninety minutes. The four of them had discussed a lot: the years that passed, the old adventures on the island, shared the view on the war and other things. Eugene and Fred didn’t stand back anymore but took seats of their own with the leaders. And the women were finishing up their work on the equipment setup. Their glances at the ranger happened more and more with the development of the conversation.
“Checkmate, JB,” Skyman said with great satisfaction when making his last move on that wide board.
The big guy displayed a congratulatory expression, but that loss wasn’t any surprising to him.
“I have to admit, though, it wasn’t an easy one,” the colonel added. “One more?”
JB checked the communicator’s screen on his left wrist casually. That action looked so natural, just like a man checking the time on his watch.
“Sure, I have time,” JB said maintaining that friendly smile.
His right-hand fingers went typing on the screen hidden from the others. A fresh layout appeared on the board. Then he started fussing around on the spot, showing how uncomfortable he was there. The mutant kept doing that until everyone in the room paid attention to him. A second after settling down, JB pulled out a device so ancient that everyone just snapped to it with their stares.
“Wow, it can’t be!” Josh got pleasantly excited. “Is it an iPhone?”
His hand reached out for the phone and stopped right before touching it. He looked at JB.
“It’s not exactly an iPhone,” the ranger cleared up.
“May I?” Skyman asked.
“Yeah, sure,” JB replied. “Just don’t touch the silent mode switch,” he supplemented at the last moment.
A minute of playing with that old device fulfilled Josh’s interest. He put the phone back and returned to the game.
“Do you still use that phone?”
“As a personal notebook mostly. It doesn’t connect to any of today’s standard interfaces. I have to put all data in and out manually…”
“Hm… Not that convenient.”
“Hacker-proof,” JB explained. “So what is this place really, Josh?” the ranger tried to change the subject to something that he was interested in.
“Are you asking me about the place where you’ve come with a planned business? To buy some reed, if I recall right?” Skyman replied with a question of his own.
“To sign a contract on a muhtionian reed supply, actually,” the agent stuck to his cover. “I asked you about the place where an undiscovered creature attacks people out of the blue, in the middle of a greenhouse.”
“This place is a rahtiongian reservation, as far as I know. A specialized facility, plant garden for breeding the fitoxes.”
Hearing such disrespectful words about another intelligent kind, as if fitoxes were some just dumb plants, JB felt a spark of contempt towards his companion. His brief severe look laid on all three of them.
“You think all such reservations breed those lethal species and do the tours during the hunting seasons?”
“What are you talking about?” Josh played out innocence.
“You know what I mean!” the ranger’s tone got much harder. “What exactly was your plan? To lead me deep into the bushes, where some of your minions would have fed me to the wild plants? So why didn’t you just destroy my boat right in space?”
That very moment JB remembered his recent encounter with the corsairs and those strange ship malfunctions. When the realization come to him, he smirked slyly.
“JB, look. I think you have quite an imagination there,” Skyman attempted to calm him down.
“So you were the ones behind it! You had infiltrated your rat in Gibson’s surroundings to cover my death… You hoped to disarm me, and then kill me out of everyone’s sight.”
“JB…” the colonel wanted to make another try of settling the ranger, but it was useless.
“An imagination you say, Cap? Oh, my bad! You’re not a captain anymore, right? Now you’re a Colonel Josh Skyman! A brave man of the Secret Service. Commander Brix Adamy’s finest! Sounds important, don’t it?” the agents exchanged looks. They were trying to figure out how the ranger could know so much about them since their files were classified. “Let me guess, you thought that I had left you back there, in Atlantis, in twenty-nine sixty-five, then I never checked on you?”
“You don’t know anything, ranger!” Eugene threw impatiently.
As a reply, all he got was a short meaningless look from JB.
“Your move, Josh…” the mutant reminded his opponent of their game. Then he looked at the communicator’s screen again. “So what about imagination? What is the limit of your imagination, gents?”
“JB, if you suspect us of something, I assure you that…” this time Fred tried to be sensible.
“Didn’t you hear the question?!” the big guy pulled the talk back to the subject, to keep his dominance over the conversation. “Is your imagination enough, let’s say, to initiate a massive military operation? Huh?”
