He held his hand out to the doors like a game show host. “OK. Which bay?”
She spun in a circle. “Crap, I don’t remember.”
Henry Lo’s voice came over a ceiling loud speaker. “Open the doors Mister Dukemejian, and we won’t flay your skin off, beginning with your feet.”
Jook sneered at a ceiling mount camera and bent down to the upper half of the Wang guy lifting the corpse’s laser gun out of its death grip, mumbling, “Wish these things would shoot at more than flesh.” He looked back up to the camera. “Flay already means take the skin off, you redundant moron!”
There was a long pause and Henry Lo’s voice came over again. “Mister Dukemejian, not only will we flay you, but we will do it over a period of days. During each day, we will expose your exposed nerves to a variety of stimuli that I promise will be simply horrific in its agony, but not so much as to kill you. Oh, and we will remove your man parts one testicle at a time.”
“There you go again, moron. You’re going to expose my exposed nerves. Why not say it with more panache? Something like, we will introduce your exposed nerves to a verity of unpleasantness.” He turned to Jennifer and said in a low voice, “Seriously. Which door? It’s only a matter of time before someone pulls up the base manual and overrides the doors. Anybody can access it. It’s not like we kept it classified.” He cocked his head. “OK, now the blood on the walls is spelling out door number 3” He pointed at three. “Ring a bell?”
“Three sounds right.”
“Central?”
“Yes, my brother.”
Jook’s cadence became serious. “Protocol 12 LN3.”
Door 3 unsealed itself and rose. Jook said, “Central. Protocol Fahrenheit 451, system wide. Exclude flight bay 3.”
The computer voice echoed off the walls. “Jook, my man. I detect no fires in the base during this current space time.”
“Override protocol—679’er XK1. Apply base wide Protocol Fahrenheit 451, extended suppression.”
“Override 679XK1 accepted. Peace out.”
As Jook closed the door to the launch tunnel behind them, a torrent of halon fire-suppressant came shooting down from the ceiling into the nexus, turning the space into a solid bank of fog.
“Wow,” said Jennifer. “That’s happening base-wide?”
“Everywhere but right here, sister.” He spoke to the airlock door. “Security Commander Dukemejian to enter.” A quick biometric scan of his vitals popped the door. Jook pointed behind him with his thumb. “Depending on how tight the quarters, the extended suppression will knock some of the bastards out. Every one of them’s going to feel a bit intoxicated.” He waved Jennifer into the ship dock tunnel with a gentlemanly gesture. “After you.”
Henry Lo wasn’t coughing so much as wheezing. He and Zheng stood almost brushing shoulders in the cramped above-ground flight-control room. One moment he was watching one of his cops land and the next the halon system was discharging massive quantities of white gas into the room. He could just make out the woman sitting at the console before him as she slumped and then slowly fell to the floor. He felt Zheng pull him to the floor as well, as if there was more air to breathe down low. Not a chance—the gas expanded into everything. When the system finally shut off, he woozily noted that the air cleared pretty quickly, then everything went black.
As Jennifer and Jook climbed into the shuttle cockpit, she asked, “You wouldn’t know how to fly one of these would you? I’m only asking because the last time I flew something I crashed.”
“Nope. Sister, you couldn’t possibly get me to wire my head to anything, even if it isn’t networked.”
“Yeah, well manual ain’t no great shakes if you’re clueless. Last time I went manual, bam!”
“Reason they pay pilots the big bucks. Happy to talk to a computer. Not a chance I let one in my head.”
“Oh, darn.”
“What?”
Jennifer pointed out the window. A cop in an exosuit had jumped off his ship’s platform and was walking straight toward them. He was carrying a toss rocket. It was a simple device. Look at what you want to blow to smithereens, toss the rocket in the air, and watch it light up and smack into what you were looking at. The cop’s voice came over the loudspeakers in the cockpit. “This is Officer Lawrence Lanoff. You will desist from any further activity. You will remove yourselves from that shuttle and return to the base. If you make any effort to light up an engine,” he warned hefting up the toss rocket, “I will add you to this moon’s dust.”
Jook sneered as he watched the cop.
Jennifer asked Jook, “Any magic words for Central?”
