Severance

by Chris Bucholz

  He caught a glimpse of the gray wall of the security van driving away as he leapt off the end of the escalator, nearly colliding with a pair of security officers as he did so. “Easy, lady,” one of them said, his smile fading as he recognized Bruce and the object in Bruce’s hand. Bruce faintly recognized him too, and, for the second time that day, knocked him unconscious with a shot to the face. The other officer reacted, not quickly enough. Bruce stepped over their bodies and stared down the street, watching the back of the security van retreat to the south.

  “Assey shit!” he yelled, knowing it was going to the main security headquarters. Behind the barricades and bulkhead doors, completely out of reach. Furious, he shot both officers in the crotch. “It’ll be more of the same if you don’t let her go!” he yelled at their comatose bodies before tossing his wig to the ground.

  §

  Hogg pulled the van to a halt in front of the plastic barricade. Through the windshield, he waved at the helmeted officers on the other side. “Come on, guys,” he said to himself, knowing they couldn’t hear him. “Move that thing.” He waved again. One of the officers waved back. “What are they doing?” he asked.

  “Dunno,” Linze said from the passenger seat. She opened the door and stepped out of the van. One of the less regrettable officers under Hogg’s command, he had let Linze stick around for the delivery. Linze walked up to the barricade where she proceeded to get in an animated discussion with one of the officers standing there. Hogg turned to look through the interior door to the passenger compartment, checking that Stein was still there. She was, head bowed, looking defeated. Satisfied, Hogg opened his door and stepped out of the van.

  “What’s up, guys?” he said, approaching the barricade. “Move that piece of junk. Thorias is expecting us.” He stopped beside Linze, facing off from the morons on the other side of said piece of junk. The head moron turned to him, looking him up and down carefully. Hogg didn’t recognize the man’s face. Which was unusual, doubly so in this case. He thought he had met all the on–duty officers, or at least seen their faces around. And this particular face was ugly enough to remember.

  The moron held his terminal up to his ear, a finger raised to silence Hogg. That was a gesture Hogg let few people get away with, and he started to consider simply driving over the buffoon. Finally, the pig–faced officer lowered his terminal. “You’ve been ordered to hand over the prisoner and the van to us and to continue hunting for the remaining terrorists.”

  “Have I?” Hogg asked. “You’d think that if I’d been ordered that, someone other than you would be telling me about it.” The smile that was spreading across his face stopped, interrupted by a beep from his own terminal, no doubt telling him exactly that. He ignored the message and set his jaw. “Get out of my way. This is my damned prisoner, which my damned team got shot in their damned faces for. I’m handing her over to Thorias myself.”

  The ugly officer sneered at him. “No, you’re not, Sergeant. Turn around.”

  “No.”

  Suddenly the ugly, stupid officer withdrew his pistol. “Sergeant, I am under orders to let no one cross this barricade. That includes you. Don’t make me use this.”

  Hogg took one large step forward and punched the officer in the jaw, sending him to the ground. “Then don’t use it,” he told the squealing asshole. He stared down two of the other officers on the barricade, daring them to say something. No one moved, so Hogg stepped back and grabbed the barricade, Linze moving to the far end of it. Together they started shifting the flimsy barrier out of the way of the van. They were interrupted by the sound of a gunshot, Hogg feeling the back end of the barricade hitting the ground behind him, a second before the sound of Linze doing the same. He turned to find himself staring down the gun of the pig–faced asshole.

  “I told you you’re not crossing this thing, Sergeant,” the asshole said. “You’re not going to get any more warnings.”

  “Warnings?” Hogg yelled. He bent down to check the warning that had thudded into Linze. “Are you fucking crazy?” he yelled. “WE’RE ON YOUR SIDE!”

  “You’re on that side right now, Sergeant,” the officer shouted back. “And until that changes, stay the fuck away from this barricade.” He twitched the pistol back down the street. “If you doubt me, read your fucking terminal.”

