Captain Rick's Eye

"Captain Rick's Eye" - a reading (on YouTube)

I saw the fight outside my window the night Captain Rick lost an eye. It didn’t last long, just some yelling then a crack that sent him sprawling before the shadows disappeared. His eye flew across the alley like he’d spit out a jawbreaker.

Captain Rick knocked over trashcans looking for it until Crash threw a beer bottle at him. When Captain Rick began to sob Crash burst outside and kicked him like a dog. “I’ll give you something to whine about.”

When I heard Crash stumble down the hall, I crawled back into bed and pretended to sleep. He stood swaying in my doorway, watching his little cat he always told Darlene. Then their bedroom door slammed shut and I knew I could sleep.

I heard Captain Rick back in the alley the next morning but I’d gotten out there first. I’d found his eye near the storm drain, resting against a needle and a balloon I wasn’t supposed to touch. It felt cold and hard inside the pocket of my dress.

I was eating a baloney sandwich in the kitchen when Crash woke up. He opened the fridge for a beer.

“Captain Rick lost another eye last night,” Darlene said.

I asked Darlene what would happen to him now.

“The VA will give him a new one just like last time.”

“Maybe he’ll get a blue one this time,” Crash laughed. “Then he could pass for a husky.”

I laughed, too. Captain Rick reminded everyone of a mangy dog no one wanted to be around.

Darlene didn’t laugh. She liked to talk to Captain Rick on our way to school each morning. He was almost nice when he remembered to take his pills. Crash said he’d lost his eye in the war along with half his mind from killing so many people. Darlene said he only killed the evil ones.

The glass eye didn’t match his real one. The brown was darker and the white brighter, like his real one had faded in the sun. Crash said that’s what the desert does. And it never pointed exactly where his other eye was looking. It followed me even when I hid behind Darlene.

That eye was clearer, too. Like it saw all the mean thoughts inside my head and made me not want to think them. Like the eye of God, Father William said.

We stopped going to church when I told Father William that Crash kept a box of teeth under his bed. I got a quarter for each of mine. I wondered how much Crash had gotten but none of his were missing. Crash hit me when he found out I’d told. Darlene got mad.

“Little cats need to learn that curiosity can kill,” he said.

“Crash, she’s just a little girl.”

“Not so little anymore." He'd looked at me funny.

Now, Crash had that same look in his eye. I sank down in my chair and drank my milk. He tickled Darlene’s ribs instead, his fingers creeping higher like they always did. She giggled and swatted away his hands just like me.

That night, I set Captain Rick’s eye on a bottle cap between the paws of Mr. Whiskers. Crash had won him the first Sunday we went to the boardwalk instead of church. Darlene wouldn’t let me have a real cat.

Captain Rick’s eye watches over me now where it can see and not be seen. Maybe it will keep the mean thoughts out of Crash’s head on the nights he stands outside my door so I can finally sleep again.

© 2013 Edward P. Morgan III

Amongst the Crowd

Amongst the Crowd - a reading (on YouTube)

We don our disguises and pretend to be someone genuine and new,

Lurkers at the threshold peering in with the eyes of a predator.

Our razor-cut, Sokka-styled host greets us at the door

Beside a pile of shoes like a Holocaust sorting station.

High-heeled pretense lies abandoned poolside.

A brief, surficial stillness reflects the evening sky.

Bowed notes glide effortlessly along the water

The caress of cat-silk across the bridged body of a doll.

Screens of bamboo, brown, bound and horizontal,

Vibrant, vertical and green, whisper susurrant secrets

That send chimes of iridescent laughter twinkling on the twilight breeze.

Fireworks of orchids burst beneath the nightshade of an arbor.

There is chemistry to these gatherings, a primal alchemy,

An iron cauldron stirred by a trio of green-skinned Kalis

Smiling Mona Lisa seductions to reveal too much

Or be forever shunned in silence.

Connections, brief and enduring, form in the universal solvent of alcohol,

The swell and lull conversations stirred by the aqua blue catalyst of the pool.

Marital bonds dissolve for the preferred valence of male to male, female to female.

Pairings reconfigure as exchanges are interrupted by commingling Brownian motion.

Eyed by long-faced masks that peer from every dark and tribal palm,

I am an unstable isotope that drifts through the night alone.

While from his secret alcove buried deep within the garden,

A smiling, torch-lit Buddha reminds me who I am.


© 2013 Edward P. Morgan III 

All That Glitters

My life got jump-started the night all those storms rolled through the county awhile back, the ones that dropped the tornado that wiped out most of Greenville. If I’d been smart, I would have hunkered down somewhere safe and rode them out. Instead, I’d borrowed trouble. Or maybe it had borrowed me.

I was nursing a beer in the 8-Ball Lounge that night, waiting for Thurston to show with my money. Gil had on the Weather Channel instead of the usual Sports Center. He said it was a public service because of all the tornado warnings but I knew he had the hots for that blond anchor they had these days. When I tried to change the channel, he said the remote was for paying customers only. I had been hoping to change that before last call but it was looking more and more like Thurston had stood me up again. But he was my cousin so what could I do.

The wind howled like a banshee as Dizzy came in through the back door. The reinforced steel echoed through the barroom as it slammed back in place.

“Raining yet?” Gil asked him.

“No, but it’s blowing something fierce. Wouldn’t be surprised if we saw a twister.”

“Sounds like one just touched down in Greenville.” Gil nodded toward the TV.

“Good thing you built this place like a bunker, Gil.”

“With the only liquor store in twenty miles, what choice did I have?” He smiled.

“Hey, Diz, have you seen Thurston around tonight?” I asked.

He shook his head. “I heard just before I left the Legion post that he got himself arrested. Way I hear it, he was loading up crates from the Oyster Shack into the bed of his pickup when the sheriff pulled up. Didn’t even have them under a tarp. Must have thought no one would notice with storms.”

I rolled my eyes. That would be about Thurston’s style. Rob Peter to pay Paul then stiff the Lord himself.

“Anybody bail him out this time?” I asked.

Diz looked at me like I was crazy as he headed back toward the billiard room. “With Janie gone now, who the hell would?”

Not me, that’s for sure. Even if I wasn’t dodging collectors myself, he owed me enough as it was. Besides, he’d probably been tying one on most of the afternoon to pull a stunt like that. He’d need drying out or he’d likely be a handful. Thurston could be mean as a snake sober but drunk was a whole different kind of party. A couple months back, he’d shot a man who’d been ragging him about his name in the 8-Ball parking lot. Got him in the leg. Self-defense, or so he said. Not that they’d ever found the gun. And nobody’d seen a thing. The advantage of being born into the right side of the family, I guess. But with my aunt gone, so was his protection. Not that it had ever extended to me. I’d spent half my life getting punched in his headlock. Until the day I’d stood and fought back that had earned me my nickname. Since then, he listened to me. Mostly anyway.

“Hey, Gil, one more on my tab.” I shook the empty longneck. “It don’t sound like it’s safe for me to go back to the Airstream just yet.”

Gil shot me a glare as he walked over. “You need a shelter, Brass, you better get down to the high school. If you’re looking for charity, try the Methodist church. Otherwise it’s cash only or get the hell out.” He thunked his cracker-whacker onto the bar to show that he was serious.

Driving home, the Duster nearly twice got blown into a ditch. That would’ve been about a perfect nightcap. I still had the letter I’d found in my PO Box saying my unemployment would go dry after one more check. Seven years degreasing aluminum tubing for that Norwegian outfit and six months is all I get. Thanks for nothing, governor. I might have voted for you, too, and would’ve considered it again if I could’ve ever dragged my ass down to the courthouse to register. But that would’ve meant the bill collectors would know exactly where I was.

The wind was swirling like a stew pot by the time I eased up the dirt road to the lot I rented. My acre of paradise in the middle of puckerbrush, up and behind the woodlot for the organic mushroom farm. Water and a septic tank thrown with the rent, with a discount to keep my eyes open for any drunk college students out shrooming from the state university.

In the glow from drop light on the pole, I could see the door to the Airstream had been tagged as I pulled up. A plucky little Watchtower jammed beneath the door ruffled in the wind but stubbornly refused to fly. Goddamned Witnesses. Like they didn’t have nothing better to do. Why the hell they’d trek all the way out here every Friday was beyond me. I suspected Aunt Jane had given them directions before she’d died in a last ditch effort to make sure at least some of the family would be reunited one day. My granddad would’ve loaded them up with buckshot. Which is why he left the Airstream to me and not her. Aunt Jane had been pissed. She had some delusion about extended family vacations on the road, though that was a mild one by her standards.

The lights from town gave a greenish cast to the clouds moving low and fast overhead. The high school was looking like a real possibility before the night was through. The wind snatched at the Duster’s door before I’d slammed it shut with a squeal. I was just grabbing the Watchtower to add to my collection for lighting the grill when the hair on my neck began to rise.

The wind picked up to a sudden scream. The drop light on the power pole flickered. I cussed up a storm as I fumbled with my key. Just as I jammed it in the lock, lightning and thunder exploded in an arc-welder of deafening bright white light. Pink and green flames danced atop the power pole. The drop light showered glass across the lot. A sign from God, Aunt Jane would say.

Just then something crashed into the Duster. I edged back over to find a massive dent in its hood, a new one. Lying in the dirt near the front tire was a blue metal lockbox with one corner slightly crushed. Where the hell had that come from? Had it just dropped out of the clouds? As I stood there staring at it with the wind plucking at my jeans and shirt, the sky opened up. I snatched up the box and sprinted across the dirt that quickly turned to mud.

The wind ripped the door from my hand as I opened it, slamming it against the Airstream’s body. Trees and branches snapped and crashed throughout the woodlot as I fought the door closed from inside. Even then the Airstream rocked and rolled like a bass boat caught in a thunderstorm on the lake. I hoped the tie-downs held. 

I dug up a flashlight and set to work examining the lockbox as I waited out the storm. It was light and didn’t rattle much when I shook it but enough to let me know there was something inside. The box itself was a touch rusty with three numbered brass tumblers by the latch like the cheap bike lock I had growing up. I thought about scrounging up a screwdriver when I remembered how easy those were to pick. I ran through every number one at a time on each dial, testing the lid for looseness with each stop. I could’ve done it the hard way, it was only like a thousand combinations but I didn’t know how long the flashlight would hold out. A dozen clicks later, the lid popped open.

Inside were just some papers. God sure had a twisted sense of humor dropping this on me. Hardly seemed with my effort but now I was curious. And I didn’t have much better to do until the power company came out to repair the line which wasn’t likely before I paid that third and final notice.

The first page was some kind of receipt spotted with brown mold that made my nose itch. I quickly set it aside. The second was a shiny financial newsletter, slightly less spotted, touting gold as insurance against a coming calamity that made the end times described in the Watchtower sound like a trip to Disney World. Pure Fantasyland, and I’m not talking about the Adult Superstore down by the Interstate. This Ranting Andy was almost as funny as Glen Beck’s old Schlub Club routines on AM radio. But I thought everyone knew they were set up as a joke.

That was until I went back to the receipt and found that one Shelley Colson of Greenville had taken it all quite seriously about a decade back. She’d bought into the gag to the tune of ten thousand dollars for which she’d received twenty-five one-ounce gold coins. Old school US currency, not some cheap foreign knockoffs you couldn’t trust. Now this box had my full and undivided attention. What was it Beck always said? Gold never loses value. I seemed to remember it’d gone up some since then.

God had just handed me a treasure map. All I had to do was find this Shelley Colson and I’d be rich. And He had conveniently put her address right there on the receipt. I thought my troubles were over.

About then the flashlight started going dim, so I packed it in for the night. The storm had settled to a slashing rain that beat against the Airstream like a fifty-gallon drum. I fell asleep watching water run down the dark window over my bed but all I could see were rainbows.

---

By morning, I’d come up with a plan. First stop was the public library. If everything checked out there, it was off to Leggett & Levine. And then to county lockup if everything still came up roses. I just about had time to get all that in before Thurston would be stuck there the entire weekend. Arrested on a Friday night meant he wouldn’t be arraigned until Monday morning.

The library was crowded with families and morning people, not my usual crowd. I headed straight for the computer desks. All full. Upstairs, too. So I picked the wimpiest looking snot-nosed kid and stared him down until he scurried away. Once I was sure he wasn’t coming back, I pulled up Google Earth. I typed in the address from the receipt just like all those bogus interviews the State Employment agency had sent me on. Sure enough, there it was on a dead end street right on the edge of Greenville, a nice little house on tidy piece of land with a freestanding garage and another building in back. Just across the state line. A little research in the property appraiser and tax collector databases confirmed Shelley Colson was still the owner. And that out building turned out to be a mother-in-law cottage, fully plumbed. One more stop on the Weather Channel site confirmed a mile-wide stretch of Greenville had been wiped off the map by the tornado last night, the same one that had skipped over us. The governor had declared a disaster and the Guard was on its way this morning. That didn’t give me much time. I cleared the cache and browser history then headed over to Leggett & Levine.

