Bodyguard

8

“Although technically competent, Lester Hollings demonstrates certain behaviors consistent with a psychopathic personality. I recommend close supervision by qualified mental health professionals.”

A notation from Lester Hollinqs’s personnel file that had been scrubbed from memory but was later found on a backup matrix

I spent the first forty or fifty hours sleeping, exploring the ship’s cavernous interior, and becoming acquainted with the rest of the crew. And a jolly bunch they were too.

In addition to the porcine captain and the hormonal Lester, the Red Trader boasted an over-the-hill pilot, a cook nicknamed Killer, and a detail-obsessed load master named Kreshenko. There were fifteen or twenty androids too, some of whom had names, and some of whom relied on numbers for identification. The most notable of these was known as “the phantom,” after the character in “Phantom of the Opera,” and was said to be in desperate need of a full-scale electronic tune-up. I decided to keep an eye peeled for him.

All of which was interesting but didn’t help me learn my job. A job that was connected with the hydroponics section, or “farm.” It seemed that production had fallen off, and, given the captain’s preoccupation with food, I was in deep trouble. Especially since the captain kept the pressure on Killer and he kept the pressure on me.

Finally, after another close encounter with a cleaver-waving cook, I retired to my cabin and sat in front of my computer screen. The cursor winked at me like an electronic pervert, well aware of my weakness, and happy to exploit it. The problem stemmed from the fact that a penny-pinching corpie had equipped the Red Trader with manual PC’s, denying me the voice recognition systems that I had learned to rely on, and plunging me into despair.

I inserted the disk, hit the key that made things go, and watched characters flood the screen. I stared at them, forced the images into my mind, and waited for knowledge to flood my brain. It didn’t. The characters remained as meaningless as ever, cutting me off from the information that I needed, and filling me with rage.

My fist came down so hard that the keyboard jumped. It wasn’t fair, damn it! I must have been able to read, must have been able to understand those squiggles, or the Mishimuto Corporation would never have recruited me. Hell, I’d been an officer, for god’s sake, and surely they knew how to read.

But the chunk of metal that had taken my memories had taken my capacity to read as well, leaving me unable to do anything more complicated than killing people.

The rage died away and tears of self-pity trickled down my cheeks. I thought of the others, the ones Bey had mentioned, and wondered if they felt as I did. Was that why one of them had committed suicide? Why the other had been confined to a mental institution? And what about the skull plates? Were they a coincidence? Similar injuries treated in a similar way? Or something more?

The questions crowded around me and made my head hurt. I pushed them away and turned my attention to the problem at hand. I didn’t understand the characters, so I’d get some help from someone who did. There were a variety of techniques available, and one of them would work. True, this situation called for a more complicated scam than usual, but there was no reason to believe I couldn’t come up with one.

I withdrew the disk, glanced at the time, and stood up. The cabin was small compared with those assigned to the regular crew, but comfortable nonetheless. I had a bunk with overhead entertainment console, a locker ten times larger than my wardrobe, and a desk-computer combo. The only trace of the previous occupant was the half-empty bottle of hooch stashed under the mattress and a black sock in one of the drawers.

I stepped into the corridor and knocked on Sasha’s door. There was plenty of time, since her shift didn’t start for another hour so. Her voice was muffled by the steel hatch. “Yes?”

“It’s Max.”

“Are you alone?”

I looked around. Lester was nowhere in sight. The corridor was empty. “Yup.”

The hatch slid open. The bandage had been replaced with a black eyepatch that gave Sasha a piratical air. And that, plus the bra and panties, was reminiscent of the more exotic strip shows I’d seen. It was nice to be trusted yet somewhat disturbing at the same time. I felt like Uncle Max, eccentric, but essentially harmless. Sasha had no idea that she’d offended my delicate male ego and motioned me inside. I slipped into scam mode.

“Hi, how’s it going?”

“Lester’s a pain in the ass, but otherwise fine. How ‘bout you?”

“Oh, nothing much,” I said casually. “The captain’s on my case…but what else is new?”