Jook slowly shook his head. “I believe the threat of that dude offering to flay me. I’m sure the offer still stands and will be acted upon. He stood and turned to leave the cockpit.”
“Where are you going?”
“Outside. I’m going to beat the shit out of that pig. Feel free to power up once I’ve got his full attention. If you can take off, sister, you should. I was already psyched up to roll the final credits anyway.”
“But—”
“Don’t power up until I have his full attention, and he has to choose where to aim that rocket. It’s fifty-fifty after that. I’m counting on him looking at me as the bigger threat.”
Jook closed the cockpit door on his way out. Jennifer checked to see if her connection to Caleb was available . . . maybe Spruck, but her heads-up still read,
Signal jam
. An attempt to use the ship’s communications offered the same response. She felt the vibration of the secondary airlock opening and closing, then Jook strolled out from under the nose of the shuttle with the erect posture of a man on a mission. He was carrying a large wrench, and she absently thought that she wouldn’t have known where the toolbox was.
Caleb watched a person, he guessed a man, exit the shuttle and walk toward the cop. All communication was blocked. He couldn’t reach Spruck, couldn’t bring up Jennifer. All he got was the same statement on his heads-up:
S
ignal jam
. His ship was still screaming warnings about missile lock, and now the douche in the base who had made all sorts of threats, including flaying him alive, wasn’t talking, either. He was starting to break into a full-blown panic when suddenly the man outside the shuttle took two huge leaping bounds and heaved some kind of tool at the cop.
Jook had never been a traditional athlete in the sense of showing any skill as a jock. As a devoted stoner and master of the C grade, he had been dared by the track coach to do something, anything, that resembled exercise. Coach Anton had passed Jook and his buds every day as they toked up outside the cafeteria at lunch before taking off to go surfing. One fine spring day, the coach had finally stopped while walking by, and to their surprise, asked for a hit. Pretty soon they were all laughing, laughing their asses off over why the hell knew what, and Coach Anton lifted Jook’s lanky long arm and challenged him to chuck a spear (technically a javelin) across the length of the soccer field. Jook, as it turned out, was a hell of a chucker of javelins and just about anything else. He was particularly proficient with a tomahawk; something his mother would not abide in the backyard. So he simply walked into the woods down the street and practiced until he could hit a donut-size target with reliability at fifty paces out. The tomahawk had been a gift from his grandpa who said that his grandpappy had given it to him, and that old timer had in turn inherited the tool from his father who had been one of the last free-to-be-me American Indians (though no one knew which tribe). The tale was spoiled when he had buried the hatchet so deep in a tree that he snapped the hickory handle off trying to get it out. A stamp inside the head revealed the manufacturer as Sears & Roebuck. The discovery didn’t bother him. The thing was still really old. A new and better-balanced handle made him all the more proficient. He also became a track star of sorts, choosing to stick with the javelin only. By being that one guy on the team who could be counted on to bring home gold, he was held in great esteem throughout the school. That didn’t stop him from being a C maker at everything else—except getting high. All to say that the pig in front of him was almost completely taken off guard as the wrench pierced his faceplate and pushed his nose and eyes into the cushy gray pillow that was his brain. In a delayed reaction, the cop’s nervous system activated his trigger finger, setting off the toss rocket, and as he spun backward in instant death, the rocket dropped from the cop’s hand. It ignited and simultaneously got caught in his weapon’s bandolier. The corpse was dragged, bouncing across the surface like a rag doll strapped to a bottle rocket.
Jook had a split second to run. The only option was forward, right at the bouncing cop. The rocket had a proximity fuse. Jook jumped over the passing explosive, and it blew up ten meters behind him. As the shrapnel pierced his suit, he felt a hard punch in his right kidney. Immediately, the atmosphere warnings went off in his helmet as air blasted out of the holes. He fell in a twisting motion and found himself skidding along the surface while looking up at a bunch of missile launches high in the space above him. Then his vision began to tunnel.
Caleb’s jaw muscles clenched in sync with his sphincter as the cops who were still pointing weapons at him all went trigger happy at once.
Missile alert! Missile alert!
