Lawless Sign Part Eighteen (Fiction)

The Stunning Conclusion of 

Chapter 25: Beyond Step One 

“Everything you’ve seen from the moment you woke up is literally true. And you are entirely accountable for your actions, whatever it is you style yourself as. Perhaps I am wasting wind assuming that you are anything resembling a rational actor, but I will ask you to reflect for just the amount of time it might take you to ruin things further. Certainly your rampage deserves a bit of a pause, even insanity requiring a moment to feed itself. I ask you how much whatever theory you are operating under makes sense. Does it add up? There must be some coherence to those cobbled together parts of yours. Maybe you are the Space Police? If you are, then what’s the charge officer? Where’s your evidence?

“You have evidence that we are running a hospital. You have evidence that we are involved in a great industry reclaiming beings from a civilization lost to a disaster. You have evidence that we are lawful members of the establishment, bulwarks of the single most just civilization on this planet. What you do not have evidence of is that we would be involved in the wholesale slaughter of peoples on another planet. That we can even get to another planet is not in evidence, nor can you contrive a coherent notion to substantiate our motive for murder on any scale. If anything, the demonstration of your senses proves that we are a force powerful mostly in our restraint. We rule nothing! We seek to rule nothing! And there is no evidence that we seek to rule rubble!

“All of your memories are lies. There is no planet of the dog people for the massacre to have taken place on. Our contact with the stars has been limited exclusively to the unfortunates stored here in this library. It is these people whom we have spent the better portion of our fortune and precious time attempting to rehabilitate. That’s who we are. That’s what we do. That’s what you are out to destroy.

“What we do have is a sinister alien enemy, an undead spaceman who has declared the library contaminated and whose sole goal is its destruction and the destruction of all who chance upon it. From the moment we discovered this place it has done everything in its power to prevent our humanitarian efforts. But we have pressed on, despite its malice, despite the hideous casualties it has inflicted to us. Take whatever dim view you may have of our motives, but search your heart. Whose cause is just here, Captain of the Space Police?

“The only other space ship you’ve seen since you’ve been here is a simulacrum of your own vessel. The only technology truly alien to you has been wielded by our enemy—Joe Blow, Sulfur. Our technology is all quite familiar to you, as it should be. Whatever you think you are is wrong. You are from here, from this library. Forget your memories. Trust your senses. Search your heart.

“You have been cheated, poorly used. At best, our enemy has chanced on a victim with a mechanical memory and jammed it full of lies. At worst, he has gutted you, destroyed your mind and grafted in a stick brimming morose nonsense. Entertain the idea for just a moment, Captain. You’re only a single instant of clarity from freedom. Press on and you’re just a thing.”

“Nice!” I yelled to him. “Too bad Sparky confessed.”

I have to give Popeye credit where credit is due. He was much better at using telepathy than I will ever be. Moreover, he was doing this entirely flat footed. It hadn’t been a blink since Sparky and I had Zoom Tubed into his domain.

Popeye was the aspect of Cole I had first met in the library, the one with half a head. In truth, he was just a much a victim of Sparky’s crimes as the people of Tiamore were. He wasn’t born with half a head. He had sustained that injury on Tiamore. His continued existence was more an accident than anything else. Thanks to the outlaw matter in this room, he hadn’t expired. Once Sparky discovered Popeye didn’t have the ability to jump forms anymore (and couldn’t leave this room), he let Popeye live. Besides, Popeye’s body was useless.

I had gained an altitude of about twenty feet. Popeye was on his stage, in front of his giant televisions. Sparky, for his part, was making a head-long run for the hatch in the dried pool.

Sparky wasn’t moving so well. He kept changing direction and stumbling. This version of Cole may have been forty or so and did not seem to have a complete field of vision. Black splotches showed through his blue overalls. I wasn’t sure if Farmer Cole was confused, clumsy or disabled.

It wasn’t about the body. It was the magic smoke inside that was shot. Again, I didn’t know this.

If Popeye so much as twitched from his podium, I was going to let him have it. I wasn’t going to give him a chance to rig up one of his little tricks. I think he knew that, too. So far, he had remained stationary.

The two versions of Cole weren’t paying each other any mind. I’m not sure I would have put any effort in if I was Popeye, but it seems blood was thicker than water, at least with him. Popeye was attempting to be as useful as he could—and had made a game effort with nothing more than words.

Our appearance here had come as a surprise to the three of us. Sparky thought he was heading to the tower.  Claudia had indeed jammed him up. Other than the hospital, this was the only place where I could trap Sparky. That said, although this place was in scab space, there was no telling what sort of things Sparky had here.

Without missing a beat, Popeye continued “The confession is a fabrication—and one without logical impetus. Like yourself, Colonel Nasus has emerged from a tube, his mind chock full of nonsense implanted there by the enemy. Sadly, you are not the first of our patients to have been so hijacked by this fiend. Please, before you do something irreversible. Think in the moment.”

I knew he was reading my mind at that moment. My plan was set: I was going to do him in and then Sparky.

I might have bought what he said if Sulfur had ever demonstrated one iota of technical competence.

Just then, the hatch at the center of the pool lifted. Out came Claudia, dressed in her picker slave leather smock and a pair of my gauntlets. In her arms was the Thomson sub machinegun she had been murdered with.  She leveled it in the direction of the stumbling Farmer Cole and shouted “Mister Cole, I have your bonus!”

Flame and thunder spat from the weapon’s muzzle. Riddled, Farmer Cole spun to the ground. Black streams arced over Claudia and cascaded in a cluster behind her down the revealed hatch.

Sparky’s body shouted “Popeye! Popeye!”

The choice was to fire on Popeye or Sparky. I went for Sparky. The helmet weapon cracked and crushed him. Whatever was left in those overalls sizzled and then popped.

Popeye disappeared, reappeared, disappeared and then jumped on Claudia. One moment they were both wrestling for the gun, the next it was Popeye alone with the gun.

I gained some more altitude and leveled my arm at Popeye. Nothing fired. The baton was jammed. (It took Rover over two hours to get it out. Repairing the arm took a full week.) I shouted down “What did you do to her?”

From my perspective Popeye was moving like a zombie. He took two large steps backwards, away from the hatch. The gun fell from his hand. He said “It’s an odd military man who cannot sense victory. You command the field.”

“Where is she?”

“Where she’s always been. You have control of the complex. The Old Man has given you the keys to shutting us down. The rest of this violence you contemplate is for your own satisfaction.”

“Sticking with the snow job? Playing for time?”