Sasha nodded understandingly. “Yeah, I know what you mean. I’m so tired of working on Kreshenko’s inventories I could puke. I’ll bet the guy dreams about decimal points. What’s your job like, anyway?”

I shrugged. “That’s the problem. I haven’t started yet…and the captain’s pissed. Not to mention Killer.”

Sasha stepped into her pants and pulled them up around her waist. I tried to ignore the fact that she had nice legs and failed. She looked surprised. “You haven’t started? Why not?”

I produced the disk. Light glinted from its surface. “1001100101111000011110. This stuff is complicated. I wouldn’t want to screw up.”

Sasha nodded understandingly, as if my tendency to screw up was an ongoing problem, which it definitely was. “You want some drill? No problem. Let’s take a look.”

I felt the thrill of victory as she slipped the disk into her console and hit the appropriate key. “Where shall we start?”

“From the top,” I answered quickly. “And read it aloud. I learn better that way.”

Sasha nodded and started to read. “The Nutralife 4000 food maintenance and production system is intended for use on Class IV ships carrying no more than twenty crew and passengers. It is essential that this system be provided with sufficient oxygen, water, and nutrients. Failure to provide these materials in sufficient quantities will reduce the system’s capabilities to provide dependents with a balanced diet and nullify the Nutralife 4000’s warranty.”

Then she paused, frowned for a moment, and pointed at the screen. “What’s that word?”

I shook my head slowly. “Beats the heck out of me.”

Sasha raised an eyebrow. “Really? You don’t know the word ‘and’?”

Blood rushed to my face. I tried a bluff. “Of course I know it…”

She held up her hand and looked as concerned as a person with a black eyepatch can. “Admit it, Max…you don’t know how to read. It goes with the brain damage.”

The way she said it was sort of sad, as if accepting the truth of something she’d suspected all along, and managed to ignore. “People think you’re stupid when you can’t read.”

I felt her fingers on my hand and looked up into her face. It was the nice Sasha, the same one who had kissed my cheek, and was occasionally sympathetic. “You’re far from stupid, Max. Disadvantaged, yes, and strange at times, but far from stupid.”

The compliment was rather heavily qualified but I decided to accept it anyway. Doing so made me feel warm, loved, and damned near human.

Sasha looked at her watch. “I have about forty-five minutes. Let’s get to work.”

She read, and I listened, and the information began to accumulate. Other sessions followed, and two cycles later, on the eve of the very shift when Killer had promised to eject me from the main lock, I was ready to go. Or semi-ready, since there were vast tracts of highly technical information that had gone in one ear and out the other.

But Sasha had instructed me to take heart from the fact that no less than three of the ship’s androids were assigned to the farm and would handle the real as well as the intellectual heavy lifting. No, my role was to supervise and provide something the instruction disk called “psycho-reinforcement,” but sounded a lot like petting. So, armed with my newfound knowledge and the very best of intentions, I headed for the farm. It was located about two-thirds of the way down the length of the ship’s hull and consisted of two sections.

The first was reminiscent of the way a revolver works. Nine cylinders rotated around a central axis, but rather than bullets, each chamber contained a thirty-foot-long hydroponics tank. Rather than using soil, which was heavy and therefore expensive, the tanks contained trays full of water mixed with nutrients. Each tank was shielded against radiation, received sunlight via external solar collectors, and had its own internal irrigation system.

Rotating as they did around a central axis, the tanks paused in each of the nine possible positions for two hours at a time. Retractable decking slid into place and allowed my robotic assistants to open the chamber and take care of the more mundane chores like seeding, trimming, and harvesting. And what a harvest it was!

I arrived on the maintenance deck just in time to see the androids remove the last of some basketball-sized tomatoes. One of the robots, a rather functional-looking unit with four legs and three arms, spotted me and minced over. Multi-colored paint drippings covered him from sensors to foot pads. They were the residue of a maintenance assignment, and the source of the nickname: Picasso. Like most higher-order androids, Picasso had the ability to supplement his original programming through on-the-job experience, and his speech reflected that fact. “Hey, dude…what’s happening?”