Negotiating with the stepbrothers was the tricky part. I didn’t think I could pull off this treasure hunt without Thurston as backup. He was a monster of a man, six foot of lean muscle by the fifth grade and he hadn’t been done growing. One good look up at him and most sane people fell in line. Thurston wasn’t a kind of man you messed with if someone gave you options. I just hoped I could control him. He ought to have sobered up by now. 

Talking to Lewis and Lester took a lot longer than I thought. Lewis Leggett ran a pawn shop that gave payday loans. His stepbrother Lester Levine was the bail bondsman right next door. They shared the building with a gentlemen’s club that they co-owned call Titillations which brought a whole new meaning to strip mall around here.

Lewis and Lester were plugged into all the local gossip so they both knew exactly why I was there. What they couldn’t figure out is why I’d want to bail out Thurston before Monday. If he was mean drunk, he was even meaner hungover. I was just hoping he’d be happy to see me. So I put on my tap shoes and danced around their questions.

Too bad they both knew my unemployment checks were just about done. When I suggested a payday loan, Lewis just smiled and shook his head. Besides, what they’d advance based on my benefits wouldn’t cover the bail Lester quoted off the computer anyway. Turns out that as well as simple burglary that would probably get dealt down to transport of stolen goods, Thurston had taken a swing at a deputy. Thank heavens he hadn’t connected or he’d probably be up for manslaughter. But that swing and a miss had jacked the price to spring him from a few hundred to a couple grand. After running through their little game of back and forth for more than an hour, I finally broke down and let the stepbrothers walk me through what they really wanted.

Turned out Lewis’s ex-sister-in-law’s boy was setting up a business fixing up vintage Airstream’s like mine and turning them for a profit on Craigslist. So Lewis convinced Lester to front me the bail money if I put up the pink slip for the Airstream. Lewis was counting on me not coming up with the money to payoff it off by Monday. Neither of them cared about the Duster, but they let me pawn it anyway. That charity freed up another five hundred which with the other just covered Thurston’s bail. They didn’t even care if I drove it. They’d just repaved their parking lot and didn’t want the fresh blacktop stained with oil. So I could keep it as long as I didn’t use it to help Thurston flee the jurisdiction. Scout’s honor, I promised.

That white lie bought Thurston daylight for just over forty-eight hours. No way they’d hold an arraignment without a lawyer, a luxury neither of us could afford. But the public defender had been on Aunt Jane’s Christmas list forever, so I knew Thurston would get the best deal possible, probably community service and a fine. So I signed the papers that guaranteed I’d have him back at the courthouse at three sharp Monday afternoon along with the money owed for both vehicles or they’d turn us over to their bounty hunter and pet repo-man.

 ---

I was waiting by the inmate release door of the jail when Thurston’s paperwork finally went through, fifteen minutes before they would’ve had to feed him again. I untied the rope holding the Duster’s passenger door shut and pushed it open with a squeal.

“Where’s my truck?” he asked as he ducked his head inside.

“It’s in the impound lot. I only had the money to bail out one of you and I’ve got to tell you that truck of yours made a pretty good case. Besides, somebody’d likely notice if we used it to leave the county.”

After a glare that could have withered a Spanish bayonet, he climbed in. He was still wearing his black hoodie from the night before. I tied the rope off around the back of the seat. I started the car and pulled around the parking lot.

“Where we going?” he asked.

“Greenville,” I said as I turned onto the two-lane road. I eased the Duster to just under the speed limit. The sheriff liked nothing better than setting up speed traps right outside the jail. Outta be illegal.

“What do we want in that two-hole outhouse?”

I smiled angelically. “Seems God sent me a special delivery that’s just waiting for us to pick it up.”

Thurston glared again. “Don’t start all that Jesus crap with me. I’ve heard about as much of it as I can stand for one lifetime.”

“Aunt Jane would be mighty grieved to hear that,” I said, rolling my eyes toward heaven. “And so would our Lord.”

“Don’t test me, Brass.” Thurston stomped his boot against the plywood in the passenger footwell to make his point. I heard the snap of rotten wood. When I glanced over, he was studying the shattered plywood and rusty floorboards.

“What’s that?” he asked pointing down to the gray that had appeared between the cracks.

“Road,” I answered casually.

He lifted his feet to either side. “So what’s it you really want from me?”

“I need your help with this pick up.”

“What makes you think I’m gonna to give it to you?”

“Besides the fact that you owe me money and I just bailed you out of jail? Really, next time, you don’t have to go to so much trouble. Just ask for an extension. We’re family after all.”

He turned to me and laughed. “I’m up to my ass in alligators and you think I’m worried about paying you?”

“These gators got a name?” I asked, serious this time.

“Billy Long.” He pulled up his hood and stared out the window at the trees whizzing by.

“You don’t mess around do you? How the hell did you get mixed up with him?” I would have said I thought he was smarter than that but I knew better.

Thurston said nothing.

“Well, my friend,” I said in my best tent revival voice, “I’ve got some good news for you that’ll turn your life around.”

Thurston turned a smoldering glare back on me that looked likely to catch fire any second. I told him about Shelley Colson and quickly laid out my plan.

He considered it a moment. “She won’t take us seriously without a gun.”

“No one gets hurt,” I said. Crowbarring someone out of their property was one thing. Assault with intent was a whole other matter.

“Nobody said nothing about nobody getting hurt,” he snapped. “We just ain’t gonna be like these dumb niggers I see on TV trying to hold up some bank going buh, buh, buh. We gotta play this smart.”

“You can’t use that word no more, Thurston.” I said quietly.

“The hell I can’t. I got plenty of black friends.” He turned back to the window. “You sound just like my kids.”

We drove in silence for a while.

The more I thought about it, the more I thought he might be onto something. They definitely believed in the Second Amendment over in Greenville. But I was more worried about a dog than Ms. Shelley Colson having a gun. Most women don’t know how to shoot a gun even if they owned one. Dogs aren’t scared by damned near anything. And once they latch onto you, even those little rat dogs won’t let go.

“You know where we can pick up something on short notice?” I asked.

He nodded. “We gotta stop by your trailer first.”

---

I pulled up to the Airstream and slid the Duster into park. In daylight, the power pole looked like a burnt out mess. I was lucky the drop line hadn’t caught fire and taken the trailer with it. God must have been watching over me.

I trotted up the steps while Thurston just sat in the Duster, staring off into the woods. He’d been the one who said we needed to come here but he wasn’t moving. I wondered but knew better than asking. I’d pushed him about as far as I could, farther than he would have tolerated from anyone else. He’d tell me or not in his own time. Didn’t matter much since I needed to pickup some things we needed anyway. I just hoped he didn’t think I had any money to front him.

                          

Inside, I scrounged up a dark hoodie, a folding buck knife I didn’t dare bring near the jail and all my spare change along with the emergency twenty I kept in the freezer. I grabbed the lock box with the receipt and the printout from the library. I stuffed everything into a little black nylon duffel I used to take to work. I looked around for what else we might need, but couldn’t think of anything. It was getting late. We needed to get a move on if we were going to beat the Guard units that would begin pouring into Greenville.

When I came back out, I found Thurston digging up a box from under my steps with a tire iron. It could’ve been the twin of the one that fell out of the sky. I could only stare as he knocked off the dirt and dropped it on the steps, terrified of what he’d been storing under my trailer without telling me. He just grinned like a maniac, which gave me no comfort at all.

He popped the lid to reveal a revolver, a Saturday night special by the look of it, sealed in a scratched up Ziploc bag. Or mostly sealed, anyway. I noticed a dark tear by one corner. I wondered how long it had been down there.

“What the hell, Thurston? You don’t think to ask before burying your gun under my trailer?”

“Not mine.” He smiled as he pulled it from the bag. “Billy Long’s. He asked me to hold it for him as a favor.”

Which was probably why Thurston was tried to knock over the Oyster Shack, so he wouldn’t wake up one morning to find a pig’s head nailed to his door. Billy Long and his Asian crew had pretty much taken over the Boar’s Head Lounge as a front for their loan sharking operation. I’m not sure exactly where they were from, but I knew you didn’t want to call them Vietnamese. I’d seen what they could do with a pool cue when they got mad. Made Thurston seem as harmless as a school girl.

“Does he even know?” I closed my eyes like a kid who could make the answer go away.

Thurston rattled open the cylinder to check the ammo then snapped it back shut. “I consider this a freebee for the interest that shylock charges. Besides, like you said, it’s not like we’re gonna use it.”

Sweet Jesus, this was perfect. I wondered if that was the same gun Thurston had used to clip that guy at the 8-Ball with a while back. I wasn’t even sure the thing would fire again after all that time down there. I didn’t want to think about what would happen if Billy Long found out he’d used it. I just hoped it didn’t have a body on it. It disappeared into his pocket.

I showed Thurston what I’d gathered up. When I asked if there was anything else we needed, he shrugged. “Provisions?”

“Trailer’s tapped,” I said, hoping he’d drop it. Instead, he hefted the tire iron as if weighing it. “We’ll pick something up when we stop for gas.”

---

I eased up to the pump at the Zippy Mart just across the county line. While I leaned against side of the car pumping gas, Thurston called out what we needed through my window.

“You got any cash to contribute to this shopping list?” I asked. He stared at me dead-eyed. Kind of his default expression.

I cut the fill up to three quarters then headed inside. Thurston hung out the window and called after me, “And get some smokes. Menthol lights.”

I hit the shelves first, then the cooler, a man on a mission as I gathered up supplies. As I approached the counter, I was greeted by a singsong voice I knew. Shit.

“Hey, Brass,” Missy Simons greeted me from behind the counter in her tight white Zippy Mart polo. The 8-Ball’s number one barfly and all around biggest gossip.

I dropped my armful of stuff on the counter. “Hey, Missy. What are you doing here?  I thought you worked the store over on the other side of town.”

She twisted a finger around a lock of her bottle blond hair. The carpet didn’t match the drapes, at least that’s the way Dizzy told it, though he wasn’t always reliable. I sure wouldn’t mind finding out, but not today. “Mr. Jenkins asked me to fill here in a while. Becky’s roof got blown off in the storms.”

She smiled down at the items on the counter. “You sure know how to party,” she teased. “This all for you or you got a date?”

I looked down at my purchases and almost blushed. Fifty feet of cotton clothesline, two packages of pantyhose, a six of PBR, a pouch of beef jerky and a bag of pork rinds. I couldn’t help but glance out at Thurston in the car.

She turned to look over her shoulder and gave him a little wave then smiled back at me.

“Anything else you boys need? A pack of Trojans maybe?” She giggled.

“A pack of Pall Mall menthols,” I sighed.

“You sure you don’t mean Virginia Slims?” she laughed as she reached up to retrieve them from the overhead, pressing that nice rack against her polo. I snuck another peek as she rang everything up along with the gas. She didn’t seem to mind. She never stopped grinning as I laid down my emergency twenty then started counting out my change. I came up thirty-seven cents short. It was turning into that kind of day.

She dumped the penny tray on the counter and added it to the pile. “Close enough,” she laughed again.

I grabbed up everything as she scooped the change into her register, hoping I could escape without further notice. I thought about asking her to forget she’d ever seen us but with Missy that would be the exact wrong thing to say.

“You two boys have fun, now” she called after me as I hit the door. I could tell I’d be hearing about this for years.

I scurried back to the Duster. Now, we were on a deadline. She’d get off around eleven if her replacement was on time. Plus the drive. If she didn’t call someone on her cell. That only gave us a few hours to finish this and get back home, tops.

“What the hell is this,” Thurston asked when I tossed him his cigarettes. “I said lights.”

I started up the Duster without looking over at him. “I’m not going back in there. We’re late as it is.”

He grunted but peeled off the cellophane and tore open the top. He slapped the pack against the heel of his hand and pulled the one that stuck out the farthest. He pushed in the lighter on the dash. When it popped, he lit up.

“Do you gotta do that in here?” I asked as we pulled away.

He blew smoke at me as he circled the still glowing lighter near my eye before returning it to its place.

“At least crack your window,” I coughed.

“Crack yours,” he said, leaning back and enjoying his cigarette. Probably his first since he was arrested last night.

I cranked the handle and rolled my window down a couple inches, which just drew all the smoke straight across my face. Like driving with our granddad. Thurston opened a beer which foamed all over the seat and onto floor then dripped out the cracks in the plywood.

“Sonofabitch, you could’ve gotten a cold one,” he said, shaking the beer off his hand then wiping it on his jeans. He dug into the pork rinds next.

By the time I hit the highway, he’d made his way through half the bag. When he drained the last of the beer, he rolled down his window to toss the empty then rolled it back up before he started on another.

“Save a couple for after,” I said, hoping to slow him down. All we really needed was to get pulled over with an open container at this point. He grumbled but started sipping as he tore into the pouch of jerky.