“When he had time to play for, yes. At the moment, I am split between a drive for self preservation and the noble desire to not have a race enemy loose in our environment.”

“I spared the Old Man.”

“The single one of us we were united in getting rid of! Who do you think hired Nedor Services? Are you out to meddle in our politics further? We protect the Earth. We own the human race. We’re from here. You are an alien.—And I have news for you, Captain. Sparky didn’t start the fight. General Alcibibiades didn’t choose the battlefield, nor fire the first shot. It was a war of succession. All Sparky is guilty of is having won.“

I said “And the people of Tiamore just got in the way. You’re not making much of a case for sparing your lot.”

“You precious Countess was merely out to brainwash them. Climb off your high horse, Captain. If the portal had never been activated, our battle would have never spilled to Tiamore.”

Popeye could have been making all of this crap up. But to this moment I have nothing to refute any of his contentions. Cause for pause though it may have been, I was having none of it. I told him “Back away from the hatch and keep going.”

He did, backing away with his hands up.

I touched down  at the hatch and asked “Does Sparky have any more bodies here?”

“You’ve strewn him all over the place. There’s not enough left of him to take a body. Show some mercy.”

“Does he?”

“There’s a distinction between surrender and sedition.”

Fair enough. I thought I caught sight of Sulfur at that moment. I dropped down the hatch, content to leave Popeye to Sulfur’s mercy.

Or I may have been just seeing things. Having dropped into the multi-gravitational chamber, I had a choice of heading in two directions: back to the fluid filled chamber or the work shop. Both had portals back to the real world. Either would have been equally easy for a disembodied ghost being to navigate. If I were Sparky, I would have chosen the fluid filled chamber. It would have been difficult for me to follow him there with any speed and it dumped out to a place with several bodies at the ready.

For a moment, I wasn’t ready to commit to either one. Then the door to the wing marked as a singularity opened and out came Sulfur. Beyond him was what appeared to be the interior of a space ship’s control station. Sulfur blinked at me and headed to the hatch to the workshop. We both flipped over and landed on either side of the door.

Sulfur was trying to warn me about something. Hallucinatory terrain ahead? He was referencing the running thoughts from the previous chamber.

I soon understood what he meant. We projected through the door and, as expected, were promptly slammed to our backs. All about us in the air were melon sized globes containing animated scenes of various sorts. Most of them were cityscapes. Intermixed were interiors. All depicted what I judged to be common events from everyday life on Earth. The globes filled in all of the space, from catwalk to catwalk and heading up to the ceiling. They overlapped and at points merged. The entire massive jumble of them was in constant motion.

A life-sized horse wearing bright silk passed over me. The figure of the gambler, still in his tweed suit, stood next to me with his hand extended down. I took it and came to my feet.

It was a very effective smokescreen--which is what I thought the intention was. My sensors were registering each of the scenes as being real, with real mass, motion and atmosphere. I could not see the actual buildings Royce Cole had here through it. Only the rocky construction debris at my feet seemed intact. Tracking the contour of the ground, I spotted one of the bobcat mini backhoes, clinging halfway down a mound of gravel.

“The odds do change, depending on the jockey. Not much. But they do change,” the gambler explained.

I said “It still strikes me as squandering money.”

“You brought a friend. Think he wants a mint julep?” the gambler said, taking notice of the rising Sulfur.

“He seems like the type. Thank you,” I said. And with that the gambler took one step left and vanished.

“More of a whisky sour man,” Sulfur said in a tone usually deployed by vacuum cleaners.

“You should have piped up when you had the chance,” I snapped. “Can you see through any of this?”

No, he couldn’t. He wasn’t even sure what any of it was. “One of the library’s functions, run amok perhaps?” he guessed between sips of julep.

I lost him and the gambler. I was soon blocked from them, surrounded by a forest of globes with moving scenes. I had no idea what any of it was, what the intent was.

A globe centered itself in my path and started to grow. In a moment, I recognized the area as being the kitchen from Claudia’s apartment. I stepped into it. Finding it as real as anything else here, I called out to her.

“Coming. In a sec,” she called, seemingly from the direction of where the living room should have been.

I said “I need to find the atorecs. I need to turn the atorecs off. Can you turn the atorecs off?”

She appeared before me, still in clad her leather smock, with her arms extended upwards. I let her wrap herself around me. She asked “What’s an atorec?”

“Atomic reaction chamber. It’s a tube, sectioned in chemicals with a DC current running through it,” I explained. With a glance I could tell that I had asked too much. “Are you alright?”

“Same old, same old,” she said, pressing her forehead against my blast shield.

“They’re on top of the buildings. The place where you were doing the picking,” I said, trying my best to avoid saying ‘The place where you were gunned down.’

“Oh, there. Right,” she said. Claudia slipped from our embrace. The globes about us parted. Fifteen feet ahead of her was the chain link fence that demarked the work shop’s compound.

Although I don’t recall passing her, she wound up behind me. The further I was from Claudia, the more dense the arrangement of globes became. From my perspective at the fence, I could see the edge of the roof, but not the atorecs on top.

The ground exploded beneath Claudia’s feet, gravel showering in all directions. I recognized the sound. It was the weapon from Toots’ under-hull. My guess was that the corvette was somewhere above us, shooting down at a forty degree angle. It fired twice more, flinging gravel somewhere far to my right.

“Missed me!” Claudia yelled. No, it hadn’t. Claudia was improbably floating above a fifteen foot deep divot in the ground. The Tommy gun materialized in her arms and she returned fire.

“We have to get to the roof,” I told her.

“Go then,” she said, letting loose with a long volley of fire. “I’ll be up in a sec.”

 I floated up, staying as close to parallel with the electrified fence as I dared. Even up top, the globes had crowded out the entire roof. I had to guess at where the atorecs started. My arms flailing outward, I made a progression of steps in the steady direction of the roof’s center.

It was only after banging my arm into a ceramic casing that I realized that I had no feeling in my right hand. I could not get the fingers to move. The mechanical arm was flat out shot.

I plucked Toovy’s tool off my belt. It sensed the atorecs. That was the good news. The bad news was that there was no central control for the array. And of the several dozen atorecs present, only two were the same model.

Atorecs aren’t set up to be shut down in the first place. Once fired up, they can go for eons. (We discovered the atorec as an archeological find.) Shutting them down meant playing around with each tube’s interface. That might take hours, if I could do it at all. What the Old Man had proposed for me to do required shutting all of the atorecs on this side down.

I leaned forward and sensed the atorecs’ power. Shutting off my vision, I came to the long table of my ancestors. Grabbing Windy’s talons, I pulled her through.

