The Waking Nightmares, page 11
Winston finally gave in and stared at Holly as she sat across the aisle from him, legs crossed. Her heel swung like a conductor’s baton in time to the music playing in her head. Like a cat in a sunbeam, she looked back through heavy-lidded eyes.
“You fell overboard,” Winston challenged her look.
“I did,” she answered softly. “And you came looking for me, too,” her smile smacked of satisfaction at Winston’s failed attempt to save her.
“You saw?” Winston said.
“Mmmhmmmm,” she murmured seductively.
“We couldn’t find you,” Billy Joe added.
“This jolly lot picked me up a few hours before you arrived, responding to my emergency beacon,” she explained, stretching out her arms on the rests to the seats on either side of her, crossing her ankles. “They found me floating, unconscious, near that amphiboid corpse and brought me aboard.”
“That’s why we couldn’t find your beacon,” Billy Joe said, connecting the dots.
She nodded in confirmation and added, “While you were searching for me, I was unconscious in their sick bay, but I saw the sensor logs after I recovered.”
Winston couldn’t help but squirm at her tone. Even without the limbic manipulator, his feelings toward her fizzed and roiled under her smug gaze.
“I did what any self respecting airman would do,” Winston mumbled humbly.
“Ohhhh…and we know about your self-respect. It’s such a big thing for you, too,” Holly purred.
Then the verbal claws came out. “How’s Valerie?”
Winston’s anger flared but the intended rebuke died in his mouth as his heart became ice.
Holly’s eyes twinkled at the direct hit.
The other skypirates strapped into their seats on the other side of the airship leered wolfishly at him. His eyes flicked over to their hungry stares.
“Oh, yes! I much prefer this subject,” she said with a crooning lilt and leaned forward expectantly. “Did it take a few days or weeks to get back into your home instance to visit? How is the little woman? Has she noticed any changes in you lately?”
“Changes?” The word hung in the air between them like a kite tethered in a windstorm.
She gave him a mocking scowl. “You know precisely what I’m talking about. There’s no use hiding it from me.” Holly’s voice rose and fell in sing-song amusement.
“In the short while we’ve been in each other’s company again, I have noticed some big differences. You’ve changed a lot since I had you face down on that container floor,” she teased, tapping a finger next to an elegantly winged eye.
The skypirates didn’t even have the common courtesy to hide their lurid interest in Winston’s torture at Holly’s hands.
“You say lots of things. What’s that supposed to mean?” Winston glared at her, frustrated by her insinuations, trying to pour psychological cement on his own doubts.
“You mean…” Holly looked shocked. “Bubby? You realize, don’t you?”
“Dunno what yer talking about, Miss H-Nightshade,” Billy Joe said.
Her brow furrowed for a second with intense scrutiny as he caught himself. Then she brightened and burst out in jolly musical laughter.
“Oh, this is too precious!” she laughed gaily, stomping her feet, unable to contain herself. “Oh, oh, yes, cheis yes! This is going to be so amusing!”
“What are you babbling about?” Winston shouted at her. His fists balled up.
“Oooh,” she cooed. “Aren’t you the tough customer all of a sudden?”
The dropship darkened abruptly, leaving them in the dim artificial light of the cabin lamps.
“Ah! Don’t worry, you’ll learn what I’m talking about soon enough,” Holly said, alerted by her pilot’s cybercom. “We’re here.”
There was a gentle descent and bump as the dropship landed inside the compound’s industrial lab hanger. Holly popped her restraints and stood up with a stretch.
She went to the cockpit, sashaying between her crew to collect Quentin, and gave orders to the rest. “Take the wounded to the medical lab. Looks like some sort of mass outage, so don’t expect much help. Take extra care with Lord Filburt here. He’s in a delicate state. Fashion some litters if you must, and don’t trust the auto-medics to work. Malcolm, Jane, with me, and we’ll escort the Baron and his entourage to see Lady Amanda so we can take care of business and get out of here.”
With orders given, Holly escorted Quentin out of the dropship, like he was the nerd who scored a date with his crush, the prom queen.
