Friday, June 27, 2014

An Unpleasant Job

The surgery had gone well. Minor scaring around the iris that would smooth out in a few hours, but that was better than most who went through it could say.  The man with blue hair edged himself off the operating slab in darkness.  With his right hand he groped for the eye-patch left on the table.  He would be sensitive for a while longer, maybe a day, before everything would be working perfectly.  Meanwhile he fumbled with knotting the cloth strap behind his head, fingers still tingling from the restart of his life-support system as it poked around through his veins and nerves for damage.  If the cyber-doc had done his work properly, the new blueprint for his right eye would be integrated with the system and it shouldn't take apart the expensive modifications as it woke up.  The man wasn't thinking of that, though.  The doc had a reputation for honest, if mostly illegal, dealings.  His thoughts were on the job the new eye was for in the first place.  He might have managed with the standard package he had installed years ago if not for the complications he had found out about after taking the money.  Not enough money for something like this, really, but the job might pay off in perks or fame.  Messing with a royal battalion on home ground was gutsy to say the least.  Stealing things from right under their noses when some foreign dignitary was visiting was worse.  Having to steal the foreign dignitary that they would doubtless be guarding would be considered insanity.  That would of course be why the client would have hired him to do it.  As opposed to the doc's solid reputation, the man's was like fire, flickering and bending and burning things it touched.  The job had come through multiple layers of obfuscation to his brooding form in a low-down pub three weeks ago.  It had asked if he would abduct a woman for a sum of money.  He had been running low on cash, accepted after too shallow of a background check.  It had come through channels that gave him easy jobs in the past and that had lulled him into a false sense of security.  Vinney would be off his white list and back onto the grey for the next while for this one.  As it was, when he got the background, not the full background, but at least a fractured facsimile, he had needed new eyes.  Going in blind was out.  Knowing what hid behind each synthetic skin and chromed holster would be what kept him alive long enough to make it out when things went wrong.  In the dark, he knew his plan was foolproof, each step taking him closer in through the underground halls to a room designed for the comfort of political guests, and then stepping him back out with one more person.  It would go wrong though, and he knew this too.  He expected to execute something poorly, to have missed key information, or to just be damn unlucky.  Two days later, in the middle of the job, it did not come in the manner that he expected.

She was waiting for him as he walked in the room.  His disguise, a perfectly tailored royal battalion issue uniform did not give him away.  His accent was perfect.  The reason for opening the door and entering had been established as an escort.  She knew, somehow, and what scared him was that he didn't know how.  Things went wrong: this was a law of operating.  When you did not know how things went wrong, only that they were was when bad things happened to people in his profession.  It was this that caused him to uncharacteristically freeze up in the doorway as she smiled at him daintily, the tips of her lips curling up ever so slightly into something just shy of a gloat.  She knew, had said so as soon as he closed the door.  That he was there to kidnap her, to disappear her from the midst of a heavily armed installation near the heart of the empire.  She said he might succeed.  She wasn't worried, or if she was she hid it behind a smooth surface of amusement.  He was off schedule, precious seconds wasted.  The pause breaks as she rises from the couch, picking up her purse, shielded so heavily even his new eye can make nothing out but smudges.  "Let's go," she says with a giggle.

They walk.  He follows a memorized pathway, recalculating everything as he moves.  Seconds mean position changes and speed changes.  Different passcodes for doors and cameras and elevators.  He is not lost though every hallway looks the same; grey-green carpet and crimson banners hung on cream walls.  Sharp, square turns and zig-zagging patterns through a colossal labyrinth.  They meet no one.  He is still panicking.  He takes moments to glance behind him, he smile static on the face of someone who should not know they are being kidnapped.  No, not kidnapped if they follow knowingly, he thinks.  He is being used, somehow, he imagines.  They walk, muffled footfalls and giggles.

Hallways, stairwell, parking garrage, small inconspicuous car.  Plans adjusted for the seconds and executed flawlessly.  The new eye keeps them out of the way of company.  It was a good investment.  The car is on the freeway when the wrongness finally clicks into place.  Her purse shimmers in the rear-view mirror and the shielding melts away.  Enough in it to vaporize the car and anything within basic-human spitting distance of the exterior.  The trigger is rigged to some remote detonation signal.  The listener is set and primed to go off.  She hasn't stopped giggling every minute or two.  All he can do is drive, hostage.  A click, the door, not the bomb his muscles tense for.  She lazily dangles it by three, two, one fingers and drops it.  It takes a second and a half before the purse begins to detonate, two before the car gets rocketed forward, riding the shockwave.  The back window is cracked into a spiderweb pattern, and he can't hear for the next minute of driving.  His foot is jamming the gas to the floor the whole time.  It's a half hour and most of a city away before she makes another sound that he can hear.  "What's next, before they figure out what happened?"