  Hogg’s hand slid down to his terminal, calculating how much farther it had to travel to reach his pistol. A bit too far. Frustrated, he opened his terminal and read the message. It was from Thorias, and it confirmed everything pig–face had just said.

  “Fuck you,” Hogg said, but the words felt perfunctory. The fight had gone out of him. He looked down at Linze, then up at the van, then down at Linze again and growled with frustration. Finally, he bent down and hoisted Linze up onto her knees, then up and over his shoulder. Without saying another word to pig–face, he slowly returned back in the direction he had come.

  §

  Sergei watched in dismay as Hogg retreated around the corner. Hogg hadn’t noticed him on the line, distracted by his confrontation with Chester. Sergei wondered if he should have interjected himself in that confrontation, talked Hogg down somehow. Chester was one of the recently recalled officers and had been put in charge of the barricade only an hour previous, apparently rewarded for some favor he had earned a decade earlier.

  After Hogg disappeared from view, Chester moved around to the back of the van, opened the door, peered inside, then slammed it shut. Sergei felt his muscles stiffen; he knew who was in there. As Chester strutted back to the front of the van, Sergei imagined himself the star of a big romantic scene, professing his undying love for the terrorist mastermind, making a daring bid for her freedom.

  But he only imagined it.

  The message he had received from Kay Sampson had been pretty confusing, until he finally realized it was a pseudonym Laura was using. Which was a neat trick; he would have to ask how she did that sometime. The message was coded, referring to completely fictional friends, and encounters, and plans the pair of them supposedly had. But between the lines, he figured out what she was saying. She had said she didn’t do it. And he believed that.

  But there wasn’t much he could do about it. Certainly not with a dozen other cops watching him.

  Chester stepped inside the van and prodded it forward, the van slowly inching past the barricades. Sergei watched it pass, feeling a little guilty. But just a little. It certainly wasn’t his fault she had gotten into this mess. And it would be sorted out soon enough. He would talk to her then. If he squinted, he could sort of imagine her understanding that. Apologies after the fact were cheaper than career–limiting stunts up front. That was exactly the kind of thing she liked to say.

  Done lying to himself for the moment, Sergei helped the officers shift the plastic barricade back into place, turning his back on the van carrying away his sometime lover.

  Previously

  Over the rim of his glass, Harold surveyed the room of happy little people having happy little conversations. It looked like fun. He missed fun.

  It had been six months since he had found Kevin’s message, months spent with his back in knots, waiting for a hammer blow that never came. They didn’t know he knew. He still barely knew himself — most of the evidence that Kevin had compiled was impenetrable, miles outside of Harold’s expertise. He had spent weeks trying to figure out the navigational and fuel consumption data before giving up, his vision swimming with important looking tangents intersecting important looking hyperboles. There were also instructions on how he could verify all these fuel consumption calculations himself, but they looked useless to anyone who wasn’t standing right beside the reactor, a location he would have a hard time explaining his presence in. “It’s all right; I’m a doctor,” could only get away with so much.

  But the memos and recorded conversations were far more clear–cut, and as Kevin had suggested, at times terrifying. The captain and his staff, casually discussing mass–murder. By the time Kevin had gotten ar
ound to recording their conversations, they had even started joking about it. Harold felt proud of Kevin for trying to stop these monsters. He hoped he could live up to the young man’s example.

  Except for maybe the last part of that example.

  A month earlier, Captain Barston, the monster–in–chief, had announced that the ship was off–course, though assured the ship that it was ‘Nothing To Worry About.’ A course correction — the Turn — was coming and would fix everything. The news had not gone over well, the ship more than a little nervous to hear tell of this little mishap, so close on the heels of their inadvertent basting with cosmic radiation. The news feeds had been hounding everyone in a naval uniform relentlessly since then, looking for someone to hang. The only responses they got mirrored the official explanation: they were off course not because of malice, but simple stupidity. An unsatisfying explanation, though a convincing one.