Winston glowered at her as she strutted past, a train of skypirates behind her, giggling like hyenas.
When the Baron and his entourage exited the skypirate dropship, the skypirates split up. One group whisked the desperately wounded Lord Filbert down the hallway to the medical clinic. Billy Joe went to the maintenance station to refill his nanosand for his arms and drive skirt. The remaining three, with Holly on the Baron’s arm, marched down to Lady Amanda’s office. A few yards from her office door, the lights came back on.
“Ah! It seems they fixed whatever was wrong with the network,” Quentin said happily. “Hope that helps Chief Shircan get things under control back at the library.”
Suddenly, Rooihemp grabbed his head as loud audio spiked into his ear. The security comms exploded with security breach alarms and an abduction warning.
“Stand down. Cancel anti-abduction response. Proceed Charlie Delta Three. Repeat, cancel anti-abduction response!” Rooihemp ordered into the comms.
A chorus of compliance came back over the comm, but Winston suspected that there was a security net being cast about them. The skypirates couldn’t escape without a fight if things went sideways.
At the end of the hall, he saw two periscopes peek around the corner. The houseguards were at the ready. Quentin opened the door of the lab to find his sister-in-law at her desk, staring into space, with a frozen horrified look.
“Amanda?” Quentin called softly. Her eyes snapped onto him, then flitted about, taking in his entourage. The look grew more panicked till it burst like a wave.
“Oh? Oh! Thank Xiao you’re all right,” she gasped. Her chair knocked over as she rushed around her desk and hugged him. Quentin laughed nervously for a moment, then hugged her back.
She moved back to arm’s length, looking him over like an overprotective mother examining her child. “I couldn’t forgive myself if something happened.”
“Aman- Amanda! Stop fussing!” Quentin said, grabbing her arms, trying to calm her.
“It wasn’t a sure thing for a while, Doc,” Winston said. “But Shircan and the rest of us got him through. Lord Filburt took a purg of a shot though, thanks to these numbbehngers.” He hooked a thumb back toward the skypirates who were standing against the back wall of her lab office watching, but ready for action. Again, he saw the house guard’s periscopes looking through the glass.
Amanda could not meet Winston’s eyes as she nodded a thank you to him. Then she recognized Holly.
“Nice to see you again, My Lady,” Holly said cordially.
“Ah,” Amanda said with stiffening formality. “I am glad to see you survived. Thank you for all you did on the Sierra Madre,” she added, her face now hardened.
The thanks she gave may have been sincere, but it was filtered through a ceramic mask of diplomacy. The awkward pause between the women filled the room like a foul smell.
“Yes. Well, I can tell I caught you at a bad time, so I will keep my business here short,” Holly said, echoing the quality of Lady Amanda’s thanks. “First things first. Where are my cases? I’ll have them now and leave you to take care of whatever is going on in private.”
“Your cases,” Amanda repeated, looking befuddled for a minute.
“Aw, cheis,” Winston said, rubbing his mouth and chin. He’d forgotten about them with all that had been going on.
“And the penny drops!” Holly turned to look back at him. “That’s right, Flyboy. You didn’t think I’d come all this way just to behng with your head, did you?”
“The thought occurred to me, actually,” Winston said. His acerbic wit generated a nasty sarcastic smile back at him from her.
“You mean those armored, biometrically sealed cases, with the null-scan linings inside scratched up corundumite casings?” Amanda asked.
“Those would be the ones,” Holly agreed.
“I sent them over to the decryption lab at Quentin’s research library,” Amanda said.
“You did what?” Winston shouted.
“Quentin has code-breakers and other cryptographic cypher machines in his library. It seemed reasonable that it would be a better place to open them. So, they’re over in his cryptography office,” Amanda explained.
Quentin held up a finger to excuse himself, went over to a terminal and started working.
Winston gave a loud groan and kicked a trashcan across the room. He glared at Holly, then turned away in disgust, turning his gaze out the windows and into the hanger.
“What’s your problem?” Holly snarled at him.
