Severance (26 page)

The next morning, Harold woke up and immediately flipped on
his terminal, hoping to see if the captain had resigned in disgrace thanks to a
heroic anonymous tipster.

That had not happened. Instead, the front page was dominated
by a headline:

ARGOS EXTREME NEWS ASSISTANT EDITOR FOUND DEAD.

He had been found strangled, killed in a suspected drug
deal. Harold slumped back in his bed, knees curling up to his chest.
How can
washing your hands after using the bathroom be a bad move?
What kind of
a moral is that?

Bruce made his way down the middle of the road, warily
eyeing the cluster of children ahead of him. There hadn’t been any school for
the past two days, which was about two days longer that it took Argosian
children to devolve. These particular children appeared to be playing a game
which combined many aspects of soccer and gang shoplifting, with a scoring
system based on who could swear the loudest. The massive meat fruit they were
using as a ball squirted away from them, rolling down the street to stop at his
feet. Bruce stopped, considered his options for a moment, then punted the orb
of meat back at the children as hard as he could, knocking two of them off
their feet. Although intellectually he understood that this was a pretty horrible
thing to do to children, he found himself unable to take any joy from it.

After watching Stein taken away to the aft and placed out of
reach, he had retired to one of his own hiding spots. Two days of running and
gunning had left him exhausted, and even racked as he was with guilt, it hadn’t
taken him long to drift off to sleep, curled into a nest made of wadded lumps of
insulation.

He awoke some time later in a sweat, shaken awake from a
dream filled with swarms of codpiece–clad security officers chasing him through
endless halls. Unable to get back to sleep, his mind wandered, adventured, even
gallivanted, as he ran the situation over in his head.

Rescuing Stein wasn’t impossible.
It was just really unlikely.
“Eat my shit, probability,” he had said, fluffing the insulation under him, trying
desperately to ignore the fact that probability was probably right in this case:
rescuing Stein was not a terribly likely thing to happen. She would be in the
main security base by that point, behind the closed bulkhead doors, behind
hundreds of armed men who hated him.

There were ways past them of course, secret, hidden ways
through the stinkier parts of the ship. But Stein was always better at that
stuff than he was; he had only been in a fraction of the ship’s bowels himself and
couldn’t think of any useful passages that would help here.

This thought led to an attempt to consult the ship’s
drawings and the discovery that he wasn’t the first to think of that. Perhaps
anticipating assholes like him doing asshole stuff like what he was
considering, the conspirators had put a lock on the ship’s schematics. And Bruce
had never bothered to put those drawings on a dummy, had never even considered
that they would be unavailable to him.

Which was why he was attacking children on the way to the
maintenance office. From what little Bruce knew about the network, there was a
chance one of the desks in the maintenance office would have a copy of the
drawings stored in its local cache. It was only a faint chance; if IT had
thought to lock down the network copies, they would surely have some way of
dealing with the cached sets.

He found the maintenance office empty, no one from the swing
shift apparently bothering to work anymore. He entered the small back office,
and sat down at Stein’s desk. Sure enough, its cache had been blanked. Any
attempt to gather information on the ship’s systems refused to work. The Big
Board was a cascade of red error messages, all complaints about access levels.
He cast a baleful look at the floater desk shared by himself and the other
technicians for their work, confident it had been wiped too. Looking at it for
a long couple of seconds, something twitched in his head. He decided he should
probably still check it.

“Stupid asshole desk!” he yelled, finding that it too had
been wiped. He wondered how they were expected to maintain the ship without any
drawings of it. He wondered if they even cared.
Helot. That ship splitting
fucker.
He kicked the desk, which unsurprisingly, made his foot hurt. He
checked the desk for damage. Not a scratch. “Bullshit durable asshole desk.”
Another brain twitch.

The floater desk had been replaced a couple months earlier.
One of the overnight idiots had managed to crack the screen with his enormous
ass. The whole unit had been sent to recycling, where it might very well still
be in one piece. He knew they didn’t recycle things straightaway — they just
picked and chose from the scraps at hand as they needed them. Which meant there
was still a chance it was intact, but unpowered, its cache intact. “Thank you,
bullshit durable asshole desk,” Bruce said, kicking it again affectionately
before heading for the door.