The escaping fumes around me scattered the globes and partially revealed the atorec array’s face.

“We could just blow them up. It’s not like we have to worry about clean up,” Windy suggested.

I asked “Blow them up with what?”

“It will come to you. I’m going to go get that corvette before it picks you off,” she said, gusting away.

“If he’s in it, stay away from him,” I told her.

 I noticed the corvette had stopped firing. It had not shot at me, nor anywhere near this building. As for Windy’s instructions, I assumed she meant the Charliq mine, which did not strike me as being all that good of an idea.

The Charliq mine didn’t seem to think it was a good idea, either. I had just plunked it from my belt when all sorts of warning indicators went off. Atorec detected. Do not activate in atorec vicinity. Do not dispose of in atorec. If near atorec, get away from atorec.

Not kosher on a cosmic scale, it seems. It was doing everything short of disowning me. Normally these things were fairly specific when it came to explaining the scale of  screw up you were about to make. I had previously been automatically threatened with demotions and loss of licenses. Apparently this was beyond that.  

“He’s in there,” Claudia said. She just appeared. And all of the globes around moved away. Her arms were in the air, so I didn’t know what she meant other than she wanted another hug. I put the Charliq away and obliged.

I asked “Where is he?”

“Am I good for you, baby?”

“You’re the best!”

“He’s under our feet.”

Other than a building, I wasn’t sure what was under our feet. I asked “What’s he doing?”

“First he got rid of all of the assembly lines. Then he pulled some cargo containers out of storage,” she said, first pointing beyond the building and then to the left. “Then he moved the cargo stuff there. And then he went into the room with the bunk beds and up the stairs. That’s where he is now, putting papers in a steamer trunk.”

“Papers?”

The whine of landing jets intruded on us as Toots descended to level with the roof. Windy had the canopy up. She asked “Where did the Earth woman come from?”

“Columbus,” Claudia responded.

“Windy, he’s in the building below. I need you to check out what he’s done just to the left of the edge of the last building. Some sort of containers. But stay away from him. If he shows, get out of there.”

“I’ve shut the remote off on Toots here,” Windy said. “The cannon is locked on the autorecs. Get it as close to the ceiling as you can and then let loose.”

“You sure you’re good here?”

“The containers are close enough to the barrier and the other atorecs,” Windy said, her explanation at the time making as little sense to me as it does to you. She then said to Claudia “Nice meeting you, dear.”

With that, she was off, I think. I had a problem climbing into the corvette. Without my arm functioning, my balance was off. I wound up spilling into the cockpit. It took me a few moments to position myself forward in the seat.

Claudia was belted in beside me. She reached up and lowered the canopy.

I could not settle in. Something was jamming my side, the side I couldn’t reach. I wrenched about in the seat and reached back. My fingers found an oblong package wrapped in a grainy, opaque film.

The handwriting across the film belonged to Toovy. The writing itself was my name. I did my best to undo the wrapping.

“Present?” Claudia asked. That would be my conclusion, also. The film was of  a type commonly used to wrap postage, at least in the Combine.

Inside the packing was a golden firearm: the matching side arm for the uniform I was wearing. My belt sprouted a holster and it attached itself.  I commented “If all of this is in my mind, if all of my memories are lies, then all of this is getting so detailed that it’s scary.”

Claudia seemed to concur. “Yeah. What you said. Happens to me all the time.”

I examined Toots’ controls. Having never sat in this ship before, I wasn’t aware of the specific configurations. Toots was both a jury-rigged wreck and a different model than Honey.

“Like it’s a Toyota, huh?” Claudia commented. I’m not sure if she was reading my mind or my body language.

“Perhaps. I only have one arm here, so I hope you can help me a bit.”

“That’s what I’m here for. What’s first?”

“Two toggle switches to your far right. Please flip those up.”

It seemed to me that her hand was moving in the direction of the switches before I had finished my instructions. Her fingers tripped the switches together—something I had forgotten to imply. Then she turned to me and said “I know this is very important and you’re busy and everything, but I was wondering if you could help me with something when you have the chance and if it doesn’t get in the way of what you got to do.”

“Of course I will. What’s our rule?”

“Claudia first!” she said, smiling.

Toots began rising through the air. We were parting the globes. I wanted to make sure we halted well before the cosmic violence at the ceiling.

“And that is always our rule, Special Spaceman,” I said.

“I want to call my mom.”

Odd request. I still had contact with Honey, so it wasn’t beyond probability. “Certainly. The moment we can.”

The layers of globes ended at an elevation about one hundred feet short of the ceiling. At this height, the globes were transparent. We could clearly make out the fence line and the outlines of the brick buildings below.

Rapid successions of lines of light sprayed from the gun in Toots’ hull, each ending in rosy mini flashes tracing the buildings. In seconds all of the atorecs had been reduced to glowing flurries of fine dust. We began our descent and the globes again swarmed us.

“Get rid of the mirror. I don’t like looking at myself when I’m talking to you,” Claudia said.

I raised the helmet’s shield.

“Lose pretty boy.”

Once I removed Cody’s face, she leaned into me and put her head on my shoulder. “That’s my square eyed creature feature.”

The work shop was now mounds of bubbling clay. We flew through a jagged hole in the wall and into the hangar. My intention was to land Toots beyond the distortion barrier and back in real space.

Windy was signaling me to land just past the wall. That’s where we touched down. Per the Old Man, it would take a few minutes for the library to become unhinged from real space. If I didn’t want to go into scab space oblivion with it, I needed to be on the other side of the barrier.

Emerging from the cockpit, I spotted the clock on the post right out of scab space. Its hands were moving backward, then forward. I didn’t have time to tell what, if any, progress the clock was making.

Windy immediately came to immerse me. She said “See that? Left. I don’t know what he’s done. A lot of that is sticking into real space. I don’t know what you want to do here.”

She was referring to an area where the dust seemed suspended in air. Whatever the invisible thing was, it was blocking our path. I would have slammed Toots into it if I hadn’t landed where I did.

We were in the aircraft hangar, two thirds of which was in real space. The various containers and assembly lines had been cleared away. Most of the space was empty as if it were about to receive an airplane for servicing. (This should have perhaps clued me in.) All that remained was Cole’s control array and the line of atorecs, which were lining opposing walls. The framework of tubes was about five feet from where I landed Toots. For a moment I checked over the tubes.

I said to Windy “If it stays after the rest of this place goes, we are just going to have to live with it, whatever it is.”