“I’ve been assigned to run the farm.”

“All right! ‘Bout time the captain sent a bio bod down here. The veggies are fine but the aniforms are antsy as hell. We shoot the breeze with ’em, and shovel their shit, but it ain’t the same. Come on…I’ll take you into section two.”

I followed the robot past the still-open module. Though smaller than Picasso, and built more like spiders, the other androids stood waist-high and were equipped with all sorts of highly specialized sensors, cutters, and grabbers. Picasso handled the introductions. “The one with the stickers all over his torso is known as Decal, and the other one prefers the official designator of Agrobot Model XII.”

Decal was the more friendly of the two and trundled right up. “Could I have the privilege of knowing your name, sir?”

“You can call me Max.”

“Thank you, Mr. Max. Your predecessor programmed me to generate large quantities of alcohol. A surplus has accumulated since his death. Should I make more, or wait for you to consume existing supplies first?”

I couldn’t help but smile. “I won’t need as much as my predecessor did. Save what you have but don’t make any more.”

To the extent that a machine can look relieved, this one did, and rolled away. Picasso explained as we walked towards section two. “You made his day. Operating the still ran counter to his main mission and made him less efficient than specs called for. The result was an internal dissonance that had to be resolved. Yeah, nothing bothers a droid more than countervailing objectives, and we get ’em all the time. No offense intended.”

“And none taken,” I assured him. “Humans provide each other with countervailing objectives every day.”

Picasso turned a paint-splotched sensor in my direction. “Really? How strange. Well, it’s like I tell the others: ‘They were smart enough to invent us, so they must know what they’re doing.’“

I wasn’t so sure, but it didn’t seem appropriate to say so. The hatch slid open and we entered section two. The rich, almost sweet smell of animal feces filled the air. I decided to breathe through my mouth. Even though I knew what to expect, the reality of it surprised me. The aniforms saw us and started to moo, bleat, grunt, and cackle. Cubicles lined both sides of the corridor, and each one contained one or more biologically engineered life forms. The cows came first.

Like their distant ancestors many times removed, the cows had heads with ears, eyes, and mouths, but that’s where the resemblance ended. Necks that had been long were shorter now and connected to rectangular bodies that rested within identical stainless-steel boxes. Legs had been deemed unnecessary and eliminated, along with tails and carefully selected bones. They all looked alike, which wasn’t surprising, since they were clones. The aniforms had been designed for one thing and one thing only: meat. The mooing had grown to almost frantic intensity as nineteen pairs of big brown eyes stared into my face and begged me to make contact. It seemed as though something unexpected had occurred during the long process that created them.

Not only had each successive generation of cows become a little bit smarter, they had become more emotionally dependent as well, until ongoing social interaction had evolved from something they tolerated to something they couldn’t do without. And the same was true of the sheep, pigs, and chickens.

And that was my function, to visit them on a regular basis, and keep them happy. Failure to do so resulted in steady weight loss and tougher meat. Which explained why the captain and the cook were so concerned. “Go ahead,” Picasso shouted over the din, “pet them.”

Having never touched a farm animal before, I was scared. I reached out to the nearest cow and its head met my hand. The aniform’s hair felt short and wiry. I ran my hand up towards the top of its head and saw its eyes close in ecstasy. A shiver ran through its black-and-white-spotted body and reminded me of the moment when Sasha had kissed my cheek.

Was the cow feeling the same warmth I had? If so, I could understand the importance of the contact. But there was no way to tell, and I continued to stroke the cow’s head. The thought of killing, much less eating, the aniform made me sick.

Droids aren’t supposed to feel emotions, but I would have sworn that Picasso sounded wistful. “An android can pet them all day long without the slightest sign of pleasure. A human comes along and they go crazy. Why?”

I gave the first cow a final pat and moved to the next one. “Beats me. Some kind of evolutionary linkage or something?”