“Other than you being here? It means we can’t get rid of you till you get your cases.” He watched the giant fabricator inch higher. It was the first time he noticed his new ship’s base and the design was already radically different from what he expected.
“Yeah? So?” Holly said sharply, as she walked over and got in Winston’s face. Her color pulsing eyes no longer intimidated him. They were just irritating now.
“You’ve no behnging clue what kinda trouble that’s going to cause,” he ranted.
“She don’t get her cases, Cap’n don’t get paid,” one of the skypirates spoke up. Then, in a more sinister tone, said, “He will get paid.” His fellow crewmates nodded in agreement.
Winston sneered at the skypirate, “You don’t get it. You’re in a horror movie now. Adding this distracting side-quest is going to get people killed!”
The skypirate scoffed at Winston’s vehemence. Disgusted, he turned his back on the foolhardy brigand and Holly.
“It’s gonna be hard enough to deal with those floating monsters from purg that’re coming out of the air vents over there, killing people. Then there’s that naqh fungus eating everything it touches. I don’t even wanna know what’ll happen if it touches a living being,” Winston explained.
“What do you mean by ‘eating’?” Holly demanded. He could hear her frustration that her physical presence didn’t cow him anymore and he dared turn his back on her.
“Are these the fungus and creatures Chief Shircan told me about?” Amanda asked.
“Yeah. Some weird mother-of-pearl looking garbage. It’s made out of silicone, we think. Something you’re familiar with. The stuff grows on everything and is all over the research library complex,” Winston said.
“And you put my cases in the middle of your mess?” Holly exclaimed, disregarding his cheap shot.
Winston ignored her.
With a sudden jerk, his world spun around and he found himself literally nose to nose with Holly. Her eyes were cycling through color like a psychotropic swirl. In a flash of lucidity, Winston saw through her act and glimpsed the fear at her core. What was it that scared her so?
“Nothing better happen to them,” she threatened.
Winston was sick of being manhandled and gave her a headbutt, knocking her back. Her mouth dropped open. He hoped to not have to repeat the move because that hurt, bad.
“Back off! I didn’t do it,” he snarled and swiped his arm in a circle, breaking free of her grasp then thrust a finger towards Lady Amanda. “She did!”
“Be nahqing glad I found where you hid your cases before we disassembled the Sierra Madre. They almost became part of that, out there,” Winston said, stabbing another finger toward the nanofabrication frame building the belly of his new ship.
“Watch yourself, tough guy,” Holly warned, then, as if a light went off over her head, she turned to Lady Amanda.
“Speaking of which…Would you care to comment on Winston’s brand new behng-bag of bravado? What did you do to Winston’s brain, Doctor? He’s sure gotten muy macho since last we met. I’d say it’s sexy, but he has the worst timing.”
Shame blossomed in deep red on Lady Amanda’s face.
Winston froze, then glowered at the doctor. “What does she mean by that?” He took a numb step toward her. His words felt weak in his mouth.
“I had to make some difficult choices, Winston. I’d hoped you would understand in time,” Doctor Amanda admitted, backing away.
A cold-water chill trickled down his spine. Now it made sense. His doubts resolved into horrifying clarity and his suspicions proved true. The evidence was all there.
He was shooting guns like an expert marksman, better than most of her guards. As he considered it, he had just beaten up a bunch of skypirates like an action hero with no training in hand-to-hand combat and it came so naturally!
Despite being winded and lacking the physical conditioning for it, his skill was advanced enough to compensate for his poor health. The lifelong fear of having his brain reprogrammed was now reality, igniting a deadly fury more intense than he’d ever felt in his life.
“You behnged with my brain!” Winston roared, flipping a chair out of his way as he approached the noblewoman. “I’m not your lab rat!”
From the corner of his vision, he caught Holly’s entertained smirk. Her obvious delight at the depth of his violation made Winston’s brain sizzle all the more.
Doctor Amanda had been talking all this while. Words poured out of her but fell on deafened ears, as Winston was in his own inner hell. He swung his focus numbly back in her direction.