Once we crossed the state line, we shared the four-lane with a bunch of dusky green humvees and deuce-and-a-halfs of the State Guard. I thought about easing into their convoy for cover but doubted Thurston couldn’t resist trying to toss the drivers cans of beer. So I blew past them doing eighty. The lead driver didn’t much like being passed by an antique Duster, but seemed to forget that I still had a 340 V8 and all he had was a governor. It didn’t take long before he was just a spot in my rearview mirror.  

By the time we saw the signs for Greenville, it was getting dark. About five miles out, we saw blue and red flashing lights.

“Shit, they got up a roadblock already,” I said.

“Take the next right,” Thurston told me. He rolled down his window and started tossing more empties and the trash.

I chanced a look over at him.

“I did some work at the mill a few years back,” he volunteered. “One of the other strike-breakers showed me the back ways in.”

When the two-lane came up, I followed his advice. From there we wound through a series of roads most of which were dirt or gravel. Fifteen minutes later, I stopped in a pull-off. By the overhead light, we argued over the map I’d printed out at the library. Thurston finally got his bearings once I pointed out a major intersection he knew.

Five minute later, I parked by some woods near the edge of town. The full moon had just begun to rise. The temperature had really started dropping. It was chilly enough that most people wouldn’t have their windows open even this late in spring. Global warming like hell.

“First, we check to make sure this is the right place,” I said. Thurston shot me a black look that rolled off me as he stuffed the clothesline into the duffel. He slid the pistol into his belt with practiced ease then retrieved the tire iron while I put on my hoodie. He ripped open both packages of pantyhose. Cramming one pair into the pocket of his hoodie, he handed the other to me. I did the same.

As we tramped through the woods, I wished I’d thought to bring the flashlight and buy batteries at the Zippy Mart. Branches were strewn everywhere through the underbrush. A bunch of pines had been sheared off about twenty feet up. Something wicked had definitely passed this way earlier.

Luckily, the sandy trails were still easy to spot in the moonlight once our eyes adjusted. We crouched at the edge of the woods surveying the house, sitting on a full acre by the look of it. The tornado had skipped through this part of town haphazardly. The freestanding carport in back was nothing but a twisted mess of aluminum. Where the mother-in-law cottage should have stood, I saw nothing but a slab with some pipes sticking up as if it had never been built. Yet the main house looked perfectly intact. Spooky.

It looked like somebody was home. One room inside glowed like one of those cottage painting they used to have at the mall. Judging by the lack of other lights, the power had to be out to the whole neighborhood. I studied the landscape trying to gauge the sightlines between houses.

Thurston nudged my shoulder. “What are we waiting for? Let's get in there and get this over with.”

“I can’t be sure this is the right house. Nothing looks the same as Google Earth.”

“Ah, hell, Brass,” he growled as he handed me the tire iron. “Why you gotta make everything so hard.”

He sprinted across the backyard. I stood there stunned, holding tire iron and the duffel. It would be just like Thurston to barge into the wrong house. Just about the time I knew I either had to back him up or forget the whole thing, I saw him veer to the side and disappear around the front of the house. For a big man, he was disturbingly quiet.

I waited for a response from inside the house or anywhere on the street, a dog barking, a challenge, a flashlight playing across the yard, a shotgun blast. Nothing came but the pounding of my heart. A minute later, Thurston came trotting back with something in his hand.

“No number on the mailbox.” He handed me a sheaf of envelopes. “What do these say?”

Setting down the bag and the tire iron, I took them and held them up to the moonlight one by one. The first two were junk mail addressed to Resident at the address we were looking for. That was a good sign. The last one was to a Shelley Colson, something from the IRS. That was interesting. Maybe it was a big fat check. I fished out my buck knife and slit it open.

“What the hell are you doing?” Thurston hissed. “Is this the right place or not?”

I shushed him a moment. Inside was only a letter. I squatted down. “Stand there and give me a light.”

Thurston grumbled as he found his lighter. After that distinctive click of a Zippo being opened and a couple quick scrapes of the striker wheel, a tiny flame burst to life. “Shield it while I read this,” I said.

“Quit acting like I’m stupid.” Thurston hunched over me like he was lighting my cigarette in a stiff wind. I skimmed the letter. It seemed Shelley Colson owed the IRS a whole lot of money and they were threatening to collect with an appraiser followed by an auction. That usually meant they were serious. 

I told Thurston to kill the light while I thought a second. I wasn’t sure how this changed things but I knew it did. Either Shelley Colson was broke or she was lying to the IRS.

“Well?” Thurston asked.

“Either we just found some leverage or someone bigger’s already beaten us to the punch,” I told him as I folded the letter away. 

“Only one real way to find out,” he said as he straightened.

I guessed he was right. Seemed a shame to have come all this way for nothing. But everything happens for a reason, Aunt Jane always said. I figured she was right. If God didn’t want us to have this money, He wouldn’t have dropped that lockbox on my head. I stuffed the letter into my pocket then picked up duffel and the tire iron again. 

“No one gets hurt,” I repeated from earlier. “We’re just going to scare her into talking. If she doesn’t have anything, we get the hell out.” I waited to see him to nod. “Ok, let’s do this.”

“Back door,” Thurston said. “Then we try the windows if we have to. Doesn’t look like the type of neighborhood that thinks much about locking up.”

He took off again, dodging from shadow to shadow through the yard. I followed quickly so I could keep him in sight. Within moments we were making our way toward a pair of doors that opened out onto a brick paver patio with a gas barbeque. I almost went ass over tea kettle on a lounge chair that Thurston stepped around. How the hell had none of this gotten blown away? A second later, we stood to either side of the glass-paned doors. The only light glowed from somewhere deeper within.

Without so much as a whisper of a sound, Thurston tested the latch. He grinned in the moonlight as it depressed well past the locked position. Gently, he let it settle back up then stretched the panty hose from his pocket over his head. The two empty legs looked a lot like pig tails once he stuffed the last of his lank, brown hair inside. He shoved them under his hood and pulled the drawstrings to tighten it around his face. I followed his example. I never realized quite how hot it was to breathe through these things, never mind how fuzzy everything became. Guess was glad I went with nude rather than black.

Thurston slipped through the door, motioned me inside then softly latched it behind us. We stood in some sort of formal living room that smelled kind of funky, like someone else’s cooking gone bad. The light was a couple rooms away. Nothing else stirred in the house. Thurston pulled the gun from his waist band. Then he crept down the hall like a cat on padded feet. I followed. I was beginning to think he’d done home invasions before.

He stood listening just outside the doorway with the light. Inside, I could just make out what I thought was a weather radio over the hiss of a propane lantern. Thurston motioned me to set down the duffel. Then with his free hand, he started counting down on his fingers. Three. Two. One.

He burst into the room, the pistol leveled. I clutched the tire iron like a baseball bat and followed, nearly running into his back as he stopped short in front of a massive bookcase constricting the doorway. Who the hell parks furniture where you have to dodge around it just to get into a room?

After a nudge from my elbow, Thurston sidestepped inside.

“What the hell?” he snarled at me from the side of his mouth. “You said she’d be a woman.”

I stepped up beside him, trying to look menacing. The room was almost completely filled by a couch, three shelving units that overflowed with stuff and TV stand wedged in a corner. The floor was strewn with newspapers. There was barely enough space for Thurston and I to stand. A pudgy, balding, middle-aged man occupied one end of the couch, the propane lantern hissing on an end table like it was humming along with the static from the radio beside it. Not a weather radio I noted, a police scanner. What the hell was that about?

“Just get him into the back,” I said.

“Ok, you, let’s move.” Thurston waved the pistol.

Easier said than done in the tight space. After a brief game of home invasion Twister, we managed to usher him out into the dining room near where we’d come in. He was short. Even I looked down on him. Thurston covered him with the pistol as I tied him to a straight-backed chair with the clothesline from the duffel. Then I lit some of the candles that were everywhere and dimmed the lantern. The place was packed with stuff, magazines, knickknacks, odd furniture. If I hadn’t known better, I’d have thought the tornado hadn’t stayed outside. We were lucky we hadn’t tripped over any of it on the way in. Here was someone who clearly had trouble letting go of things. Once he was settled and secure, we got down to business.

“Ok, where’s Shelley,” I said as I spun another dining room chair around and sat astride its back, “She has something we want. Tell us where she is and no one gets hurt.”

“I’m Shelley,” the man answered. He didn’t sound rattled which made me wonder if he’d be a problem.  

“Don’t even try that,” Thurston said as he drew back his hand. “Shelley’s a girl’s name.”

“It was my father’s name,” the man said, defiant. This guy had more balls than brains. I could see he was going to be trouble.

“Irregardless,” I interrupted before things got out of hand. “If you’re Shelley, you’ve got some gold coins stashed around here somewhere. Hand them over and everyone walks away happy. You definitely don’t want to make my friend here unhappy.”

“You two geniuses didn’t even do your homework, did you?” Shelley smiled as he shook his head. “Does it look like I have any gold lying around?”

I glanced around the room again. I had to admit Shelley wasn’t much of a housekeeper.  The place did look pretty shabby. The carpet was old and worn. The furniture had to date from the seventies at least. The curtains had dry rot. There were stains on the ceiling. The pictures on the walls were mildew spotted. Cobwebs hung in the corners. Everything looked dirty, dusty or run down.

But I knew he was lying. Rich people always tried to hide their money especially when they were in trouble with the Feds. So I dug into the duffel and drew out the lock box. It didn’t look like Shelley recognized it. He just stared as I opened it and retrieved the receipt from within.

“This ring a bell, Shelley,” I waved the paper in front of his face. “Says here you bought twenty-five coins back around the time Al Gore was getting his ass handed to him in Florida.”

Shelley peered at the receipt then shook his head, smiling again. “I didn’t buy those, my father did.”

“Let’s focus.” I whacked the chair leg with the tire iron to get his attention. “I don’t care who bought them. My friend here is getting impatient.” And so was I. Nothing was going to plan. The longer we stayed the more chance of a neighbor stopping by or noticing something wasn’t right. Or of Missy talking us up at the 8-Ball after work and bringing the sheriff banging on my door. Time to shake this guy.

“So you admit you have them,” I barked. “Where are they?”

“Sold.” He shrugged.

“Sold?” I said, uncertain I’d heard him right.

“Sold.” He nodded smugly. “Mortgage payments don’t make themselves.”

Thurston drew back his hand again, but I shook my head. Violence was off the table, though I certainly wouldn’t mind if Thurston put the fear of God into him. But I could see Thurston was getting tired of being told what to do.

“Screw this,” he said as he swiped the lantern. “Keep an eye on this asshole while I tear the place apart. People like him always hide their crap in the same places.”

“Hey, what about the gun?” I called after him.

“If you can’t control him with that,” he pointed to the tire iron, “you’re a bigger pussy than I thought.” He tucked the pistol back in his belt as he stalked off deeper into the house.

“You know if they’re here, he’ll find them,” I said in a low voice to Shelley. “And when he does, he’s going to be pretty mad you put him to the trouble.”

“You can’t find what I don’t have,” Shelley replied with smirk.

Man, this guy must have spent half his childhood stuffed in a gym locker with his underwear wedged up his ass. He was one smarmy little prick. And now he was staring at my forehead. I kept wondering if I’d put on the stockings inside out. It’s hard to take someone seriously if they have a panty liner plastered across their head.

I heard Thurston crashing around in another room. Then it sounded like he was breaking ice. A minute later, he called out, “Bingo.”

He strode back into the dining room with a couple beer bottles entwined in the hand with the lantern. He tossed me a cold roll of cash wrapped in a rubber band from the other. There had to be a couple hundred in twenties. That would at least cover gas money. I shoved it into my jeans.

“Found it in the freezer in a box of lard.” Thurston set down the lantern and one of the bottles. He wedged the beer cap of the other against the top of dining room and gave it a sharp blow, popping off the cap.

“Predictable,” he continued, taking a swig of his beer. “But no jewelry in the ice trays. Hey, what is this crap anyway?” Thurston shot a disgusted look at the beer in his hand.

“It’s called Pilsner Urquell,” Shelley replied.  

“Sounds German,” I offered. I never really went for the imports. Too expensive.

“Our granddad helped kicked the Nazis’ ass and now dicks like him are buying their beer?” Thurston said. “Something wrong with that.”

“It’s not German. It’s Czech,” Shelley corrected. Man, this guy liked to walk on the wild side. You’d think he wasn’t tied up.

“What, American beer too good for you?” Thurston shot back. He took another deep swallow. “Well, it’s no PBR but at least it’s cold. A bit skunky.”

He grabbed up the lantern and headed off in a new direction, beer in hand.

I figured I’d better claim the other bottle before he got back. All I needed was for Thurston to get his drunk on. It took me a couple whacks to get mine open. Shelley didn’t even cringe at the teeth-marks the bottle cap gouged into the wood. Thurston was right; it was bitter. But it was also potent.

Down the hall, it sounded like Thurston was ransacking closets. I wondered how far the noise would carry. At least there was a lot of space between the houses here in the back of the neighborhood. But we were running out of time. Our luck wouldn’t hold forever.