  Harold had struggled to feign surprise when the news broke — he had been neck–deep in navigational calculations for months and had forgotten that their cross–eyed way–finding wasn’t common knowledge. The planned course correction was accounted for in Kevin’s evidence. Kevin thought it was small, and would have a negligible effect on the fuel load, but this was the part of the evidence Harold was least sure of. He was hopeful someone else could do better with it.

  To that end, he had been loitering in the bar for the past week, a copy of Kevin’s data, less the video message, on a dummy terminal tucked in his waistband. All three of the main news feeds had offices in this neighborhood, the hacks and pretty boys who worked there regularly spending their free time in the bar. Any one of whom would potentially be very interested in what he had stuffed in his pants.

  For much of the past week he had been weighing the pros and cons of simply handing the evidence over to a reporter. But the months of fear and paranoia, and the memory of Chief Hatchens’ mirthless smile, had convinced him of the folly of that plan. He had instead decided he would find some way to dump this information off anonymously.

  His eyes settled on three of the carefree bastards standing on the far side of the bar, easily picking them out by their teeth, white to the point of fluorescence. One of them in particular caught his eye, a reporter from NewsFantastic! Chet Something. Big, broad–shouldered, constantly grinning. He had been more aggressive than most of his colleagues while harassing his sources about the Turn, even managing to use his big toothy grin to bed a junior naval officer, apparently getting the poor girl thrown into the brig. It had been the talk of the bar a couple of nights earlier. For Harold’s purposes, he would be perfect. Not only would he be interested in the story, but to an outside observer it would be plausible that he had dug it up on his own.

  How to actually get the terminal in his hands was trickier, though a number of feeble ideas had been battling it out in Harold’s mind for the past hour. As he watched the three reporters, Chet Something got up from his chair and crossed the bar, heading to the men’s washroom. Harold sat up straight, watching this with interest. Sensing an opportunity, he made a snap decision and followed the big reporter.

  Inside the washroom, Harold saw his quarry at the far end of the bank of urinals, his back turned to the door. Harold went to the sink and washed his hands, looking over his shoulder. The rest of the washroom appeared to be empty. Harold tugged the terminal out of his pants and set it down beside the sink, setting it to display “READ ME” in bright green letters. Drying his hands, he turned and went for the door, casting a glance at Chet, just shaking himself off.

  Outside the washroom, Harold picked his way back across the bar floor to his table. As he sat down, he looked up to see Chet Something’s big empty smile as he was already sitting back down with his friends. Harold realized Chet must have left seconds after, right on Harold’s heels. He wasn’t in possession of the terminal, nor had the expression of a man who had just uncovered a diabolical conspiracy. “You filthy bastard,” Harold said, shaking his head, the doctor in him dismayed by the man’s hygiene.

  While he berated himself for the short–sightedness of his plan, he watched another sap enter the washroom. Assuming he wasn’t a filthy degenerate himself, he would be in for a surprise. For the next two minutes, Harold sat extremely still, only his hands moving, but those not stopping. Finally, the man walked out of the washroom, terminal in hand, a wary expression on his face. Harold looked down at his own glass, eyes locked on the rim, not daring to look directly at the man. He watched through the corner of his eye as the man sat down with his friends, not far from where Harold was sitting himself. His ears strained to pick out their conversation over the music and clamor of the crowd. Nothing about a mysterious terminal or murderous plot to sunder the ship. They were talking about work — it sounded like they worked for one of the feeds. Harold realized he had been holding his breath and inhaled deeply, then rewarded himself with a hefty pull from his now warm drink. Ass–backwards, he had managed to get the terminal to someone who might do something with it. Harold finished his drink, stood up, and left the bar, feeling a long–forgotten lightness return to his step.

  The next morning, Harold woke up and immediately flipped on his terminal, hoping to see if the captain had resigned in disgrace thanks to a heroic anonymous tipster.

