by Andrew Post
Flam was at work trying to wedge the elevator open, huffing and puffing.
“Don’t bother,” Clyde said.
“What?”
“Stop. It’s not worth it.”
Easing into a standing position—with some help of the wall and a hand firmly latched to the small of his back—Flam took a break, tossing aside a tool he’d apparently found in one of the supply closets. Far better than going around beating everything into operation with his blunderbuss.
“What do you mean?” Flam asked, forcing his spine straight. “What’s not worth it?”
Clyde wondered how the Mouflon would react when he told him his services were no longer required. “He wasn’t worth it. Mr. Wilkshire.”
But Flam gave his reply fast, as if he’d been thinking the whole time something like this might come up. “Sorry to hear that. But we still need to get out of here, Pasty, and my word’s my word. We’ll get you to Adeshka. We’ll get you somewhere safe. We may not need to go after a pilot anymore, but I’ll see you to a new place where you can start over at least.” He gestured at the doors. “I’m going this way regardless.”
“Thank you.” Clyde wanted to think about what Adeshka would look like, what this new life of his might entail, but couldn’t. He was still hung up on what Mr. Wilkshire’s journal had said. The words echoed in his mind, not in the voice of Rohm, as he’d heard them, but from Wilkshire himself. Deep tones, slowly speaking as if each word were chosen carefully.
Here he was, giving him thought, feeling sad about him. He changed subjects, telling Flam and Rohm what he’d seen, the active heart monitor for someone who was listed in the hospital basement as Patient Eleven.
“There’s someone down there?” Flam grimaced. “Alive? But the evacuation was months ago. How could anyone be alive—still in their room?”
“Well, I was alone for weeks. Perhaps they’re like me and don’t require food.” That singsong moaning coming through the vents again, what he had thought was a ghost.
“Or like us,” Rohm put in, “living off what was left behind.”
Flam grunted. “Can’t imagine there’d be a lot to scavenge in a hospital subbasement. Which level did you say they were on?”
“The bottom one, the third subbasement. They’re still alive; their pulse was on display. They seemed calm enough, but that doesn’t mean they want to be in there.”
“Maybe it does. Maybe they like it here,” Flam said, his pitch a little raised.
Clyde knew the Mouflon well enough by now to tell when he was afraid. “We should try to help if we can.”
“We agree. Captivity, voluntary or involuntary, is no way to live,” Rohm added. “We can attest to that.”
Flam rammed the blunt, bladed tool between the elevator doors again. “I just don’t think we should be picking up every stranger we come across, but since we have to go that way anyway to catch the elevator to sea level . . .” Again and again, he partly drowned out his own voice with the great metallic pounds on the stubborn doors.
If anyone was down there, they heard it.
Chapter 13
A Proposition
It took the better part of a day for them to remove the weapon from Aksel’s head and neck. The refugee camp infirmary medics told him they’d be unable to provide him with any painkillers. Aksel heard their smiles through their paper masks. They just wanted him to suffer. Which was fine. He didn’t mind pain that much. Especially after the accident that had freed up that half of his head for the weapon to be installed. What a weekend that had been.
He was able to block out most of it, but the sounds of drills and pneumatic wrenches were hard to ignore. A few times their tools were too much for their users, it seemed, and they nearly stripped the head off one of the protein bolts fastening the trigger mechanism to his cheekbone.
“Come on. Be careful. I would like to have some of a face when you’re through.”
“Pipe down.” After the grisly work of getting the base of the head cannon screwed out, the metal coils were next. After the bracing mechanism was pulled up out of his neck, the anchoring slab that used his collarbone and shoulder blade as moorings came next. More tools were required, and of course they had to go have lunch. They left him there gaping for forty-five minutes in the chemical-smelling room under the hot surgical lamps. When they returned, they finished up and dropped the wet heap of biomechanics onto a tray. While snapping off her elbow-length latex gloves, one surgeon commented that they’d leave the head cannon there in the room with Aksel. It had been requested by the head security officer, so he could use it as a visual aid when speaking to their recently flayed Bullet Eater. Again, with that word . . .