Claudia stood up in the cockpit and asked “Phone call?”

“We might get better reception on the other side of the barrier,” I said.

She instantly rattled off her mother’s number. I patched it through my helmet and handed the helmet to her, saying “It’s ringing.”

“I hope my mom didn’t change her number,” she said, slipping my helmet on.

“If she has a phone, I can get her number,” Windy said. Windy then said to me “I don’t think that’s invisible, whatever it is. I think it’s in scab space, another scab space. Did this other guy say how long it would be for the place to go pop?”

I didn’t listen in on the other end of Claudia’s phone call, but I got the impression that her mother thought she was dead. “Mom? It’s me. Claudia. Sit down. Sit down. Look, I have to make this fast. I wanted to tell you that I love you. I didn’t say that the last time I talked to you. I said some things I didn’t mean. I said a lot of things to you that I didn’t mean at all. I don’t know where to start. Can you forgive me? Thank you! No, you never did anything wrong. Not to me. I’ll forgive you but there’s nothing for me to forgive you for. You were saying things I wasn’t listening to. But it’s like you said, no love given is ever lost. I love you! I’ll see you when I can! Got to go. I love you, too.”

“Happy thoughts,” I muttered in response to Windy. “Windy, get past the barrier. If I can’t get Toots out cleanly, Claudia and I will just walk out.”

“No problem getting past the barrier,” Windy said, seemingly having slipped through to the other side of the hangar.

“Sadly, probably where Sparky escaped through,” I said.

“He’s still in there,” Claudia said, handing me back the helmet. “He’s smeared all over that trunk. Sliming his way up through the junk.”

“Then there’s no reason for us to stay here. Are you ready?”

Claudia and I sat down in Toots. She lowered the canopy. Toot’s treads grabbed hold and we began crawling around whatever was protruding ahead of us. We seemed to clear it and headed into the barrier.

As the barrier started to wash over us, Claudia leaned over and planted a smearing pink kiss across my blast shield. And then she was gone, nothing remaining but streaks of day-glow lipstick.

I halted Toots and popped the canopy. I felt Windy sweep into the cabin.

Looking back, I saw a pair of jet engines, looming ever larger and immediately converging, thunder and racing wind as their accompaniment.

I am certain that the impressively named A-10 Lightning Bolt Warthog deserves a better description than that, but the rather large running engines are all I can recall seeing at the time. I felt the heated whirlwind, heard the trembling cannonade, saw the engines and dove.

That’s what Sparky had in his scab space within a scab space: a fully operational and currently running armored fighter aircraft. It was a heck of a battering ram. Or  a  distraction.

All I knew was that no one was flying the plane. My dive ended at the edge of the control array. I can’t say how fast the A-10 was going, other than to say that it wasn’t fast enough for the thing to take flight. It was out of the hangar in under a heartbeat. Streaking hot fumes and booms,  it missed me.

I scanned the barrier.

Windy sped Toots out and took a sharp right once clear of the hangar. The metal plated A-10 hopped the tarmac and then spiraled into a ditch between runways, nose down. Neither Toots nor the A-10 ever occupied the same space, which is good.

A metal steamer trunk came skidding through the barrier. I saw a form. I triggered the belt and the helmet. Then I fired my new sidearm.

Whatever was beyond the barrier looked as if it had been dropped from some vast height. I heard it warble “The Space Police! I’ve killed thousands! Nothing happened! I kill a bunch of dogs and suddenly the Space Police appear? The dog people sent you? Really!”

I looked down at the sidearm to see what setting I had used. It was fairly ominous and it kicked. (No, this is not standard field testing procedure, even for me. I was still a little stunned. ) When I glanced up, everything was gone--the entire rear third of the hangar. I was looking out over a ditch. Beyond that was a field, then another runway and then another set of hangars.

Then I spotted Sulfur, in the doorway next to the hangar’s massive service opening. Maybe he was satisfied with this result? He wasn’t lunging to attack. Then the black figure disappeared, perhaps simply stepping aside, perhaps vanishing from all reality. With the library and Sparky now dispatched, he may have sauntered off in hopes of hunting down and sticking his scythe through the other survivors. I don’t know. Since this incident ended, we don’t talk. That was, to date, the last I have seen of him.

Drawing Toovy’s tool, I approached the steamer trunk, which was registering as being made of plant fibers and  containing plant fibers. Inside it was a collection of pictures, mostly photographs, but also some ancient looking drawings. They were of Cole’s children.

Windy’s theory is that this is the godhead itself, that the aspect that can organically remember who most of these people are is the real Royce Cole. I have my own theory, which is less wild sounding and also probably as wrong.

Windy came up to me as I was examining the trunk, saying “Time to go.”

“I was thinking maybe we should shut off the atorecs on this side.”

“I’m thinking that whatever you want to do, you have just the time until the first person notices the rest of this building is missing. Or the running jet in the ditch.  Or our spaceship.”

“Point taken.” I was about to wipe the lipstick from my blast shield, but then stopped. If nothing else, it was a good reminder.

You get into space because you are certain of certain things. Having mastered your ball, you approach the void clad in what you think are stilts. Once you become aware, you realize that most of what you were so certain about are anecdotal anomalies, connected solely by the incidence of your having discovered them. By blinks it dawns on you that the god and gods in their heaven and heavens can do whatever they please. You will never master their whims nor make thorough note of them--and that is not why you have been invited here. This is an invitation to adjust your perspective. You are here to have your stilts resized to toothpicks, your awe renewed. The pink lipstick is still there, months later. 

Coda

The gig at the hardware convention went better than I thought it would. Right up until the time we set up at the pier, I didn’t think it was going to go down at all.

I’ll spare you most of it. Miss Tomlinson’s life had erupted in a spate of misery. Her mother had fallen and was hospitalized in Topeka. Vrecky’s sisters had called and said, in parts, that her mother’s condition was grave. Or maybe they were just “guilt tripping” her and rubbing it in that Vrecky didn’t have the money, time or inclination to come to her mother’s aid. To cut to the chase, the issue was essentially money.

It took me more detective work to nail that down than it took to uncover Sparky. So I flew Vrecky to Topeka. In Honey. And then we flew back. And then we loaded our crap into her Delta 98 and made our way to this miserable gig at Navy Pier.

I didn’t know it at the time, but this my was last appearance as  Cody. Cody has continued to make appearances since then, mostly in magazine advertisements. He’s in crowd shots, in the vicinity of imbedded intergalactic navigational symbols. I have no idea who is trying to contact me and I don’t care. The people who can and should contact me have a method of doing so. So far Colonel Nasus has greenlighted nothing. As for me, I am currently walking about in a more age appropriate guise, a sad-faced cowboy.