  That had not happened. Instead, the front page was dominated by a headline:

  ARGOS EXTREME NEWS ASSISTANT EDITOR FOUND DEAD.

  He had been found strangled, killed in a suspected drug deal. Harold slumped back in his bed, knees curling up to his chest. How can washing your hands after using the bathroom be a bad move? What kind of a moral is that?

  Chapter 6: Everything is Ruined

  Bruce made his way down the middle of the road, warily eyeing the cluster of children ahead of him. There hadn’t been any school for the past two days, which was about two days longer that it took Argosian children to devolve. These particular children appeared to be playing a game which combined many aspects of soccer and gang shoplifting, with a scoring system based on who could swear the loudest. The massive meat fruit they were using as a ball squirted away from them, rolling down the street to stop at his feet. Bruce stopped, considered his options for a moment, then punted the orb of meat back at the children as hard as he could, knocking two of them off their feet. Although intellectually he understood that this was a pretty horrible thing to do to children, he found himself unable to take any joy from it.

  After watching Stein taken away to the aft and placed out of reach, he had retired to one of his own hiding spots. Two days of running and gunning had left him exhausted, and even racked as he was with guilt, it hadn’t taken him long to drift off to sleep, curled into a nest made of wadded lumps of insulation.

  He awoke some time later in a sweat, shaken awake from a dream filled with swarms of codpiece–clad security officers chasing him through endless halls. Unable to get back to sleep, his mind wandered, adventured, even gallivanted, as he ran the situation over in his head.

  Rescuing Stein wasn’t impossible. It was just really unlikely. “Eat my shit, probability,” he had said, fluffing the insulation under him, trying desperately to ignore the fact that probability was probably right in this case: rescuing Stein was not a terribly likely thing to happen. She would be in the main security base by that point, behind the closed bulkhead doors, behind hundreds of armed men who hated him.

  There were ways past them of course, secret, hidden ways through the stinkier parts of the ship. But Stein was always better at that stuff than he was; he had only been in a fraction of the ship’s bowels himself and couldn’t think of any useful passages that would help here.

  This thought led to an attempt to consult the ship’s drawings and the discovery that he wasn’t the first to think of that. Perhaps anticipating assholes like him doing asshole stuff like what he was considering, the conspirators had put a lock on the ship’s schematics. And Bruce had never bothered to put those drawings on a dummy, had never even considered that they would be un
available to him.

  Which was why he was attacking children on the way to the maintenance office. From what little Bruce knew about the network, there was a chance one of the desks in the maintenance office would have a copy of the drawings stored in its local cache. It was only a faint chance; if IT had thought to lock down the network copies, they would surely have some way of dealing with the cached sets.

  He found the maintenance office empty, no one from the swing shift apparently bothering to work anymore. He entered the small back office, and sat down at Stein’s desk. Sure enough, its cache had been blanked. Any attempt to gather information on the ship’s systems refused to work. The Big Board was a cascade of red error messages, all complaints about access levels. He cast a baleful look at the floater desk shared by himself and the other technicians for their work, confident it had been wiped too. Looking at it for a long couple of seconds, something twitched in his head. He decided he should probably still check it.

  “Stupid asshole desk!” he yelled, finding that it too had been wiped. He wondered how they were expected to maintain the ship without any drawings of it. He wondered if they even cared. Helot. That ship splitting fucker. He kicked the desk, which unsurprisingly, made his foot hurt. He checked the desk for damage. Not a scratch. “Bullshit durable asshole desk.” Another brain twitch.

  The floater desk had been replaced a couple months earlier. One of the overnight idiots had managed to crack the screen with his enormous ass. The whole unit had been sent to recycling, where it might very well still be in one piece. He knew they didn’t recycle things straightaway — they just picked and chose from the scraps at hand as they needed them. Which meant there was still a chance it was intact, but unpowered, its cache intact. “Thank you, bullshit durable asshole desk,” Bruce said, kicking it again affectionately before heading for the door.