Severance (37 page)

A moment passed before the involuntary comedian delivered
the punch line. “The Chinese kid doesn’t want to be a popsicle when he grows
up.” The sound of a dozen officers shifting uncomfortably. Thorias pursed his
lips and nodded. “Because they’re going to freeze to death,” the comedian
added. The color began to drain from his face.

“What’s the other kid being Chinese have to do with
anything?” one of the other officers asked.

“Nothing. I don’t know. It’s a new joke. I’m still working
on it.”

“It’s good,” Thorias said, still not laughing. “I think it’s
funny.” To judge by his officers’ reactions, this was somehow much more
intimidating than yelling. Thorias continued, “Just popping by to tell you to
keep up the good work. Carry on.” He turned and began walking away, a thin
smile on his face.

“That joke was awful,” Helot said quietly as they left the
barricade. “For a lot of reasons.” Thorias didn’t say anything. “You need me to
list them?”

“Just a joke,” Thorias said.

Helot began collecting his words, needing to correct his
valuable subordinate as delicately as possible. “We can’t…” he began saying,
interrupted by the sight of Thorias flying into the air, arms, legs, and
seemingly several other limbs all flailing uselessly. With a sickening thump,
Thorias went down hard on his back.

“Sir!” someone yelled. A half–dozen officers from the
barricade ran over as Thorias gasped in pain. Helot stood back, still not sure
what had happened. A pair of officers crouched beside Thorias, helping him up
to a sitting position.

“What the hell did I step on?” Thorias yelled. One hand
clasped to his back, his head darted back and forth, looking at the patch of
floor he had just trod over. Helot couldn’t see anything out of the ordinary.

One of the officers, the involuntary comedian, prodded his
foot on the ground behind Thorias. “Careful, Brint,” another officer said, too
late, as Brint’s foot slid out from under him, sending him into an
uncomfortable looking set of splits. A strangled gasp escaped Brint’s lips as
he rolled to his side, clutching himself.

“What is that?” Thorias said, getting to his feet. His hand
reached behind him for a moment before recoiling, clearly desperate to rub his
ass, but unable to lest he further damage team morale and discipline.

“It’s that slippery shit,” another officer said, his voice
rising to be heard over Brint’s moans. “There’s patches of it all over the
fourth level.” He got down on his hands and knees and probed the ground
carefully with his hands. He then reached into his pocket and pulled out an
orange marker, drawing a big circle with an X through it over the slick part.

“Where’d it come from?” Thorias asked. “Where’d
they
come from? And why hasn’t anyone told me about this?”

The officer looked up from his handiwork, indecision on his
face. “Would you tell your boss that you just fell on the floor like an
asshole?” He looked around. “We don’t know where they came from.”

“It was that fucking little robot, I bet,” Brint said, who
had managed to get to his knees, both hands still buried between his legs. “Remember?”

“No one saw it except for you, Brint. And how would a robot
make things slippery?”

“Get back to your posts,” Thorias ordered them softly. The
officers hustled back to the barricade, Brint hustling a bit slower than the
rest. “I’ve seen enough,” he added, before blinking, seeming to remember who he
was talking to. “How about you? Sir?”

Helot didn’t smile, but it was a struggle. “I’ve seen enough,
Chief.”

But as they walked back to the nearest elevator, his mood
darkened. If he had needed any further proof that he had less control over the
situation than he should have, the sight of his security chief demolishing
himself on a simple walk would have done it. Slippery shit? Tiny little robots?
What the hell was happening on his ship?

§

As the light from the windows turned the hospital room from
yellow to orange, there was a noticeable click as the lights on the ceiling
turned on. Stein looked up at the ceiling in surprise, then down as another
glass of Grape was set in front of her. Griese winked as he poured another for
himself. On the other side of her bed sat Bruce and Ellen, also Graped up.
Their vigil at Stein’s bedside had gotten quite a bit rowdier in the hours
since Stein had woken up, much to her doctor’s dismay.

“The infamous flying quadruple cockpunch!” Ellen squealed,
doubling over with laughter. “I had completely forgot about that!”

“The what?” Griese asked.

“The infamous flying quadruple cockpunch!” Ellen repeated,
no less delighted the second time around.

“It was a lot more than four punches,” Bruce corrected her. “More
like eight.”