It was also the last appearance of the Captain Meteorphone. The non-plumbing operational guts of this device are now housed within the depths of a base fiddle occasionally lugged around by my sad faced cowboy self.

These changes were affected in short order, but were not even in the ethers as of the Navy Pier gig. That gig itself remained in the ethers for a good hour after our arrival at the pier. No one knew who we were or what we were supposed to be doing. All dropping Reynold’s name got us was the continual question “What’s a Reynold?”

No band was expected here. This was a dinner reception. There was no band shell of any kind set up. Vrecky started making phone calls. Someone did come to shag us, so I am guessing one of her calls bore fruit.

Fruit was the operant term, since that’s where we were to set up: in the fruit and Jell-o section of the salad bar. The bar ran about thirty feet and was in the shape of a horseshoe. An ice sculpture of a winged naked woman—Victory, Freedom or the Hardware Convention’s mascot—stood in a brass brazier, Kool Aid shooting from her feet, at the open end of the arrangement. Our actual performance area was a ten foot square patch beyond that, right before the curved array of dressing bottles.

This left us no real room for the amp nor Vrecky’s chair. There was also a problem with the plugs.

I wasn’t going to let anything stop us. I convinced Vrecky to sling the keyboard and play it standing. As for the amp problem, I assured her I could route the keyboard’s output through the Captain Meteorphone.

At that moment, Vrecky would have believed anything I said. She has since lost that willingness. And to think I used all of my magic up to play a gig inside a salad bar.

People did soon appear, vast lines of them—all tracking their well dressed paths about us as they piled plastic plates heaping with salad parts. The mayor even appeared, with his entourage. He pointed at me and he and his fellows laughed at my spaceman suit.

Romanian dance music was played.

Show tunes were played.

An ice sculpture melted.

The End

We will now continue with our normal slate of blog postings. Your comments on this serial are very much invited.  

Lawless Sign Part Seventeen (Fiction)

Chapter 24: Beyond One Step

The thin, olive-skinned woman behind the oval desk settled into her padded rolling chair, drew a belt across her lap and locked the buckle. She plucked up her metal tissue paper cozy and placed it atop a magnet on the desk’s white surface. Kicking her seat back, she locked the chair into a circular track. Her fingers brushed against the keyboard on the desk, making sure that it too was somehow anchored.

Like everyone in the hospital she had heard the intercom counting down from fifteen. It was now several seconds past the zero mark. Nadine knew from experience that the countdown itself meant little. There was a feeling in the ground, a rotational slide, which actually heralded the onset of weightlessness. And there was usually an announcement before that, too. People were still milling around the halls. It didn’t seem to her that anything would be happening for at least a few minutes.

Weightlessness was messy, however. She wanted no surprising floatation incidents around her desk this time. Having made sure the strap of her purse was wrapped around the chair’s plastic armrest, she snapped closed its flap and tugged the change compartment’s zipper to the end. Her foot went to the pedal of a trash can. Its lid rose and she dropped the tissues she had wadded in her hand.

Nadine’s computer screen showed grids and streaming lines of text. It was part of her job to check for any status updates on the instant messaging system. So far the computer displayed that the hospital’s phone lines had all been switched to voice mail forwarding and that the internet was now disconnected. A box was giving a countdown to the termination of cellular telephone contact, which was the most accurate indicator of impending weightlessness that Nadine knew of. The powers that be were addicted to their cell phones and wireless pads. Nothing would happen until all communication via such had subsided. At that moment, the countdown had halted.

A tall, broad shouldered man emerged from the hallway to her right. Unlike most of the assorted staff present, he wasn’t wearing scrubs, but rather a flight suit. It was similar to the one worn by Sal Lieberman, but had a different shoulder patch. The man’s hair was flaming red and without a part or sideburns. This hair was really a cheap wig. It covered the extensive surgical plate that ran from just above his brow to right behind his ears.

Nadine had known this man for seven years. His name was Joe Doaks. He had spent the entirety of the first two years of their acquaintance comatose. It was Nadine who had given the seemingly homeless, brain damaged man his name. Five years ago the man woke up. After a year of physical rehab, wherein he gained nearly seventy pounds, Doaks was given a job here. She wasn’t entirely clear what it was Doaks did, but he was always very active on space days.

Doaks had a face like a mirror. His every emotion ran across it. With a glance, Nadine could tell something wasn’t right. She asked “Issues, Joe?”

“We are missing some atmospheres,” Doaks said in an accent originating galaxies away. Meteor Beasts are gifted, but even that has its limits.

The Meteor Beast was right: there was quite a bit of air missing from the hospital. We had let quite a bit out when I released the prisoners. Although the automated systems were under Claudia’s control and thus not registering it, Doaks must have read something on a manual system which told him otherwise. It seemed that Doaks was a veteran spaceman since his concern wasn’t with the amount of air that was missing, but rather the possible presence of a leak.

Nadine asked “Do you want me to ring Young Cole? I think his cell is available.”

“Still with the vets?” he asked, then adding “Your eyes. What’s wrong?”

“Personal issue,” she said, glancing up at the screen. “Says here the air pressure is normal.--You know how Young Cole is. Like we don’t pay these foreigners enough, he has to pamper them too. I think he should be done with the whole little show in a minute or two. Do you want me to ring him once he’s done?”

“Do please,” Doaks said. “I’m going to check the sensors in the basement. Turn the elevator back on for me.”

Claudia asked if she should slow the elevator down or make it malfunction. At this point it didn’t matter. Sulfur and I had already found the air duct tube and had sealed ourselves in. My companion was reaching a skeletal hand up to the rung beneath my feet. The tube we were in ran parallel with the back of a closet wall on the main floor. I was viewing the activity at Nadine’s desk through a mesh screen in this wall.

Somewhere to the left of the closet’s opening was a shower stall-sized transparent plastic aquarium. Tubes sprouted out its top transom. These were connected to a clump of plastic boxes mounted atop what looked to me to be a lamp on rollers. Inside the tank’s bubbling interior bobbed a quite contented and animated Corona Surfer. It had a long fleshy pink arm dangling out the tank’s top. Its four sucker-tipped fingers were pressing a paperback novel against the glass. I’m guessing that one of its many independently roving eyes was reading.

A television chattered just beyond my view. There was a radio playing, too.

I was starting to have some reservations about this. Was I really going to shoot this place up?

