Fiction River: Fantasy Adrift (13 page)

“Yeah, well, have at it.”

“I can blow you off the face of the planet, Ziggy. Ask your chickenshit brothers. Open the gate!”

“Talk is cheap. You got anything to back it up?”

“Fine. It’s on you.” His face vanished.

The image of B.B.’s hopper sat there for a moment without anything happening.

Ziggy found himself holding his breath.

There was some kind of distortion that made the image waver, blur, then disappear.

“Gate-camera is offline,” the computer said. “Switching to backup.”

The image flowered, viewed from a slightly different angle.

B.B.’s hopper was still there.

So was the crackling force field that protected the compound.

“All right!” Stroh said.

“Hot damn!” Stocke said. He pumped his fist.

Ziggy let his breath out and inhaled again.

Another distortion rippled over the image, but the camera stayed lit.

“The field is holding,” Ziggy said. “And whatever he is throwing isn’t getting much past it.”

The ripple came a third time. To no effect.

Chew on that, motherfucker!

Ziggy said, “Com on. Hey, B.B.? You still out there?”

B.B.’s face appeared on the screen. Ooh, he was pissed. Looked like he was about to blow an artery.

“What are you doing?” Stroh whispered.

Ziggy shook his head, waved his hand over the presets. “Happy birthday. I got you something.”

Overhead, his drones unleashed their hellfire rockets, targeting B.B.’s hopper.

B.B. caught it on his scopes. He snarled, waved his hands at his own board.

Bright light strobed B.B.’s face through the hopper’s windows as his defenses reached out to slap the incoming hellfire missiles.

“Didn’t do any good,” Stocke said.

“I didn’t really think it would,” Ziggy said. “Just gave him something to think about. Maybe he’ll get mad enough to stroke out.”

A moment passed.

“I can wait, Ziggy.” B.B. said. “You will have to come out sooner or later.”

“Want to bet we have a shitload more supplies in here than you have in that hopper? You’ll have to go home to eat long before we need to leave. We can take a little ride into Bidet Town and maybe even stir up the constable while you are gone. Go away, B.B.”

“Fuck you.”

“You are not my type,” Ziggy said. “Com off.”

Stroh and Stocke looked at him. “Now what?” Stroh said.

Ziggy shook his head. “We knew this was gonna happen eventually. Even if he lets off and we skate this round, he’ll be back again. Might have a bigger hammer next time. We have to do something about him.”

“Do what?” That from Stocke.

“I have a plan,” Ziggy said.

From their faces, neither of them liked hearing that at all.

***

“You are out of your fucking mind,” Stocke said.

“No, I’ve been considering it for a while. We can’t go on like this. First off, I don’t want you two clowns camping in my house forever. Second, no matter what we do, B.B. isn’t going away. We block a hundred punches and the hundredth-and-first gets through? We lose.”

Stroh’s face had gone pale with fear. “No. No. It’s a bad idea.”

“It’s not.”

“You don’t even know if he’ll go for it!”

“Yeah, I do. That’s what he is. He sees himself as the predator and us as prey. He can’t not go for it.”

Stocke was still shaking his head. “No. You’re crazy.”

“You are welcome to leave any time,” Ziggy said. He smiled. “My house. My rules.”

***

Ziggy waited all day and all night before he set it into motion. It couldn’t look too easy.

“It won’t work, I’m telling you,” Stocke said.

Ziggy looked at him. “We’ll see.”

***

Ziggy imagined himself in B.B.’s place. His big gun had splashed against his quarry’s force field and not done shit. He was pissed, and never the most patient person. So when his field scanner caught an anomaly, it would wake him right up: Hello? What do we have here?

What it would look like was a phase-shift and an accidental partial-code reveal. A join between two overlaps in the fields which, if you pushed against it with a degausser and a little juice, would open a hole. Not a big hole, not enough to drive the hopper through, and low enough he couldn’t begin to get an angle on the house with his vortex weapon, but big enough so that he could crawl on his belly and wiggle through it.

The smug bastard Ziggy had made a mistake. He had misaligned the fields!

He could get into the compound, and with a pulse rifle and a couple of shaped-charges? He could blow a hole in the wall, step in, and the idiots in the house would never know what hit them. Thrum, thrum, thrum! see you, assholes!

The yard had motion-detectors and defenses, the anti-vehicle mines and all, but they weren’t designed to stop a person on foot, and somebody who knew how to step carefully could thread his way through them, he had his own scanners, it would be tricky, but he could do it ...

Ziggy leaned back. “Here we go,” he said.

Stroh and Stocke weren’t there. They had both had sudden urges to go visit the toilets.

***

When Stroh and Stocke returned, Ziggy was watching the computer’s projection intently. They came to stand behind his chair.

“What—?” Stocke began.

“Shh! Look.”

The tracking cam’s screen showed B.B., pulse-rifle in hands, strapped with the power backpack, some shaped-charges crowed to his belt. He skulked across a patch of ground. Paused, tapped his ear.

“Listening to his computer give him directions,” Ziggy said. “He’s going to turn left, watch.”

Sure enough, B.B. stepped to his left.

“Wider angle,” Ziggy told the computer. “Thirty percent.”

The image shifted, giving a wider view of the area around B.B.

“Here we are. Come on, come on ...”

B.B. paused, looked from side to side.

“No, don’t stop. Keep going ...”

“Oh, shit, he knows!” Stroh said. “We’re fucking doomed!”