Ellen frowned. “Octocockpunch!” she squealed again.

“Seriously, what are you guys talking about?” Stein asked.
She had thought they were talking about something about the Breeders, Stein
mostly just listening as her shady friends illuminated the shadier parts of
their past.

“It was when we were fabbing some stun grenades,” Ellen
said, her eyes flicking down to her bag at the foot of the bed. Stein knew full
well that she was the only one in the room not armed, although at least her
friends were still making attempts to conceal their weapons. “We nearly got
caught by a security officer,” Ellen continued. “Bruce saved us.”

“With the octopunch?”

“Octo
cock
punch,” Bruce corrected her.

“I’m going to need a little more than that.”

Ellen swirled the Grape around in her glass. “We were in one
of the ratty fab plants we were using at the time over near America. I forget
which one. Zimmer was there, Bruce, myself, and Vince.” Ellen looked around,
checking that she had everyone’s attention, then continued. “So, one of the fab
lines breaks down. Vince, Zimmer, and me are trying to start it up again when we
hear a voice behind us:
Put up your hands, you punks!
”

“This would be the victim of the infamous octocockpunch,
then?” Stein asked.

“Ahh, don’t spoil it,” Ellen scolded her. “Anyways, we turn
around and there’s this little doofus of a security goon, and he’s got his
little pop gun out. We freeze. Zimmer was carrying — he was supposed to be
watching the street, but had come inside to help us with the machine. Bruce was…”

“In the upstairs office,” Bruce filled in. “Standing guard.”

Ellen snorted. “Guarding a fucking sandwich.”

“And did you see any security officers eat that sandwich?”

Stein smiled. “So, you’re standing there, hands up. What
next?”

Bruce drained his glass and tossed it across to Griese,
drips of Grape specking the bedspread over Stein’s legs. Griese caught it and
poured another refill. “Well, I hear all this commotion below, and after
securing the sandwich,” he said, patting his stomach, “poked my head out the
office window to have a look–see. Sure enough, there’s a security officer
standing there with a pistol. Directly below me.”

“So, you jumped?” Griese asked.

“I did.”

A pregnant pause, as they waited for Bruce to continue. “And?”
Stein finally asked.

“He missed,” Ellen said with a smirk.

“I didn’t miss. The ship moved.”

Everyone but Bruce groaned. “
The ship moved
” was the
standard excuse for every botched athletic feat on the Argos, something everyone
learned as a child. In this particular case, there was a bit of truth to it,
though only a bit; from that height, the Coriolis effect couldn’t have shifted
Bruce’s descent more than half a meter.

“So, we’re standing there, about to be shot or arrested,
when the dumbest projectile that ever was falls out of the sky. Boom.” Ellen
illustrated an explosion with her hands. “Everyone freezes. We’re staring at
the cop, he’s staring at us, and we’re all staring at Bruce lying on the floor.
Then the cop starts laughing. So, we start laughing.” Ellen paused here to
refill her drink. “So, we’re laughing, right, enjoying the moment, when in a
blur, fatty there spins his legs around and trips up the cop. Bruce pounces on
top of him, knocks the gun away, and they start wrestling.” Grape sloshed out
of Ellen’s cup as she pantomimed this. “Somehow, Bruce here gets the security
guard into an advantageous position, and then WHAM WHAM WHAM WHAM.”

“The octocockpunch,” Stein said.

“Not yet,” Bruce corrected her. “WHAM WHAM WHAM WHAM. That’s
eight.”

“At which point Zimmer zapped the poor guy, preventing the
possibility of a…whatever nine is cockpunch,” Ellen concluded.

“Noctocockpunch,” Bruce suggested. Ellen threw her mostly
empty cup at him, which bounced off his forehead and clattered to the floor. The
group broke out laughing.

Stein immediately regretted the laughter, as it sent jabs of
pain up her right side. Something awful had happened to her upper arm in the
crash, involving some pointy part of the van’s drive system driving itself
through the floor and into her arm, nearly amputating it. Now wrapped up in a
healing wrap, the arm didn’t hurt too badly anymore, so long as she didn’t move
it. Her leg actually felt worse, despite just being bruised. Years of obtaining
similar injuries in similar circumstances had caused her to start classifying
them as
Brucing
. Seeing Griese looking at her with an expression of
concern, she forced a smile. “How’s the play coming along?” she asked.

