(Copyright Act Admissions/Lanham Act Disclaimers. This piece infringes copyrights owned by Sega and DiC. It is not a product of Sega, DiC, or Archie Comics. All available rights are reserved.)
Tolsalvey, Robotropolis, 8 Floreal 3230
The phone rang, her land line. Throughout the hopeless week she'd felt lethargy filling her, pooling in her feet and legs and arms like heavy stuffing in a ragdoll. But Molly Lotor leapt at that phone like a trained pet, rolling off the couch and scampering to her feet, sending a little chip of plastic to the floor when she ripped the handset from the mount. "Hello?"
"Molly?"
"Baxter?" she cried, and she wasn't able to keep the relief from her voice. "Thank gods! Where have you been?"
"Are you okay?" the human asked.
"Yes," she said, and then "no," and then, "I had to—Kolensky—it's been a bad week," she finished.
"Get to my apartment. Now." He barked out the address like a quarterback calling the play action.
"Baxter, I can't. I'm under house arrest; Kolensky has a camera—"
"Fifteen minutes, get here." The last of his syllables were eaten by an ocean roar of fuzzy sound.
"Baxter, this phone—you shouldn't—"
"Damn it, move your ass over here!I need to talk to you now—"
Molly slammed the handset back on the wall mount and turned, heard it clatter onto the kitchenette tiles behind her, bent back around and grabbed it and put it back on the mount and it started to slip off again, and she felt that some sort of hook was gone that kept the handset in place, and then she ran for her door, the faint harmony of the dial tone receding quickly behind her.
Bus to the bridge, leap off it, wait horribly at the security checkpoint while the guard scratches at the little red dot on her ID that means potential treason, wondering if Snively has told these guards to arrest her. Maybe, she thought, looking at the river, she should just kill herself. She couldn't imagine living like this much longer.
"Go on through," the male said, returning her ID.
Molly stopped running at the northern edge of the downtown, laying her palm on the rust-pocked newsbox and retching fruitlessly down at the gutter while the legs of her shorts dug into the burning rut they were cutting in her thighfur. Her job was an expired fiction; her teaching position was in jeopardy, but all of that was secondary: Baxter was going to kill her. She had betrayed him and he was ordering her to his apartment so he could kill her. But he might not. Kolensky was definitely going to kill her. Someone was going to kill her, and she had to obey the man least likely to kill her. That was Baxter. She was his slave, and she had angered him, and with a squeak from her throat that was something like laughter she forced herself to start running again, to throw herself at her master's feet and beg for a chance to earn his forgiveness.
When she buzzed the door clicked open without a word. She stumbled up the stairs, the aching cramp in her belly bending her to look at her watch—twenty-five minutes, an unthinkably short time in which to reach the near east side from Molineaux—and knocked on the walnut door beneath the number, gasping, eyes stinging, panting openly.
The door opened a couple inches and Baxter nodded absently. "Oh! Right, come in."
"I'm late," she gasped.
"Don't worry about it. I just got in from the airport, I can barely think—come in, come."
She followed the human through as he walked down a narrow hall past a kitchen into a colorless library, shadowed in horizontal flares of sun from between the slatted windowblinds. About three times the kind of place that her money and furred skin could by. There was a human dress shirt, worn and torn at multiple points in the expanse of fragile white fabric, balled on a low-slung modernistic black leather chair with chromed steel arms and leg-structure; a fresh one was on Baxter's shoulders, the pointed collar turned up against his throat like the edge of a cloak. He was looping one of those bizarre human ties around and around in front of his throat-apple, looping the thing into some black-and-blue-striped noose.
"You wanted me?" Molly asked his back.
"What?—No," he said, threading the knot taut and carefully flipping the collar down around it. "But I'm having a showdown with Snively—did you know that's how he pronounces his name? With Captain Kolensky this afternoon, and I wanted to find out whether he would try to involve you somehow. My guess was if you could get over here pretty quickly on short notice, you couldn't be part of a trap. Not a well-organized one, anyway." He nodded, turning to her. "And you did. How'd you get across town so fast?"
"You're okay?"
Bemused grin. "Barely."
"Why didn't you call?" Molly was still breathing hard. "Why didn't you call me after things went to hell with the ambush?"
"Oh fuck, I forgot. This . . . bomb went off in front of me, if you can believe that, and then I had to go to Vorburg, and up there . . . ." Baxter shrugged, fastening the buttons over his wrists. "There's just been a lot going on."
"You're not angry," she said.
