Hi, I know it's been years since I've updated this story. I actually have three more chapters written out. I plan to post these, then post a 'treatment' of the rest of the story to provide some closure. I'm working on finishing a Zootopia story, determined for once to finish a complete story. Thanks everyone, for your patience following this over the years-JN
"Target status change for Fry, Phillip, and Rodrigquez, Bender. Termination now acceptable, provided proof of kill documented…."
It was odd how silent it was in Amy's car, with all the explosions bursting outside their window, the flicker of laser lights rastering in the distance, and Nibbler's restlessness, with only a steady hiss of escaping air providing a background to this latest news. Leela and Amy stared silently at the ruby glow at the end of their weapons, half-expecting a voice to say, "just kidding" at any moment. Leela didn't know how long the moment lasted, but shortly thereafter she was squinting at the tractor beam's dynamometer, gauging how much further she could strain the beam, as they reeled just behind the damaged fin of the Donbot's limo. She thought she could see figures struggling on a crude gangway connecting the limo to the PE ship.
"Leel-Lola- why did they-"
A flash of light caught Leela's peripheral vision, and she glanced up to see the gangway shatter under laser fire from the limo. She could see the lasers scar black lines into the electric mucus-colored hull of the ship, before the shrapnel from the gangway blocked her view. Without consciously thinking, she wrenched the controls hard to the port, the whiplash throwing her against Nibbler and Amy. Someone's head cracked, hard, against the windshield, but there was no time to look, as the shrapnel scraped away her starboard maneuvering rockets, as well as Amy's expensive pink paint job. The ship spun wildly, proximity alarms screamed nonstop, and Amy thought she could see pale faces flash by them as they hurtled into the oncoming traffic desperately trying to dodge above, around, and below the expanding clutter spiraling away from the limo and the PE ship.
Leela glimpsed a large tanker truckship lumbering toward them, noted a gap in front of the vehicle, and aimed directly for it. The small ship missed the grill of the truck by inches, and seconds later they could see clear space all around them, the stars shining steadily in all directions, utterly indifferent to the fact that they had almost died.
They barely had time to realize that the forcefields surrounding the starway were down again, before Amy's ship shuddered, and then, as if it had simply decided that enough was enough, completely disintegrated into millions of flake-sized pieces. Leela, Amy, and Nibbler found themselves sitting on nothing but a car seat, an unattached steering wheel resting in Leela's hands, and a cute fuzzy dodecahedron floating in front of their faces. That and something else. Leela blinked. Nibbler floated unconscious next to the ornament. So that's who hit their head on the dashboard.
After one eye blink, Leela held her breath, detached her helmet, seized the unprotected Nibbler, shoved him in the helmet and sealed it shut, back onto her suit, before he even had time to panic. It was crowded in there, and smelled faintly of raw okapi, but it was no worse than your standard mosh pit.
"Le- - Lola, watch out!" Amy's voice cried over her helmet comm.
Their luggage, including the large package the Professor had given them, was now drifting free, and the Professor's package was making a beeline right toward her head. She managed to raise a glove to shield her faceplate, but the package hit her helmet, slamming her head against the inside. Dazed, she fuzzily wished she had never been forced to bring the damn thing—
"Don't force us to take this damn thing. Amy—I mean, Faye and I are going to be leaving in less than an hour, and I have to meet someone at the pizza place in a few minutes." She had to go meet Gary in less than ten minutes, in order to say goodbye for what she hoped would be a short trip.
"Uh, wha? Did you say something? Are you felling sick? Fatally, perhaps?"
Leela fell silent. It would just be quicker to do what the Professor wanted.
He plodded ahead of her through the massive underground cavern that sat underneath Planet Express, a miracle of geology that somehow managed to sit underneath the Hudson River. Besides the main lava pit, there were branches upon branches splitting from the lava pit chamber that ended in inky darkness. They were traveling a short distance along one of these passages now, the red glow from the lava pit still reflecting faintly off the walls. The Professor was moving surprisingly quickly for a plodder, so shuddering, she caught up with her employer, who was now pointing toward a circular platform sitting askew on top of a large pile of rubbish. The platform was about one foot thick and three feet in diameter.