“Maybe,” Picasso said doubtfully, “but it still seems strange.”

Time passed, and Picasso turned his attention to shoveling shit. I was halfway through the cows and well on my way to the sheep when the captain called. Her voice came from a speaker mounted over my head. There was a vid cam as well but duct tape covered the lens. “Hey, Maxon, you there?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Well, I’ll be damned. He’s actually doing some work for a change.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Well, get your ass to the bridge. We got trouble.”

There was a cacophony of disappointed moos, baas, grunts, and cackles as I turned towards the hatch and made my way forward. “What kind of trouble?”

“Bad trouble. It seems that Lester made a move on your skinny-assed friend and she put a dart through what was left of his brain.”

“He deserved it.”

The captain’s voice followed me through the hatch. “Probably…but that’s beside the point. Lester was our engineer and we needed him.”

“Give me a break. This ship has backups for its backups. I assume Lester was no exception.”

There was a long silence followed by the sound of the captain clearing her throat. “Well, Lester was supposed to have a fully qualified assistant, but I couldn’t find anyone to fill the position.”

I remembered the long lines outside every business office on Staros-3 and knew the captain was lying. The miserable bitch was using a phony identity to line her own pockets. I knew better than to say anything, however. “How unfortunate.”

“Exactly,” the captain agreed. “Now get your butt up here.”

I entered the “holy of holies” four minutes later. It was roomy and almost entirely automated. Banks of seldom-used manual controls glowed softly, air whispered through duct work, and the star field hung almost motionless on a curvilinear screen. The entire crew had gathered around the captain’s thronelike command chair. There was Wilson, the round-shouldered, gaunt-faced pilot; Killer, his whites stained with what looked like blood; Kreshenko, his carefully shaved face devoid of all expression, and the captain, who looked as she always did: fat.

I saw Sasha and hurried over. She had an angry-looking bump on her left temple and her clothes were ripped. The question sounded lame even as I asked it. “Are you alright?”

She gave me one of those “how could anyone be so stupid?” looks and shook her head. “Never felt better.”

But the size of her remaining pupil, the tightness around her mouth, and the quick, shallow breathing told a different story. It felt awkward to put an arm around her shoulders, but I did it anyway, and felt pleased when she made no attempt to escape.

The captain raised an imperious hand. Light glinted from her rings. “Now that chrome-dome has been kind enough to join us, we can begin.”

She pulled a pocket comp from her pajamas and read aloud. “Consistent with Comreg 6789.2 paragraph three, it is the captain’s duty to hold a formal inquest upon the death of a crew member, and take whatever steps he or she may deem necessary up to and including summary execution. Reports of the captain’s findings, plus physical evidence if any, shall be filed at the next port of call.”

The captain closed the pocket comp and put it away. A pair of piggy little eyes swung towards Sasha. “So, sweet buns, what happened? And remember, the bridge recorders are running, so this is for keeps.”

I felt Sasha shrug and allowed my arm to fall away. “Lester made sexual advances towards me from the moment I came aboard. I rejected them over and over again. So many times that I feared for my safety and carried a weapon.”

“Which I told you not to use.” the captain said sternly.

“True.” Sasha admitted calmly, “remembering that you warned me about Lester, and did so in front of a witness.”

The captain had forgotten about that, and she scowled accordingly. “Go on.”

Sasha nodded slowly. “I got up at the time I usually do, took a shower, dressed, and stepped out into the passageway. I was halfway to the galley when Lester stepped out of a hatch and punched me in the side of the head. I fell. He slapped my face, threatened to kill me, and ripped at my clothes. I reached for my gun…”

“Where was it?”

“In a shoulder holster under my left arm.”

“So he couldn’t see it?”

“Correct.”

“Go on.”

“I reached for my gun, pulled it out, and shot him in the face.”

“And?”

“And he fell over dead.”

The captain nodded grimly. She looked around the compartment. “Questions?”

Silence.