Griese held up his hands. “It’s not. All my players
disappeared. Something came up. Some sort of riot. Don’t know if you heard —
you were gone for a while.”

“Ahh.” She watched the quiet fellow for a moment. “But you’ve
been keeping busy though?” No one had yet told her what exactly Griese and
Ellen had been doing while she and Bruce were on the run, but from a couple of hints,
she got the impression they had been busy with some kind of deadly new toy.

Griese shifted in his chair and looked away. “Yeah.”

“I won’t ask.”

He smiled sadly, still looking away. “You just did.” Ellen
gave her a small shake of her head. Bruce burped.

The door opened, an interruption everyone was probably
grateful for. Stein’s doctor, a lanky man called Berg, entered smiling. “How’s
my famous patient?” he asked. He broke step for a moment, seemingly surprised
by the number of people in the room.

She shrugged, one arm doing a better job of it than the
other. “Okay. How are you?”

Berg seemed to seriously consider that question. “I’ll live,”
he finally said, before laughing at his own joke. He poked something into his
medical terminal. “You’ve been up for a few hours now, so I’d like to run a
brief brain scan on you. If I may? Check for a concussion, cognitive damage,
tau wave synchronization. It’s easier if you’re awake.” He looked at Stein’s
friends, then down at the Grape stained bedspread, then to the bedside table
and the three empty bottles standing vigil there. “Might be easier if we’re
alone, too.”

“I think he wants us to go, guys,” Bruce said, standing up
abruptly, knocking his chair over backwards. “As a student of human behavior,
that’s my reading of the situation.”

Ellen rolled her eyes, but got up as well, patting Stein’s
leg as she did so. “We’ll be just outside.”

Stein smiled and watched her friends leave. She looked at
the bottles on her bedside table and then up at Dr. Berg. “They’re just happy I’m
alive.”

Dr. Berg nodded. “Well, they can hardly be blamed for that.”
He wheeled the bedside table out of the way and sat down beside her, poking some
instructions into his terminal. “Could you look into the yellow light, please?”
he asked, holding the terminal up to Stein. “Have you had any dizziness?
Blurred vision?”

“No,” Stein said to the yellow light. “Not lately. Not since
I woke up.” She remembered the fuse torch and the flash of letters, and quickly
weighed the pros and cons of keeping that secret to herself any longer. “I was
seeing one weird thing though. These strange shapes in my eyes. Before the
accident, actually.”

He looked up from his terminal. “What did these shapes look
like?”

Stein swallowed. “They were letters. I saw an extremely
bright light that nearly blinded me, and when I closed my eyes, I could see
letters.”

Berg’s eyebrows crept upwards. “What kind of light?”

“It was the blade from a fusion cutting torch.”

“What’s that?”

“A really bright blue light.”

Berg shook his head. “And it made you see shapes? That
looked like letters?”

“They were definitely letters. Is there any way you could, I
don’t know, scan my eyes?” She pointed at the medical terminal.

“For what? I still don’t know what you saw.” Berg tapped something
into his terminal, eyes scanning the screen as he waggled his head back and
forth. “Okay. I guess this couldn’t hurt. Now, look into the sensor once again.
Good. Now look up. Look down. Look left. Open your eyes wider, please. Thank
you. Look right. Your eyes are fi…huh.”

“What?”

The doctor scratched his forehead. “I honestly don’t know.
But the terminal’s seen something.” There simply weren’t enough doctors on
board the Argos for more than a handful to specialize in the various subfields
of medicine. Almost all doctors were generalists, relying heavily on the semi–intelligent
diagnostic and prescriptive recommendations of their instruments. “Hang on,” he
said. “Okay. Look into the sensor again. This could be bright.”

Stein looked directly into the sensor. A nearly blinding
light appeared, which she struggled not to close her eyes against. Forcing them
open, she watched the light as it started vibrating, flickering, and changing
colors. The letters appeared in her eyes, fainter than before.

“Wow. Do you see data?” Berg asked.

“What?”

He looked up from the terminal and squinted at her face. “The
letters in your vision. Do they say ‘data’ in all caps? Like this?” He turned
the terminal around and showed her a false color image of her retinas, the word
“DATA” etched in badly misshapen letters.