§

“So, when you get a desk like one of these sent to you, what
do you do with it?” Bruce asked.

“A desk like one of these? We put it right here,” the
recycling plant supervisor replied. “Beside all these desks.” He pointed at the
massive stack of desks, just one stack in the room full of shattered furniture.
He winked at Bruce with one of his heavily wrinkled eyes. On board the climate
controlled Argos, it was hard for any person to look weathered, but this man
managed it somehow. Bruce wondered what effect the recycling process had on the
local atmosphere.

“You don’t do anything else with it? Like wipe its memory?”

“Oh, sure. We’re definitely supposed to do that.”

“Supposed to? You mean you don’t?”

The recycling wizard licked his lips. “You know how many
people care about the recycling department? How many people come here and ask
questions?” He studied Bruce’s face.

“A lot?” Bruce guessed. “Because people find you and your
work enthralling, and love to hear your stories?”

“Hah!” the recycler said. “No one gives a good goddamn about
recycling.”

Bruce’s heart raced. “Okay. I’m looking for a specific desk.
Which hopefully still has some data in its memory cache.”

“A specific desk, you say? Well, what does it look like?”
The recycler waved his hand at the stack of cracked and broken desks, all
identical, save for the damage and disfiguring marks that presaged their visit
to the room.

“You don’t keep an inventory?” Bruce asked.

The recycling wizard’s eyes narrowed. “Do you know how many
people care about…”

“No one cares. Got it. Okay, I’ll look around.”

It only took forty minutes before Bruce found the right
desk. The crack across the screen wasn’t terribly distinctive — it was a common
problem with desks and asses on board the ship — but the corners and edges of
the desk’s surface were badly chipped and scuffed from its life in the
maintenance office. He stared at it, a mixture of excitement and worry washing
over him. He had no idea how he would find out if there was any information on
there, much less how to get it off. By powering on the desk, it would probably
connect to the network and be immediately wiped.

“If I wanted to get the data off here, do you know how I
could do that?” Bruce asked.

“You mean without anyone finding out about it?” the recycler
asked, grinning. “I might be able to help you out with something like that.”

Bruce gritted his teeth. “And will you?”

“Why should I?”

“Because I’m the first person to have spoken to you in
months?”

The recycler considered that for a moment. “Fair ’nuff.” He
retreated to his little office, returning in a minute with a modified terminal
with its rear cover removed, a long strap protruding from the circuits within.
The recycler crawled under the old maintenance desk, and after some prodding
around, popped off a panel. Some more fiddling attached the thin strap to
something inside the desk. He set the terminal down on the floor gently and
crawled back out. “Takes a few seconds,” he explained.

“Done this before, then?” Bruce asked.

The recycler scratched his cheek, then made a vague gesture
with his hand. “Sometimes find some pretty interesting things on these units.
Usually not. Usually not worth my time.” He looked up at Bruce and winked. “Sometimes
is.”

Bruce desperately wanted to avoid learning what was worth
the man’s time, so he stopped talking to him. They waited in silence for the
next few seconds until the terminal beeped. The recycler undid his handiwork
with the cables then tapped a few commands into the terminal. “I’m wrapping all
the information within a generic document with no access restrictions,” he
explained. “Makes it a little cumbersome to read, but it won’t look the same if
anyone on the network is scanning for it. Your terminal?”

Bruce held up his terminal, thumbing the confirmation to
accept a terminal to terminal file transfer.

“Though if this is real important, I’d put a copy on a
dummy. Got a spare one right here I can sell you.”

“Maybe another time,” Bruce offered. The file downloaded, he
tucked his terminal away. “Can you keep a copy yourself, though? Just in case?”

“Was going to anyways.”

“Thought so,” Bruce said, backing away from the strange
little man.

§

Thumping and groaning sounds heralded the arrival of Griese,
the man himself arriving a minute later, crawling headfirst out of the
crawlspace. He stood up in the pump room, clothes spotted with grime, offered a
wan smile to his wife, turned to Bruce, and shook his head. “I checked three. Two
of them had doors down and locked.”

“And the third?” Bruce asked.

