Out
A series about Mars
by Daniel
E. Machado
Chapter 23
Forward to Part Two
Blade’s day quickly goes from miserable
to worse. Apparently some of the recruiters for Atlantis Corp had been
more interested in their finders fees than in their client's worthiness.
A few had apparently been coached through certain test obstacles designed
specifically to remove them. Some people should never be placed into cramped,
dark, noisy, gravity-free environments for an extended period of time.
Specialist Semore Barns happens to be one such person.
When Blade first comes onto shift
she finds Barns wrapped up tight in a sleep-net cocoon he's duct-taped
to the console couch. Somehow the lunatic has managed to loop-back the
archive locals without setting off any net-sync alarms, leaving lights
and warning beepers screaming for attention from all directions as she
tries to fight her way past the screaming man. Leaving the med-team to
try and remove Specialist Barns from a control room designed for an occupancy
of one, Blade slowly comes to understand the full extent of the night's
neglect. It will take several hours to get some of the systems turned back
around.
For some reason the med-team seems
reluctant to sedate Specialist Barns without first knowing the extent and
cause of his explosive personality decompression. Denied chemical relief,
Specialist Barns proceeds to become even more violent, thrashing like some
snared animal against his self-imposed cocoon. Cutting this madman loose
in her control room mid-disaster is non-viable, so one of the techs finds
Blade a zero-g anti-torque wrench and she hurriedly unbolts the command
couch from the wall. Helping the med-team shove Specialist Barns out the
control room's hatch Blade resists mentioning a continued journey out the
nearest airlock.
Should have left the locals in
that feedback loop. Blade smiles slightly. But, the insurance companies
start shitting asteroids when they don’t get to watch.
With the command couch gone and a
disaster team in place the command-recovery team begins the work of calming
down several hours of total neglect. Two members of command-recovery crawl
up into the cramped control room with Blade, working back-to-back on the
most critical systems while Blade herself directs both the general recovery
and also maintains the few still unaffected systems. By shift's end her
head aches and she wants very desperately to strangle the life out of something.
Preferably Specialist Barns. The timed posting on her handtablet inviting
her to come play VR before dinner comes as an extremely welcome sight.
"I’m going to miss you, Fredy boy."
Blade tells the tablet's display, remembering almost sadly that Mars hangs
less than a week out ahead of them. Then a mischievous smirk brightens
her bedraggled face.
"But, tonight I’m gonna kick your
big ugly ass. You’ve got treachery to answer for trog-boy."
The passage-ring feels like heaven
after eight hours of shoulder jostles and elbow jabs. Kicking herself out
into the passage-ring Blade holds her outstretched flight, pulling her
body through a tightly tumbled pirouette just as her feet peg the wall
and slide up under an anchor strap. After flexing her tension-stiffened
body through a quick warmups series Blade enters the rec-room and into
its human-thick jumble. After making her way across the vaulted room Blade
pulls herself into her assigned VR pod, quickly strapping herself down
with contacts in and gravity simulation pads in place. Sensing the pod's
closing door Blade waves out her hands in front of her to let the sensors
calibrate. Soon her character Jix stands before the Waiting Room's long
wall of mirror.
"Pause game introduction. Display
control panel." The waif-like child with naked feet and filthy tattered
clothes tells the mirror. Blade recognizes her character's gaunt dirty
face and stringy brown hair, smiling at her own wretchedness as a curved
ribbon of control panel floats into existence before her. On it a standard
selection of defaults and preferences is displayed. "Activate voice."
"Voice active." A generic program
voice replies.
"Show me where Xaniila and Nihilist
are in relation to the last time the character Jix was active in the game."
The waif stands amid an erupting forest of displays, some graphic, some
text, most holographic. Blade directs Jix’s dirty broken fingernail along
the virtual path of actions, following Captain Nihilist and Princess Xaniila
down to the Stealth planet to find a fantastically monstrous research facility
just begging to be exploited for valuable clues and artifacts.
"It’s a trap." Jix mumbles with Blade’s
voice.
"Continue player movements to current."
The waif drags her finger along the timeline, watching as the two adventure
hunters investigate the laboratory complex, occasionally pausing her search
to listen to the two discuss clues and options. Along the way the occasional
pesky creatures springs up, but mostly the investigation seems quiet.
"Definite trap."
"Am I… is the Jix character still
locked up in the wardroom?" The girl asks the mirror.
