Replaceable: An Alan Lamb Thriller

by Bouchard, J. W.

  “That’s me.”

  “I want to thank you for what you did,” Officer Yodel said. “You saved a lot of people.”

  “Thanks, but I didn’t do it alone. I better get going, or I’ll miss my flight home.”

  “Agent Lamb, just one more thing.”

  “Yeah?”

  Yodel had extended his hand, offering Alan a small piece of folded paper. “I took this off the dead guy. I caught it during the pat-down, but things were moving so fast, I didn’t have time to give it to you before you went into the interrogation room with him.”

  Alan took the paper and unfolded it.

  There was a single date scrawled on it in blue ink: 05/08/2008

  “I took a look at it,” Yodel said. “I hope you don’t mind. That date mean anything to you?”

  Alan had stared at what was written on the piece of paper for a long time. Eventually, he had folded it and placed it in his pocket. “Thank you, Officer. I better catch my flight.”

  And he hadn’t gotten a wink of sleep during the flight home because the date written on the piece of paper did mean something to him. In fact, that precise date held great significance when weighed against all the other days that had occurred throughout the course of his life.

  Because it was the date on which he had nearly died.

  Alan arrived at GCB headquarters at around three-thirty that afternoon. When the elevator doors opened, he was greeted by a standing ovation. The first standing ovation anyone had ever received by the rest of the investigators and essential personnel in the agency. He accepted this little triumph, these little pats on the back, with tired gratitude as he made his way to Gant’s office and closed the door behind him.

  He sank down into one of the chairs facing Gant’s desk, believing it wouldn’t be outside the realm of possibility for him to fall asleep sitting upright.

  Gant stared up at him over a stack of papers that formed a small mountain on the center of his desk. “Now you’re the hero,” Gant said.

  “Am I?”

  Gant looked at his right wrist, pretending to check the time on a wristwatch that wasn’t there. “Yeah, for the next five minutes or so. You better enjoy it.”

  “I’m not in the mood to enjoy anything right now. Except sleep, maybe.”

  Gant shuffled through some folders on his desk, found the one he was looking for, and slid it over to Alan. “Okay, time’s up. You’re catching again.”

  Alan sat forward, grabbed the folder, and began to sift through the documents inside of it. “We’re popular all of a sudden,” he said, skimming over the pages.

  “That’s what happens when you put yourself on the map. Though I gotta say, Strickland was pleased as punch.”

  “McKay?”

  “He’s been released. He’ll probably never know how close he was to taking the fall for everything. Of course, he’ll probably spend the rest of his life looking over his shoulder with Darrow still out there somewhere.”

  “I doubt that’s his real name.”

  “Crafty one, that one. Still haven’t figured out why he targeted you?”

  Alan remembered the scrap of paper in his pocket. The one they had taken off of Darrow with the date written on it. He hadn’t mentioned it to Gant and he made the decision now that he wasn’t going to. What good would it do to open another barrel of mystery?

  “No idea.”

  “He’ll turn up.”

  “Bad pennies always do.”

  “You’ve got that right.”

  Alan glanced down at the contents of the folder. “Váli Labs?”

  “Yeah. Apparently, they’re involved in some real cutting edge physical enhancement experimentation. Might not be entirely on the up and up.”

  “I better get to work.”

  “It’s almost closing time on Friday night. Go home. Sleep. It’ll be here come Monday morning. By then your celebrity status should be a thing of the past.”

  “I hope so.”

  Alan left Gant’s office and returned to his own. Lucy was at her desk, her fingers tapping hurriedly at her keyboard. When Alan stepped into the office, she frowned without looking up. “You forgot.”

  “Forgot what?”

  “To let me know you were okay,” Lucy said, glancing up at him. “That’s the second time now.”

  “It slipped my mind. I’ve been buried up to my eyeballs in clones lately.”

  Lucy’s fingers stopped, her hands coming away from the keyboard. “So Morrie Arti was Darrow all along?”

