The Last Enemy, page 9
part #3 of A Time Traveller's Best Friend Series
“I don’t think finding you a spork counts as necessary work,” said Marx. “Some people would even say it’s a mercy not to have to use one.”
“Them people prob’ly ain’t tried to eat a tuckbox,” opined Kez. “They’re prob’ly rich an’ stuff. I want me spork! I’m flamin’ hungry!”
“Fine,” said Marx. “We’ll find you a spork. But we’re not blowing anything up.”
“Not a spork,” said Kez stubbornly. “My spork. The one wot they said was included.”
Marx stared at her for a thoughtful few seconds. At last he said, “I don’t know why I’m always dragging terriers around with me.”
“’Zat mean we’re gunna get my spork?”
“All right, all right, just don’t bite anyone.”
There was a red dot blinking on a small screen at Mikkel’s console when he woke up. He didn’t like red dots on his console in general, but he liked red dots even less when they were on this screen in particular.
Groaning, he rolled out of bed, and slapped a hand onto the communicator that was waiting within arm’s reach.
“We’re on alert,” he said, his voice still rough with sleep. “Kez and Marx just popped up again.”
When he strode out into the passageway, still pulling on his uniform jacket, Arabella was already waiting for him; probably had been for some time already.
Mikkel sent a somewhat sour look in her direction. “If you’re planning on shutting me in my room or hitting me on the head or—”
“Just here to help, sir,” she said soothingly.
“To help whom exactly? Those employers of yours? Yourself?”
“Don’t be like that, sir. Ostensibly, my employers are Time Corp.”
“Yes,” said Mikkel, trying vainly to straighten his collar at the back. “That’s exactly what I’m complaining about. Ostensibly. Ostensibly, I’m a high-functioning and well-decorated officer—no one knows that I’m actually a complete wreck just waiting for the day when those two finally derail my career beyond repair.”
“You’re not a wreck, sir,” Arabella said comfortingly, rising on tiptoes to fix the collar for him.
Her hands were warm and firm, and Mikkel, distracted from the urgency of his mission by the fact that Arabella was equally warm and very much within arm’s reach, had to remind himself not to put his arms around her.
“And why do you always arrive so early?” he complained. It was unfair of her to be so firm and business-like about his collar when he found it so appallingly difficult to resist slipping his arms around her. “The first time I met you, I was just getting out of the shower; now that you’re ostensibly working for me, there’s never an incident with those two where you don’t turn up while I’m still getting dressed or just getting out of bed.”
Arabella smoothed his collar from the back to the front in one, swift, precise movement, and for the briefest moment, Mikkel was aware of the tug of her hands as she gripped his collar.
“That would be because you’re so adorable when you’re half-dressed and frowsy, sir,” said Arabella, with stunning forthrightness. She patted his chest once, then released him and started down the passageway toward the bridge.
“Wait!” Mikkel said, belatedly breaking free from his stupor. He strode down the passageway after her, calling, “Come back here!”
“Absolutely not, sir,” said Arabella, walking just a little bit faster. “I have a feeling that might be more dangerous than an encounter with Kez and Marx. They’re waiting for us on the bridge.”
Kez had made no promises not to bite someone. She hadn’t decided she would bite someone, but she liked to leave her options open. Sometimes biting happened on the spur of the moment: a necessary adjunct to a current situation.
Marx knew that, and in Kez’s opinion his not reminding her again was tacit agreement that if the situation called for biting, biting was allowed. Kez herself would, of course, be the best judge of whether or not the situation called for biting.
Still, when they arrived at the production plant by the simple expedient of a quick Core search and an unused loading bay that was just big enough to house the Upsydaisy, it seemed that the point was moot. Marx had doctored his usual workman’s identification to give them easier access, but there was no need to use it: not only was the loading bay completely unpeopled, the production floor stretched as long and empty as a desert ahead of them when they entered the double-doors at one end. A few drink-bottles stood beside some swivel seats along the conveyer belts as if the owners had merely gone to lunch, but the production floor itself was messy and cluttered. Kez had worked a few production lines in her short life, and she was aware that employees didn’t leave for any kind of break without tidying the floor first.
It was needless to remark that the place was empty: Kez, however, in her annoyance, felt the need to draw attention to the fact.
“Ain’t no one ’ere,” she said disapprovingly. “No wonder there’s problems in pro—in production.”
“Maybe they’ve gone to lunch,” said Marx. “Listen, kid, empty is good.”
He said that, but Kez was fairly certain he didn’t mean it: he had that look to him, all sharp glances with just his eyes moving, and he had already positioned himself where he could see in all directions.
“Ain’t,” she said, shooting him a look of her own as she started up the room.
“Look,” said Marx, grabbing a spork off the production line closest. “Here’s a tuckbox spork. Time to take off.”
“Ain’t mine,” said Kez, without stopping.
Marx’s voice came from behind her, grey and hard. “What do you mean, not mine?”
“Ain’t mine,” Kez called, and broke into a trot. If Marx was too close, he would grab her and drag her back toward the Upsydaisy, and even though she could slip out of his grasp by dodging through either time or space temporarily, that was cheating and not allowed unless necessary.
