Borant had to make a choice, I realized. They could probably heal her in seconds, but only if she teleported away. Save a low-level admin or save their two highest-grossing crawlers?
I looked down at the injured woman and smiled.
“You… you did this,” Loita panted.
“What do you mean?” I asked. “It was an accident. The robot blew up. You’re the one who made them put that self-destruct sequence in it. I was in the other room. I have no idea how it blew. You saw how buggy that damn thing was.”
Outside through the broken window, multiple lights appeared, rushing toward the sub. These were other ships, coming to repair the trailer. They wouldn’t get here in time.
“You won’t win,” she gasped, gurgling the words. Foamy, colorless liquid oozed from her mouth and gills. “The Bloom will prevail. You will be forgotten.”
“Nobody likes melodrama, Loita,” I said as the kua-tin died.
But if I do manage that second step, please forgive me. What I do from here on out is solely for me and my people. As long as I am alive, I will do everything I can to make them burn.
They will not fucking break me.
19
It only took the repair subs about thirty seconds to mend the damage. The moment it was fixed, Donut and I teleported away. But when we jumped, we did not return to our personal space. That did not surprise me.
Our destination, however, did.
Entering the Desperado Club.
We were in a small, cluttered office. The paper-covered desk was occupied by a tall man. The shadowy figure wore a dark cloak with a hood, which supernaturally obscured his face, grim reaper-like. His hands, the only flesh I could see, were a dark, dark purple, almost black. His elongated fingers were almost elf-like, though the man’s height suggested he was nothing of the sort.
It was a small office, with wood slat walls and the same tiled floor as the rest of the Desperado Club. A tapestry hung from one wall, looking almost like a Turkish rug. There were no other decorations. Through the wall, I could hear the very distant pulse of the nightclub dance floor.
Our status indicators did not snap back on, but I could examine the man’s properties. Sort of.
Orren.
Syndicate Liaison.
There were a pair of old, wooden chairs in front of the desk.
“Please,” the man said, indicating the chairs. “Carl and Donut. Sit.” He had the voice of a British professor. Authoritative, but not aggressively so.
We both wordlessly sat down. I chewed on the jagged edge of my fingernail. The chair wasn’t high enough for Donut to look over the desk, and she suddenly looked very small sitting there. I reached over and gave her a pat. She was trembling.
The man put his pen down and folded his hands together. He regarded us. The darkness under his hood swirled.
“My name is Orren. I do not work for Borant. I am an independent consultant retained by the Syndicate. I am a neutral third party observer. I work in concert with the current season’s showrunners, the Syndicate government, and the controlling AI. You would not normally meet me or one of my colleagues but under certain extreme circumstances. And as you can imagine, these are extreme circumstances.”
“So, what? You’re like the vice principal of a high school? You collect the naughty boys and girls and tell them what their punishment is?”
He approximated a shrug. “I am a non-AI fact finder. Not quite a sheriff. Not quite an attorney.” He paused. “Not quite a judge.” He moved in his chair, and it creaked, like his body was heavier than it looked. “If the Syndicate sees something that requires more information, they will ask both the kua-tin and AI for reports on what happened. Sometimes those reports contradict each other. Sometimes those reports are inconclusive. In such cases, a liaison such as myself investigates. And if the facts warrant it, I recommend what should be done about it.”
We were in extreme danger here, and we both knew it. I felt for poor Donut, who’d had nothing to do with what had happened in the trailer. But I didn’t regret it. Not one bit.
The creature steepled his fingers. “Do you know how many assassination attempts there have been on dungeon admins over the solars?”
“Probably a lot,” I said.
“More than we would like to admit, yes,” the man—Orren—said. “And quite a few have been successful, too. Two seasons ago, a crocodilian managed to snap the head off of his outreach associate. He shouldered the admin into the hallway and literally bit the man’s head off. And instead of teleporting him away into the crawler disposal unit, the idiot Fortent admins sent two of their own security agents to subdue the crawler and also got themselves killed before the AI finally intervened. Three admins at once, which were the only admins killed by crawlers that season.”
Orren casually leaned back in his chair, which continued to groan and creak ominously. I knew he was wanting me to say something, to offer up information—much like how a real vice principal would if he was trying to get an unruly student to admit their guilt. I wasn’t going to say a word unless he asked me a direct question.
“Three was nowhere near the record, of course. But three is still considered a lot. Last season the Squim Conglomerate had no admin fatalities due to crawler attacks. I’d like you to guess how many have died this season so far due to your fellows.”
That was a trick question if I’d ever heard one.
“Zero,” I said.
The man grunted with amusement. “Not including this most recent death of Admin Loita, the number for this season currently stands at 15. Lucia Mar has killed two. Three if you count her first game guide, which we do not. The rest were all one-off attacks.”
I was genuinely intrigued at that, and more than a little proud of my fellow humans. “I thought all violence against admins was met with immediate justice from the AI. That’s what the warning says.”
Orren ignored me. “Fifteen is already considered a disaster. Do you know why that number is so high this season?”