“... I needed to keep Quentin safe. He would not stay home like he ought to, so I had to find other options. You needed work, and a new airship. Why not solve all the problems at the same-” she flinched as Winston flipped over a table she had slid behind. “-same time?” she stuttered.
Amanda’s eyes grew wide keeping pace with Winston’s seething anger. She tried to soothe him with a weak smile. “So I added a few minor, small, little... upgrades?”
Winston felt a subtle change in air-pressure as the office door opened. “A few upgrades?” he growled.
Several arms tried to subdue him with a gang tackle as the guardsmen reacted to the now actualized threat to the Baroness. With some deft moves, Winston slipped their grabs, sending one guardsman into the hanger window glass, shattering it into a white spider web.
“Looks like you amplified his aggression a bit too much,” Holly teased Lady Amanda.
He plucked a pair of guardsman stun batons out of their holsters and swept their legs. Winston drove another man face first into a nearby cabinet with a loud crunch and spray of blood. Another attacker he torqued over Lady Amanda’s desk and into her office chair, knocking both onto the floor in a tangled heap.
From the corner of his vision, Winston saw Holly bouncing up and down slightly, like a gladiator’s girlfriend cheering on his martial display. It annoyed him all the more, but his focus never wavered from Lady Amanda.
Winston stood in the center of a battered heap of Puala’Lolo’s best fighters. The skypirates stood back, watching with a ‘not my problem’ attitude.
“Yep, definitely too much,” Holly quipped. “You made yourself one purg of a killer, My Lady! I might want to borrow him sometime.”
“Hoss, what’re you doin’?” Billy Joe gasped.
Winston whipped around to see his horrified loadmaster staring at the pile of guardsmen he’d just maimed. His blood-spattered hands brought forward the realization of what he had just done.
The remaining rational part of himself agreed with Billy Joe’s horror, but the red tinged rage still darkened his mind. A terrified animalistic instinct was in his body’s pilot’s seat and his rational self was along for the ride.
“I don’t understand. They were just small upgrades. They shouldn’t have caused such a reaction,” Amanda protested, trying to analyze what had gone so wrong, as she cowered in the corner of her office, nowhere left to run.
Winston spun back around and stalked toward her. “A few small upgrades don’t do this! You wanted a killer, so you souped me up like one of your mechoids!” Winston shouted, making Amanda flinch.
“I haven’t touched your morality or memory! I just added skills you could use, shou-” Amanda pleaded against Winston’s emotional torrent.
“You didn’t bother to ask!”
Winston gave a crushing back kick to one of the house guards who tried to ambush him from behind, continuing to advance on her.
“Tsk-tsk. Your violation of cyber-ethics aside, you can’t amplify emotional response without consequences to morality and decision making. Or so one of my cyberneticists warned me,” Holly lectured the terrorized doctor. “It could create a suppressed trigger for psychotic events. In this case, may I present our dear Winston as case in point?”
“Xiao on a cracker, Hoss,” Billy Joe breathed.
“And because you had a need, and I was at your mercy, you took advantage of me,” Winston hissed. “Mother told you to be my protector and patroness. Paid you well, too!”
“And I have and will be, but now your value is-” Amanda tried to explain.
“I don’t give a cheis about what you think my value should be! It’s my mind! My life! My decision! For behng’s sake, you could have given me the chance to say yes!”
“I didn’t have time!” Amanda pleaded as Winston loomed over her.
“We had all the time we needed!” Winston thrust his hand forward to grab her by the throat, desiring to choke the lies out of her.
“Winston, no!” shouted Billy Joe, snaking his coal-black sand arms around his partner, restraining him. “Easy now, Hoss,” he soothed into his ear. “This ain’t worth killing over, but we’re gonna make it right.”
Winston screamed in inarticulate frustration, remembering how he couldn’t break free the last time Billy Joe caught him in a half-nelson.
“I warned you, Doctor,” came a familiar voice from a computer speaker. “You shouldn’t have tampered with his mind.”
