04 His Last Box
I peel out of the shipping container like the Devil himself is on my heels.
Which is pretty darn close to the truth.
Sadie chatters into my ear about the emissions coming from the thing as it boots up, while I burn will to hop up over the two-high stack of containers. I somehow resist the urge to yell "parkour", not least because it would be a serious tactical error.
The noises stop just as I land. Then I hear the clomp clomp of metal on metal as the machine stomps out.
Where are you, little pig?
I'm not sure why the suit makes everything he says come out greedy. Maybe it's a prototype. If it was designed for military use, you'd think they'd use will or rage, like that one cyborg in that Global Frequency story. Then again, I may well be the only person who can see the Spectrum on the planet.
I made you the second you showed up.
Well, no point maintaining the disguise. I tell the holoprojector to go and be a good little distraction while I consider my options. I hear the mini-mecha bugger off after it, and take advantage of the minute or two of silence.
All right, activate Iceman Mode. The idea was for the ring to suppress my physiological response to stress, especially the type that caused me to make bad decisions in combat.
Like, for instance, throwing plates at bad guys. Plates.
How did I even get into this mess in the first place?
"Nice Vespa."
"Cheaper than a Lincoln. What's up, Lamar?"
"You know your PI company you're always telling stories about?"
"I'm not technically a PI, but, yeah, it's better than just waiting for my top-fade. You need a card? Got a girlfriend who you think is cheating?"
"No, uh, nothing like that. Can you keep something on the DL?"
"If you ask me to. Just to be clear, when I tell stories, I change some of the details to keep it anonymous, like those doctors on Untold Stories. Also, I reserve the right to write about them in a book later."
"...You serious?"
"Yes. Your brother?"
"What-how-"
"You know that thing Sherlock Holmes does when he looks at someone and he can tell who they are from a bunch of small clues? It's kind of like that. When was the last time you heard from him?"
"A week ago. He was one of the security guards on that show where they auction off shipping containers."
"Oh yeah, the black guy. I loved that episode where he stood there with his arms crossed and said nothing. All right, give me his cell number, I'll see what I can do."
What do I have? What do I want? How do I get there? Why did I never finish reading Luminosity?
1) A ring, some friends who can't get here in time, and the contents of any containers I can reach and crack open.
2) To neutralize the threat by any means necessary. Lethal? If I can't mission-kill the armor, or the man... Hold, pending further observation.
3) Dropping container? Tabled. Blowing up a ship? Too much collateral. The old bullfighter ploy? Tabled.
Observed, oriented, decided. Time to act.
"Good afternoon, Mr. Benson. Sorry to keep you waiting."
"It's all right."
"Have a seat."
"So, why do you want to be a guard on the show?"
"Student loans. If you don't mind me asking, what happened to the last guy?"
"Rick stopped coming to work one day. Happens in this line of work. Corporate told me to fix the problem, so, here you are. I understand you got another job since you submitted your resume?"
"I work from home. It won't interfere."
"Right. The job consists mostly of standing around looking tough-"
"I can do that."
"-And occasionally moving things as the bidders require."
"I can do that too. Used to work in an electronics store, and I'm a big guy, so I was always the one to move stuff."
"Well, we'll be fine as long as you don't give the bidders any tips, ahahaha!"
"Ha ha ha."
"You'll be working with Washington's old partner, Veracruz."
"Do I get a locker?"
I am acutely aware of my need to practice fine control with my flight.
George Lucas said that the AT Walkers from Empire were inspired by the container movers from the Port of LA; those things that look like the mother of all AV carts, that pull containers up on cables.
So, it turns out that even with an alien hypercomputer on your finger downloading schematics into your brain, it's actually quite hard to get one of them to drop at the drop of a hat. Almost as if it were some kind of safety concern or something!
Hence the flight. Hence the hanging upside-down, acutely aware of the unforgiving steel twenty feet below me, and the even more unforgiving concrete below that. I keep an indicator in my HUD, even though Sadie assures me that we totally have more than enough juice, you big baby.
Wait, why am I doing it the hard way? I drop to the container. Sadie, calculate the amount of rage to apply to get this crate within about 250 pounds of breaking and execute.
(! That will leave it quite sensitive to any jumping. ¡)
That's the plan.
It occurs to me that he's not using any of his suit's weapons, though I can clearly see them. He just keeps trying to paste or roadkill the decoy.
He would make sport of me? Then I shall trap the hunter.
...That would sound a lot more impressive if I wasn't hiding on the roof of a cargo container. I'll have to punch it up for the memoir.
Sadie, while I'm waiting for him to show up, call Tritter. Give her a précis of the situation. End with "come at once, if convenient. If inconvenient, come anyway."