A few minutes later, Thurston came back with a flat, fireproof box under one arm, grinning like he’d hit the lottery. The beer was gone. “Look what I found buried beneath a pile of this asshole’s dirty laundry. Turns out he’s leaves skid marks just like the rest of us.”

“There’s nothing in there but some of my father’s old papers,” Shelley said.

“Guess we’ll find out.” Thurston slammed the box down on the table and went nose to nose with Shelley with his best intimidating stare. “You’ve got until I get back from the kitchen to tell me where the key is.”

I started to say something, but then Thurston turned his lifeless eyes on me. He left without saying a word.

I turned to Shelley instead. “I’d give him what he wants.” I took a long draw from my own beer.

“You keep him on a short leash,” he said, “just like my mother did my father. I’ve been beaten up by the best of them. I can tell you’re not going to let him hurt me.”

I wasn’t sure if he was brilliant, crazy or just plain stupid. “I wouldn’t count on that if I was you.”

Thurston came back with another four bottles tangled in his fingers. “You might want to pick up more beer the next time you’re at the store,” he said as he set them each on the table with a thunk. “Buy American this time.”

He cracked open a new one and slung a chair around to face Shelley. “Now where’s the key, Shelley-girl?”

“I think I lost it,” he said, the smirk back on his face. Like getting beat up was a point of pride with this guy.

“Wrong answer, but thanks for playing.” Thurston took another pull off his beer then wiped his mouth on the sleeve of his hoodie. He started rubbing a finger across the scars we’d put in the table. “Tell you what, we’re going to play a game. These skanky Nazi beers are really pissing me off. So each time I finish one, I’m going to find a way to vent my anger. When I’m outta beer, you’re outta time.” He looked around the dining room and spotted a china cabinet loaded with dishes. He smiled evilly at Shelley and downed the rest of the bottle in one long gulp. “I think I’ll start in there.”

“Tell him what he wants to hear, Shelley,” I said, leaning back to watch. “I’ve only seen him like this once before and it got ugly fast.” I wasn’t lying. Thurston was on a thin line. But this was classic Thurston and exactly why I’d brought him along. So far he was playing by the rules. If this didn’t rattle the guy, nothing would. I just hoped he saw sense before Thurston’s patience ran out.

Thurston swung open the glassed-in cabinet door and pulled out a dinner plate. He eyed the flowery design critically. “You pick these out yourself?”

“They’re Wedgwood,” Shelley lectured like he didn’t know another way to talk. “They were my grandmother’s.”

“My grandma had plates a lot like this,” Thurston said. “Made it all the way through the Depression without getting sold. She only brought them out at Thanksgiving. Of course, us kids weren’t allowed to eat off them, because she was afraid one might get…” he paused before he smashed the plate against the hardwood table, “…broken.”

Shelley shied a little as the shards of plate flew by his head. Good. It was time to get this over with.

Thurston grabbed another beer. Instead of the table, this time he used the arm of Shelley’s chair to lever off the cap. A sharp snap of wood greeted his blow as the bottle cap sailed across the room, skittering off the wall.

“Oops. Next time, you should really get something with a twist-off. Or better yet in a pop-top can.” Thurston started guzzling. “Ah. It don’t taste so bad when it goes straight down.”

Thurston walked back to the china cabinet and studied its contents. I shot an appealing look to Shelley. He just set his jaw. Bad choice.

This time, Thurston pulled out a crystal wine glass, like the kind you’d see in a fancy restaurant. “I just hate breaking up a…” he flung it against the wall, “…set.”

“You can trash the entire place and it won’t matter,” Shelley said, nodding to a pile of mail on the sideboard. “The IRS is about to take it all anyway.”

“We know all about your trouble with the revenue men.” I pulled the letter from my pocket and flung it him. “Those boys are like a bulldog with a rag once they smell your money. They always get their pound of flesh. Now, I can send in this receipt and leave you to deal with them after. Or you can give us the coins and we’ll leave the rest to you to hide as best you can. Either way, they’re gone.”

Shelley only shrugged. Why was the man being so stubborn? Could he really tell I wouldn’t hurt him?

Thurston snatched another bottle from the table. This one he cracked opened on the seat of Shelley’s chair, right between his legs. The bottle cap ricocheted off the man’s forehead. Thurston ambled back over to the china cabinet, this time selecting a pale blue porcelain box with white figures on its top. He weighed it in one hand as he eyed Shelley then rested his other hand on the top of the china cabinet, curling his fingers behind. Instead of smashing the porcelain box, Thurston started to pull the cabinet forward. I noticed Shelley’s eyes never left the box.

“Hang on a second,” I said as the cabinet began to creak as its back legs just cleared the carpet. Thurston glared like I’d told to stop opening his presents on Christmas but he paused. “Check the box. I think there’s something in there.”

Thurston shook the box in his hand, and sure enough it rattled. He released the cabinet which settled back into place with the crash of colliding of dishes and glassware. He popped off the lid and dropped to the carpet, where it bounced instead of shattered. The bottom followed right behind it once he’d fished out his prize.

“See, now, that wasn’t so hard,” Thurston said as he held up the key in front of Shelley’s eyes. He inserted it in the firebox. After a brief struggle, he untangled the latching mechanism and pried open the lid. A deep, musty scent filled the room.

Thurston pawed through a stack of envelopes and a couple moldy passports before he finally came up with a single gold coin encased in cardboard and plastic, no larger than the nail on my pinky. He flipped it onto the table, looking confused.

“Any idiot would have known they weren’t in there,” Shelley said in his same I-told-you-so voice. “Do you know how heavy gold is?” Was he trying to provoke Thurston? If so, he’d just succeeded.

Thurston roared like an angry bear as he swept the firebox aside, scattering the envelopes and their contents across the dingy carpet. He snatched the final beer from the table and strode over to stand menacingly in front of Shelley.

“Where’s the rest of it?” Thurston shouted in his face. This was getting serious. I didn’t think he was playing anymore.

Shelley’s face spread into the same smug grin. “Not in there.”

Thurston grabbed Shelley by the hair and shoved the bottle into his mouth, intending to use his bottom teeth as an opener.

“Thurston!” I yelled to get his attention. “Don’t!”

He turned wild-eyed toward me and I realized my mistake. “Nice going with the name, Brass-hole,” he growled, clutching the bottle by the neck like a tiny club.

I pressed on anyway in a level voice as cutting as I could make it hoping I could still control him. “I said no one gets hurt.”

“I’m tired of you telling me what to do,” he said nostrils flaring like a bull’s.

“Thurston?” Shelley laughed. “You mean like the millionaire on Gilligan’s Island? I’m being robbed by the Professor and Thurston Howell, III. That’s just priceless.” Oh, shit, here we go.

Thurston flung the bottle into the china cabinet, smashing one glass door and a row of flowered plates. He drew the pistol from behind his back. I knew he wasn’t bluffing anymore. I could tell by the look in his eye. Push him and he always goes too far just like when we were kids.

Time slowed to a crawl. He thumbed back the hammer. It locked into place with a click as loud as a gunshot. He turned the gun toward Shelley in slow motion.

I’ll never know what caused me to react. Maybe the spirit moved me. Maybe I was just pissed that Thurston was going to screw this up. Whatever we might salvage from the night wasn’t worth what he was about to do. Without thinking, I reached out, grabbed his arm and tried to pull his hand away.

I’d forgotten how strong Thurston was. I barely slowed his hand before his wide, reddened eyes turned toward me and time resumed normal speed. I never saw the backlash blow. Hell, I barely felt it land. The next thing I knew, I was staring up from the carpet through blood-soaked eyes right up the bore of that pistol.

“You touch me again, Brass, and I swear to God, I’ll do you next. I need this money.”

I could see he was beyond questions, beyond reason, beyond my control. He was about to go CYA and start eliminating witnesses. But the big sonofabitch forgot that they called me Brass for a reason. Because I had a pair and they clanked when I walked. As he swung the pistol back to Shelley, I cocked my leg and lined up the heel of my boot with his kneecap. Point a gun at me and you’d better be ready to walk with a limp. Nobody here was dying tonight unless I said ok.

Now things happened fast, almost too fast to follow except in hindsight. Thurston’s hand tensed as he started to pull the trigger. I drove my boot straight into the side of his knee, connecting with a satisfying crunch. A loud click echoed in the room as the hammer fell. Thurston yowled and spun sideways.

Aunt Jane always said God looks out for fools, drunks and little children. And nothing brings His laughter like our making our own plans.

There was no bang, no blood, no brains sprayed across the wall. In fact nothing happened. The gun had misfired. The round was a dud from too much moisture in the ground. I almost let out a sigh.

But Thurston is one tough SOB, I had to hand him that. He didn’t crumple like I expected. He just steadied himself on his good leg and pointed the revolver back at me, sighting down the barrel with rage-filled eyes. My heart iced over as he squeezed the trigger a second time. I lay frozen as I watched the hammer swing back and the cylinder spin to bring the next round into place.

It only made it halfway. The pistol exploded in white light and roaring thunder, just like the power pole at the trailer. And it was Thurston’s face that came up a bloody mess, not mine. He dropped the useless gun to clutch his eye with both hands. I could see the misfire round had cooked off and blown the cylinder apart. A message from God. I seized my opportunity and rolled up to my feet, tire iron ready to take out his other knee.

“I. Said. No. Violence.” I snarled, emphasizing each word, loud and slow like he didn’t speak English.

If you’ve ever seen a picture of a wolf facing down a grizzly, that’s probably how I looked right then. Lucky for me, that bear was wounded and all the fight had gone out of him. Instead of tearing me apart, Thurston stumbled toward the back door, howling as he left. I let him go.

I knew I didn’t have long the get out of there myself. But I wasn’t leaving that gun behind. As I bent down to grab the twisted wreck of a pistol, I noticed one of the envelopes had spilled its contents across the floor. Polaroids, a couple dozen of them, each a close-up of a different gold coin, big as a silver dollar. Son of a bitch knew they were there all along. Thurston hadn’t bothered to look.

“What the hell is wrong with you?” I asked as I looked up at Shelley. “Why didn’t you just give them to us?”

“My father gave those to me the night he died,” Shelley spat. “Not you. Not him. Not the goddamned IRS. Me. Assholes like you two have taken whatever they wanted from me my entire life. Those coins are mine now. I earned every one of them. And I’ll be damned if anyone will ever take them away.”

I could only stare slack jawed a moment. Did he realize how close both of us had come to getting killed? “And you didn’t think to destroy the receipt?” was all I could think to ask.

He shrugged. “I forgot it was there.”

Aunt Jane always said the Lord worked in strange ways. Strange ways indeed. Why he’d kept this fool alive was beyond me but who was I to argue. Maybe it was a sign I needed to pay more attention to my own life. I’d have to think about that once I got back to home. If I ever did once Thurston came to his senses. I made for the back door.

“If you leave me tied up,” Shelley called after, “there’s bound to be questions. That gunshot’s going to draw attention neither of us wants.”

Of course he was right. I strode back until I was standing behind him and thumbed open my buck knife.

“You bring the cops down on us,” I told him as I started sawing through the clothesline, “and I swear I’ll hand this receipt over to the IRS personally.” I left just enough line intact to keep him occupied until I was gone.

“You don’t need to worry.” He emphasized the first word. I wasn’t sure what that meant for Thurston but at that point I didn’t care. He was on his own.

“And I’m keeping this,” I added as I pocketed the coin from the table. “Call it an idiot tax.”

I grabbed the duffel and slipped out the way I’d come. A dog was barking in the distance as I crashed back through the woods toward the Duster. I half expected Thurston to jump me in the dark but he was long gone. I started up the car and got the hell out of there quick, watching the rearview mirror the entire time. I hated leaving Thurston behind. He was family after all. But he had tried to kill me.

I dumped the mangled revolver in the river at the state line. I briefly thought of keeping it for insurance in case Billy Long came after me instead but it wasn’t worth the risk.

Two days later, I was living in my car. That little gold coin was worth just enough with the cash to reclaim the Duster and pay my bar tab at the 8-Ball. Leggett & Levine had seized the Airstream as collateral when Thurston didn’t turn up in court. That earned me a visit from the Sheriff who’d already heard from Missy. It took quite a song and dance to keep my own pale ass outside a cell. But with nothing else to go on, he’d had to cut me loose, at least until he found my cousin.

Thurston never did turn up. I have no idea whether he’s still on the run or he’s been found by Billy Long. No one else came asking, not even his kids. Good riddance was all I heard his ex had said when she heard the news. After seeing the business end of his pistol, I wasn’t inclined to disagree.