"No. Captain Nihilist unlocked the
wardroom just prior to going out onto the planet’s surface."
"Show me Nihilist and Xaniila current."
A holo-wire diagram of the secret lab encloses a small realtime holo of
Nihilist and Xaniila as they stand investigating the control panel of a
massive vault lock.
"Show me all disarmed traps." Several
bright yellow skull-and-crossbones appear around the chamber, some on the
stairs leading down to the vault lock, a few more on the chamber walls.
Two disarmed traps show on the lock itself.
"What’s this?" Jix’s finger points
out a faint rectangular outline on a small outcropping of rock high up
on the chamber wall.
"Uninvestigated." The mirror replies.
"You missed one, didn’t you." The
frail looking child grins with Blade’s mischief. "And, it’s right above
you. Are there anymore traps in that chamber?"
"Disallowed query. Do you wish to
switch to Cheat Mode?"
"No! No, ahh… Did they leave Jix’s
pack?"
"Yes."
"And, everything's still in it?"
"Yes. Over Princess Xaniila’s strong
objections the pack still contains all the artifacts so far acquired by
the character Jix."
"Everything? Fredy must be getting
soft. Close control panel and continue character introduction. Deactivate
voice."
Before her the mirror vanishes to
become a rather luxurious stateroom. The walls stand darkly paneled in
oak and draped with deep red velvet and expensively rare art. The filthy
canvas backpack laying piled at Jix’s feet looks very much out of place
against the immaculately perfect Persian wool beneath it. Snatching up
her bag Jix dashes for the open door.
Fred had been right about one thing
all those many months ago back on Earth, Jix is very much a fun character
to play. She makes it acceptable for Blade to once again be that wild little
street urchin that she has worked so long and hard to outgrow.
Out on the command deck Jix finds
the ship deserted, not even one of Nihilist's virtual crewmen maintaining
imaginary equipment. Moving across the command bridge and into the airlock
Jix quickly checks for atmosphere status. After over an E in space, Blade
– in both her real and virtual incarnations – cannot leave an airlock without
first checking for the amount and composition of opposing atmosphere.
Despite her desire to hurry the incredible
architecture beyond the opening airlock pauses Jix. The real Blade reasons
that the entire laboratory complex must be the multi-million dollar holographic
presentation of some famous and fabulously overpaid architectural genius,
and that the corporation he’s contracted to must have wanted to recoup
some of their production losses by licensing the generated holo to a games
distributor. This cynical suspicion takes nothing away from the immense
imagination apparent in the arched spires Jix finds lacing out through
the laboratory's vast campus of towering stepped pyramids, or the kilometers
tall segmented dome that stands at its focal point. Grassy rolls of parkland
rise around the broad amphitheater where Nihilist has landed his gigantic
dark winged warship. Yet the mighty Trogship destroyer Death Horse
looks like a tiny toy in this almost organic encroachment of monumental
architecture and vast acreage of manicured lawns laced with walkways of
black mirror polished marble.
Digging down through her backpack
Jix retrieves a small jeweled orb, quickly thumbing the bio-tracer active.
Segmenting itself apart like a bottom-hinged orange, the orb opens itself
up to reveal a small domed holo display. Fred had been extra nice to leave
this little trinket behind. More than once tiny Jix has used the device
to find and lay traps for both Xaniila and Nihilist. Unfortunately, at
the end of their last little play session Jix had made the mistake of getting
a little to close to Nihilist, and the big ape tossed her into a locked
stateroom to brood. Then he and Xaniila sold the data crystals that she’d
stolen fair-and-square while they were both out busy chasing monsters.
"You’ll pay for that one, you big
oaf."
Chasing through the towering labyrinth
of modernistic pyramids Jix's bio-tracer shows her both Xaniila and Nihilist
still in the lock chamber. As Jix makes her way down into a cavernous arched
stair-well, down into the heart of the gigantic complex, she begins to
suspect Xaniila and Nihilist have found one trap too many. Neither character
has move more than a centimeter for several minuets. Stopping only a moment
to pull her precious stealth cloak from its hidden compartment, Jix slips
the ancient Precursor cloth on over her head before continuing her descent
down into the mysterious laboratory's bowls. Various bloody green chunks
of dead monster, apparently some sort of genetic warrior rejects, lay twisted
in small partially disintegrated piles along the passageway. One or two
of the living creatures occasionally pass her, but without Apeman and Wonder
Woman blasting away at everything in sight they're easily eluded. While
she's still several corridors away Jix hears her companions blasting the
local fauna.