His ship went into an automated defense mode, firing to full thrust, blasting out flares to trick the missiles and firing lasers that sought to confuse the hunting hardware on each incoming warhead. He didn’t fire his own missiles for fear of accidentally blasting Jennifer. In truth, all Caleb could do was snug up his seatbelt and scream.
Jennifer didn’t hesitate to go after her savior. She paced in circles in the airlock as she waited for the thing to suck the air out of the chamber. When the light went green, she launched herself out of the shuttle and skipped toward Jook. She saw the light show above right away and realized Caleb was in trouble. She was momentarily torn before quickly calculating that nothing could be done about that. She bounced past blasted bits of the cop and skidded to a stop next to Jook. She crouched and fairly easily, due to the low gravity, hoisted him over her shoulder and bounded back to the shuttle. While laying him down in the airlock, the sky behind her lit up as proximity fuses made their deadly calculations. A quick glance over her shoulder allowed her to catch sight of Caleb’s cop ship taking a glancing hit and spinning wildly back toward the base. She cringed with worry for her new friend and watched through the porthole after she pulled the airlock door shut.
Caleb screamed at his ship, “Land, Mother Fucker! Land! Don’t you smack that dirt! Don’t you smack that dirt!” The ship righted itself somewhat and at the last moment pulled up enough to drag its belly along the ground. Caleb watched straight ahead as one of the landing platforms grew closer and closer. Then his ship shot right under the steel scaffolding, careening like a pinball off the structure’s spindly legs before wedging itself between another leg and a staircase, the wounded bird jolting to a stop. Every possible alert klaxon informed him that the ship was in terminal distress. He smacked the seatbelt release button on his chest, pulled his helmet on and scrambled for the airlock only to see the control panel flash a disabled warning at him.
As the air in the ship escaped, it was vaporizing, causing the interior to fog. Caleb yanked his helmet back off and spastically shrugged out of the spacesuit while finding himself gulping for air. Free of the thing, he turned to the exosuit hatch and leaped like a jackrabbit into a hole. When the hatch closed behind him, he flicked on the cop suit’s life support and slipped his arms down into the sleeves, thanking human efficiency for the universal design of exosuits. He noted that, like the ship, this cop suit was a new model and felt great. His gloved fingers found the release for the outer hatch and hit it. The door unsealed and rose perhaps twenty centimeters before stopping.
“Oh, come on.”
He shoved his right foot under the edge and pulled up, feeling the hatch scrape as it rose another few centimeters against strong resistance on the outside. He maneuvered to press his back against the entry hatch and lifted with both feet. The outer hatch raised another fifteen centimeters and stopped. No amount of force could get it to budge another fraction.
“Shit, motherfucking cocksucking douchedoor!”
The hatch was open at the bottom fewer than sixty centimeters. He kicked it and then looked up in the direction of what must be a clearly entertained deity and said, “Come on!” He kicked the door repeatedly then clicked the release on the back of the suit. With the sound of a metallic
thunk
, he was free and able to crouch down. He stuck his legs through the gap, turned and shoved his ass out, then the hard part: He knew damn well that the suit around his upper torso was at least forty-five centimeters in diameter, wider in some spots, the helmet at least that much, too. And . . . yeah . . . something behind him snagged. He got his hands down and outside and pulled against the edge of the launch platform
. So tight. So don’t want to rip the suit. Squeeze, twist, ah there, a bit more. Snag . . . so snagged. Climb back in a bit. Un-snag. And back out slowly.
His legs dangled and kicked outside the hatch.
Shoulders, shoulders . . . and helmet.
A long scraping sound, the glass visor protesting loudly against metal, a screeching sound inside the helmet, nothing but silence in the dead space outside.
Just a little further . . . free!
He stepped back a bit to take in what he had escaped from. The door was jammed along one of the landing platform pilings. If he had stopped another foot farther, it wouldn’t have opened at all. Anyway, he was out.
He jumped up onto the slightly mangled external staircase and took the steps four at a time. Up top, as he had hoped, sat the ship that the now blown-to-bits Officer Lannoff had used to land. Caleb stepped on the still-open exosuit platform, backed up to the entry hatch, and felt a satisfying thump as his new cop suit attached to a fellow cop ship.