I shrugged. “Probably two reasons. My people don’t like fish telling them what to do. And the kua-tin are running this show as cheaply as possible. I don’t know the details on how these zone things work, but I know they make it more dangerous for the workers.”
“You are correct, on both accounts.” He drummed the desk with his hand. “However, crawler. Every one of those fifteen deaths, and in fact, every single admin murder from the first crawl until this very moment all have one thing in common.” He leaned in. I detected a very slight distortion to his voice, like he was talking through a speaker. “We know exactly how the crawler pulled it off. This dungeon is the most scrutinized, most surveilled location in the universe. Yet, nobody knows exactly how you did it.”
“She died because that stupid cat blew up,” I said.
“Carl, I’m beginning to suspect this Orren fellow thinks we murdered Loita,” Donut said, speaking for the first time.
“No, no, you misunderstand, crawler Carl. We know exactly how she died. It took longer than I’d like to ascertain all the facts. We were, at first, thrown off by the force of the explosion. There were no extra explosives brought into the production trailer. Yet, the explosion was more powerful than it should’ve been. That was the first mystery, though the AI did have a quick explanation for that. Do you know what it was?”
“I had the cat on my table,” I said. “She was watching me decant those infusions.”
He slapped the desk and pointed at me like I�
�d just given him the answer to an equation. The sudden and unexpected sound was like a thunderclap. I tried not to flinch, and I hated myself for flinching anyway. “Yes! The yield on the toy’s self-destruct mechanism was artificially enhanced by the AI simply because it sat upon your sapper’s bench while you were working on it, which as you know is one of the benefits of your table and your explosive handling skills. But that happened on its own. Records indicate you made no direct adjustments to the toy’s explosive. It’s what you did next that caused the explosion.”
Donut scoffed. “Oh my god, he does believe we did it on purpose.” She made a frustrated noise and then jumped onto my shoulder so she could look directly at the man. “If Carl was going to purposely kill Loita he would’ve shoved a stick of dynamite in her gills and then kicked her in the head. Carl is very good at killing things, and he can be very clever about it sometimes, but he doesn’t do secret Asian man style murders.”
“Agent,” I said.
“What?” Donut asked.
“It’s secret agent man. Not secret Asian man.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes, I’m sure. How does ‘secret Asian man’ make sense?”
“Yes, I supposed that does make more sense. Anyway, that’s not his style, and besides, every one of his plans always screws up somewhere along the way. He would’ve been caught. When he was with Miss Beatrice, his definition of ‘subtle’ was pulling his boxers down and saying, ‘me so horny.’ No offense, Carl.”
“What? I never did that.”
“Oh, right. That was Brad, wasn’t it? Anyway, you get my point. This was not my Carl’s handiwork. It’s quite impossible. He is not a ninja. And before you ask, it wasn’t me, either. Do you have tape of the actual explosion? I would just love to see it. Are you certain it wasn’t one of those Skull empire orcs? Or maybe the Veriluxx people remote detonating it because Carl had discovered their secret, evil plan?”
Orren nodded. “We have surveillance from the Mexx unit in the trailer, but that is it. Since you weren’t in the room, the footage isn’t nearly as holistic as we’d like. But it doesn’t matter. What happened is quite clear. Administrator Loita jumped down off the couch. The toy jumped down to follow, and a few seconds later, it exploded, killing her and almost killing you two as well. The panel on the back of its head dislodged when it jumped, which activated the creature’s self-destruct sequence and set off the explosion. Due to the interface lock-out because of Admin Loita’s presence, neither of you received the self-destruct warning.”
I grunted. “So that shitty little panel on the back of the cat’s head fell off? Look, it’s no secret that we didn’t get along with her. But that panel was made out of plastic. That toy was a cheap piece of crap. I mentioned it was going to fall off on its own more than once.”
He nodded. “I know. I watched the recording multiple times. It’s not plastic, at least not as you know it. The panel was made of a reactive, tamper-proof polymer called Zentix. It’s very popular throughout the galaxy, especially in children’s toys. It’s designed to fail under certain circumstances. Obviously, the explosion part isn’t usually a feature of the toy, but the panel is designed to break if someone tampers with or attempts to illegally modify the toy’s innards.”
“Then why is there a panel in the first place?” Donut asked. “If you can’t play with it, then why is it there?”
“It depends on the toy. Most have varying degrees of features depending on the user license. Some panels can only be accessed by authorized users. Some have controls that can only be adjusted by qualified personnel. It’s a smart polymer with multiple security settings. It’s not important. We are straying from the point.”
“So what is the point? What’re you trying to say?” I asked.
“I’m saying the residue dust left behind by the disco ball smoke curtain started to slowly eat away at the panel. That process was greatly enhanced when you placed the toy within range of Admin Loita’s rebreather apparatus. The moisture caused the remaining dust to run across the panel and along the edges. Then you engineered a situation that would cause the admin to get up off the couch. And because the toy was programmed to follow her, the act of jumping down dislodged the panel and thus caused the explosion. It was, quite simply, one of the most brilliant assassinations I have ever seen a crawler execute. And I applaud you for it.”