"Where's Jix?" Roselene’s voice pleads
to the sound of another mutant warrior's painful sub-atomic dissolution.
"She should have been here by now."
Pulling apart a thin slit in her cloak's
hood Jix finds Xaniila and Nihilist both hopelessly entangled in a slow
animate vine. Seems a odd organic defense for such a techno-rich setting,
but the trap was apparently effective. Our fearless Trogship Captain stands
beside the lock controls covered in slowly rustling vine, his weapon has
been depleted trying to blast the plant from its roots. Only the Captain’s
head and right hand remain free. Blade easily imagines the frustration
of having your arms and legs free to flail in the weightless VR pod, and
the only things that work are your mouth and one hand. Princess Xaniila
stands entangled only up to her waist, Roselene’s character playing at
a less advanced setting than Fred’s. The enhanced standard blaster the
woman wields does very little damage on the vines, though the warrior still
occasionally blasts away at it all the same. But for all her effort no
more than dark surface burns mark her blaster strikes.
"You wouldn’t happen to have a monofilament
blade hidden somewhere on you, would you?" The Trogship Captain asks.
"No." The Princess replies with obvious
disgust. "Somebody wouldn’t let me take the one out of Jix’s bag."
"Yes, but aren’t you glad we left
her that bio-tracer?"
"A lot of good that’s doing us. Jix
probably isn’t even coming."
Blade hears true disappointment in
her little girl’s voice, disappointment far truer than any played role.
"Well, I’m sure as heck not coming
in there with you guys blasting away at everything that moves."
Wrapped tightly in her stealth cloak
Jix slides around the wall's edge and slips into the vault's lock chamber,
moving quickly around the far wall.
"Jix! You made it!" The Princess Warrior
cheers. Say one thing for Xaniila/Roselene; no matter how excited she rarely
breaks character.
"Hurry." The Princess Warrior eagerly
addresses the chamber's entrance. "We need your monofilament blade to help
get us out of here."
Still watching a vacant doorway Xaniila
waves her blaster loosely off to the side, waiting for Jix to appear. Captain
Nihilist only barely detects the thin child-like arm as it flicks out of
the parted stealth cloak, then quickly disappears. Jix’s AI bolo quickly
targets Xaniila’s weapon, secures it in thick woven monofilament cord,
and then retracts the weapon back into the girl’s cloak.
"Ah, now. That’s better." Jix lets
her hands slip from her sleeves and pulls the invisibility back away from
her face. One hand holds Xaniila’s blaster, the other grasps the carved
gold handle of a monofilament knife. "Now, we can talk."
"You little sneak!" Xaniila shouts,
the warrior's muscled arms thrash at the frail looking girl. Blade imagines
Roselene’s legs kicking wild inside her VR pod, but the Princess Warrior
stands stranded up to her waist in the long rustled vines. "Next time we
leave you with nothing!"
"Next time maybe you’ll think twice
about stealing what’s mine." The small girl replies.
"Now, Jix." Ensnared up to his neck
in carnivorous vines, his hand and weapon buried deep in leafy green snake-like
coils, Captain Nihilist makes for an extremely pathetic bargainer. Still
he tries. "It’s not like we weren’t going to cut you in on a share. Really
we were. We even unlocked the stateroom and left you all your stuff. It
would seem downright ungrateful of you now if you don't help us get out
of this one little fix. We’d be glad to split whatever we find in the vault."
"Excuse me?" Jix’s face twists up
into a very Blade-like squint. "You are the same big ape that snatched
me up by the ankle and stole my stolen data crystal; aren’t you? Then locked
me up and cut me out of my extra game points? Any of this ring a bell?"
"Ouch!" A grimace crowds Nihilist's
massive primal face. "So what’s your counter-offer?"
"Offer? I was thinking more along
the lines of a demand." Jix thumbs a small button inset on her knife to
activate an inch long thread of light at the handle's end. The light, a
ring of focused laser, extends out only as an indicator to warn the user
of how far the static rigid strand of monofilament extends. In the real
world static monofilaments can only be held stiff for a few centimeter.
Jix’s variable filament knife extends out over two meters.
"We split everything inside fifty-fifty."
The ragged waif smiles.
"Run that by me again." Nihilist's
expression turns both confused and suspicious. "Fifty-fifty doesn’t divide
well by three."