“That was the vent. Same deal, different door. Kind of a
slatty kind of door.”

“Damper,” Bruce corrected him.

“Well, it was also locked.”

“Fffffffuuuuuuuuuuuck,” Bruce said, exhaling heavily. He
kicked over a chair. “Fuck you, chair.”

Using the drawings that he had recovered, Bruce had been
trying to find a way into the aft of the ship that didn’t involve strolling
past a dozen security officers. But there were only a handful of between–deck
passageways large enough to fit a person, all of which were apparently shut
with the same kind of bulkhead doors blocking the main streets. Griese had
offered to investigate those on his behalf — the underground stuff had always
been Stein’s specialty due to Bruce’s diameter issues.

“I did only check three,” Griese said. “Maybe one of the
others will still be open?”

Bruce shook his head. “Don’t bother.”

“So, what now?” Ellen asked. “Can’t you bypass that somehow?
Isn’t that part of your job?” she asked. “What is your job, anyways?”

Bruce righted the chair he had just kicked over, then kicked
it over again. “Probably. No, definitely. It just won’t stay secret for long.
They’ll have a big screen which will start flashing red, saying some asshole is
opening doors.”

Griese sat down at the crate that was serving as their
workbench. He gave his wife a grimy hug, which she squirmed away from. He then
turned to the plans open on the terminal in front of her. Neither of them had
actually admitted yet that they believed the theory about the ship splitting in
two. But given the goodwill they generally felt for Stein, and the ill–will
they generally felt for security officers, it hadn’t taken much convincing on
Bruce’s part to get them involved.

“Have you come up with any brilliant scheme we would employ
if we could actually get past these doors?” Griese asked.

Bruce jabbed the terminal, dragging the image on the screen,
his heavy touch spinning the terminal around as he did so. “Sort of. If she’s
anywhere, she’ll be in the security base. Not that we’ve really got a good way
of getting in there anymore. Not one that doesn’t require shooting a bunch of
dudes in the face, anyways.”

“I still don’t see what’s wrong with that plan,” Ellen said.

“Too many dudes. Too many faces.” Bruce tapped idly on the
terminal, the map shifting in a jerky manner. “If she is here,” he said,
pointing at the holding cells, “she’s completely on her own.”

Ellen snatched the terminal from Bruce’s hand and
concentrated on it. Suddenly, a startled look appeared on her face. “I’ve got
it! Okay, here’s what we do. Bruce, you put on a skirt. I’ll bake a cake with a
file in it. Then you go to the security chief, seduce him, eat the cake, and stab
him in the neck with the file. Ok? Good, because next the plan gets
weird
.”

Bruce snorted, not especially amused, and not game enough to
return a volley. He nodded absentmindedly, eyes moving up, drifting across the
pipes running across the ceiling, continuing to nod, the nod starting to make
him look a bit unhinged. He stopped mid–nod. “Oh, shit. Cake. Of course.”

“Shit cake?” Griese asked.

Bruce looked at Griese solemnly. “That’s right, friend. Shit
cake.”

A lengthy pause, accompanied by more crazy nodding from
Bruce. Griese and Ellen shared a glance. “I sure hope he’s using that as a
figure of speech,” Griese said.

“Bad news for them if he isn’t.”

“Bad news for
everyone
if he isn’t, I think.”

§

Leroy Oliver made his way to the front of the crowd, his
best friend Rick close behind, helping him through the mass of people with
judiciously timed shoves. The plaza in the northern end of the garden well was already
full, crowds spilling over into the surrounding streets. Even with the short
notice, a lot of folks had shown up to see their mayor speak. Or get arrested.
Or shot. Anything interesting, really.

Leroy collided with a bulky blond man, who pushed Leroy back
harder than Rick could push forward. They had reached the front of the crowd,
on the southern edge of the plaza. There wasn’t much to see — a desk had been
dragged out of an apartment building and placed against the wall. A loose
semicircle of stupid–looking guys was arrayed around it. On top of the desk,
Leroy could see men adjusting some sort of device on a stand, the sound
equipment that would be used to broadcast the mayor’s voice and make it sound
more regal. The whole operation looked laughably makeshift.