She heard him start to jog behind her—heard the muttered, Third World words he was using to swear—and hustled a bit faster, grinning. Kez could fairly smell mischief, and she wanted to know why that Mischief had deprived her of her spork when it was most needed. She kept up a good speed and used her smaller size to nip under things Marx had to go around, always just in the lead. She had only a vague conception of why he was so desperate to stop her from running wild in this particular facility—even Kez was aware that an empty facility was not a good sign—but even if he didn’t want to investigate further, she did.
There was a snarl from behind her, and a threateningly low voice said, “Kid! Get back here! If I slip in one more puddle of tuckbox slop, I’m going to pack you off in your own tuckbox complete with a spork!”
“Can’t,” Kez said back, though he wouldn’t be able to hear her from behind the gurgling tank she’d skirted. Her assertion was untrue, if one looked at it from a purely physical perspective. When one looked at it as a matter of principle, however, it was obvious that Kez couldn’t do as she was told. “Gotta get me spork! Heck!”
This last exclamation was forced from her rather than said by her: Kez collided with a wall of sheer muscle that was as unperturbed by the collision as a real wall might have been, and bounced backward with some force.
She said “Heck!” again when she was able to draw breath, staring at the sheer height of the giant she had bounced off. Fascinated, she demanded, “Wot’d you stand in growin’ up? I fort only weeds grew like that!”
The giant tilted his head at her without understanding—Seventh Worlder, Kez realised, belatedly, and possibly didn’t understand Universal—then swooped and seized her by the collar.
Curious and not yet frightened—she had her ability to shift, and, more importantly, she had Marx—Kez allowed him to scruff her without doing more than grin offensively at him as she dangled from his huge hand.
The giant lifted her until he could take in the full effect of that offensive grin, and said in Seventh World dialect, “What is this little thing?”
“Bad luck,” she told him, switching to dialect; and since the offensive grin wasn’t having as much effect as she would have liked, she scowled at him. “Why didden you give me a spork, eh?”
“What?” he said, the word nasal and drawn out in dialect.
“Shoulda given me a spork,” she said, more clearly. She could see Marx over the muscly shoulder: he tapped a finger to his lips and melted back into the conveyer belts and swivel seats of the production line. Again in dialect, she said, “Because then I wouldn’t have come, and then you would’ve gotten away with all of this.”
The giant froze, then shook her once more, this time until her teeth rattled. Through the fuzziness of the assault, Kez heard him growl, “What do you know about this, you little rat?”
Kez flung this way and that, instinctively curled into herself and wrapped her legs around that beam of an arm, snaking her arms around it as well, and thus twisted away from her collar, attached herself by the teeth for good measure.
He screamed, and would have shaken her off if he could, but Kez was firmly attached; legs, arms, and teeth. The giant spun in a circle, still viciously shaking his arm to fling her away from himself, and Kez saw a second man flash in and out of sight; heard the babble of his voice testily advising the giant to stop and listen. The giant did neither, and Kez, feeling her grip waver, did a small shift that let her pre-empt and soften the inevitable release, tumbling to a stop several feet from the giant.
He retreated a step, cradling the injured arm with his other arm, and the second man stepped forward. Like Marx, he seemed to be very well aware what Kez was capable of, because he seized her by the ear instead of the collar, his hand out of reach of her teeth.
Kez could have shifted once again, but now she was curious. There was something about being with Marx that gave her the space to be curious instead of biting, running, and hiding, and Kez liked having the space to be curious.
She was also still very much annoyed that her spork had been purloined.
The man who had a grip on her ear gave it a bit more of a pinch and said, “Listen, kid; where’s the other one?”
“Summink wrong wiv yer eyes?” asked Kez solicitously.
“There is nothing wrong with my eyes. Where is the other one?”
“I look like two people to you, bucko?”
He twisted the ear, and Kez bared her teeth at him.
“Then who were you talking to before?
“Ain’t a crime to talk to meself, is it?” she demanded, hunching her shoulders.
She heard the clicky pickup of a comm behind her, and the man with a grip on her ear said, “I hear you. Yeah, we’ve picked up a little rat out here. Want to see it, or should we throw it in the freezer with the others?”
The giant looked expectantly at the man behind her. “Well?”
“Freezer’s full,” he said. “Boss wants to see the kid: he says to bring it along.”
Kez could have slipped away then and there, but Marx wasn’t attacking anyone, which meant that things were safe enough for now. Besides, this factory had promised her a spork, she had come for her spork, and she was going to find out why she hadn’t been given a spork. It was obvious that these Seventh Worlders knew something about the state of the production floor, and Kez was very much of the persuasion that punishing anyone but the perpetrators of wrong was a waste of energy.
“Come here, you,” said the giant. Made cautious by past experience, he grabbed her by the neck instead of the collar, where she couldn’t bite him.
Kez only grinned at him, and that seemed to bother him, because he shuffled her until she was facing away from him. She grinned at the back of the second man instead.
First she would find out what they had done, and then she would know who to bite.
“Report!” barked Mikkel as he strode onto the bridge.