"About?" he asked, with the self-satisfied smirk that he sometimes wore when he felt particularly smart. "No, I'm not angry. Wait here until I get back."
"Here?" she said. "In your room?"
"You're here already, aren't you?"
"Where will you—what are you going to do?"
"I'll let you know what I can when it's done."
"Where are you going? What are you—"
"Gods, I got to get moving, okay?" He picked up a thick manila folder, waved it at her. "It'll all be fine. Don't worry your pretty head about it."
Molly struck Baxter in the face.
He had not been expecting the blow and there was no flinch, but Molly was not weak, and she did not slap him but cuffed him, aiming the heel of her palm at the front of his little pushed-in non-snout. The force of it turned his face a little off true before he turned back to stare at her, brown pupils tightening with shock, fear creeping toward offense. "What—"
Molly hit him again. Her muscles had been fallow and building tension all week, all year, longer, and the sense of acting on something was so pleasing that she just kept hitting him while he threw up his hands, his tie somehow winding up flipped over his shoulder, while he said over and over again with the halting speech of a choking man, "Molly—Mol—M—Molly—"
"Do you like this?" she was yelling at him, slapping the top of his head, following him to the corner as he tried to take shelter beside his bookshelves, "Do you like this?"
"Moll—I'm sorry, Molly, stop!"
"Do you think I like being treated like this? Do you care about me at all?Do you like being hit?"
"Yes!"
She stopped, left hand tight around his shirtcollar, right poised in the air.
Baxter cringed, ratlike, looking up at her, at her hand. "I mean, no—yes to the—the other one—"
The raccoon grabbed the man's tie and hauled upwards, screamed in his face. "Get out!"
"I—"
She put a hand on his shoulder and threw him towards the kitchen, almost tripping him over the edge of a glass coffee table. "Get out!"
He backed away from her, turned and stampeded for the door. "I live here!" he protested.
"Get out! Get out!"
He turned back on the stairs to see her start down after him, the bulk of her fur filling the doorframe, snarling face lowered so that it looked like her skull was anchored between her shoulders, and after that he didn't stop running until he was in the noon sun, turning at the curb to raise his hands to his chest in a shallow imitation of a boxer. The front door shut with a click behind him, the glass a mirror of golden sunlight. When it didn't open in a quarter minute, he strode forward and pressed his hands and face to the glass, looking at the dark, empty lobby. He stepped in an unthinking circle on the sidewalk patting his pockets, finding wallet and phone and no keys. Pulling out his phone, he dialed for the police . . . . and then stopped, thumb over the send button.
There was no reason for Molly not to be killed, at this point, other than her potential value to Snively in locating Baxter himself, which, at this point, unbeknownst to Snively, was nothing. Calling the police to get her out might as well be killing her.
With perfect timing, his cell phone was buzzing. Baxter prayed for a wrong number, turned it over and saw a call from Code 19. "Hello?"
"Captain Kolensky can no longer meet with you at Napiers Hospital." It was a woman, but not Lila Spitz. Baxter didn't recognize her.
"No shit. You read the papers?"
"You will go to the Eastview Park. It is close to your place of dwelling, but you will not go there directly."
"Who are you?"
"You will follow the route I dictate." The woman had a warm central Mobian accent, but wedded to the precise, cold tones of a soldier or functionary and that peculiarly Vorlandisch nominative command form. She dictated a ridiculous route: through the city center and over the river, then back east over the river again and back to the park. It multiplied the entire distance tenfold or more. "You will follow the route exactly. Wait by the flagpole in the middle of the park. You'll be approached by an associate of Captain Kolensky. Go now."
"What's your number if I have a problem?"
"I don't have one. I'm broadcasting to the cell network directly."
And then she wasn't. Baxter was successfully unnerved.
Baxter collapsed his phone, walked to the curb and sat down, leaning against a hot cherry car.
For a week, he had been making greater and greater leaps after the rottenest, most reeking bits of intelligence, finally packaged into a deluxe stinkbomb for the bosses, something to finally shut Pulaski up, socking it to him hard enough to make those lips part and spit loose just the finest amount of involuntary respect. Something, also, to at worst lock him in a MAD relationship with the Director's angry nephew. He had felt fast and sharp and very, very smart.
Now he was sitting on the curb, eighty sovereigns in his wallet, over a hundred thousand sovereigns in debt not secured by either of his government employers, a passport with a pair of missing entry and exit visas, and a folder full of incriminating records prepared by Kogen Baird that constituted the stinkbomb. The last two of these were in his apartment, which had just been stolen by his confidential informant.
How can you steal real estate?