My theory was that I had Sparky trapped the moment the Voliant Wave event started. I thought he would be unable to switch into any of the spare bodies he had stowed all over the countryside. As long as I had him here, he could only transfer to the bodies he had in the hospital. For reasons of preserving my confidence in this endeavor, I guessed that he only had two: the one he was using and the brain dead elderly version of Cole that was occupying a bed on this floor.

I had nothing to back any of that up.

The truth is that I am here because I represent the absolute worst in my race,  am an example of the most degenerate bent of my trade. I embody everything wrong with my nation, my religion and my sex.

I came here to snap this thing’s neck--and that’s what I am going to do. I would trust the machinations of human society, chance the odd whirl of their justice, but that just isn’t within my philosophy. I am witness to the massacre in The Garden. The dead of Tiamore are calling. If there is to be an answer, I will provide it. And other gibberish like that.

Not quite full blood lust, but it’s loaded.

As if I wasn’t bad enough, my undead wingman is a certifiable Kamikaze pilot. Sulfur’s content to kill everyone in here, innocent or guilty. For all I know, it’s his immutable goal. This was all set for disaster. The only question was scale.

The silver elevator doors parted and Doaks disappeared. My view then became dominated by a nurse, a thin red headed woman, who had entered the Corona Surfer’s room. The young woman had a plastic baggie in her hands which she proceeded to cover a flower arrangement with. Once bagged, the flowers were placed in a wooden cabinet. She picked a pen off the floor and seemed to be scanning the room for stray unanchored things.

The nurse came to hover in front of the aquarium. She said “You almost through with that chapter, Sweetie? The TV and the CD player can stay on, but you’re going to have to put your hand back in. Water good?”

She casually lifted the paperback from the creature’s hand and walked it to the cabinet where the flowers were stowed. The Corona Surfer may have said something at this point, but I didn’t catch it. The nurse sealed the book in a compartment with a stack of other books and then swung around back to the aquarium, saying “No, I don’t know where the Orient Express ran between. That takes place between the wars. It’s her most famous one, but I don’t think it’s one of her best. You’re not going to like the ending.”

The nurse looked the aquarium up and down. “Yeah, it does look like any of them could have done it. That’s the way it is with those.—The closet?”

She shot a glance in my direction. For a moment I thought the nurse was looking me straight in the eyes. Her attention quickly turned to the tank again. “I don’t see anything. Or hear anything. We are about to float, so all sorts of stuff goes on. Would you like me to get you another CD? I think Cats finally came in. I’ll check back with you after we take off.”

No sooner had she drifted out of my field of vision when Sparky appeared at Nadine’s oval desk island. He was Royce Cole’s youngest version, a thin man in his late twenties to early thirties. Like all of the Royce Coles, he sported a baggy grey pinstripe suit and a white straw hat. He had a surgical mask pulled down, drooping beneath his pointed chin. He asked “Leon?”

“Mister Bernstein is not picking up,” Nadine reported.

“He’s either embarrassed or he’s chickening out. I’ll bet anything the police aren’t buying his line of crap. So I have an intervention to look forward to after all this,” Sparky said. “Kill the cell phones in three minutes. Put on the NBC chimes at the one minute mark. Send the usual text at the same time. Then initiate.”

“Joe Doaks wants to talk to you before we initiate,” Nadine said.

“Eyes? Problem? Talk to Destiny,” he said, leaning over her desk.

“It’s nothing,” she muttered.

Sparky hissed “Is that young man still abusing your daughter? He doesn’t have to live, you know? You work for mobsters. Say the word. It will be as if he never existed.”

“You’re very kind, but no,” Nadine said softly.

Sparky was the last of the operational versions of Royce Cole.  The Old Man had been crafting Royce Cole like bodies from the beginning. They aged as per normal. Originally the Old Man would use a body until it wore out and then, at some point, create a new one, leaving the old one dead. That process was good enough, until he discovered the Voliant Wave. Like everyone else who discovered the Voliant Wave, he came to abuse it—at times aging himself years in a single session. Soon the Old Man had need of an industry for creating his new bodies. Sometime after discovering the library, the Old Man hit upon the idea of spreading his essence about, inhabiting more than one body simultaneously.

In short, it took the thing about 4000 years to figure out how to reproduce. His previous intermingling with humans did nothing to promulgate the inner smoke signal. Blowing smoke into his own clones, however, wasn’t perfect either. To the Old Man’s surprise, the clones only had part of his memories and only the potential to achieve the original’s abilities. He tried several methods, including subdividing himself almost equally into several parts, but none of them were quite the exact duplicate.

I guess the Old Man was willing to live with it. Sparky here is a bit of a black sheep. Ghengis Khan never ran through his wife. The whole concept of man being on a march to extinction is something he has been told, but not concluded for himself. He was unreconstructed, with fresh memories of having been the general Alcibiades and a distant recollection of having been Osiris, but nothing more modern. He may have soaked up modern trappings, but not much of the Old Man’s hard won perspective. And he did not think of himself as a junior member. Once the Old Man was incapacitated, being equals with the other avatars went out the window. Thus leading to the end of the other avatars and, unfortunately, the people of Tiamore.

“I’m not being kind. I’m ruthless and murderous. But I am paternalistic,” Sparky said. “It’s my one saving grace.”

The only thing saving him at that moment was that we weren’t in scab space yet. It crossed my mind to take him then and there. If he held that position, I had a good shot—providing that anything I had was capable of taking him down. I held off.

“Do you want me to initiate or do you want to talk to Joe first?” Nadine asked.

“Initiate. We can call off any time before the decoupling. Get the magnetic turrets set to disarm,” Sparky said. “Where is Mister Doaks?”

She answered “Basement.”

“Looking for something to blow, no doubt,” he said, striding to the elevator doors. “I have more concern for the prospects of the zero gravity Crème Brule Chef Sprocket is attempting than I do eruption from the pipes below.”

The elevator did come. The scene didn’t shift much for the next few seconds. If Sulfur and I had not suddenly found ourselves floating, we would have had no inkling that the ship had taken off or that we were now in another realm of being.

A moment later the figure of an amused surgical tech came cart wheeling past the room’s doorway. Some other shoeless individuals paraded after him, all floating and pushing themselves off the walls. By this time I had handed the rear panel from the closet down to Sulfur. I didn’t think that any of the people bounding through the hall had spotted me.

The same could not be said about the Corona Surfer whose room I was about to invade. The pink thing had constricted, becoming a fuzzy ball at the back of her aquarium. I think she was signaling the nursing station.