“Shut the hell up,” Ziggy said. He leaned forward, holding his breath again ...

B.B. took another careful step. A second.

Ziggy held his hand over the computer control board ...

B.B. took a third step ...

Ziggy palmed an invisible control—

Fire blasted across the image, bathing B.B. in a heavy yellow-orange stream, almost a plasma it was so intense—

WHOOSH!

“Gotcha, asshole!”

The filters cut in. After a moment, the image resumed.

A smoldering, dark lump lay on the ground, smoke rising from it in lazy tendrils.

“So long, B.B.”

Stroh and Stock screamed for joy.

Ziggy grinned.

Score one for the good guys.

***

Scarne looked at his grandson. The boy was what? Almost nine years old now? What a mouth on the child! Where did he learn such language?

He shook his head. “It’s a very nice story, Teevo. Um ... Memaw told it to you?”

“Uh huh.”

“Really?”

“Well, kind of, Bepaw. It was different when Memaw told it, so I changed it a little.”

“How come?”

“It had talking pigs and a wolf who could blow down houses with his breath! Nobody would believe that, Bepaw.”

Scarne shook his head again. “No, I guess they wouldn’t,” he said.

He patted the boy on the shoulder. He’d have to keep an eye on this one. Sooner or later, somebody with this much imagination? He was going to be trouble.

You could bet the farm on that.

Introduction to “
In the Play of Frigid Women”

In August of 2013, Dean Wesley Smith started blogging daily about his writing progress. He’s attracted thousands of new readers this way, although the real attraction might be the adventures of his cat, Walter White Kitty, who accompanies him every single moment Dean’s at his computer. It’s easy to blame the cat for Dean’s penchant to experiment, but that started before Dean met Walter. Still, in the last year, Dean has started two magazines—this one, and
Smith’s Monthly
, which contains his work only (and has a full brand-new novel in every issue, plus serializations). In the past five months, he’s published six novels, the most recent being
Kill Game
.

His most popular series by far follows the adventures of Poker Boy, a professional poker player (like Dean) who has magic (unlike Dean) and interacts with the Gods. I can’t tell you if Dean interacts with Gods or not, since there are some things in life that a man only shares with his cat.

The inspiration for this particular Poker Boy adventure comes from the news reports in 2013, and some long-ago trips to Alaska. Leave it to Dean to come up with some images that have to do with fish and rudders that I will never get out of my brain…

In
the Play of Frigid Women

Dean Wesley Smith

ONE

In a million years, I never would have thought I would find myself adrift on a dead oceanliner off the coast of Alaska, freezing my fingers off while staring at mostly black water, white ice, and jagged mountains for as far as I could see. I was from Oregon. I mostly lived in Las Vegas. My job as the superhero named Poker Boy seldom took me away from casinos.

And from natural heat sources.

Granted, this was supposed to be a heated cruise ship and there was a casino, but one room with one automatic poker table and a bunch of slot machines didn’t really match my definition of a casino.

My girlfriend and sidekick, Patty Ledgerwood, aka Front Desk Girl, thought I was being snobby with my attitude about the ship’s little gambling area. She said the attitude didn’t suit me, since I was seldom snobby about anything else.

She might have been right. But still, I’ve seen bigger gambling areas at truck stops in the middle of the Nevada desert where they served greasy eggs, burnt toast, and floppy bacon and the waitresses couldn’t find a clean apron if a plane full of them was flown in from Vegas.

Just saying.

Besides, it had been Patty’s idea that we take a cruise, get away. I wasn’t sure what we were getting away from exactly, since I liked my job of playing poker and saving people and dogs, but she thought it would be a good idea to not have to worry about saving the world all the time.

She promised me good food and lots of time together in a large suite with a huge bed. She had totally fulfilled those two promises.

Not a word of complaint there.

And wow, the scenery of Alaska was something to believe. We had spent many an afternoon in our suite, our feet up, just watching the towering snow-capped mountains pass as the ship moved from one small port to another.

Beautiful didn’t begin to even describe Alaska from the water. I could see why people took these cruises. Or at least I could until the fifth day of a ten-day cruise. We had booked this cruise because it went the farthest north. Starting in Seattle and going clear up to Seward before turning around and heading back.

But then the storm hit as we steamed back south and our wonderful suite up high and near the bow seemed to turn into more of a carnival ride than a suite we were spending thousands of dollars for.

I don’t normally get motion sick, but even I was getting bothered by the room suddenly tilting in all directions. I was pretty sure it was not supposed to be an uphill walk to get to the bathroom.

And then a moment later a downhill slide. My double-wide in Oregon never seemed to have this problem, Patty’s apartment in Vegas never had the problem, and the new house Patty and I were building better not have that problem when it was finished.

Patty, who had wristbands and anti-nausea patches on her arms headed for the bathroom ten minutes after the sudden storm hit.

After thirty minutes and the storm seemingly getting worse and the climb to the bathroom getting steeper by the moment, I finally couldn’t take it any longer and teleported us back to her apartment in Las Vegas, where I put her to bed and went down to the Bellagio and managed to get fifth place in the poker tournament that night.

The next morning, Patty looked much better, not as sickly pale, and over breakfast in the fantastic Golden Nugget buffet, she gave me the bad news.

“We have to jump back.”

“Why?” I asked, looking up from my slice of ham and scrambled eggs. The last thing I wanted to do was be back on that ship. Five days had been a perfect vacation. We could just forget the last hour and the tiny gambling area and remember everything else.