He had to meet Snively Kolensky in about an hour and a half, at which point Snively might try to kill him. Alternatively, Snively might try to have him arrested for espionage, a death-penalty felony of which Baxter was guilty.
He was starting to feel a little less smart.
The Captain's initial suggestion that they meet at Napiers Hospital was ominous, given events of the previous day. At Napiers Baxter could have been disarmed by security, then been required to meet in a place without witnesses. This new place, a public park, was a lot better . . . . but the steel sandwiches of the security checkpoints at the river weren't. Snively was clearly in some sort of trouble after the bizarre massacre he'd apparently caused, but it would only take two or three allies left in ISO for someone to cry look out, he's got a gun . . . .
Eastview Park, the sign said. Robotropolis Park District, Established 3221. The timing was a little suspicious, and the topography added to it: in the middle of a swampfill city, a tiny park filled with hills that limited the east view—as well as the views on the north, west, and south—to the second floors of low-rise "middle"-income flats, squatting over the place like people poking their toes at some interesting but not particularly enticing mystery. The hills didn't roll so much as erupt from the dirt fully-formed like Winged Victory from the brow of her father: grassy and smooth. Baxter was convinced they were piled atop bombing wreckage the government hadn't bothered to drag from the city. Anemic, crippled trees clung to them, but their roots didn't penetrate far; if trees could have emotions, they would be unpleasantly surprised.
Baxter walked around a slight right bend in the cobbled path and encountered what he was told to expect: flagpole with halogen bulbs sprouting from it like warts, dull in the daylight. He walked up, touched the little bubbles in the greenish paint, then had his face shoved into it with a soft, metallic ting. "Hands behind your head. Spread your legs."
"Gods," he hissed, but he didn't fight, for two reasons. One, it was the lady from the phone. Two, she had a grip like a pair of handcuffs.
She finished patting him down, and, weirdly, removed his cell phone from his pocket. He heard it get crushed on the cobblestones. Then she stepped back. "Safe, Commander."
Baxter turned. It was the fake robot monster. He blinked, looked over the contours of the skunk's armor, verifying that they were to the specs they had given to Molly to give to the Royal Army, that they weren't just some new suit. They were.
"How much did you cost?" Baxter marveled.
"My uncle says too much, but don't believe him," Snively rasped as he hobbled forward behind his monster. There was a laugh in his voice but not his face. His cheeks and throat were bruised. Some knot of pain in his neck kept tugging at the corner of his mouth like an invisible fishhook. His arms hung limp, his hands at the end swollen like a surgical glove when you blow air into it, fingers bulging and discolored up to the unmoving knuckles. Tongue depressors or popsicle sticks pressed into his palms, tied down with some kind of thin surgical tape, preventing excess movement and anchored deeper in his sleeves. "Surprised?" he croaked.
"That you've got a new female to do your dirty work for you?" Baxter asked. The monster upended everything. He had no idea what was happening. Bluff. "It's practically your standard operating procedure."
Snively gave a horrible grin. "Well, no one has ever accused me of lacking charm with the ladies."
Baxter glanced nervously at the sculpted, post-sexual creature beside him. "Can I be the first?"
"Cute, but 'you have a problem with women' is so trite. Can you leave the psychoanalysis to experts, such as me?"
"You know, Lila said something about a female warden at—"
The monster punched him in the stomach. Punched in the stomach, however, did not adequately convey how hard the thing drove her fist into his belly. She punched him in the lower spine, via the front of his body. Then she grabbed his throat and choked him against the flagpole.
Snively leaned at him, a horrible, shivering energy in his face, like he was about to fly to atoms. "I'M SORRY, DID YOU JUST ASK ABOUT IRONLOCK?" The film was shuddering, about to fly out of the sprockets, lock and burn. "I DON'T THINK THAT'S A VERY INTERESTING SUBJECT; DO YOU?"
"Nkk. No. No." Baxter shook his head. The monster tilted her hand with him, to let him shake it.
"THEN WHY DO YOU WANT TO KNOW ABOUT IT?"
"I don't," Baxter whimpered, tears on his cheeks.
"GOOD!" Snively took a pneumatic breath through locked teeth and then let it out of him in a fit of laughter like a burst of steam from an emergency release valve. "HAHAHAHA, woo, hah! Glad we see eye to eye on that one." He nodded at the monster and she let Baxter breathe. "I brought you here because I need your help. Thanks to Renee's decision to bug your cell phone and the computer intrusion skills of my lovely Amanda here, I can truthfully tell you that I now am in sole possession of recordings that prove you've committed espionage with another spy in the Lachels Embassy in Robotropolis, with the goal of humiliating Mobius and destroying its reputation. Either you protect me from my uncle or I send the tapes to Justice and State." He gave Baxter a moment, watching the news sink in. "And if that doesn't sell you, I could have Amanda here kill you. Or what's left of your family in Lachels. Or your raccoon girlfriend. I could get very imaginative."