Nadine pivoted her head in the direction of the Corona Surfer’s room. At that moment Cole came scampering out of a staircase across from the desk, saying “I can’t find Joe. We didn’t blow. So I guess he was wrong.”

“Gonor, narotene,” blurted a box on the aquarium’s side. It must have been terrifying for the Corona Surfer. A cybernetic space pirate had invaded her sick room--and promptly reduced her human benefactor to spewing gore and flying organs.

I hit Sparky with everything I had. My baton went through his back and out his chest. The radial waves from my helmet shoved him up and off his feet, pulverizing him across the wall behind the desk. Purple light from the scrambler on my belt drenched the area and then fled in sticky globs.

No sooner had the baton made its last bounce back to my hand, when Sulfur bolted ahead of me. He un-slung his scythe and dove into the ball. A guttural yell followed. Someone was on the business end of Sulfur’s curved blade.

I had not killed Sparky. I had laid waste to that body. I thought that this might be a two round fight, but I was not prepared for what I had just seen.

The grizzly figure of Nadine rose, bursting out of her seat belt. She yowled “You murdered her! You maniac!”

That wasn’t a typo. She said ‘her’ and by her she meant herself. By ‘you’ she meant me, but that was just self-justification. The moment I hit Sparky with the scrambler I saw a thorny snake of smoke exit his body and arc into Nadine’s.

I didn’t know he could do that. Judging by what he said, it seemed the process of body jumping caused irreversible harm to normal humans. That Sparky was a bit squeamish about this I guess is to his credit. (He was just squeamish enough to complain after he did it.) The bottom line was that he could jump into any human here. That left me contemplating the endearing possibility of having to kill all of the humans in the hospital.

That would be what seemed to be Sulfur’s plan. We were two seconds into this and we already had three dead people. Thanks to Sulfur’s indiscriminate dispatching of two medical techs and my own mayhem, the front desk area had gone from primarily white to primarily red.

I advanced from the Corona Surfer’s room, propelled by the floaty belt. Nadine was floating in a crouch, her knees just above the desk level. Sparky had jumped to Nadine simply because she was close. He didn’t have any of Royce Cole’s formidable abilities while inside a regulation body. Now that he had his wits about him, Sparky chanced Nadine asking me “What do you want?”

In another universe, maybe I said something to him. In this universe, I didn’t want to tip my hand. I discovered at that moment that he couldn’t see Sulfur. He had never been able to see Sulfur—and couldn’t do it through Nadine’s eyes, either. He thought I had killed the medical techs, but couldn’t figure out how.

Sulfur leapt in the direction of the stairwell. His boney free hand caught the door jamb. He must have sensed something that I couldn’t.

It then dawned on Sparky that I was reading his mind. He could not reach back and was defenseless while still inside Nadine. My scrambler was back up and I triggered it. Nadine and her splattered desk were engulfed in a purple flash.

He was going to be leaving Nadine either way. Nadine was dead the moment Sparky entered her and his exit made that plain. Black smoke rolled out of her mouth and nose. Her head lolled. The woman’s limbs floated without intention, as if she was bobbing in liquid.

And I failed to kill it again. The impression I got from the fleeing giant smoke hose was more terror than pain. Sparky was a big thing—and lightning fast. It took the thorny vine a good second to clear the lobby, trailing a sonic boom in its wake. The thing was simultaneously running across the ceiling, floor and walls as it streaked down the hall, its path ending at the last door on the right.

Joe Doaks shot out of the stairwell behind me. In Joe’s hand was a metal rod with a lampshade like tip. This was a rather common spaceman device, a hand held jet. I used to have one. Every crew member on every freighter I’ve ever been on has had one. Joe even had the strap wrapped around his wrist the right way. These things are much faster than the floaty belt, although they only work in zero gravity.

It didn’t do Joe one bit of good. The moment he cleared the doorway, Sulfur planted the scythe’s curved blade right between his shoulders. The tip burst through his left breast.

I couldn’t read Joe’s mind, but he looked surprised. He might have even been miffed. Sadly, he was not dead, nor really that badly impaired.

I’m not sure if Sulfur knew what he was dealing with. Meteor Beasts were notorious for being able to fight on, even when decapitated. It was said that they could manipulate their severed limbs at close range.

All of that said, I had killed the last transplanted Meteor Beasts I ran into with a low radial blast from the scrambler. I was building up the scrambler’s charge at the time, but that’s no excuse for enjoining this thing in hand to hand combat--which is what I did.

Doaks tilted his jet mast and orbited about. Having let go of his now imbedded scythe, Sulfur flipped backward. It seemed to me that Sulfur was drawing another weapon from his hip. I bashed my baton against Joe’s head and loosed a radial blast powerful enough to smash him flat.

The rotation we had been expecting, the one that supposedly heralded the start of weightlessness, happened at some point during this. Our entire environment took a quarter turn to the right.

Most importantly, from that immediate perspective, the window imploded. I honestly don’t know what the cause was. Sulfur might have done it. I have no idea what weapon he was using. Doaks could have misadjusted his jet mast and sent it errant. My helmet blast could have strayed.

It was a substantial window. The thing was a half foot thick. Something broke it. It didn’t break on its own. Whatever happened, it was scattered into cubes.

Normally space ships don’t have large windows. This one did double duty as the lobby’s main window, so it would have been cosmetically hard to disguise.

Had I known what was going on, I might have next expected to be sucked out into the void. That did not happen. As opposed to a vacuum, scab space is crammed to the gills with something akin to cigarette ash. It was pressurized, several times the atmosphere of the hospital’s interior air. The stuff was about one hundred degrees and registered the radioactivity of a dental x-ray.

One instant I am bashing the Meteor Beast on the head and the next I’m in an avalanche. I wound up pressed against the elevator’s doors. Then came a cascade of clicks: the hospital’s cheapo airlocks were sealing. By the time I turned myself around, the ash was the consistency of water.

My blast shield dropped. I had air. The sensors in my suit were trying to determine the volume of the ash and its degree of radioactivity--and all sorts of other data I could live without knowing. Per what I could tell, Sulfur was plastered to the ceiling of the stairwell. His scythe was back in his hands. Doaks’ jet mast had choked and died. It was somewhere in the vicinity of what was left of Nadine by the desk. Doaks and the two lab techs were gone, either swept out in some way or pushed to the other side of the now sealed airlocks.