“This is just like the end of a Perry Mason episode,” Donut said. “I’m almost disappointed it’s all made-up and Carl isn’t really going to start crying from the witness stand and confess to the murder.”
Donut was cracking jokes, but I knew that she was very tense. And worried.
“But,” Orren continued, ignoring Donut, “as impressive as it was, we cannot allow crawlers to murder admins, even low-level ones such as Loita.” He slid a piece of paper from the pile on his desk and turned it toward me. It was a mostly-blank sheet of paper with a signature line at the bottom and a hand-written headline at the top in Syndicate Standard that read, “Admission of non-sanctioned violence by Crawler number 4,122 ‘Carl.’”
“You want me to sign a blank piece of paper?” I asked. I was mildly offended that they’d think that would actually work. “Yeah, no.”
He shrugged. “You might just survive if you admit it. Lucia Mar happily signed a confession both times, and she’s still in the dungeon. We’d give you a similar deal.”
“If you really thought I’d killed her, we wouldn’t be having this conversation. You wouldn’t be asking me to sign anything.”
Orren didn’t say anything for several moments. “You knew the forcefield would protect the trailer’s hull from the explosion. You asked about it. You knew about the chemical reaction that would eat the panel. You created one of the few explosive combinations that leave behind a persistent residue.” He pulled the blank sheet of paper away and produced a second one, and this one was covered with many, many paragraphs of text. It still had a blank signature line at the bottom. “You’re obviously getting information from an outside source. We know it wasn’t Agatha or any of her helpers. None are in your bubble. We don’t believe it was Odette, either.”
I reeled at the mention of homeless, shopping cart-pushing Agatha. What was it she’d said to me way back on the second floor? Them critters already know I’m here. They just don’t know what to do about it.
“Tell us who your source is and how they communicate with you, and you will be returned to the dungeon with no penalties, and you will be given a Legendary box that will contain an item that will all but guarantee your survival until the ninth floor.”
I was stunned at the offer, but only for a moment. Contract or not, there was no way I was going to trust them about anything. Besides, my “source” was the cookbook, and I did not want to give it up. If I mentioned it, it would disappear. Would they even believe me? It wasn’t worth the risk. No fucking way.
Plus, this guy’s version of the assassination was significantly more complicated and high-tech than what had really happened.
I had no idea about the polymers or the residue of the disco ball reacting with the weird space plastic. That shit was well beyond anything I’d be willing to trust. Donut was right that my plans usually went off the rails. This time it had been to my benefit. That whole chemical reaction thing was nothing more than a happy little misdirection.
I had known about the forcefield thanks to Coolie’s passage in the cookbook. I had known that the disco ball would’ve covered everything in technicolor dust, also thanks to the cookbook. My purpose with that had been simple. I wanted to get that crap all over the toy so they wouldn’t want it brought into the studio. That was it.
I had not known that little panel was made of some weird type of plastic. I did, however, know it was a piece of shit. I’d been worried from the start that the stupid panel would fall off. I’d been toying with using my duct tape to hold the thing in place.
Instead, I came up with an idea for it to fall off exactly when I wanted it t
o.
If I was going to risk everything, then all of the circumstances had to be perfect, and I wouldn’t know if they were until the last possible minute. Only then could I gamble on “arming” the toy. I hadn’t realized the dust from the disco ball was already doing the job for me.
Any kid who’s had battery-operated toys—or any adult who’s had a remote control for their television—knows exactly what happens when that ridiculous little plastic tab over the battery compartment breaks or somehow gets out of whack. The whole cover refuses to stay put, and any big jolt causes it to take a dive, usually disemboweling the batteries in the process.
I couldn’t just outright break off the little tab. That would’ve been both obvious and would’ve caused it to fall right away. So instead of breaking it, I simply pushed it down with my left palm, placed my left thumb between the little tab and the holder, and I broke off my strategically-cut left thumb fingernail, creating a shim.
I’d been collecting all the broken pieces of the robot Donuts every time Mongo killed one. I had a perfectly-preserved back panel from the first iteration in my inventory. I sat on the toilet and practiced the move several times with other fingers before I got it right. I’d cut my nail 3/4s off, but close to the finger so it wasn’t noticeable. The panel thing was such an utter piece of crap, it easily fell off with just a little foreign object. In fact, it was so flimsy, so easy to fall off, I was starting to suspect the toy had actually been a low-effort assassination attempt on us.
When I’d leaned in to tap on the glass and ask Loita if the trailer could go into space, thus confirming Loita was really there thanks to the moisture, I’d attempted to get my nail in place, but it’d slipped out. I’d had to lean in a second time to get it right. I leaned over the couch, and I’d made the move with my left hand, pressing the robot toy against my chest. In the end, it’d been simple. I held the panel in place as I pulled my hand away. When I placed the toy on the couch next to the admin, I’d pulled away with enough force to dislodge my fingernail, which held the panel precariously in place.
The Gate of the Feral Gods Page 28