He let that one slide, focusing on the insane part: "You want me to protect you. From your uncle."
"You've got proof of my dealings with the fascists, no doubt. Take the case to him, get in his good graces. Show some goddamn imagination!" Snively sighed with exasperation.
". . . . That's protecting you?"
"I'm leaving my day job to pursue my interests in cybernetics full time," Snively smiled. "It will require extensive travel. I need someone on the inside to smooth travel for me."
So much for bluffing. Baxter was totally and obviously lost. "So why'd you send Lila after me?"
"She practically sent herself, she was such a true believer. Anyway, things are simpler for me now that she's dead."
"She's dead?"
Snively rolled his eyes. "The fascists killed her! Keep up!"
". . . . But you were giving the fascists money," said Baxter.
Snively blinked, then broke out in laughter so intense he winced at the pain it caused him.
"Or laundering it," Baxter corrected. The evidence was still a little ambiguous. "They transfer dirty money to you, you route it through Science Ministry's medical programs, and then . . . it must go . . . ."
"You're looking at where it goes!" Snively gasped for air, tears on his horrible cheeks. His expensive monster put a hand on his shoulder to steady him, shared his mirth with an affectionate smile. "I've been robbing them blind, you idiot! Everybody I used to set up the deal has been assassinated! I've been hiding out in a hospital basement since Thunderday to stay alive!" He threw back his head in an airless cackle.
"Huh," Baxter said. It was starting to make a little sense. "So that's why I was supposed to cross the river and back. The checkpoints would have made sure the fascists couldn't follow me to find you."
Snively went totally silent, though he still smiled. "You didn't cross the river?"
The monster leapt to cover her master from any gunfire. If the snipers had been waiting for a better shot over the steep hillsides, they didn't wait any longer. The bullet hit the monster's armor with genuine sound of ricochet, dulled slightly by the ablative effect of the black plate. The sudden tumult gave Baxter a sense that the shooter was close, and he spun and hunched, gaze flying over the blank, reflective windows rising above the park's sheltering hills, one of them, the roof—
Snively turned and hobbled back along the cobblestone path to the street; behind him the monster pulled a pistol from a holster that was actually glued to her hip and fired a string of shots high into the solar glare flaring around the building to the south, gouts of flame matching its loud barks. Five shots and she ran after her Snively, reloading with another clip from her body of tricks.
After a moment's hesitation in the sniper's silence, Baxter ran after them. The monster seemed good at keeping the people around her alive.
The gentle path serpentined for them, and the artificial hillocks provided good cover. A police siren swelled in the air—that was fast, Baxter thought, remembering for some reason the monster's ability to command the cell network. Everyone but the monster stopped when another sniper shot came up low and kicked a clot of sod flying over Snively. He recoiled and his monster grabbed him in a bear hug, making him squeal as she hustled him forward faster than his injured body wanted to go. A pale ghost in a charcoal suit ran up the sidewalk and Baxter wondered whether he'd seen the man before at the airport, or back in Terscala, wondering whether the man and his maniac brethren harbored any hope of getting their money back with that banana-clipped machine pistol he aimed at Snively.
The monster threw herself into a matador's spin that turned her into a dust-devil of black and sunshine gleam. Baxter could have sworn she had been shot and shot but the bullets must have gone between her limbs or into her armor as she aimed with impossible caution and put a round into the man's face. He flew backwards, arms opening out like the petals of an ash flower, gun silent.
Snively was curled on his side by her feet, a squirming, screaming fetus with thinning hair. The monster moved to pick him up, but stopped as a red police cruiser screeched to a halt on the far side of the street, rear wheel jumping the curb. Baxter's heart leapt: Cops! He threw up his hands, running forward. "Help!—"
Before the driver's door could open the monster snapped her pistol forward with one hand and shot him through the window, backsplash of red against the powdered glass. Then she holstered the gun and ran, shoulders low like a linebacker, and threw her left shoulder into the door with a sharp bark of effort, the crumple zone sagging. Her right hand seized the underside of the body and with no visible strain under her featureless armor it lifted. She braced her feet against the asphalt as she pushed forward, the car's front right tire blowing out under the lateral strain, and then the dry, brittle crunch as the prowler rolled onto the sidewalk and punched its roof through the windows of a ground-floor apartment.