“A military operation?” Josh clarified in a calm manner. His eyes snapped back to the chess board.
“Okay, let’s take chess for example… Or no, something more specific. Let’s say, Arturukv planet, Capella system, twenty-nine sixty-seven,” the attention of the five elevated to its peak. As for JB, he was looking exclusively at Skyman. “You had enough imagination then, right? Enough to send a several thousands of your people to certain death. You also showed your courage then. When you had left your friends there to die.”
“Stop it, JB…” Skyman pushed out through his teeth.
“Why, Joshy? Do you even remember their names? Alex, Vitaliy, Ellison… Huh? Or you think that twenty-four point seven grams of UP-3.4 sedative stimulators will block the nightmares forever?” the smirk on the ranger’s face was making the agents more and more angry. And his stone confidence seeded up their own sense of insecurity. “I see all of you have toasted your brains with that quantity of stimulators a long time ago! Or, perhaps, you blame the war for all of your problems?”
“What the hell do you know about the war?!” Eugene shouted out nervously.
“So if it’s war, then all methods are good, right?” JB said and checked his device once more. “But still, you’re the colonel, Josh. You know better. Indeed. What do I know? I’m just a ranger…”
“Pf-f-f… Ranger…” Eugene expressed his contempt.
The mutant looked around with another crookish look of his and stopped at their equipment.
“I didn’t recognize you then, you know. Despite even my premonition… Those were you, whom I encountered on the Magnonium planet, Menkar system, sixteen days ago. Right? And those are what was inside that container I had lost…” JB pointed at the memory units, which were in El’s and Tina’s use. JB met El with eye contact. “How do you feel, by the way? As I remember, you took most of the damage there…”
“Stop it, JB,” Skyman said firmly. “You’ve lost!”
The colonel nodded at the chess board. Where a holographic animation was jumping around over the figures, it displayed the name of the winner.
“You still don’t get it, Josh? I’ve never played with you. Not now, not earlier…” Everyone paid attention to the ranger’s personal screen projection. He uncovered it for them to watch. There were countless lines of a program log which JB was interested in. Not related to chess in any way. “While you were playing with the AI, I’ve snatched the archives from the station's central server. I probably have to apologize for my manners, but it was the perfect opportunity to get direct access. But, you may be really pleased with the job on
the game you did. Next time I may even set your AI-opponent to the ‘middle’ difficulty level.”
JB looked at the communicator for the last time, to ensure that data transfer was complete. Now he could fully get back to the conversation.
“So what did you want with me all this time?” JB wanted to close the last unresolved question before leaving.
It wasn’t easy for Josh to swallow his pride when he had to give it up to JB for the sake of the job. He turned to the women agents so they would join the big circle. El and Tina came closer to the men. The chess board projection vanished.
“How well do you know your body, JB?” El started.
“Was there anything that might have happened to you that could cause a genetic change in your organism?”
Thousands of pictures of memories from the island flashed before the mutant’s eyes. Then he remembered Dr. Gibson with his treatment, hundreds of shots of biostimulators, and countless cans of Ranger Juice, one of which he was holding that very moment.
“Not that I could remember, no…” he casually shrugged. “Well, who knows what you might catch in that damn cosmos,” he added to lead them away from the thoughts of the island.
“Have you or your ship ever been exposed to a massive amount of radiation?” El continued.
It was sort of odd for the mutant to watch those people with his glowing eyes and still hear those clueless questions. When all there was to that mystery lay on the surface of his appearance. Yet, JB put on an innocent grimace and shook his head.
“The thing is, we have studied that sample of your blood, which we got from you on Magnonium. And the conclusion was that that sample had in common with a human’s blood not more than the beast which you met earlier today.”
“So you do know what that was, right?”
“The blood…” Tina got back to the main subject. “Your blood is the most conductive organic material known to man. Our instruments went nuts when we started testing that sample!” the monotone talk of hers gained more excitement. “What’s the secret?”
“Yo! Bitch, I don’t really know what you think you are. But let’s imagine for a second that you’re talking to a dude from the streets… Wait. You don’t have to imagine that, since I am,” JB pointed at himself with both thumbs. “Don’t you use those fancy words when talking to someone like me.”