  “More like Morrie Arti and Darrow were somebody. Both of them were figments of someone’s twisted imagination.”

  “I can’t believe he was a clone. The real guy is still out there. Do you think you’ll hear from him again?”

  “According to him, yeah, I guess I will.”

  “So all he told you was that he’s like your arch nemesis. That’s it?”

  Alan didn’t know what compelled him to do it, but he took the slip of paper from his pocket and handed it to her. He hadn’t planned to tell anyone about it, but it was tough keeping a secret. He needed at least one person to confide in, and Lucy would have to do.

  Lucy unfolded the piece of paper and read it. She looked up at him and said, “A date? What does it mean?”

  “That’s the day I had the car accident,” Alan said, surprised to feel better now that he had shared his secret with someone.

  “The one that gives you recurring nightmares?”

  “One and the same.”

  “Wonder what it means.”

  “No idea.”

  “I’ll bet it’s another clue,” Lucy said.

  “A clue to what?”

  “I think you’re probably the only one that can answer that. Are you still having it?”

  “The dream?”

  “The nightmare.”

  “Yes.”

  “Occasionally.”

  “You should really go see someone.” She held up a staying hand and added: “I know what you’re going to say, and I’m not saying it has to be a psychic. But you should talk about it with someone.”

  “I’m still debating. What about you? I thought you were supposed to have your big date with Marvin tonight?”

  “He stood me up.”

  “You’re kidding?”

  “It’s a long story, but it ends with him getting back together with his ex-girlfriend.”

  “Marvin’s a player. Who would have thought?”

  Lucy said, “It doesn’t matter. I consulted my psychic friend last night. He didn’t think it would work out anyway.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “For what?”

  “That Marvin didn’t pan out.”

  “You win some and you lose some, right?”

  Alan glanced at the folder in his hand and then pitched it onto his desk. “I haven’t eaten anything yet.”

  “Okay.”

  “So, I know what you said about guys that come off as desperate, and you’ve already shot me down once, but I’ll give it one more shot. Would you like to go to dinner with me, Lucy?”

  “Like a pity party dinner?”

  “Like a regular dinner.”

  “You’re just taking pity on a girl.”

  “I’m no Marvin, but maybe you can find it in your heart to settle for me as a consolation prize?”

  Lucy hesitated, but Alan noticed that she was blushing. Finally, she said, “I guess that would be okay. But it’s only dinner.”

  “Scout’s honor. But do me a favor? Cool it with the telling me to go see a psychic stuff?”

  “Look at that. Our first date and you’re already trying to change me.”

  “I thought it was only dinner?”

  Lucy smiled and said, “That’s what I meant.”

  Excerpt from Project Diamond

  By the time I brace for the impact, it’s too late.

  The ship crashes into a mile-long asteroid like a mosquito colliding with a dinosaur.

  I try to breat
he, but I can’t – all that happens is a strange whistling sound comes out of my throat and all I feel is incredible pain.

  But that’s gone in a flash as a bright white explosion blinds me.

  Then everything fades to black.

  Then I wake up. That’s always when I wake up.

  Because that’s not me I’m dreaming about. It’s just my mind’s fantasy about the way my dad died. Only it probably didn’t happen that way. He would have been spared any suffering because he would have been asleep in his cryo-unit, maybe dreaming about something pleasant when the end came. At least that’s the way I like to think it happened. It’s easier to stomach. Quick and painless. Here one minute, gone the next.

  Accidents happen.

  That’s what the corporation my dad worked for said afterward. They issued a formal apology, but denied any wrong doing. They had miscalculated the asteroid’s trajectory. Oops. Sorry. Everybody makes mistakes, right?

  Nobody could prove anything one way or the other. Every ship had a black box on board, but since my dad’s ship practically disintegrated on impact with the asteroid, there wasn’t anything left to salvage. As a failsafe, in the event of a major disaster (which the corporation my dad worked for had always considered to be an infinitesimal possibility), the data from the black box should have been relayed back to Earth.