The lobby was now shut off from the two wings of the hospital. Incredibly, I heard an airlock open down the right hall. I say ‘incredibly’ because the ship was operating the way it is supposed to. Only an idiot would over-ride the safety functions that are actually working. It would be like disarming your car’s airbags during a crash. This was no time to be playing with the airlocks. Then he did it again. And he didn’t close the airlock behind him. He was coming from the safe zone to our position. My mouth moved before I realized what I was saying “Close the airlocks behind you, you idiot! You’ll flood the entire ship!”

“The pirate appears! Where’s your hook, Captain? Where’s your eye patch? Your peg leg? Come on! At least a parrot!”

I guess Sparky found the concept of Space Police or Space Monk too improbable, so he went with pirate. The being that pierced the right airlock had a crooked human outline at its center. At least that part looked like a bent little old man. This blotch radiated flaming concentric crimson coronas. Shooting from the man’s outline and crossing every surface in the lobby were jagged blades of black. The corona rotated. Its attendant sharp lines swept in random directions. Two bladed slashes of black crossed the elevator’s doors, flashing through the ash as if it wasn’t there.

“What are you? What the hell do you want?” it bellowed as two of its black beams converged across my chest. “Some sort of undead thing? A mechanically animated corpse?—“

“—I’ve been called worse! I am justice, summoned by the people of Tiamore. And I have come for you!”

Perhaps I’m saying this in retrospect, but I wasn’t talking to the guy just to talk to him. I was waiting on my weapons reaching maximum yield. Each time I recount this in this manner, however,  Vrecky Tomlinson  believes it less. I will confess to having macho issues. I was pretty sure I was dead. And that my actions had killed all of the otherwise innocent people in this hospital. My incomprehensible focus was making Sparky dead first.

Sparky yelled back “Gibberish! Whatever you are, you’re no more metaphysical than I am!”

“Whatever I am, wherever I come from, we spit things like you off assembly lines. And we know how to dismiss the defective ones!”

I hoped. I fired, in any case.

We may have known something about creatures like Cole, who was something like creatures like Windy, but I doubt there’s any set procedure for dismissing them—or whatever the heck I’m trying to imply here. To my knowledge no one has ever tried to off a chunk of race memory. There’s no call for it.  Ours didn’t go rabid.

My baton shot straight back at me and jammed into its housing. Purple light drained from the lobby, briefly causing the floor and furniture to glow through the ash. Fast mist from what had been Sparky’s corona radiated, adding pin prick pink droplets to the mix of suspended, churning soot.  The old man’s outline was gone. Something black and curly, a knobby prehensile tail,  sprouted from the ash and bounded for the staircase.

Both Sulfur and I dove for it. It was gone in a blink. The thing was liquid, supersonic. Booms reverberated from the basement.   

Why was he going to the basement? It was the one part of the hospital with no people in it. Then the obvious dawned on me. I asked Claudia “Are there any Royce Coles in the tube vault?”

Of course there were. Why hadn’t I asked this question before?

“He’s at the control panel down here,” Claudia reported. In a chipper voice, she asked “Do you want me to jam him up?”

“Please. Anything you can do will be very much appreciated, Special Spaceman,” I said.

She issued a guttural squeal, full of mischief. I found it inspirational.

Sulfur was inspired to put his skeletal paw upon my shoulder. His eyeballs were lighting up out of sequence and he hadn’t said a word since the window broke. He may have been having problems navigating. Or he may have run out of ideas. (My guess is that he ran out of ideas four years ago.) The floaty belt dragged both of us in the direction of the staircase. I explained “I think he went this way.”

He had, indeed. Sparky had managed to pound through each and every iris of the airlocks on the way to the vault. The locks were now flower shaped fountains, spraying ash from one section to the next. Each of the exploded petals was dotted in black fluid.

I didn’t know it at the time, but this black fluid was the creature’s cell material, both its blood and its nerves. I had hurt it worse than I thought I had. It was on its last legs. Sadly. I had no inkling of this.

We weren’t dawdling, but I had concluded that the entire event was a misadventure. Nothing good was going to happen. There was no mitigating the consequences. All that had to happen was for it to end.

A moment later, I thought it had. With one turn to the left for everything that wasn’t floating, the right wall became the floor. It was on an angle to gravity and all suspended things fell to it.

Sulfur landed on his head and “meeped” at me from his pile.

“What’s the matter? Haven’t you ever been involved in a thorough disaster before? This is what it looks like,” I snarled, crawling upright.

We were caked in ash. The hallways in the basement were three quarters of the way filled. Lighting was sporadic at best, and poorly positioned. I concluded that we had popped back to real space. If so, that meant the game was over. Sparky was now free to transfer himself to any of the hundreds of bodies he had stowed on Earth.

Somewhat dispelling this notion was the feeling of movement. The entire hospital seemed to have been encountering some form of turbulence. So it was up in the air as to where we really were. For this reason, I pressed on.

I was right the first time. We were back in real space. The sensations we were experiencing involved the condition of the hospital itself. Its interior had reappeared out of alignment with its façade and foundation. Per the newspaper photo running in the next day’s Sun-Times, the foundation had spit the structure out. For a moment, the basement, its sub basement and the two wing first floor were standing like a top. There was another momentary feeling of weightlessness as it toppled and then slid down the hill. Eventually the entire intact mass came to a tumbling halt in the rear parking lot.

Had the interior of the hospital been made of something other than space freighter hull, a substance similar to diamond, the structure certainly would have broken apart. Although it fared well, I cannot say the same for everything inside the building.

I was at the now sideways staircase to the vault when the next spate of weightlessness struck. A rumbling was coming from the vault itself. It seemed as if the tube carrousel had become jammed. It was most distinctly louder than it had been before.

I pointed Sulfur in the staircase’s direction. He refused to move. So I bolted ahead. Halting my progress half way, I turned back to him and asked “Problem? Something down here?”

“You told me not to go there.”

“I’m un-telling you. This is no time to be particular,” I said. I never did figure out what the perimeters of the thing’s programming actually were.

I can’t even tell you if he followed me. One moment I was there, the next I was weightless and at the bottom of the staircase.

The actual tube vault was on the ceiling, gushing freeze water from its central chute. A bright ball of yellow was emerging from its depths. Materializing with a sparking blue outline was a glowing trapezoid. Where it was is hard to say, since the room moved the moment I caught sight of it.

What I was looking for were Claudia’s screens. If they were there, they had become shorted out.

The yellow light sprang from the chute. I fired the helmet and belt at it. The thing blistered, spat off black gobs. Its man-like outline took flight, zeroing in on the center of the trapezoid. I hit the floaty belt and charged after it.

Next: The Stunning Conclusion of Lawless Sign.