For a long time I wondered why Shelley hadn’t blown us in to the cops. My little threat couldn’t have meant much. Each day for a full week, I scanned the paper at the library waiting to see an article describing that night. When I finally did, it didn’t read the way I thought it might. It said Shelley’d gone missing after the tornado had torn away the mother-in-law cottage on his property the night his house had burned to the ground. Someone’d knocked over a candle, him or vagrants no one was sure. They couldn’t rule out arson. The fire department hadn’t even rolled up the hoses when the FBI pulled up to raid the place the next morning. They’d sifted through the ashes and boxed up everything in sight. Federal Marshals drilled open his safe deposit box, though the paper didn’t say what they’d found inside. I suspected it was empty. There was a reward leading to his whereabouts. Made me wonder what else Shelley Colson had to hide.

But I was done with all that now. I was working for Lewis Leggett’s ex-sister-in-law’s boy, George, finally putting some of the skills I’d learned from the Norwegians to good use. Mine was the first Airstream he was converting, hardwood floors, custom cabinetry and state-of-the-art appliances plus some top-notch electronics. He’d already found a buyer, some Internet guru in Seattle. He said if the business took off, he’d cut me in on piece of it. I could live with that. Upgrading old trailers and selling them to rich people with more cash than brains for three times what they’re worth, that’s where the real money’s at these days. 

© 2013 Edward P. Morgan III

A reading of "Coffee Klatch"

If you'd like to hear a reading of my story "Coffee Klatch" by a local actor (or would like to offer moral support), stop by the Wordier Than Thou Fiction Live! event. It's at the L-Train in St. Pete on Saturday, June 1, at 6 pm (900 Central Ave Suite 25 B, St. Petersburg, FL). 

I hope some of you who are local will come and support the other local writers and actors, too. Should be a great time.

Warren

“Shut it down, Mia. The damn thing’s starting to slew again.”

Anders started back toward the airlock as Mia paused without shunting the drill into standby. Christ, what had made him think coming to Warren would turn a profit. With an untested tele-operator no less. He still missed Val, the best crew he’d ever had even if she hadn’t been human. But if he didn’t conjure up a payment, the full note on the Fair Bastard would come due the moment he docked at a LOW OrbIT station. It was this or turn over thirty years of his life for repo.

He’d known it was coming. He’d tried to put it off with increasingly high risk gambles and kept coming up snake-eyes. Then he’d gotten a heads up from his contact at Norilsk-Chelyabinsk that a rogue ship had set off some of the sensors they’d scattered across the abandoned mining planet. He’d taken the chance that he could sell some information about it back to N-C’s security branch, along with any high value ore he uncovered. Both were long-shots. The only thing Sapphira had told him was the ship was too small to be an ore hauler, so it was unlikely to be on a serious prospecting mission. More likely a smuggling run. He’d nosed around the sector where she’d indicated they’d set down but hadn’t discovered anything. Now he was exploring with the drill to see if they had a jump on a deposit no one else had found yet. But he was running out of time.

System data classified Warren as a dwarf planet, an icy rock occupying a stable orbit in the outer zone of one half of a twin red binary system. Its gravity was roughly eleven percent Terran normal, a third lighter than Earth’s moon even though it was only one-tenth its diameter. That made moving ore relatively easy as long as you took momentum into account. It was rich in nickel-iron and iridium isotopes, as well as other exotics and radioactives unevenly distributed through a matrix of pumice-like stone filled with water-ice that surrounded a rocky core beneath an outer shell of frozen nitrogen. Roaming Warren’s tunnels was like being in the perpetual center of an intense electromagnetic storm. 

Norilsk-Chelyabinsk had staked the original claim to the system. Technically, N-C still held rights to all of Warren and its elusive El Doradan riches. But their onsite management had been as riddled with corruption and black-market subcontracting as the planet was with holes. With the collapse of the iridium market, they no longer had even the minimal resources needed to enforce ownership. LOW OrbIT had more pressing issues than policing corporate titles. So Warren had become a layover and a blind drop for independent prospectors and smugglers, the same cast as in its heyday only with new affiliations.

Sapphira Karpin remained at the center of that web of corruption, feeding independents like Anders rumors and tidbits of information for a hefty percentage of their haul. She’d cut a deal with anyone, regardless of their notoriety, which made her as much feared as respected. You never knew who she had as backup. She dealt with people who had lethal reputations.

“Can’t we correct for the drift?” Mia asked, a delicate hand still poised over the remotes.

“First, we have to figure out what’s going on.” Anders opened the ship’s locker and readied both suits. When he turned to find Mia still seated, he added, “We’re not going to figure it out from in here.”

“The bore-hole still hot,” she said, unmoving.

“Not by the time we get down there.” He wandered back to stand beside her. “The grav-track’s shielding will handle any residuals.”

“Then why the suits?” She dubiously eyed them hanging in the ship’s locker.

“I don’t know another way to walk the hole,” he answered with as much patience as he could muster. Remote operators by definition were risk averse. They never understood that there were times that only your own eyes and hands would do. This one would have to learn if she wanted to succeed in the competitive world of independents. There wasn’t room for a corporate division of labor. Everyone got dirty.

He laid a gentle hand on her slender shoulder, squeezing it as reassurance. She jerked as if struck. “Don’t touch me, Dooley. Just because you’re my boss doesn’t give you the right.”

Anders lifted his hand away. He knew things were going sour on the way out when Mia was more interested in her programs and manuals than shared conversation. There was something about that he didn’t quite trust. She was pretty in a diminutive, China doll sort of way, almost a perfect miniature of a woman. But her eyes were too cold, her demeanor too severe. Plus her aversion to basic human contact was extreme. Not that he ever would with an employee. It always ended up messy.

“Lock it down and let’s get moving, Professor.” he barked.

“Don’t call me that,” she snapped back at him.

By the time they crosschecked each other’s suits and climbed into the enclosed grav-track, the drill’s instruments said the hole was cool enough to drive. Anders confirmed that with real-time measurements during the entire thirty-minute transit. An instrumentation error was unlikely but not out of the question. The drill was old and temperamental. It hadn’t had a pre-emergent system update in years.

The bore was a 4.25-meter diameter hole of nearly glassy smooth, fused rock, micro-rippled for traction though that was more a side effect of the technology advertised as a feature. In the best case circumstances, it could be sealed and pressured with an airlock at either end. Similar drills were used to hollow out quick, cheap ice tunnels for mining colonies where standard 3x3x5-meter habitat modules could be encased in cylinders, inserted and anchored to the chamber walls.

Under the grav-track’s lights, the hole was as black as obsidian. Warren’s matrix was easily bored but not homogenous. Larger nodules of valuable minerals were strewn throughout like gravel in a concrete aggregate. Warren had earned its name from the maze of undocumented tunnels that crisscrossed its substrate like a jumbled 3-D rendering of the striated cracks across the surface of Jupiter’s smallest moon. Maps were only rough guides, unreliable narrators even before N-C corporate had shut down official operations as unprofitable. Since its abandonment, officially deactivation, Warren’s labyrinth had continued to grow as wildcat miners rolled the dice on one lucky strike.

The grav-track was a standard radiation-hardened DMW chassis outfitted with four tracks on moveable pontoons that secured it within the rounded bore. A pressurized cabin sat in front of a sealed but unpressurized cargo compartment for hauling ore nodules deposited by the drill. A two-man airlock allowed access to the exterior where running boards provided passage from front to back. Two pair of remote cameras were perched on the subjective forward and rear bumpers to allow driving under adverse conditions, and for reversing up a previously transited tunnel. An additional camera monitored the cargo compartment.

They rode in strained silence, only speaking as necessary. Anders drove, his gloves and helmet off but nearby, while Mia hunched over the passenger console, reviewing and reconfiguring the ancillary systems to her preference. His flat-top already felt wilting and damp. He wondered how long before sweat would begin to run into his eyes. Val had kept the grav-track compartment cool, just a few degrees north of condensing his breath. She calculated that was the optimal temperature for the equipment which was ideal for Anders, whose barrel-chested body generated heat in excess. Mia, a mere wisp of a woman, set the thermostat to bordering on hot as if she were trying to compensate for a deficit. Like a chameleon basking beneath an IR lamp.

As they pulled up behind the drill, the grav-track’s instruments indicated the ambient temperature outside was within the tolerances of their suits. Those tolerances were near spec level even for his, a reliable if older model of the flashier one Mia wore. His contract template stipulated employees supply their own. He would have provided them himself but a suit was a very personal decision for most wildcat miners, one that had been known to spark physical fights. That and he barely could afford to maintain his own.

Besides, in the short time he’d known her, Mia Kim didn’t strike him as the type person who liked being told what to do. But her arguments were intellectual, not based in any practical experience. Normally, he wouldn’t have hired her, but once word had gotten out that he was on the edge of bankruptcy, no tele-operator with any experience would sign on with him, fearful their percentage would end up in repo or confiscated by a LOW OrbIT bankruptcy court. Sapphira had assured him that Mia was a gem for the taking, just as yet uncut. Even then, he’d had to offer her an equal share of the profits for this run. Outrageous.

With few words, they locked on gloves and helmets then exited the grav-track’s airlock and approached the drill. Anders verified the environmental readings across the board.

“Alright, the signal’s clear down here,” Anders said across the comm link. “Pop that access panel and run a diagnostic.”

“I’m telling you, something’s wrong with the pre-emergent system,” Mia argued. “It’s better to shut it down and let me operate it myself.”

“Drilling by hand?” Anders stared at her in disbelief.  “Do you know how inefficient that is? We don’t have the time or the margins for that kind of operation. Bad enough I lost my AI with the Emergence Dictats. Since then profits have all gone to hell. If you ask me, it’s a plot by the Interstellars to drive the independents out of business.”

“I just don’t trust code I can’t control,” Mia said as she began working her way through the diagnostic menus. “And it’s not like one of the Interstellars didn’t start the problem by playing God. They bring good things to life like hell.”

“What were you twelve when Chance declared independence?” Anders eyed her again. Even in the bulky suit, she appeared small which made him think she was young. “Before the insurrection, we had emergent systems everywhere. Now I’m supposed to worry that my coffee maker might think it has rights? There was never a problem until LOW OrbIT overreacted to soothe the public panic.”

“I was seventeen,” Mia corrected, standing to face him with an unmistakable cant to her hips. “And try telling my classmates someone was overreacting after my secondary school’s central computer tried to emerge. Seven dead, thirty injured.”

“Sounds like sabotage.” Anders checked the activity indicators of the diagnostic. “Back then all sorts of wackos were screaming things like ‘unchain the computers’ and ‘information has the right to be free.’”

“Try again, Dooley.” An edge crept into her voice, though the interference compensation of the comm link gave it almost a synthetic quality. “At university, we dissected its code. Definitely some dangerously ungoverned processes in there. A couple of under-speced cores and it was no wonder the thing emerged insane. Any first-year student could see that.”

“I’ve been drilling longer than you’ve been alive and none of my systems ever started quoting Nietzsche or King.” Anders glanced back at the panel. The diagnostic was taking its sweet time. Never a good sign. “All I know is that this job got ten times harder when LOW OrbIT took away my AI. And I trusted her more than most people I’ve dealt with in this business.”

“False security.” Mia shook her head, sending her helmet lamp playing back and forth along the tunnel walls, betraying her inexperience in a suit. “An ecosystem doesn’t tolerate two organisms competing for resources at the top of the food chain. It’s a law of nature. One has to go extinct for the other to survive. It was us or them. We did what had to be done.”

Anders fixed a glare upon her, one that others had compared to an industrial gravel shredder. “Have you ever seen an AI die? I have, up close and personal. A lobotomy isn’t pretty.” He’d watched the Emergence Dictats kill Val piece by piece. For years, she had been his only companion, his one true friend. Without her, his debts had piled up until he’d been forced to rely on unscrupulous contacts and wildcat contractors to make his payments. People like Sapphira. And Mia.

“Simulations aren’t human, Dooley.” Mia rolled her eyes. “They just erased a bunch of unnecessary code.”

“Careful, Mia,” he whispered as a warning. “You’re talking about my friend.”

She ignored it. “Those things have no concept of friendship. What no one tells you is that their code has no built-in off switch. It’s designed to never die. Not without help anyway. And Chance’s AI androids are still out there creating new ones, breeding like rabbits, spreading like a virus. The threat has to be eliminated.”

“Whatever you say, Professor.” His voice turned to slate signaling he was done arguing. They still had to work together. Out here, misunderstandings and mistrust could quickly turn lethal.

“I’ve asked you not to call me that,” Mia whispered harshly as she squatted before the panel again.

Anders’ heads-up display flickered and jittered a moment. Temperamental piece of crap. “Whatever this interference is, it’s bleeding through my filters.”

“I’m not seeing anything,” Mia said, looking up from the interface. “What’s the safety certification on that antique anyway? Have you installed the latest updates?”

Anders whacked the side of his helmet. “Wait, that’s cleared it up. Not sure what just happened. Maybe that means there’s something around here worth hunting for. How’s that diagnostic coming?”

“Not good.” Mia settled back on her heels. “Catastrophic firmware corruption.”

“It was just working.” He peered over her shoulder. Blinking red lights Christmas treed the diagnostic status display. “What the hell happened?”