Tuesday, June 17, 2014

The Lazarus Halls.

Like a sunrise, the lights eased on in the long hallways of the cargo hold.  A dull glow along the floor between brighter cylinders that fell through a few, largely separated, holes in the ceiling.  Along the sides of the many rows were doors.  Metal with no windows, a keypad just below shoulder height, and a seal around the bottom.  Behind these doors people were waking up.  They were done being cargo at this point, woken from a deep freeze to get up from their dead popsicle state and crowd out into the halls.  That would happen in the next few hours, perhaps sooner for some of the more hardy ones.  Needles and pills and electronic voices that informed them of how well the voyage had gone were their present state.  They also needed to get dressed, though in their haze of waking the voice had to prompt some more than others that it was in fact mandatory before unlocking the door.  So they pulled on pants and shirts, zipped up jackets, and walked like the exhausted down the long straight halls.  The ladders positioned on the walls under the light-cylinders were like insurmountable obstacles to them.  The voice told them they must go up, but braced against the cold metal walls, almost too tired to walk, they just looked blankly at the things.  The man who designed the ship and the waking process, almost guaranteed to be dead after so many hundreds of millenia, had underestimated the toll on the body.  Eventually the voice went silent, asking the captain what it must do to get them to cooperate.  The ship hummed to itself, lightening the spin of its core.  Gravity relaxed, letting the men and women straighten up.  A few looked to the holes in the ceiling then.  Some would take more time than others, but now slowly progress resumed.  Hand over hand, minute after minute and finally they began to reach the top of the ladder, twice the height of the ceiling that sat just out of hand-reach.  It was a neutral light on the ladders, not cold but without the warmth of any feeling.  The ship was made when feelings were cast aside for greater goals of survivability and thus reflected its creator's mind at the time.  The one consideration that was put in waited above.  Hardened translucent metal hulling stretched the far wall of the gigantic room they stood in.  Before they awoke it had been scrubbed of radiation, flooded with manufactured oxygen, and un-sealed from the rest of the ship.  A troublesome process, but the view warmed them as the ascended.  A bright yellow sphere on the horizon with small blue specks on the opposite wall.  They let out short gasps and moans, letting out more of an emotion than an idea, drawn forward to the hull like zombies to a feast.  Only a few of the thousands sleeping below had awoken, just enough to throw a seed to the blue specks behind them.  The first seed of many in this solar system.

Thursday, June 12, 2014

Home.

Cold dark streaming in the windows greeted him as he walked onto the bridge.  Space was filled with tiny mites of light that shone across countless light years yet each mattered little to him.  Even the small light barely visible to the human eye that glimmered in the distance was a past that meant little to him.  He had thrown it away with his journey, tossed the prospect of life on a familiar planet with a familiar sun away into the darkness he had crossed through.  His gaze was drawn to the empty blackness that surrounded those lights.  It shifted between a flatness and an infinite abyss before his eyes, pushing and pulling at his conceptual awareness.  He identified with it.  His eyes shone not with the light of the stars but with the blank depth of the void.  It was a light that drew him back out as it blinked to life on the panels below him.  He could vaguely recall their meanings after the deep slumber, slowly moving his head downwards to inspect their polygonal shapes more closely.  With a sigh he slumped into the chair of the bridge, letting instinctive movements guide his hands to the controls.  For his body it seemed like barely a year had gone by.  It was the thing that lurked within him, the spirit that held his head aloft that was weary.  He scratched at buttons and switches, playing a game with the lights to settle them back down to black blankness.  The ship turned, silent and slow as the internal gravitational engines twisted and turned deep within the hull.  It was moments before the light of a star crept into view, moments more of an almost-darkness.  The light was a low yellow, splashing its way into the bridge and bathing the captain with warmth.  It shined deep into his being, the light he had come to claim.  His emptiness was marred, filled with a fragment of purpose that buoyed his form.  Yellow beams pressed him backwards and upwards against the chair, straightening him.  There were more spaces, vast spaces within him that were not filled still, more expanses that resonated with the void, and in time they might be filled too, but for now there was only the small yellow glow that sparkled its way into his eyes that mattered.  A bright spot at the center of his universe.