With a few nasty glares, the surgeons left him again. The locking bolt from the opposite side was nice and loud so he wouldn’t even feel compelled to leave. He’d come along willingly when they came to collect him at his shack. Why prove himself a bad guest now?
Besides, if they wanted him dead or expelled from the camp, they would’ve just made it so. Rendering him harmless by removing his cannon meant someone of import was going to be brought in here. No such lengths would be taken for just anybody. They had mentioned the head security officer. What could this be about? Was Adeshka going to recruit Aksel, make him some kind of involuntary frontline man? Rumor ’round the ration lines, after all, was that they were planning to send troops after the Odium. Not because it was the right thing to do but because after Geyser was nothing but a smoldering smudge on the map, where would they come next? Adeshka was nothing if not a city full of calculating procrastinators, only acting when it meant death not to.
With the lamps off, at least now he could actually finally feel the air-conditioning. It didn’t provide much comfort, though.
As soon as Aksel sat up, the pain began soaking in. It was like a bad toothache nesting within the itchy burn one felt when a bad fever came on. Thankfully, he experienced pain differently on the right side of his head—which now hung sad and empty, like a half-rotten jack-o-lantern. The initial injury had seared more than a few nerve endings. The bolt shot from that wayfarer’s rifle had close to six hundred thousand volts to it, and when a few of those streams of angry electricity back-fed through the rest of him, it rendered more than three-quarters of his pain receptors to mush. This now he could take, no problem. He’d already had his head cracked like a walnut once. Having it done again today, well, c’est la vie.
He stared at the biomechanical pile on the tray, still dripping both blood and organic lubricant. The head cannon—the premium edition DeadEye—looked like a bifurcated face staring back at him. There was the jaw, with the teeth and everything; the top part of the skull, which housed all the inner workings and aiming systems; the eye socket itself, which looped the barrel and operated as a hidey-hole for the weapon; and even half a nose made of the same rubber replacement that robot’s hands and feet were made of. All in all, it was well worth the eighty thousand spots he’d paid for it, both as a means of threatening self-defense and as a sort of prosthetic. Yes, the half of his face they cloned and stapled on was a few hues off from the olive tone of the rest of him. But as far as these things went, it was close enough. Better than going around with half a face, right?
The door banged open, and two figures entered.
One was tall, thin, and hooded with a black cloak, and the second was a burly fellow who could’ve very well been Neck Scar’s older brother. That is, if Neck Scar’s older brother knew how to stand up straight, properly shave, and dressed himself in a regal red surcoat, immaculately creased trousers, boots that gleamed like new oil, and gloves so white they could’ve been stitched from clouds instead of burlap rags. Not that Aksel could judge a person based on apparel; he too was in the regulation camp fashion of potato-sack tunic and knickers.
“My name is Karl Gonn,” Neck Scar’s long-lost brother said, pulling up one sleeve, then the next of his fine surcoat to show white shirtsleeves underneath.
What is this guy doi
ng here dressed like this? Aksel thought. Are you trying to make us all feel bad, jerk? We get it: you’re rich, and we’re temporarily homeless.
“And this is Moira. Your name is Aksel Cooper, yes?” His voice was buttery, deep.
“Yesh, but it’s said like excel, not whatever it is you jush said.” Aksel slurred due to having only half a lower mandible now. He wasn’t all that well restrained, but he didn’t feel like springing to his feet and attacking these two.
While Karl seemed nice, he was wealthy enough that clearly no true violence had entered his life. The woman behind him, Moira, looked like she could snap off Aksel’s fingers and feed them to him. She seemed like Karl’s puppeteer.
Aksel almost laughed at the thought. “Whash thish abow?”
“This is about you,” Karl said sternly.
“Why? I’m nobody.”
“True. Aksel Cooper is nobody. Merchant, traveler, buyer and seller of goods. Some late fees for taxes on importing off-world goods, but that’s pretty tame compared to another Aksel I’ve heard about.”
Aksel’s neck grew warm. “I had it changed.”