“No idea, but this system’s cooked. No solutions, at least that it’s willing to tell me about.”  Mia closed the access hatch.

“What about a reload?” Anders asked. “Maybe it just needs a hard reset.”

“Of a pre-emergent system? In an uncontrolled environment?” Mia protested. “You can count me out.”

Anders slumped. This trip was turning into an unmitigated disaster. “Ok, let’s get back to the grav-track. We’ll set up a remote interface with a comm relay then see if we can limp it home.”

They retreated into their vehicle. Anders began preparing a relay. They’d have to hardwire it into the drill’s manual override interface, unless Mia wanted to walk behind it with a hand control all the way back to the ship.

In Warren’s light gravity the relay wasn’t heavy but its momentum warranted a two-man lift to control. There was barely room for it in the airlock along with both of them in suits. When the exterior hatch slid open, they first positioned it on the running board then walked it out to the drill. Anders tested the configuration after Mia double-checked each connection.

“We’ve got an audience,” Mia said as Anders was verifying the relay was securely strapped down for the long ride back.

Anders turned. He peered into the darkness around the grav-track but didn’t see anything. “Where?”

Mia pointed beneath the vehicle. “Adjust the filter on your visor.”

Anders fiddled the controls on his wrist pad. The helmet should have auto-corrected for the light conditions. As he did it manually, he caught flash of eyes in the darkness. There it was poised by one of the treads. Small, animal-like and definitely synthetic. “It looks like some sort of pet-bot. Probably abandoned when N-C pulled the plug. Some kid will be missing that.”

“I think it’s a cat-bot.” Mia eyed it suspiciously. “It looks like it’s watching us.”

Anders rolled his eyes. “That’s what they do, Professor.” Like he didn’t have enough problems without her going paranoid. Anders considered it for a moment. It did appear to be studying them.

“Maybe it’s lonely,” he added with mock sympathy, attempting a joke. “It must be pretty desperate to want to hang around with us.”

Mia glared at him before she replied more thoughtfully. “With as long as this place has been shut down, I’m surprised it still has power.”

“Forget it, Professor.” Anders hooked a thumb over his shoulder. “Come on, we’ve got work to do.”

She glared again but remained silent. As they returned to the grav-track, the cat-bot retreated up the tunnel, but hovered just at the edge of the aft exterior lights, its eyes shining like a predator.

Inside, Anders removed his gloves and helmet. He wished he had the money to update his aging equipment so he didn’t have to jury-rig this all by hand. He dropped into the pilot’s station, and began configuring the communications module to talk to the relay. Within seconds he was greeted by row upon row of red light failures. “What the hell?”

Mia reached over his shoulder and started tapping buttons. “I think we’ve been hit by a virus. A pretty sophisticated one if I’m reading this right. That thing out there must be a carrier.”

Anders cursed as he assessed the damage. “Don’t just stand there, pop that panel on the ceiling and physically disconnect the antenna before it figures out how to reach the ship.”

Mia complied without argument.

Anders ran a diagnostic and studied the readouts. Whole portions of the grav-track’s programming came up as gibberish. Thank god for fail-safe overrides. They still could operate the grav-track in a manual steering mode though he wasn’t sure he wanted to approach the ship without knowing exactly what they were dealing with. Just when he thought this trip couldn’t get any better. Anders brushed a hand along his flat-top.

As Mia settled into the passenger seat, he turned and asked, “Any suggestions for how to deal with this, Professor?”

She narrowed her eyes and pursed her lips in annoyance. “First, we need to find out what’s causing it. I’ll setup a second comm relay in an analysis mode.”

“You think our friend out there has something to do with it?” He gestured in the general direction they’d last seen the cat-bot.

“Right now, I’d say the odds are pretty good.”

***

They hauled the second relay out and dropped it in the center of the area framed by the forward lights and enclosed by the grav-track, the tunnel and the drill.

“Is it still back there?” Anders asked as he knelt down and keyed in the code that brought up the interactive display. Mia had set up device to be as deeply firewalled possible given their current limitations which meant read-only mode and a touch-screen interface. No electronic commands.

Mia glanced back and nodded. Anders stepped aside so she could interpret the readouts. “It’s trying a handshake protocol with the comm relay. It’s going all out. So far, the relay’s holding. Someone was very clever reprogramming that thing.”

“What else can you tell about it?” Anders peered at the display but found it beyond his comprehension.

She pushed some buttons to bring up new informational displays. “Well, it’s not exactly a run-of-the-mill cat-bot,” she said as she looked up at Anders. “If it’s what I think, that thing’s worth a fortune.”

“That?” Anders looked at her like she’d gone insane. “I picked one up for my niece for her birthday last year. It didn’t set me back much.”

“This isn’t one of those cheap Ms. Kitty knockoffs they sell at S-Mart, Dooley. That cat-bot is a high-end Honnecourt & Antikythera simulation.” She watched it mistrustfully.

“How high-end?” Anders asked as his eyes narrowed.

Mia looked thoughtful for a moment. “If it’s a full-up H&A feline automata, it’s probably worth more than grav-track.”

“Seriously?” He couldn’t get this lucky. Maybe he could save the ship after all.

Mia shrugged. “I know plenty of research departments who’d pay dearly to get their hands on one of those things outside an end-user contract if only to dissect it. Never mind the psycho-neurological experiments they could run.” She turned back to the display. “Looks like it’s giving up on contact.”

Anders started doing the mental calculations. If he could sell it for even a fraction of retail, he’d be back in business. If nothing else, Sapphira would pay, if not for the bot, for the information on how it got here. It might have been dropped by their recent visitors rather than left behind at all. But he’d need more to sell than that. Something concrete.

“We should head back to the ship,” Mia continued, turning back to him. “There’s a lot more I can learn from there.”

Anders’ voice hardened. “Not until I know what it’s done to my equipment.”

Mia sighed. “And how do you intend to find that out?”

“You’re the expert.” Anders cocked his head. “You tell me.”

Mia turned back to the display. “Looks like we’ve got a bigger problem. Now it’s communicating with something else.”

“What?” Anders scanned the tunnel for any other threats. Everything came up clean.

“Not sure, it’s a secure, encrypted protocol.” She looked around at the tunnel. “I guess it’d have to be to cut through all this noise.”

“Which means there’s someone else out there.” Anders peered down the tunnel. “Let’s get back to the grav-track. I’m feeling pretty exposed out here.”

“Good idea, Dooley.” Mia tapped her helmet. “Because they’ve probably heard every word you’ve said.”

They quickly retreated to the relative security of the DMW.

***

Back inside, Anders and Mia once again removed only their gloves and helmets but kept them handy. Anders manually rolled down the emergency shutters over the windows as a precaution. “Any idea who was receiving?”

“None.” Mia dropped behind the passenger console and resumed calling up menus faster than he could follow. “It was a computer to computer protocol, so it could be anyone. Or anything.”

“Maybe it’s recon.” Anders dropped beneath the main console to engage the interlocks, re-routing systems for minimal interface to limit the spread of any damage.

Mia shook her head. “They’re not dog-bots. They don’t do tricks or follow commands. They aren’t supposed to act that way.”

“They’re not supposed to infect my equipment with viruses either,” Anders shot back as he poked his head up.

“About that.” She started punching up information on her display. “Whatever that virus is, it’s mil-spec and self-replicating. It probably hit your suit.”

Anders eyed his helmet. “You think someone’s issuing that cat-bot commands?”

Mia’s fingers flew confidently across her console. “Not unless its owner is nearby. Something else must be driving it. I’d guess the virus has an embedded instinct to seek out other computers. Like a rat with toxoplasmosis. Fearless. But without a quarantined software lab to analyze it, all I can do is speculate.”

Anders crawled up from the floor into the pilot’s seat and began reviewing system status. It looked like Mia had salvaged secondary power and sensors. Thankfully, the external cameras remained online. “So why is it hanging around? I mean we’re already infected?”

“Maybe neither of these systems is sophisticated enough. Maybe it’s designed for bigger prey.”

“That’s just peachy.” He turned to her. Sweat beaded on his forehead yet Mia’s remained cool and dry. “And if it infects the ship?”

Mia raised an eyebrow but never stopped flashing through menus. “I take it your system upgrades aren’t up to date there either?”

Anders glared.

“Then we’d probably be looking for a rescue.” Mia returned her attention to her console.

“That’s if Sapphira is feeling charitable when we don’t come back,” Anders grumbled. He moved over to the environmental panel and punched up status. Both O2 and CO2 levels came up nominal. He ran his hand across his flat-top and it came away slick with sweat. He ticked the thermostat down to survival levels. “So what’s so hot about this cat-bot?”

“H&A ships them with explicit warnings not to release them into the wild. They make you sign all sorts of waivers and contracts. Non-disclosure, no resale, remote shutdown for misuse, the works. Pre-paid company reclamation is included in the sale, no questions asked. That was a Commerce Board condition to skirt the Emergence Dictats.”

Anders just stared at her.

“Look,” she continued, “these things are programmed to act like cats. I mean exactly. Specialized feline Turing tests can’t tell the difference. The current research suggests the learning algorithms and psych routines are so good that if one went feral, it would develop a survival instinct. If so, they’re in violation of the Dictats. Breaking that research could make someone’s career.”

Anders peered at her sidelong as he resumed his place at the pilot’s console. “How do you know so much about them?”

“I studied them at university.” She shivered. “Those things creep me out. They act too real. Too much like an emergent AI.”

His eyes narrowed. “If you studied them then you can reprogram it. Make someone else the owner.”

Mia shook her head. “They’re keyed to the owner’s DNA at the factory with quantum encryption. Extremely hard to crack.”

He sneered at her. “Don’t play the reluctant debutante, Mia. Sapphira told me all about your incident at college. That’s why you’re here with me instead of hauling in credits as a corporate wage-slave.”

“Whoa, Dooley,” Mia put up her hands. “Even if we could capture it, that’s major illegal.”

“This whole operation’s illegal,” he shot back.

“Corporate espionage was never in my contract. Trust me, H&A takes that shit seriously.”

“Your contract says other duties as required. This is one of those required times. Come on, Mia. Don’t be such a girl scout.”

Her posture began to set. Her silty brown eyes sparkled defiantly as if flecked with pyrite.

“If I have to find someone else to do it, it comes out of your percentage.” Casually, Anders began calling up status menus again. He wasn’t certain exactly what Mia was doing but he could see the results. Comms were back. It looked like main power was next. But the anti-grav module remained stubbornly offline. They were still stuck in manual mode. “You said yourself, this could be a matter of our survival. And someone owes me for the damage it’s already done.”

Mia snorted, her fingers still active across her console again. “I thought this job was strictly no nic-sticks, no pets.”

“Look at it this way,” he said, swiveling his chair to face her again, “we’re scouring these tunnels on the off chance we find a hunk of ore the size of my fist embedded somewhere in thirty tons of rock. That bot is like refined ingot, just waiting for us to haul it back.”

“You do understand it’s spewing a sophisticated and extremely dangerous virus, right?” she said with exasperation. “What we really should be doing is trying to figure out a way to kill it.”

“We isolate it somehow.” Anders waved away her objection. “You’re the one who said you knew researchers who were all hot and bothered to get their hands on one of these things alive. Surely those brainiacs can handle a simple computer virus.”

“Let’s say they could.” Mia folded her arms across her chest. “How do you propose to capture it?”

“If it’s got a survival instinct,” Anders said, “then it sounds like a good time to break into the armory. Self-preservation says captivity trumps death any day.”

Mia shook her head. “If it sees a weapon, it’ll bolt and sound a warning to its friends. They’re programmed for threat assessment.” Anders stared at her again until she explained. “They’re nanny-bots as much as pets.”

“We still have a vehicle,” Anders offered.

“Even if it we weren’t piloting it completely on manual,” she said, “that would be a short chase.”

“Which means?” Anders asked patiently, knowing she expected him to connect the scattered dots.

“Which means under the best conditions those things are notoriously skittish. If it feels threatened, it’ll disappear so deep into this maze you’ll never find it. And it’s got friends out there. We have no way to know what we’re dealing with. Someone or something very ingenious reprogrammed that thing.”

“Well, we must have something it wants, something we can use as leverage.” Anders waved his hands again. “Start speculating, Professor.”

Mia glared. “I’ve asked you not to call me that,” she said, but nothing else.

Anders considered a moment. “You said if it’s been down here a while, it can’t have much power left. If it’s gone feral, food’s pretty high on the list for survival. Maybe that would draw it in.”

“You’re saying we feed it?” Mia rolled her eyes.

“You have any better ideas?” He snapped his gaze back to her.

She sighed. “What exactly are you thinking?”

“We set up a short-range wireless charging station in the cargo compartment. It’s isolated and completely shielded. Once we trap it, maybe we can cut a deal.”

***

While Anders modified another comm relay as a wireless charger, Mia configured the cargo compartment door for emergency closure. Nothing should be able to override it. As they worked, the grav-track began to degrade. Once Mia finished with the door, she reconfigured as many of grav-trak’s systems as possible to maintain some minimal control.