  But it didn’t work out that way. Due to a glitch in the black box’s programming, all that data was lost in space. The science geeks say that information is never lost, so maybe it was still floating around out there somewhere; maybe it was still drifting through the vacuum. Doesn’t matter though, no one would ever see it.

  The corporation received what amounted to a slap on the wrist. They were required to issue a formal apology to all of the victims’ families. Like that was supposed to make it all better.

  My mom did get some money out of the deal. The corporation paid out Dad’s accumulated wages. It wasn’t much, and I didn’t see a dime of it.

  When I was seventeen, my mom left. Maybe it was easier to pretend she had never had a family. Make a clean break and a fresh start. My dad died when I was fifteen, and in the two year interim between that and my mom skipping out, she was really only a ghost that bumped and banged during the night.

  I wasn’t as broken up as I thought I would be after she was gone. She had been around, but only in a physical sense. Mentally, she had checked out a long time ago.

  I had spent that two year period training for the inevitable. Learning how to fend for myself. It wasn’t hard. I knew how to cook well enough. At least anything that came in a can. Pour it in a bowl, nuke it for three minutes, and what you pulled out was a steaming pile of something almost edible.

  My mom left me the apartment. I don’t mean she owned it and then deeded it over to me as a consolation prize for suddenly going MIA. What I mean is that she only rented the cramped apartment we had moved into shortly after Dad died (like I mentioned earlier, she hadn’t received any giant windfall after he passed, so in an effort to conserve what little she had, we had moved from a four bedroom house to a one bedroom apartment).

  When she skipped out, I basically inherited the apartment. If I wanted to keep a roof over my head, I had to pay the rent somehow.

  I was of average strength and intelligence, and that was enough to land me a job bagging groceries at a mom & pop store called Jeff’s Foods. It was one of the few stores left that wasn’t part of a chain. That lasted for six months, during which time I worked my way up from bagging groceries and stocking shelves to unloading the delivery trucks when they showed up at the back dock at five-thirty every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.

  It was menial labor. Grunt work. I wasn’t exactly content.

  I had just turned eighteen (seeing as how I was on my own, there was no celebration, but it didn’t bother me all that much seeing as how I hate birthdays with a passion) when I answered an online ad looking for training dummies.

  The ad put it a little more eloquently than that, but practice dummy was really what the job boiled down to. What it was exactly was one of the fancy cadet training schools needed someone who could assist the survival training instructor with hand-to-hand combat training classes. It was all part of what they considered prerequisite training for the interstellar space missions that went out every year or two. Just like a lot of community colleges provided degrees that geared students up to eventually become doctors or lawyers, specialized academies had cropped up over the years that catered to students that wanted to qualify for prolonged space missions.

  The consensus was still out as to whether these schools (accredited though they might be) actually helped a student gain an upperhand when later applying for a job with one of these missions, but I didn’t much care seeing as how my only interested was in getting a better paying job.

  I can’t tell you how many applicants they had, but in the year 2171 obesity was as big a problem as it had ever been. Despite having dropped out of high school and having only a GED, apparently the fact that I was physically fit ranked me high on the potential job candidate list. I interviewed, was invited back for second interview a week later, and several days after that I sat down with a guy named Burnell Steinmeyer who was the lead combat instructor at the Hancock Interstellar Space Academy.

  We hit it off. He was a no nonsense kind of guy, and I like to think he appreciated the fact that I told it how it was and didn’t pull any punches. I didn’t try to oversell myself either. I knew what I was, and I wasn’t ashamed of it. I didn’t have a lot of experience, but I was a quick learner, and I figured that counted for something.

  That, and I made Burnell laugh.

  He said, “Jacob Lansing?” I told him he could call me Jake. He told me he would call me whatever he damn well pleased. “Fair enough,” I said.