(! Done. ¡)
Thanks. And our guest has arrived. Is the hologram in position?
(! Roger. He's under us. ¡)
Aaand...jump!
The container creaks before the cables snap. I go to flight, and I like to think his eyes bulged out comically in a cartoonish fashion before it crushed him.
I may have been feeling a little bit smug as I dropped to the deck. Okay, we need to-
Clever.
There's a thoom as something hits the wreckage.
Not clever enough.
Another impact, and the wreckage shifts.
I don't stick around. Sadie, find me a ship that hits the criteria for plan B.
"Morning, Floyd."
"Morning Mr..Aldrin. Don't worry, I'll clean it up."
"How's the case going?"
"Great! Just great, sifu! Except for the part where it's not really going at all."
"That's Chinese. You never explained the whole undercover thing."
"I dunno. I just thought it would be like the TV shows."
"Like that episode of Bones where Kathy and Booth become circus performers?"
"Yeah. But it's just been boring. Just standing around or moving stuff when the producers tell me."
"Security's usually boring."
"Private or public?"
"Little of both."
"Pass a coaster, please. The most exciting thing was that time someone got food poisoning from the food truck, and being hit on. "
"The woman or the gay couple?"
"The woman. I'm pretty sure her husband doesn't know. Unless they're interested in that sort of thing. Doubt I'm the first brown pony she's wanted a ride on. Thank you Lord for this food, may it do my body good, Amen."
"Are you actually going to eat that?"
"Waffle, egg, bacon. All perfectly normal breakfast foods."
"They're not normally in a sandwich."
"I like to consider myself a trendsetter. Remind me to show you my hot dog taco idea sometime. But as for right now; Sadie, send the casefiles to the holoprojector."
"You are thorough, aren't you, son?"
"I got the take from everyone within two Bacon numbers of our lost little lamb. Sadie - the ring - is really good at gathering digitized information. I've sifted through it, even used some pattern recognition algorithms I found online."
"Where?"
"I think you don't want me to answer that."
"Hypothetically."
"If I had a magic space ring that could plant quantum entanglement nanocomputers in certain trunk lines. Hypothetically. Like I was saying, nobody is acting like they had anything to do with his death. No significant deviations."
"So, nothing stands out at all?
"I can't find his actual phone, but as best as I can tell, he was just a normal guy. "
"What did you find in his apartment?"
"...Um."
I once saw a video where someone snuck onboard a capsized ship that had been righted and towed to dock to be scrapped. It was a careful advance through the night, pausing behind boxes and around corners to listen and look for workers.
That is not remotely what I do.
I tell Sadie to dump the boat's plans into my head, and the spike of pain makes me nearly do a Miss Myanmar 2015. I recover about half a second before he comes crashing through the containers like the Igor suit towards the end of Iron Man 3.
Time to go.
I lead him on a merry chase, through the bowels and bulkheads of the ship, which is abandoned after the financing fell through. I even spit red fire at him, ineffectually, until finally he turns a corner and sees that he's trapped me against a wall.
Found you.
I turn around, fear written on my face. I imagine he smiled, internally, before he charged.
Then he stopped smiling as he went through the hologram where the external bulkhead should've been, and dropped straight into the ocean.
One born every minute.
I call back the holoprojector from the deck below me as I consider the situation. Even if the suit is watertight, there's nowhere nearby for him to get out of the se-
(! Disturbance detected. ¡)
Oh come on.
You know that scene in Avengers where Tony bursts from the water? It's a lot less amusing when it's being done by a guy you hate, who just hovers there, somehow looking smug without even having a face.
Come on, mayate. Hit me with your best shot.
"Euurgh."
"Problem, Benson?"
"...know what Veracruz? I'm gonna level with you. I'm actually a PI looking into the disappearance of Michael Washington. I was hired by his brother."
"Is that why I saw you poking around?"
"Yeah. The last ping I got to his cell phone is somewhere near here, but it's not precise, and I can't find the phone itself-"
"Oh. It's...it's in my locker."
"What?"
"Found it, thought he dropped it. So I stuck it in my locker and pulled out the battery, I figured when he came back, I'd just give it to him. But he didn't come back. Here."
"Okay, there's still a charge in the battery."
"How did you know the code?"
"...His girlfriend gave it to me. Looks like someone sent him a text. 'Meet me at-' Do you recognize that container code?"
"I can look it up."
"Perfect. Lead on, Macduff."
Overclock.
Okay, this Mother Hubbard is too OP. Writer, please nerf.
I have to believe the writer or ROB wouldn't put me into this situation if I was underlevelled.* Unless I'm supposed to die (unlikely, he's a sub-boss at best) or run away. But I'm not ready to throw in the towel just yet.