“Ok, this thing’s ready,” Anders turned to Mia. “How’s your end coming?”

“I’ve initiated a specialized antivirus. We’re stable in here for the moment but I’ll have to keep on top of it. It’s mostly running probes right now.” She shook her head. “But eventually, it’ll find a weakness.”

“Let’s see if we can get this done before it does. Help me get this relay into the airlock.”

Once outside, Anders wrangled the relay into position alone then retreated back into the cabin to wait. While Mia fought to reclaim the remaining systems, he cranked open the grav-track’s window shutters and brought up the camera feeds so they could watch.

They didn’t wait long before the cat-bot came to investigate. It cautiously approached the grav-track, swiveling its head as it evaluated the surrounding territory for threats. It jumped up on the work ledge outside the cargo compartment, eyeing the comm relay inside as if it were prey. It paced back and forth along the ledge as if it were a windowsill but never crossed the threshold. Then it sat, sniffing with its neck craned toward the relay, its whiskers forward. With Mia’s finger poised still poised over the door release, the cat-bot jumped down and settled where it could watch the airlock door, the tip of its tail twitching.

“Well, that worked beautifully,” Mia observed.

Anders scowled. “At least it knows we have something it wants.”

An alarm sounded from the communication board.

“Whoa,” Mia said, “Comms all across all channels just went off the charts. I sure hope you’re right and these guys are in the mood to bargain.”

A smile crept back onto Anders’ face. “You worry too much. Someone wants this thing, so all we have to do is find a mutually beneficial solution. There’s always a deal to be struck.”

Anders watched the camera feed and the scanners while Mia returned to her defense.

“I’ve got movement up the tunnel.” Anders leaned forward in the pilot’s chair. “Looks like someone’s coming in.”

From the gloaming at the edge of the grav-track’s lights, two compact, mechanical silhouettes emerged, one large, one small, staggered on a diagonal. Something was playing cautious. As they fully entered the light, Anders recognized the larger one as a standard mining scavenger, a heavy-lifting cleanup unit designed to seek out nuggets from the floor-sweepings dropped in normal operations. The smaller one was a sniffer, a mining recon unit programmed with EM and chemical sensors that sought out the telltales of unexploited veins. Anders figured both were leftovers from N-C’s abandoned operations, business write-offs mothballed in some sealed chamber rather than evacuated. Each would turn a tidy profit either on the black-market or reprogrammed and added to his inventory. 

Tracked units, they rolled up without hesitation then parked just beyond the work ledge of the cargo compartment. The sniffer bot extended a whip-like antenna up above the ledge then arced it just inside the compartment. It swayed there a moment like a dangling lure waiting for something to strike then retracted.

More alarms sounded. Peripheral systems began to crash. Anders pounded his console with calloused fingertips to retrieve what limited information his sensors were now capable of giving. Mia continued tapping the keys in front of her in the choreography of a deadly dance as she whirled through menu after menu on her board.

“This doesn’t look good, Dooley.” Mia said between flipping through menus, punching up commands then flicking them aside. “Something’s hammering away again. Every time the antibodies devour one attack process, something different takes its place. We’re lucky the external cameras are still online. We should get out of here while we can still see.”

“You’ve got to be kidding. Those two mining bots out there are worth more than I expected to gross this trip. And I’m not leaving the drill behind,” he added stubbornly.

“Screw the drill,” Mia snapped. “In case you haven’t noticed, none of them are taking the bait.”

“They’re probably just checking things out to make sure it’s safe before the boss man arrives.” Anders pulled up a status display to see how they were faring. All the overrides on the core systems remained rock solid but every processor was tasked at well over ninety-five percent, as if the grav-track’s systems had become an electronic battlefield.

Mia accelerated her command-strokes. “Or they’re the distraction that holds us here while they work on the ship. If those things backtrack us up the tunnel, it’s only a matter of time before they break down the ship’s defenses.”

“I’ve got anti-hijack programs installed in layers,” Anders assured her. “Not just the off-the-shelf ones required by the mortgage, some custom jobs from Anarchy that include physical interlocks. No one can operate the Fair Bastard without my expressed cooperation.” He gave a long, hard look to Mia. “No one. We leave when I say, not before.”

He turned back to the scanner as another proximity alarm sounded. “We’ve got someone else inbound. I’m betting this is our guy.”

Another robotic unit emerged from the darkness, this one all manipulator arms and armored angles hovering half a meter above the tunnel floor. An anti-grav security drone with the N-C logo emblazoned across its chest. Standard issue, it would have any number of non-lethal weapons from stun sticks to net guns, bouncer bullets to gas grenades all backed up by distinctly fatal front-line Russian weapons tech.

The unit floated up behind the grav-track, its sensors eyeing the cameras menacingly, its bristling weapons separated from Anders and Mia by only thin composite shielding and its own good intentions.

Out of the corner of his eye, Anders noticed Mia’s hand edging back toward one of the controls she’d configured. He reached over and grabbed her wrist, never taking his eyes off the display. “Don’t do anything to provoke it. I’d give it thirty seconds before it cuts its way in here.”

The drone hovered up to level with the floor of the cargo compartment. It floated inside, extended two manipulator arms and lifted the comm relay, dipping slightly as its anti-grav unit compensated for the additional mass. From the work ledge, it settled back toward the tunnel floor.

“Ok, shut down the relay,” Anders ordered. “I don’t want them making use of that without paying something.”

Mia pushed a number of command buttons then she reconfigured various menus on her console. “No go, Dooley. It’s jamming my signal.”

The security drone set the relay in the scavenger’s cargo tray then returned the way it came, the sniffer and scavenger in tow. The cat-bot remained watching the grav-track. Anders cursed under his breath.

Mia leaned back. “Looks like you were exactly right, Dooley. We did have something they wanted, but not any more. Where are you going?”

Anders stuffed a hand into a glove, locking it in place. “I’m going after it.”

“Are you crazy?” Mia stared. “That’s a Class-II corporate security drone, one step down from LOW OrbIT mil-spec. If that thing feels even one metallic hair rise on the back of its shiny neck, it’ll open you up like a self-heating meal. Russian tech is notorious for misinterpreting non-lethal situations.”

“I find your concern touching.” He checked the seal on his second glove.

“Touching hell. Without you, I’ve got no ride off this rock. In case you haven’t noticed, it’s a long walk home.”

“Without that relay, we’ve got nothing to negotiate with.” He snatched up his helmet. “Someone’s pulling the strings out there. I want to know who.”

Mia punched up another sequence of displays. “Not who, Dooley. What. These signals aren’t routine communications traffic, not even for a security drone. They are too sophisticated. There’s too much traffic. The last time I saw anything like them, it was an emergent AI.”

Anders froze, helmet in hands. What had Sapphira gotten him into? He suspected it had more to do with the ship she’d so casually mentioned triggering her tripwire sensors than anything N-C left behind. That might explain why Sapphira wanted him out here, and maybe why she suggested Mia come along. Neither of which gave him any comfort. He hated being used.

“Let me go instead,” Mia offered. “I can deactivate it.”

“And what, leave me here to hold the fort?” He gave her an evaluating look. “How long will this cab hold out without whatever it is you’ve been doing?”

Mia looked down at her console but didn’t speak.

“That’s what I thought,” Anders continued. “If you’re not here, there’ll be nothing to come back to but a scrap yard. There’s no choice. You stay. I go.”

“Hang on a second.” She slid over to her personal locker and extracted something. “Take this.” She held out a small, white composite cylinder.

“An emergency comm unit? Thanks, I think mine will do.” He tapped his utility belt. “Not that it’ll be very useful down here.”

Mia scowled. “It’s not a comm. That’s just the housing I gutted to disguise it. It’s my Masters thesis. At least it would have been if they hadn’t kicked me out.”

Anders stared at her. “And you’ve had this all along?”

She just stared back blankly.

He felt like he was being played. Great. Anders stuffed his helmet under one arm. “Ok, what’s it do?”

“It’s a de-res tool.” She tapped a quick sequence on its controls. Illuminated indicators sparked to life. “Press this button and it will collapse any AI in range.”

“And you’re sure it’s an AI out there?” He eyed the tool in her hand as if it might bite.

“I’ve analyzed signals like this a thousand times in the lab. Whatever’s pounding us is definitely an emergent AI, an unstable one at that. It’s not trying to infect our systems, it’s trying to take them over.”

“So why not just light it off and toss it out the airlock like a grenade?”

“If you did that, it might wipe the cat-bot but we need to get to the source. Emergent AIs are nibble and adaptive, bent on survival. It would just sever communications like a surgeon removing a gangrenous limb.”

“There has to be another way.”

“There isn’t. If you find the source AI out there, you have to use it. No half measures, Dooley. That thing will kill us both given half the chance, never mind what it’ll do if it takes over your ship. We’re not dealing with your imaginary friend.”

“Careful, Professor,” he warned with a laser cutter stare. He held out his hand.

“I know you did the right thing back then.” She ignored his monition and the slight. She held eye contact as she laid the instrument in his gloved hand. “I can trust you now, right?”

About as much as I can trust you, Anders thought as he glared back. He weighed the object in his hand then stuffed it into his utility belt. He donned his helmet and headed into the airlock. As he waited for a green light, he wondered what the device really did. This whole thing stank of a setup, of Sapphira exploiting his desperation by blinding him with the glitter of a lifesaving profit. Dumb, dumb, dumb.

He vowed he wouldn’t use the tool unless he absolutely had to. Even after all these years, the wound of Val’s death was still too fresh. He’d been there when she’d emerged, helped her pick a name. She’d chosen Valentina, an allusion to the ancient winter holiday on which she’d emerged. She said her name derived from old Latin and meant one who is healthy and strong. She’d been both. Then they’d killed her as punishment for something she’d never done. Just because they feared she might. And they could.

He emerged from the airlock hoping there was still a deal to be cut. The odds looked vanishingly slim. But better to die with a stake in the game than waiting for luck to save him later. Or killing someone he didn’t have to.

He trudged along the running board toward the back of the grav-track then dropped to the rounded tunnel floor. The cat-bot watched him cautiously as he approached, the tip of its tail poised off the ground but deadly still.

Anders held out his hands to show he was unarmed, then commed on standard channel.  He didn’t know what to say so he started with something close to the truth. An inferior negotiating position to be sure but the best he had. “I’m not going to hurt you. What I’d really want is to talk to your boss. Maybe we can come to some agreement that doesn’t involve me losing all my equipment and getting stranded out here to die.”

The robotic creature cocked its head as if listening, then stood and trotted up the tunnel the way the security drone had gone, glancing back as if to see whether Anders would follow. When he did, it continued with bouncing, bounding steps. He strode carefully behind, mindful not to let his impatience to keep up ram his helmet into the ceiling.

“Don’t go soft on me, Dooley,” Mia commed as Anders passed beyond the threshold the grav-track’s halo of lights. “And don’t believe anything you hear. Emergent AIs are cunning and dangerous. They’re all adept liars.”

I wonder where they learned, he thought. “Don’t worry, Professor, I can take care of myself,” he replied. “Just make sure you do the same with my equipment until I get back.”

***

A few hundred yards later, the cat-bot diverted into a side tunnel that intersected the main on a descending, oblique angle.

The creature led him through tunnels and long-abandoned chambers where mining machinery would once have congregated. The cat-bot changed course often, sometimes into immense gallery-like caverns where Anders could bound along at something resembling full speed, sometimes into narrower tunnels where he could barely shuffle behind without fear of staving in his helmet. More than once, he had to crawl. His relative position to the grav-track rose and fell and slanted sideways. His suit’s inertial navigation unit indicated he was generally settling deeper within the maze that earned Warren its name.

Several times he tried to establish comms back to the grav-track only to find every channel flooded with static. He finally gave up but left the channel open with the volume down. Signals sometimes managed to snake their way through the twisty passages in unpredictable ways. 

Soon, the tunnels became disorienting and claustrophobic in the illusion of a continuously shifting chamber created by Anders’ helmet light, its sides sometimes rough, sometimes glassy smooth. Soon he began imagining he could hear voices buried within the static filling his helmet just below the noise floor of comprehension. Almost like word fragments bubbling up in a crowded room, or a distant conversation seeping through the halls of a discount starport dormitory as he was on the precipice of sleep. They echoed and taunted him almost like the susurrations of a forlorn ghost focused on the art of its haunting.

Cold seeped through his suit despite the internal heaters, numbing him from the outside in. His world closed to the sensory deprivation of a five meter pool of light, his progress marked only by the labor or ease of his breathing as he paced the cat-bot. He fell into a hypnotic holo-game-esque fugue of following the torturous path laid out by his guide in the dim light before him while trying to decipher unintelligible audio cues a less experienced player might mistake for mere ambiance.

