Zero history

70. DAZZLE

The penguin smelled of Krylon, an aerosol enamel Fiona had used to camouflage it, so to speak. Milgrim knew more about camouflage, now, than he would ever have expected to, via Bigend’s interest in military clothing. Prior to that, he had only been familiar with two kinds, the one with the Lava Lamp blobs in nature shades, that the U.S. Army had featured when he was a boy, and the creepy photorealist turkey-hunter stuff that a certain kind of extra-scary New Jersey drug dealer sometimes affected. What Fiona called “dazzle,” though, was new to him. Fiona said it had been invented by a painter, a Vorticist. He’d Google it, when he had time. It had been Garreth’s suggestion, and Fiona had told Milgrim that it didn’t actually make a lot of sense, in their situation, though anything was better than silver Mylar. She liked Garreth having suggested it, though, because it seemed to her to be part of some performance-art aspect of what he was doing. She said she’d never seen anything quite like it, what Garreth was doing, and particularly the speed with which it was being put together.

Out in the bike yard, she’d sprayed the penguin’s silver Mylar with black, random, wonky geometrics, their edges fuzzy, like graffiti. Real dazzle had sharp edges, she said, but there was no way to mask the inflated balloon. She used a piece of brown cardboard, cut in a concave curve, to mask approximately, then went back with a dull gray, to fill in the remaining silver. When that had dried a little, she’d further confused it with an equally dull beige, ghosting lines in with the cardboard mask. The result wouldn’t conceal the penguin against any background at all, particularly the sky, but broke it up visually, made it difficult to read as an object. Still a penguin, though, a swimming one, and now with the Taser and the extra electronics that Voytek had taped to its tummy.

There was an arming sequence, on the iPhone now, that required a thumb and forefinger, with the other forefinger needed to fire the thing. Milgrim hadn’t been entirely sure what a Taser was before, but he was getting an idea. If he accidentally fired it, here in the Vegas cube, a pair of barbed electrodes would shoot out, on two thin fifteen-foot cables, propelled by compressed gas. That was strictly once-only, the barb-shooting. If the barbs went into Bigend’s spotless plasterboard wall, the penguin was anchored there, he supposed, and there was a lot of fine cable around. But if you tapped the iPhone again, in the firing circle on the screen, the wall got shocked. Which wouldn’t bother the wall, but if those barbs happened to get into anybody, which was what they were actually for, that person got a shock, a big one. Not the kind that would kill you, but one that could knock you down, stun you. And there was more than one shock stored in the toy airship cabin Voytek had taped under there.

Fiona said that he wouldn’t have to worry about any of that when he flew the penguin. She said it was just extra bells and whistles, something Garreth had tossed in because he’d happened to run across the Taser. That was what Voytek had indicated, grumpily, on his way out, when they’d gotten back here on the Yamaha.

But that wasn’t what Garreth had told him, in Hollis’s hotel room. Garreth had said that he needed Fiona to operate the other drone, the one with the little helicopters, so he needed Milgrim to operate the penguin. To keep an eye on the general area, he said. When Milgrim asked which area that was, Garreth had said that he didn’t know yet, but that he was sure Milgrim would do very well. Milgrim, remembering the pleasure he’d taken in rolling the black ray, decided that simply nodding was the best course. Though the idea of anyone wanting him to operate anything was new. Other people operated things, and Milgrim observed them doing it. But, he supposed, he was really only being asked to observe something, whatever it was, through the cameras in the penguin, and it was best, as Fiona suggested, to regard the Taser as a random add-on.

It was harder to get the penguin to do anything, in the constrained space of the Vegas cube, than it had been to get the ray to do those rhythmic somersaults, but he was starting, now, to manage a repeated stationary roll. If he bumped the wall, Fiona noticed, and didn’t like it, so he tried to be as careful as he could. She said that the robotics in the wings were fragile, and the penguin was helpless without them. It didn’t really fly, because penguins don’t, and it was a balloon; rather, it swam, through air instead of water, and once you had it going where you wanted it to, it knew how to swim by itself. He was careful to keep that overridden now. He wished they could take the thing out and really fly it, the way he’d seen her fly the other one in Paris, but she said that they couldn’t, because people might see it and get excited, and because Garreth had ordered her to keep him inside.

Being kept inside with Fiona was an excellent thing, as far as Milgrim was concerned, but he was starting to recall Hollis’s scary-looking shower with something other than fear. “I wish there was a shower here,” he said, slowing the penguin’s roll, bringing the Taser around until it was on the bottom, stopping it. There was something wonderfully satisfying about this thing, something silky about the way it worked.

“There is,” said Fiona, looking up from his Air, where she sat at the table.

“There is?” Milgrim, on his back on the white foam, glanced around the blank white walls, thinking he’d missed a door.

“Benny has one rigged up. Drivers use it, sometimes. It has a geyser so old that it has a box that used to take coins. I could do with one myself.”

Milgrim was simultaneously aware of the stickiness of his armpits and what even the briefest image of Fiona in a shower did to him. “You go first, then.”

“You can’t trust Benny’s geyser,” said Fiona. “Get it working, it’ll go once, then stop. We should shower together.”

“Together,” said Milgrim, and heard the voice he only had in police custody. He coughed.

“We’ll leave the light out,” said Fiona, who was looking at him with an expression he couldn’t identify at all. “I’m not supposed to let you out of my sight. Literally. That was what he said.”

“Who?” asked Milgrim, in his own voice.

“Garreth.” She was wearing her armored pants, low on her hips as she sat on one of Bigend’s elegant chairs, and a tight T-shirt, white, that said RUDGE at the top of a round black emblem, the size of a dinner plate, and COVENTRY at the bottom. Between these names was a red heraldic hand, open and upright, its palm presented as if to warn anyone off the small but prominent breasts behind it.

“If it’s all right with you,” said Milgrim.

“I suggested it, didn’t I?”