Right. My ring.
The suit was completely emotionally opaque, except when he spoke, and then greed came through loud and clear. But he was immune to fear. Rage didn't go in, just impacted on the surface.
At least, from the outside.
I need a construct. Some kind of carrier, like the protein shells that coat viruses. Compassion can channel other lights and also phase. But I'm probably going to lose the signal the moment it penetrates.
Wait.
Armor-piercing.
I saw a documentary once, about High Explosive Anti Tank RPG rounds, and how they used an explosion to focus liquid copper into a thin stream. And thanks to our pal, I have no surfeit of what I need
Except for the fact where I wasn't really compassionate about the people running for their lives. I took this case out of boredom, not because I really cared.
At least, not about real people.
Sadie, drop Overclock.
I make the pose. Hands together, draw one back-
Clint "Hawkeye" Barton. Used to be a circus archer, and a bad guy. I've done what I thought was the right thing, only to realize I was very wrong later. Played by Jeremy Renner in the films, his partner was the lovely Natasha "Black Widow" Romanoff, and this was not a good time to be thinking about pretty redheads, or I'd start thinking about Her-
I can feel the string under my fingers. The ring starts to tint.
Or maybe it was time. Katniss "Mockingjay" Everdeen. Volunteered for the Capitol's twisted gladiator games out of love for her sister, became the figurehead of a revolution. I had been stung by wasps, just like she had. Walked right out the door into one, took the stinger right in the lower lip. I could empathize, though mine weren't burdened with the name "Tracker Jackers" by some marketing department.
The...bendy thingy creaks as it bends.
Robin of Sherwood. Got his green rear handed to him by Little John, Friar Tuck, I'm not sure if Maid Marian ever got in on that action. I know what it's like to try your best and still fail.
The fletching brushes my draw hand.
His name is Oliver Queen. After five years trapped on a desert island, he comes home and finds everything he knew changed. He falls into old patterns, but he's just going through the motions, when what he really wants to do is-
Well, I didn't want to be a costumed vigilante. But other than that.
The boxing glove head forms on the end. Gotta respect the classics. Especially when you don't have to worry about physics.
I was using "rather irritable" before, but as I recall, the real good stuff comes from rage, the pain that you get from a loss. Which leads to a very simple question; what have I lost?
A Wise Man denied his Homeland.
And a simple answer.
Everything.
(! He is not going to hurt anyone else. ¡)
The core of the ring shoots through with red. The arrowhead fills with liquid. Red like blood, burning like fire.
Will this even work?
Breathe in.
Breathe out.
Open your eyes.
Let fly.
"On three, ready? One, two, pull!"
"Rragh!"
"Madre de dios, the smell!"
"Yeah it...ain't exactly a dozen roses. On the other hand, we found him."
"What's left of him."
"Why didn't anyone notice the sm-this isn't a normal container. It was sealed and...wait a second. The walls are thicker than they should be. I think this is shielding. Probably whatever's under that tarp back there."
"You seen this sort of thing before?"
"Not outside of CSI, no. And NCIS, and Law and Order. What do I tell Lamar?"
"What's under here…?"
"Whoa. What is that?"
(! Object appears to be a small mecha, with the legend "Test Unit 017", in Korean. ¡)
"So...what? Is this some secret North Korean weapons project someone smuggled out of the country?"
"You know Korea unified in the 80s, right?"
"I mean Northern Kore-don'ttouchthat!"
"Why not? It's just a robot-whoa!"
"...Sadie... Did that robot just eat Veracruz? Just turn him into a beam of light and suck him up? Did I see it right?"
(! Confirmed. ¡)
Oh no. I'm right here. Who's Sadie?
I walk over the ground, littered with debris.
Turns out that when the suit is damaged badly enough to go flying all over the place, it eventually dumps the pilot. Or maybe he pulled the equivalent of the yellow handle. I don't really care which, as the result is more than satisfactory; the suit lying on the ground, eating its guts out, and Veracruz desperately crawling away from me.
Well, satisfactory except for the scent of burning electronics and flesh.
He'll be lucky if he keeps his legs, which look like a rendering glitch in a game. Sadie, shut down my sense of smell.
(! Roger. ¡)
I place a foot on his back, and press down. He moans as his hands slip out from under him, a low, animal sound. I grab them and twist them behind his back, slickness under my fingers.
Don't think about what you've just done to this man. Focus on something else. Anything else.
(! Police approaching. ¡)
"Veracruz," I say, as I bring out the safety cuffs. "You have failed this city."
-PR-
*Authour's note: That's exactly what I do. Throw 'em in the deep end and watch them try to struggle out.