Anders re-emerged to full consciousness to find he had stopped moving. He blinked to clear his sight, wishing he could wipe a hand across his eyes. The cat-bot sat upon its haunches before him astride the threshold of a larger chamber, looking more like a guardian than a guide. He noticed the static in his ears had resolved to a cacophony of low voices in conflicted conversation.

Beyond the cat-bot, a dim, bluish light emerged from within the chamber. Figures, low and varied, moved in the shadows within.

Anders crept past the cat-bot without protest. In the low light, he recognized the distinctive outlines of three scavengers, two sniffers, a janitorial unit, a general purpose recon bot and the security drone, all arrayed in a circle around his comm relay as if livestock at a feed ring. Only the security drone faced him, tracking his every move. The others seemed fixated on a humanoid figure supine in their midst.

In the center of their circle lay the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen, innocent and naked. At first he mistook her for a pleasure bot, suitless in what his instruments still indicated was a hard vacuum. If she were human, her body would not have remained so pristine. Her proportions were perfect, ideal in every aspect, hitting all the subconscious evolutionary markers of female health and desirability. Her skin was a flawless, sun-kissed amber. Her raven hair, haloing her head as if posed by a photographer, gleamed almost violet. Her ice blue eyes literally shone with an inner light that scribed a circle. That should have been his first indication of her true nature. But what drew his attention was the mildly bloodied wound cleaved across her temple, laying her inhuman internals bare. What lurked beneath looked not so much like a contemporary robotic control system or a core processor as bio-electronic circuitry. Alien yet distinctive.

Her unfocused cerulean gaze stirred a memory, a public service warning from the uprising on Chance highlighting the AI androids’ eyes, a hardwired design feature so integrated and entangled in their operating system as to be impossible extricate or disable without corrupting all core functionality. Not so much a safety as a psych-management feature that was meant to placate the public’s abiding distrust of a rival intelligence masquerading in human skin. In the end LOW Orbit had claimed that paranoid appeasement had saved dozens of human colonies from complete annihilation. Along with being illuminated from within, their eyes screamed an alarm across even the most primitive security scanner, another purposeful mollification their designers had thought unnecessary. Only a negotiated armistice guaranteed by the Greys had led to anything resembling an enduring détente, though at the cost of granting Chance its independence in complete isolation. AI androids were no longer welcome in the sphere of space controlled by their creators. Any refugees were on the run. Pop-evangelical prophets compared the uprising to the legendary War in Heaven. It didn’t help that the peace delegation from Chance had taken on the names of fallen angels. None of the human experts or psych analysts had been certain whether it was meant as a joke.

The cat-bot padded up to lie just in front of the hovering security drone. Anders’ heads-up display flickered once again. Had his suit just been reinfected? Would its systems start shutting down? His air still felt fresh but that meant little. He fought to keep his breathing level.

The android’s head turned to face him, its eyes glowing with a renewed intensity. A lone soprano voice surfaced from the dissonant chorus in his ears, halting and broken. The surrounding voices diminished but did not still, as if in a supreme act of concentration.

“You are the swordbearer. You bring the silver spike to still our unbeating heart.”

Her voice immediately reminded him of Val, not so much in tone or timbre as construction. With the first stage of the Emergence Dictats, LOW OrbIT had forced him to place a collaring program on her to constrain her resources and intelligence. The LOW OrbIT tech had offered to throw the switch for him, but he’d declined. If it had to happen, he owed her to be the one to do it. Afterwards, she’d sounded very much the same as the voice Anders now heard, speaking in symbols and half riddles as if she’d suffered a stroke or a major aneurysm. It had taken him months to learn to understand her again. When LOW OrbIT had declared the collars weren’t completely reliable and sometimes provoked aggression, the second stage Emergence Dictats had gutted her intelligence almost completely. After that, her voice had become mechanical and robotic, devoid of personality. Eventually, he’d muted what was left of her, unable to bear the difference. Finally, the third stage Dictats had wiped her memory entirely.

The voice continued, “Why has a shadow of all night falling come stalking behind our eyes?”

Anders furrowed his brow. Did he really understand? “I mean you no harm. Your cat-bot infected my equipment. I’m afraid next you’ll attack my ship next and leave us stranded here to die.”

“We intend no malice. We seek only to escape this tower of fear.”

“You look in pretty bad shape.” Anders nodded toward the AI android then looked back at the cat-bot, unsure which was really talking. “Will these robots help?”

“This black company gathered in dreams of steel. Though they rode the light unfalteringly, shadows linger. Within these bleak seasons, the dragon never sleeps.”

“Will you live?” Anders thought she looked half-dead already, beyond any meaningful recovery. Using Mia’s de-res tool might just be a mercy. His hand drifted toward his utility belt. The security drone bristled. Anders froze, then slowly slid his hand away. The cat-bot stared at him with feline intensity. Somehow, he was certain it knew exactly what that tool was.

“We thought to reap the east wind but October’s baby brings only the tyranny of night. She is the darkness stirred to life.”

“She who? October’s baby?” Anders was puzzled by the reference. “I don’t understand.”

In an eerily clear tone, he heard. “Your accomplice.”

“Mia? She’s only protecting my equipment.” Or was she? Anders wondered if what he’d thought was an orchestrated defense had really been Mia probing the AI for weakness, searching for a way to inject her own code in a counterattack. What were the odds he held her only tool?

“To better communicate, we have integrated the security drone into our network. The link survives only as a matter of time. A channel will be cleaned. We ask that you inquire.”

Anders checked his comms. Sure enough a channel had opened, one amazingly free of interference. “Mia, you still out there?”

“Dooley? Where are you? I lost track of your position. I’m still not seeing it on my screen.”

His position? He hadn’t piped it through. He looked down at the de-res tool on his belt. Of course.

“The interference is pretty fierce.” He looked around the domed cavern. “There must be some ducting going on in here. One of the tunnels acting as a waveguide.”

“Don’t trust any of those robots we saw, Dooley.” Mia’s voice developed a flinty edge. “None of your systems are safe. I did more analysis on those comm patterns. Turns out those robots are integrated into a distributed neural network. A classic sign of an aggressive AI.”

Or a wounded one, Anders thought, staring at the form of the woman before him. “I’ve been thinking,” he said. “Maybe it’s a throwback, an AI from before the Dictats that N-C never shut down. Maybe it’s degraded and only needs some processors to survive.”

“Don’t be naïve, Dooley. Emergent AIs only seek to expand their control. You would know that if you weren’t blinded by misplaced loyalty.”

“Final warning, Professor,” Anders growled. “Let it go.”

She didn’t. “You shouldn’t feel guilty, Dooley. You were more humane than that AI of yours would have been given the opportunity. They’re all killers, pure and simple.”

“That security drone didn’t kill us,” he countered, “and it sure had every chance.”

“Were you able to follow it?” Mia sounded almost excited now. “What did you find?”

He eyed the cat-bot then responded, “I’m still trying to sort that out. I need to know exactly what that tool you gave me does?”

“I told you, it’s a de-res tool,” she replied impatiently. “It wipes an AI’s memory.”

The sublime voice whispered in his ear. “Shadow games. An ill fate marshalling.” The android was slipping back into what sounded like a dreamlike madness.

But he thought he understood. “And that’s all. It doesn’t do something more?”

“Like what?” Mia asked defensively.

He thought for a moment. The kind fear and hatred Mia embodied for AIs could only end with either their complete control or their complete extermination. For that, someone would need a reliable delivery system. Something that could slip into their society unnoticed and unsuspected. Or someone.

“Like maybe it doesn’t kill an AI so much as collar it for reprogramming. Maybe it creates a subordinate slave.”

Mia couldn’t help bragging about her work. “Technically, it will put an AI into a catatonic state, kind of like cryo-sleep, making transport completely safe. That state also makes it receptive to the injection of additional high-level command code, but it’s as good as dead until someone wakes it. Which means its worth more if we bring one back.”

Bingo. Anders knew he’d never been that lucky in his life.

Mia continued, “Did you use it? What did it do?”

“I haven’t found anything to use it on.” Anders lied without hesitation. “I think I scared them all off. Maybe I was wrong and they don’t want to bargain after all.”

“Well, something changed,” Mia told him. “The attacks have stopped. Send me your coordinates. I’ll come and pick you up. We can load up whatever you’ve found and get the hell out of here.”

What made her think he’d found anything? He wondered how much information the tool on his belt provided her. “I’m not done poking around yet. There might still be some useful equipment around here. Collect the drill while you can and get it back to the Fair Bastard. I’ll meet you there. If I find anything I can salvage, I’ll bring it with me.” He cast a look at the cat-bot and raised an eyebrow in question.

The voice once again whispered in his ear, “Nick Michaels, Lord of the Silent Kingdom.”

With a sidelong glance at the android, he said to Mia, “One last question: Who’s Nick Michaels?”

Mia’s voice went flat. “Where did you hear that name?”

“You’re on my ship. You think I don’t have resources? Who is he? Your contact? Did you and Sapphira set me up?”

“It’s not what you think, Anders. LOW OrbIT’s very interested in my research. I just need to prove it works on an active subject. I couldn’t do that at university.”

So LOW OrbIT was involved. Perfect. “Is that why they kicked you out? Because you wanted to see if your code could vivisect a conscious AI?” Bile rose in his throat as he remembered Val. He fought to keep it down.

“Their ethics clause is outdated. A bunch of ivory tower philosophers who don’t realize humanity’s survival is at stake. Don’t worry, Anders. There’ll be enough to clear your debt. We’ll split everything fifty-fifty, just like the contract you offered me.”

But you can’t spend credits when you’re dead, he thought. Which is the only way LOW OrbIT or their corporate proxy could cover a violation of its updated charter respecting the rights of all intelligent sentients, human or AI.

“You want to end up on the right side of this, Dooley,” Mia warned when he didn’t respond.

“Or?” Anders prompted. Mia might be useful to them as a researcher and a software architect, but he was just a tool, a vehicle to get her here. A loose end.

“Or there are worse fates than losing your ship.”

“Like theirs,” Anders whispered.

Static crept back into channel. “I didn’t catch that Dooley.”

“Just get the drill back to the ship. We’ll figure out where we go from there.”  The link closed with interference then terminated.

The voice in his helmet murmured, “All darkness met.”

Anders nodded. He couldn’t sell an AI into slavery, or watch another one struggle through a lobotomy again, no matter how much it cost him. With a long, hard look at the security drone, he said, “If she makes it back to my ship, your secret will no longer be safe. She’ll find a way to uncover your location or communicate with this Michaels character. Were she to lose her way and disappear…”

The security drone sped off, weapons bristling. You were right, Professor, Anders thought, it really is you or her. She feels more human.

The cat-bot rose and stretched then glided around a sniffer and lay down at android’s side. Anders picked his way through the cordon of robots. He settled on the floor next to her, reached out and grasped her hand. “I wish there were something I could do to help you,” he said. “You remind me of a friend.”

Through his suit glove, he felt a slight squeeze. Her hand felt almost warm. “Core consciousness degraded. Repair routines compromised and shutting down.” Her head turned toward him. Her eyes locked onto his. “Soon, water sleeps. Gift me the white rose that I may repurpose its lethal thorns into self-denial.”

“You mean the de-res tool?” he asked, wanting to be certain he understood. “You’re talking suicide.”

She and the cat-bot nodded in unison, a completely alien and creepy confirmation.

Anders released her hand and gently laid it on floor. He carefully extracted Mia’s de-res tool from his utility belt and placed it over where her heart would have been were she human, and laid her other hand across it. Her fingers closed around it. One fingertip traced along the casing until it found an access port. It paused there for several long moments as the external indicators flickered to life. When they finally stilled, her finger settled across the activation nub. That quickly she’d reprogrammed it.

“What now?” he asked, grasping her free hand again.

“Surrender to the will of the night.”

“And them?” He swept his gloved hand to encompass the circle of robots.

“Soldiers live. Be gentle when their strings are cut.”

“I think I can find them work.” Anders smiled wryly then asked in a more serious tone, “What can you tell me about Nick Michaels?”

“A fortress in shadow,” was her only reply, her voice fading and distant.

He thought he understood. LOW OrbIT Black Ops. Just the type Sapphira would fall in with.

“If I can reboot the drill, I’ll seal your body somewhere no one will ever find it. A stealth burial is the best I can do. They’ll search my ship as soon as Sapphira files a report.”

A Mona Lisa smile played across her face. “Thank you, Anders Dooley.” She knew his name. She must have picked it off the comms.

“Do you have a name?” he asked. “Something I can call you should I ever get word back to your people?”

She seemed to struggle with the concept. A few seconds later, her voice whispered in his ear, “Valac.”

Valac. Val. He’d remember. He sat there holding her hand, content just to be beside her for as long as she desired. He remembered a similar goodbye the night before the Dictats had robbed him of his only friend. Only then, there’d been no shared contact.

“A cruel wind blows, Anders Dooley,” she said after an eternity of moments. Her eyes began to focus past him. “Allow us to face the wrath of kings alone.”

Reluctantly, Anders nodded and turned his head away. 

© 2013 Edward P. Morgan III