“All right, given the fact that Sasha Casad’s testimony is consistent with the physical evidence, and is partially confirmed by a security camera located in the vicinity of the attack, I find that Lester Hollings’s death was a justifiable homicide, committed in self-defense. Inquest closed.”

The captain nodded to Wilson, and he touched a button. She smiled and looked around the bridge. “Okay, everybody, the recorders are off.”

Sasha and I turned to go but stopped when the captain said, “Not so fast, chrome-dome. We still have a problem, and you’re going to help.”

“She means the phantom,” Killer said helpfully as he examined a set of absolutely filthy fingernails. “We’ve got to find him.”

I looked at the captain. “Why?”

She scowled. “Because the phantom was programmed to assist the engineering officers, that’s why. Barring a major drive failure, or something equally catastrophic, the phantom has enough shit to see us through.”

I nodded slowly. “Oh.”

Sasha was more inquiring. “Why search for him? Get on the horn and order him to come.”

The captain rubbed her chins. They jiggled. “It ain’t that simple, honey buns…the phantom doesn’t like humans.”

Kreshenko spoke for the first time. “We believe that Lester abused the Engineering Support Android in a manner that caused it to run away.”

Sasha frowned. “Abused…how?”

The rest of the crew looked at each other. They were visibly uncomfortable. It was Wilson who answered. He had a deep, rumbling voice. “Lester tried to modify the ESA’s body so that it could function as a sex surrogate. That’s the theory, anyway, but none of us have gotten close enough to confirm it.”

There were sexroids of course, lots of them, but they had programing appropriate to the job. The ESA didn’t, and Lester’s attempts to graft that function over the others had driven it insane. Which raised some interesting questions: Assuming we were able to capture the phantom, would it be able to perform the job it had been designed to do? And why had the whole thing been left so long?

I think everyone had similar thoughts, but no one wanted to say anything. To do so would be to question the way the captain did or didn’t do her job and risk one’s livelihood. A real no-no when there are twenty people waiting to fill your slot.

The search began in the bow. All of the Trader’s crew plus most of the ship’s ambulatory robots had been recruited for the task. The plan was simple: Start in the bow, sweep towards the stern, and drive the phantom before us. Once it was concerned, it would be a relatively simple matter to repair the damage that Lester had done and put the android right. Or so we hoped.

I looked around. Kreshenko had armed himself with a section of cargo netting. The captain had a sandwich in one hand and a stun gun in the other. Killer had fashioned a lasso from a length of utility line and twirled it over his head. Wilson untangled his homemade bolo and Sasha looked bored. “All right,” the captain said through her food, “go get him. And remember, if you hurt the little bastard, we’re screwed.”

Not the most inspiring speech I’d ever heard, but direct and to the point. We spread out and headed down-ship. Hand-held radios helped coordinate our movements. Each corridor, passageway, compartment, and cubicle was searched. We found all sorts of things including rats, a parrot’s mummified body, a cargo module with “urgent” marked all over it and a five-year-old delivery date, the still my predecessor had maintained, plus an entire storage room packed with supplies that Kreshenko didn’t have listed on his inventories and the captain ordered him to ignore. But no android.

Various members of the search party did catch glimpses of the phantom, however, always a step ahead of us, fleeing towards the stern. But large as she was, the Red Trader was only so big, and the outcome was inevitable. We found him huddled in a locker full of pneumatic cargo jacks, trying to blend in with the equipment around him. The things that Lester had done to his body were disgusting enough, but the artificial intelligence that stood in for his brain had been scrambled, and required three shifts of electronic therapy. The result was somewhat twitchy but functional enough to meet our needs-barring what the captain called “major catastrophes,” which I was too stupid to imagine.

And so it was that I went back to petting the aniforms, finished my shift, and hit the rack. The dream grabbed my mind and pulled it down.

“Holy mother full of grace, help me make it through this place…” The pilot’s personal mantra was little more than a whisper now, as if the strikers might hear it, and punish us with a missile. And I couldn’t really blame her, since they were damned close and had some first-class detection equipment. And why not? They had stolen it from the same place Mishimuto did. I patted her shoulder. It was slick with sweat. “You’re doing good, Loot. Just a few more klicks and it’ll be over.”