  He hired me that day.

  Burnell wasn’t a large man. Five-eight to my five-ten and thinner than me, but he had a wiry kind of strength to him. And, as I discovered on my first day of employment at Hancock, he was fast, too.

  I remember that day pretty well. It was early spring in 2171. I was standing a few feet from Burnell as he addressed a crowd of twenty new recruits, all of them aspiring wannabes and still wet behind the ears. I remember sizing Burnell up as he spoke to them, thinking he was several inches shorter than I was, with a build thinner than my medium one. I knew he had years of training under his belt, but I had the size advantage, and since I did an hour-long workout regimen every day, I figured I had a better-than-average chance at taking him.

  I was wrong.

  Burnell didn’t waste any time that day. He wanted all the recruits to know what they were getting themselves into. He didn’t take it easy on me either. He motioned for me to advance, telling me I should try to take him down. “Okay, give it your best shot,” were his exact words. “And don’t be afraid to get rough. In real life, you’ve gotta remember one thing: no one’s gonna go easy on you.”

  I took a few steps towards him, hands raised, smart enough to be cautious.

  I swung at him with a right, but my fist sailed through empty air as he sidestepped out of the way. I told myself I was going easy, hadn’t been as quick as I could have been.

  I took another shot, faster this time, coming in with a left jab, aiming straight for his face. Nothing but empty air again, only this time as he stepped to the side, he grabbed my outstretched arm, twisted it around and brought it up behind my back, painfully. I grunted with the pain. He shoved me away, motioning for me to try again.

  It went on like that for a good five minutes, by which time I was chugging for air. I couldn’t touch him. I’d take a swing, and next thing I’d know he would have me in a headlock, or would have swept my legs out from under me, or would have me pinned to the ground.

  After class had ended, I was ashamed of myself. Burnell could tell I was upset. “What’s eating at you?” he said.

  “I’m not sure I’m cut out for this.”

  “Quitting already?
”

  “I couldn’t even touch you.”

  “So? What would it say about me if you had? Listen, I didn’t give you the job because I thought you knew everything there was to know. I just need someone that can keep getting up. The rest is cake.”

  It wasn’t a speech. I don’t think it was even a pep talk really. Just letting me know that there was nothing to be ashamed of. I shook myself off and took his word for it. I ended up spending two years working with Burnell.

  And he was right. I learned. In all that time, I don’t think we ever got close. We weren’t friends, he didn’t once sit down and ask me about my problems, and we sure as hell never went out to lunch together. But I respected him, and, by the end, I think he respected me.

  In all that time, I never managed to beat him. I got close a couple of times though. I could hold my own, at least get him breathing heavy. One of the first things he always told the new recruits was that chances were they’d never have to use what he was teaching them. That given all the factors, a fist fight in space was probably the least of their worries. I think it was a lesson in confidence-building if nothing else. If you could make a person feel like they could handle a given situation, chances are they would be able to when the time comes.

  There weren’t a lot of perks working at Hancock. The pay wasn’t great. Paid the rent, but not much else. One of the things they did do was let you audit any of the classes for free. You couldn’t attend as a student, the waiting list was too long for that, but you could sit and listen in. Which is what I did. I didn’t have any friends, and there wasn’t much to do at my apartment, so I spent most of my off time sitting in on the different classes, listening to instructors drone on about everything from ship mechanics to the basic principles of colonization of various planet types. What worked on one type of planet didn’t necessarily work on another.

  There were classes on the history of space travel, from Sputnik to the first successful manned flight outside our solar system.

  There were more ambitious courses that introduced students to mission hierarchies, ranking systems, and chain of command. They showed us video of the first astronauts to land on Mars (2043) and footage of a probe being swallowed up by a black hole (only the black hole wasn’t doing much “swallowing” per se, the probe looked more like it was just sitting there, suspended in space for eternity).