Karl continued. “But—and this might just be me—I would’ve thought the first name would be the thing someone would change when trying to hide, especially with a name as unique as Aksel.”
“I washn’t trying to hide. I was trying to start a new—”
Karl kept right on. “Once we heard Aksel Cooper was here, we thought, why not go and see if this man might know of another Aksel in the system somewhere. Aksel Browne. Aksel ‘Eagle Eyes’ Browne. Captain Aksel Browne. So now that we’ve gotten a chance to sit down with you, could you, Mr. Cooper, tell us if you know this man, this other Aksel we’re seeking?”
“Okay, enough,” Aksel grunted and clunked his head back onto the table. “You got me, okay?”
But he didn’t. He just kept quoting himself, talking in that pompous way that only some Northie Adeshkian could. “And then I thought it’d be a shame if the Aksel we were seeking couldn’t be found. Because we could give a man like that, someone of such precise skills, a chance to do something other than waste their time hiding away on third-rate moons and planetoids, hocking guns and stolen goods.”
“Stop already.”
Aksel looked at all the tools the medics had left strewn everywhere: various bladed instruments and things with moving parts that could cause a great deal of harm in the right hands. He hoped it wouldn’t come to that, honestly. Really, with how this Adeshkian was going on and on, he was halfway looking around for something to use on himself. But one well-timed plunge with that bone saw into Karl’s barrel chest—
He wanted Karl to see him looking, sort of send a silent message of his intentions. So he took his time sizing up his options, as one would scan a menu.
“I’d recommend not doing that,” Moira said sincerely in one of the most intriguing voices Aksel had ever heard: sweet yet weighty, airy but kissed with the faintest bit of Eastern Embaclawe. Now if she would just take down that hood and let him see if she had a face to match . . .
“I washn’t,” Aksel said. “I wouldn’t.”
“You were. And you would.”
“Some accent. Dovetail, if I’m not mishtaken, right? Dovetail, Eastern Embaclawe? Yeah, definitely Dovetail. Long way from home, aren’t you, girlie? But, then again, I’d forgive speaking to shomeone from that pretentious continent shince, best as I remember, all those Dovetail gals were all gorgeous. Like shomething had been introduced into the water. Caramel skin, blue eyes, hair as blonde as threads of shunshine . . .”
Aksel was nearly spilling off the table leaning in his restraints so far. If only Karl would move to one side a little. “Let me shee your face,” he said, giving the best roguish grin he could with a half-gone skull.
Moira shrank back behind Karl. Three of her could hide back there. “Let us get this over with,” she said from the other side of the mountainous man. “We haven’t a lot of time.”
“One peek?” Aksel pressed. “Pretty pleash? Just let me shee your face.”
“Enough,” Karl said. “All right? We’ve seen this act before. First you’ll come off like some kind of drunken buffoon, trying to get us to drop our guard, and the next thing we know you’ll have a knife buried in our necks, classic Bullet Eater bait and switch. It’s not going to work on us.”
“Shorry,” Aksel said. He brought up a hand to support his face so that the words came out a little smoother. “I think it’s the air-conditioning. I haven’t been somewhere that wasn’t a million degrees day and night for going on seven months.”
“We understand,” Karl said impatiently, “but, as my companion already said, we’re not exactly made of time.”
“And . . . who are you and your companion, again?”
“Karl. Moira.”
“Got your names just fine, just not who you are.”
Moira spoke. “We’re in the business of insurance.”
“That’s swell. Because do you see my face? I would really like to find the prick who did this to me originally and sue the pants off him.”
Karl was clearly through with Aksel’s runaround. He moved forward to give Aksel a thrashing, but Moira took a quick step around him and put herself between the two men, a boot heel clicking on the sanitized white floor. Like a trained dog, Karl halted, but his expression remained a scowl.
With Moira one step closer, Aksel could see into the dark recesses of her hood a fraction better. She appeared to be wearing extensive pancake makeup or to have some kind of horrible skin condition that rendered her skin pale as bone. Not from Embaclawe.
Moira shifted and pinched her hood together to envelop her face fully in shadow. From inside the black silk, “Not that kind of insurance, although once you’ve done what we want you to do, we may be able to work something out.”