She nodded stiffly and kept her eyes straight ahead as she slid the ship around the side of a slowly tumbling asteroid. The trick was to keep it between us and the research station for as long as possible. After all, you can’t shoot what you can’t see, and even the best detectors can’t see through solid rock.

That was the theory, anyway, although the strikers might have surrounded themselves with a whole network of remote sensor stations that were busy screaming their heads off.

I imagined missiles leaving their racks, zigzagging away from the installations that fired them, and accelerating in our direction. The Loot might have time to detect them, might have time to say the words uttered by so many pilots before her, but would die a millisecond later along with me and the entire team.

The Loot rescued me from my own imagination. “We’re twenty from the drop.”

I hit my harness release. “Gotcha. I’ll be with the team. Thanks for the lift.”

It was macho stuff, the kind we practice in the corps, and she wasn’t playing. “Your team will have sixty seconds to deploy.”

I nodded, snuck one last look at her nipples, and floated free. I pulled myself down the corridor, cycled the hatch, and propelled myself into the cargo bay. The gunny yelled “Ten-hut” and the troops did their best to obey. But it’s hard to look military inside a Class III battle suit, especially with all sorts of extra gear strapped to your body, and no gravity to hold things in place.

I said, “As you were,” and accepted the gunny’s help in donning my battle suit. It was similar to the trooper model, except for the lighter weaponry, heavier armor, and a sophisticated command and control package. It fit like a glove, smelled like the dump I had taken in it the month before, and was servo-assisted. The gunny thumped her helmet against mine. She had wide-set eyes, a pug nose, and a dusting of freckles across the top of her cheeks. “How ya doin’ sir? Everything okay?”

I tried to ignore the smell. “Just fine, gunny. Couldn’t be better.”

She grinned knowingly. “Life sucks, don’t it, sir? Well, that’s why god gave us the corps. To shorten the suffering.”

I laughed, knowing it was expected of me, and knowing she was scared too. And there were thirty-six men and women on our team, their helmets turned in my direction, all of whom shared the same feelings. I thought about some of the stupid gung-ho crap other officers had laid on me and tried to avoid it. “We’re on final approach. You know the objective, the layout, and what you’re supposed to do. Questions?”

Silence.

“Okay, then. Load the tubes.”

I used handholds to pull myself towards the stern, stopped in front of the starboard ejection tube, and checked to make sure that my squad had lined up behind me. They had. I dived inside and used fingertips and toes to push myself forward. My squad did likewise. A hatch closed behind the last member in.

The gunny did much the same thing along the port side, followed by a seal check. She called thirty-eight names, got thirty-eight affirmatives, and blew the tubes.

We were in position now, ready to be fired out of both sides of the ship, falling, or in this case blasting, down towards the target below. Of course the Loot, plus the ships behind her, would cover us with cannon fire, missiles, chaff, electronic countermeasures, and everything else they had up their naval sleeves, but none of it would mean diddly if the tool heads knew we were coming. Yes, surprise was the key, that and the most fickle ally of all, luck.

“Five and counting.” The Loot was tense but rational. Better than some I’ve flown with, but wired tight just the same. And who could blame her? Recon pilots have a life expectancy of five or six months. “One and counting.”

I stared at the steel in front of my helmet and tried to ignore my surroundings. I gave thanks when the ten-second count began. “Nine…eight…seven…six…five…four…three…two…one.”

The hatch, mounted up against an indentation in the spacecraft’s fuselage, slid aside. I braced myself, watched the inner hatch cycle out of the way, and felt a wall of air hit the bottom of my boots. We were propelled outwards like bullets from a gun. I had little more than seconds to orient myself, to realize that it was an ambush, and feel the individually targeted micro-missile hit my chest plate.

They say you can’t scream if you’re dead, but I proved they were wrong. It took hours to slow my pulse, to think pleasant thoughts, and drift off to sleep.