“We’ve got a code thirty-four that came in five RMUs ago,” said the commander, pleasingly prompt.
Mikkel waited for him to continue, but the silence stretched out, thin and awkward. Eventually, he said impatiently, “Well? We’ve had six minutes notice now: where are we going?”
The commander and lieutenant exchanged glances before the lieutenant, always the more willing of the two to make a fool of himself, said, “We’re not sure yet, sir. That is; we’re pretty sure, but we’re pretty sure about two different places, and last time something like this happened we went to the wrong one of the two places, so—”
Mikkel tried to hide the sigh that swelled his lungs, but wasn’t quite successful in doing so. “Why do we have two locations again? I thought they found the glitch in the Core that made it look like those two were in two different places at once?”
“They did, sir,” said Arabella, causing the commander and lieutenant to both shoot her an appreciative look. “I read the official memo: it’s on your desk for today. The problem as far as I can tell is that the Core isn’t quite sure yet exactly which version of events is going to happen.”
“That’s exactly it,” said the commander, latching gratefully onto her explanation. “The Core is having trouble narrowing it down to one of two outcomes, and each outcome has a different place for the two of them to end up. It looks like one of them is still wavering back and forth about what decision they want to make.”
“Or we’ve got another Core breach,” Mikkel said, a little grimly.
“Well, yes sir.”
“Either way, we have to wait and see.”
“Yes sir.”
“Make sure she’s ready to go as soon as we know exactly where and when. And get a time lock ready to go: I don’t want to hear that we’ve let them slip through our fingers because we couldn’t get a time lock settled around the place as soon as possible.”
From his side and slightly behind, Mikkel heard Arabella murmur, “And what will you do with them if you catch them, sir?”
He looked back at her, and was fairly certain that she was a hairsbreadth from laughter. Wanting to surprise it out of her, he said affably, “Oh, I don’t suppose it’ll go as far as that, do you?”
Arabella choked a little. “I thought you were quite determined this time, sir.”
“I am,” he said. “But I’ve yet to learn that my determination has any bearing on an outcome when it comes to those two. I just don’t want to make stupid mistakes. If by some chance I do catch them one day, I fully expect it to be because they want to be caught, and I’ll be living in constant fear until they’re off my ship.”
“I’m glad to see you so resigned, sir,” she said. “If it helps, I’m rather sure that there will be a good outcome from this regardless of Kez and Marx.”
“Are you?” he asked, highly suspicious. And then, as she went to assist the navigation officer to double up on co-ordinates, “A good outcome for who, that’s what I’d like to know!”
Kez, dangling from one massive ham of a fist as her captor headed deeper into the building, amused herself by paddling with her feet and scanning the production floor to see if she could catch a glimpse of Marx. She didn’t know what he was up to, but she was sure it was bound to be fun; more, she was certain he wouldn’t leave her here alone.
Deeper into the factory was another set of double doors that were set up for decontamination. To Kez’s indignation, the decontamination gear had been disassembled with some force: she didn’t object to disassembling items with force, but she was very fond of the sudden, icy blast of decontamination spray and the following warm gush of clean air that dried and finished the process.
They passed through the doors without provoking more than a sulky hiss of escaping air from one of the decontamination units, and Kez heard the sound of conversation floating down the hall toward them. The cool wall of industrial fridges on one side, and the frosty edge of a walk-in freezer on the other side gave her the chill that she hadn’t got from the decontamination unit, but when there was no following warmth of clean air, Kez became irritable.
“Don’t go openin’ the freezer!” she snapped at the man who had seized her by the ear. “It’s flamin’ cold!”
“Mind your manners, or you’ll go in there yourself,” he told her briefly, opening the door despite her snarl.
Over his shoulder, Kez caught a glimpse of people—no, she realised, looking into glassy eyes for a brief moment, bodies—and vigorously kicked the second man in the shoulder.
“Oi,” she said. “Wot you lot fink you’re doin’? You can’t pack people into freezers. Even I knows that.”
The giant shook her casually. “Shut up.”
“We only put the dead ones in there,” said another voice from down the hall. “If they behave, they stay in the fridge.”
Kez turned her eyes away from the freezer and toward the fridge doors on the other side—which had, she now realised, locks on the outside of them. When she had looked at those, she turned an angry look on the man who had spoken. She had seen many pleasant-faced Seventh-Worlders: TuanTuan was one of them, with his curving, happy eyes and crooked smile. This Seventh-Worlder’s eyes were as narrow as TuanTuan’s were, but where TuanTuan’s eyes were bright and sparkling, this man’s were hard as black granite.
Almost, Kez thought, her own black eyes growing dark and pebbly, as dangerous as her own.
“’Oo are you, then?” she asked.
“Carrigan,” he said, though he seemed surprised to find himself answering her.
Kez didn’t think it was his real name—not unless he was third or fourth generation removed Seventh Worlder, changing his name to fit whatever world he’d settled in.
“’Oo’d you put in there?” she asked him, tilting her chin at the fridge door.
“The workers,” he said. This time, Kez got the impression that he meant to answer her; that he meant to scare her. He said to the giant, “Bring her in. We’re in the middle of a game and it’s cold out here.”