“Forget about it. A friend of mine got him already. I was just testing you.” Aksel regarded Karl, looming nearby still, ready to plunge in if his companion seemed at all in danger. With him standing so close, Aksel could smell him even over the disinfectant. “You mind?”
Karl kept his eyes on Aksel. “Moira?”
Moira, undoubtedly blind inside her hood, nodded. “It’s fine.”
Grunting, Karl gave them space but not too much.
Aksel returned his gaze to Moira. “All right. You want something out of me. First, let’s get down to the brass tacks. Two questions. What’s in it for me? And why me at all? Otherwise, you can just turn right around and—”
“Twenty years ago, at fourteen, you lied about your age and joined the Fifty-Eighth. Am I right? The Adeshka militia outfit? Better known as the Battalion of the Weird, a small army that ran around playing soldiers under the claim they were all fabrick weavers—except one actually was. Susanne Clover.
“I assume you spread this rumor about the rest of yourselves to make your outfit seem even more daunting, even though you were all just ex-gang members, reformed con men, sell slugs, peddlers of all kinds, which in turn sullied the general opinion of the woven for years, something we still haven’t completely recovered from . . .”
So that was it. These two were fabrick weavers. Woven. But how did they know so much, specifically about Susanne?
Aksel hated it when people knew more about him than he had told them and gave them nothing in his eye to show them they’d surprised him. He folded his arms and nodded. He didn’t feel like talking anymore or holding his face up to get his voice to sound decent. His bravado melted away in a blink, and Karl made it clear he noticed by a wry grin. Jerk.
“Yeah, fine, I’m not a weaver, and neither were hardly any of them. What of it?”
“You accepted false information from a freelance battlefield scout that misled your squad and made your battalion destroy a small village occupied by two thousand innocent men and women—”
“Yeah, we all know the shtory.”
But Moira persisted, her hand not pulling her hood shut but held out rigidly, finge
rs spread. She wore a black glove with two white dots painted in the palm that reminded Aksel of a domino. On second glance, he realized it wasn’t paint but her actual skin showing through these two round holes. Strangely, he became transfixed upon her hand as she talked. It was as if he had no choice but to listen. Puzzling this out, he suddenly realized how talkative he’d been till this point. Though he hadn’t said a lot, even that much was more than he really wanted. Something was going on here.
“I feel shtrange,” he said, meaning to just think it. “Are you doing thish?”
“Your position was disclosed when you released said salvo, resulting in all but ten soldiers of your battalion being wiped out. Of them, only three were able to walk again unaided. Susanne, as you know, went on to bigger and better things. Another, who also went to Geyser to start over, has to rely completely on a wheelchair and a bird assistant to perform his job as a miner with any sort of normalcy—”
Aksel interrupted again. “Okay, okay, okay, okay. I get it. You made your point: you know me. Susanne married a prince and ended up dead, and last I heard Nigel is just fine living in Geyser. Well, was fine . . . before, you know, Geyser found itself in its current condition—and that, I assure you, I had nothing to do with.”
“Susanne Clover died giving birth to someone who should’ve gone on to become a princess,” Moira hissed from beneath her cowl.
“So is thish about Gorett and that rumor about him stealing the throne?”
Moira sputtered, “She—he—”
Karl cleared his throat.
Moira continued after a moment, with less fury choking her voice. “My point is, she was the lucky one. Think about the other members of the Fifty-Eighth.”
As much as Aksel didn’t want to, he did. He thought about his old cocaptain, Nigel Wigglesby, who was rumored to live in Geyser driving drillers, of all things. Aksel rarely spent more than a day there in town, hocking goods, out of fear he’d run into the man. Now trapped in the camp, he was doubly afraid. After the first few months of not seeing Nigel in the ration line or walking the fences as most of the Geyser refugees did each morning, Aksel concluded Nigel had died in the attack. Which made Aksel feel better, seeing as how he wouldn’t have that awkward run-in, but then worse when realizing he’d just thought that about a man he’d once considered a friend.