"Oh sure it does." The tattered girl
in the invisible cloak chirps, her head and hands floating in independent
coordination. "Fifty percent for me and fifty percent split between you
two by whatever agreement you made before I got here."
"I still want my five percent finders
fee! And, I want it from the gross!" The Princess yells.
"Now, wait a minuet." Nihilist pleads
reason at two of the most unreasonable characters he’s ever met. "Both
you just hold on. Let’s work this thing out. How about sixty-forty?"
"Fine, I’ll take sixty percent, but
that’s my final offer."
"No, Jix!" Xaniila pleads, then looks
back at Captain Nihilist. "She can’t make us do that, can she? Nihilist,
please don’t take the deal."
"Don’t worry, Princess. Our little
friend here will never make it into the vault without our help. You’ll
see."
"Dream on, monkeyboy." Jix’s monofilament
knife extends out to just over a meter. With deliberation Jix slices away
at the slowly moving vine, her cloak drawn back over her shoulders to free
her arms and reveal their frail contrast to the hulking Trogship Captain
and Princess Xaniila’s massive musculature. Blast marks from Nihilist's
reverse-polarity quark-disrupter show little more damage than discoloration,
yet her infinitely thin strand of laser-lit monofilament slices through
the tangle of hissing vine as if the strangling green tendrils were no
more substantial than smoke.
"How come your blasters didn’t split
this stuff into quarks?" Slicing ever closer to both the vault's control
panel and the vine trapped Trogship Captain tiny Jix leaves a broad swath
of dead tangled vines in her wake.
"No idea. And, I find the total lack
of damage extremely disheartening. I paid more than ten-thousand credits
for that blaster. It was supposed to disassemble the atomic structure of
anything put in front of it."
"Just no truth in advertising anymore,
is there. Especially when you buy from a creature who considers all humans
as prey species." Slowly upbraiding itself the vines retreat from the danger
in a calculated pattern that avoids Jix while still holding its captives.
"But, how could simple plant matter survive a subatomic phased-polar reversal?"
"One of the lock codes we deciphered
mentioned something about the Precursors using temporally phased bio-mechanics,
but it looked like a blind lead. And, as it didn’t seem to help open the
vault lock I stopped researching it."
Carving her way up to the lock controls
Jix pushes in closer to the Captain. The snarled vines begin retreating
from around Nihilist's double-barreled reverse-polarity quark-disrupter.
The weapon's twin barrels of molded onyx set into a pistol gripped shoulder
stock carved of solid beryllium seems so massive as to weigh at least a
ton. A small red light blinks on the display just below its aiming sight.
With zero-g ease Jix snatches up the huge weapon and checks the charge
indicator on its display.
"Nearly fifty percent recharged from
zero in only five minuets." She tells Nihilist. "Not bad. How much do you
think the buy-back is on one of these things?"
"Okay, okay. I’m sorry we locked you
up. We’ll cut you in on a full shares of the data crystal and we’ll all
call the whole thing even. That's fair, isn't it? What do you say?" Nihilist
tries to plead reason at the girl as Jix adds his weapon to the growing
collection under her cloak. "You can even record the contract before you
cut us loose." In full retreat from Jix’s molecule-thick strand on carbon
the vine slowly backs away from the Captain’s right side. Nihilist twists
his massive dark arm out of the snarl, watching it swing as he enjoys the
return of control.
"Wouldn’t consider freeing up the
other one, would you?"
"Do I look like I really enjoy dangling
upside-down?" Jix asks in injured disgust. "Now if you don’t mind, I’d
like to find out what the Galactic Precursors went to all this trouble
to hide, and preferably before dinner time."
"The lock sequence should still be
up on display. We worked the lock code out to some sort of biological component."
Nihilist offers. "After we deciphered the lock's next-to-last segment this
vine popped out of the wall and we got distracted."
"Nihilist, shut-up! Stop helping her!"
Xaniila demands. Jix looks back and forth between the Princess and the
Captain, a wicked grin growing wide across her thin dirty face.
"Did Her Highness tell you that she
and I had already made arrangements to cut you out of the data crystal
deal before you grabbed me?"
"No doubt." Nihilist nods his broad
simian brow. Waist deep in the clinging vines the Princess Xaniila stands
arms across her chest and lower lip thrust out looking very much like the
angry child that lay inside the warrior's image.