Baxter stood with hands in the air, motionless. He was terrified.
But not of the sniper, which he didn't remember until he felt his right arm explode.
After that things were spotty as his consciousness decayed. Baxter felt grass against the back of his neck, the broad warmth and the distinct blades pressing into the fringe of his haircut, the white hot pain everywhere under his shoulder. Somehow he saw a hand, saw the fingers moving at his volition, but it was in the wrong place. Police over him—
"Sniper!" he gasped. "Sniper." He jerked his head to indicate behind him and passed out again.
Someone took his belt off. He kicked his heels against the dirt and the dirt gave way. There were people in white coats against the sky—paramedics.
"Oh thank gods," he gasped. He may have gasped it more than once. Someone tapped a hypodermic needle and knelt beside him.
Someone put a black bag over his head.
"Hi!" Kima said again. There was such energy in that voice. All gone, all gone, when he'd seen her last.
Josh felt himself starting to cry. "Oh shit," he sobbed.
"You've reached Kima and Josh," Kima continued. "We can't come to the phone right now, but we'd love to hear from you! So leave a message at the tone."
Josh hung up before the tone. He'd already left one long message and two short ones, so there was no point. He opened the line again and hit redial, listened to the rings.
"Hi! You've reached Kima and Josh. We can't come to the phone right now, but we'd love to hear from you! So leave a message at the tone."
She was probably out at the University. Her cell phone was clearly turned off, because that dumped him to voicemail without a ring. She was probably in a lecture or something. There was no reason to assume that she was sitting at home, had listened to his first message, and then just sat there, refusing to pick up. Hell, she said she'd love to hear from him. Right? Just to check and make sure, he hit redial.
"Hi! You've reached Kima and Josh. We can't come to the phone right now, but we'd love to hear from you! So leave a message at the tone."
Your lover would like to talk to you, honey. I know he's ignored you for two years while he plays around at saving the world and commits multiple felonies and buys murders and has a grand old time. But he's in trouble again. Please pick up the phone. I promise I'll come home if you just pick up the phone.
"Hi! You've reached Kima and Josh. We can't come to the phone right now—"
He hung up. This international phone bill was really getting out of hand. He called 411.
"Yeah, international. High Demon, Lachels." He waited. "Premier's Office. Yeah, the Premier of the country, yes. . . . Yeah, you can connect it, thank you."
He sighed.
"Yeah, hi," he continued after a moment. "I need to talk to someone who could address a possible conspiracy within the Foreign Affairs Department? Who would that be? . . . . I work at the Lachels Embassy in Robotropolis. My name is Joshua Dursine." He gave his employee number and waited. "Sure, I'll hold."
With a squeak the gurney bent behind Baxter's hip, turning his back almost upright, filling his headspace with intense, enervating whirlpools, prolonged by the opiate fog and the lack of any external reference beyond the black bag. Then the bag was whisked from his head, burning the tip of his nose. He squinted, but the room was dark and quickly resolved itself.
Standing in front of him was a mongoose in a human-style navy blue suit that had been lived in for well over twenty-four hours. The mongoose knocked a cigarette from a carton and slipped it back into a vest pocket; beside him on a desk an ashtray smoked like a recently doused housefire, rising at a near-perfect vertical in the undisturbed air, positioned carefully so as to not interrupt the view of the two minicams of the tri-vid recording setup aimed at Baxter.
The desk was big enough to pass beyond ostentation and into levels of wealth and power approaching science fiction. It was an aircraft carrier of a desk. If the institution of monarchy had developed during a period of modern industrial technology, they wouldn't have bothered with really nice chairs. They would have used this desk.
Two people sat behind it. One was a white mouse court reporter, her pinkish ears folded down over a pair of earbuds, delicate, quick fingers working a shorthand keyboard as she tracked the audio that was simultaneously sent to a discrecorder.
The other person was Julian Robotnik.
Baxter thought that his right arm was gone, but he wasn't sure.
"My nephew," Robotnik said, "is out of control." His voice was deeper than on trivid, grinding through registers that dropped well below the mass media definition of a mellow, powerful voice. "You're going to tell me everything that you know about him. If I'm convinced that you haven't been complicit in his treason, you may live to see something other than this room."
He coughed once, putting his fist before his lips, sinking down, down into the groaning leather. Then he pointed at Baxter: "Go."
Kain Blackwood - 2009