"Leela, this is a combined holmem/communicator hybrid. I thought of it after my hybrid hair dryer/salad shooter didn't quite work out. With this device you can talk with me or Hermes on a secure channel-"
The professor spoke so slowly, her attention wandered, and her eye swept over the large piles of junk surrounding them, clearly untouched for years. She was uncomfortable, but not only because of her tight time schedule. She had actually been in the caves several times over the past several months; indeed, in a passage just adjacent to this, as far as she could tell.
"-in addition, the platform has a semiautonomous capability that embeds a neural network of my and Hermes' brain-"
No one had known she had come here, at least she had hoped. Because after having bribed the holophoner from that creep Zoidberg, soon after her return to Planet Express, she had come here to try to play it.
"-thus if there are gaps in the transmission, the platform will make a very good guess at what I or Hermes were trying to say, based on the Shannon entropy-"
The first few months she had simply put it away, in the corner of her closet. But the grief over her losses had persisted, easy to ignore during the busy delivery days, impossible to ignore during the nights. She had started to dance again, and that had helped. But one evening, after Gary had held her a little tighter during a particularly fast turn at dance class, she had found herself sitting in the apartment, staring at the holophoner in her hand.
"-and the platform will fill in the gaps."
She didn't understand what had motivated her to try to play the instrument. She understood the shame she felt in trying. She shouldn't be lingering on the past. She should have been frustrated by the fact that she couldn't even produce a clear note. She had been embarrassed enough that after a couple of evenings in her apartment, when she was scared that someone, anyone, might hear her, and disturbed by the close vicinity between the holophoner and the bed, she found the most isolated place she could think of, the caverns underneath the PE building, a place where she was sure no one would be able to hear her. It was also a place that contained no vivid memories of Fry, once she was out of sight of the lava pits.
"No matter how weak or unsecured the connection, the hologram speaking above the platform will seem so real-"
About once a month-all she would allow herself- she would sneak down here at night, open up "My first holophoner", and work on teasing out some note, any note. She was amazed at how hard it was, and amazed that she kept trying through the months, even as her feelings for Gary blossomed, even as the décor of Planet Express evolved from its utilitarian base to a much more upscale ambiance.
"-that it will be as if Hermes or I were actually there, with our combined knowledge of science and bureaucracy combined. Very useful for a bounty hunter-"
Three months ago, she had managed to make a thin, reedy sound. On her next attempt, one month later, a little wisp of smoke had actually emerged from the instrument's tip. Finally, just two weeks ago, she had been sitting in the cavern, blowing without concentrating, musing over what to do about Gary, remembering little Eureka, and then, against her instincts, thinking about a certain redheaded delivery boy, and then unbidden, unexpected, a long, longing, lonely tone emerged, and along with it, a cloud of smoke that swirled and swirled, and as she stared somehow unable to stop or think an image emerged, an image of a flat endless plain, so flat, so endless, that it was terrifying in its blankness, and all this time the tone continued, and then she saw there was something on the plain, a tiny something that looked like a shack, and there was a amber pale glow coming behind the drawn windows inside-
"Leela? Do you see where the switch is? Leela?"
She snapped back into the present.
"Where, professor?"
"Where the big, green "ON" button is. Now this button controls the focus-"
She had managed to hold the note until she nearly fainted from the lack of oxygen. Then the note, the shack, the plain, the cloud of smoke, all had vanished, and she had sat there, alone, trembling, in the dark cavern, suddenly imagining she could hear things rustling in the darkness.
The holophoner went back into the closet. She finally made up her mind that she had to make a firm break with the past, and two weeks after that night- yesterday, in fact-she had brought Gary into her room. And then—well, yesterday was now an evening she wanted to forget. There seemed to be a lot of those lately.
"Leela. Leela! Pay attention, you miserable myopic! Here, carry this out."
It was heavy and bulky, but carrying it on her back wasn't too bad, though it forced her head down, so she found herself staring at the Professor's slippers as he led the way out.
Something strange caught the corner of her eye. She turned and saw a tunnel had been dug out of a mountain of junk, as if a giant mole had burrowed out of it. She paused, and wandered sideways a few feet to see if she could glimpse inside. Faintly, about seven feet through the hole, she saw that it opened into a burrow about the size of a coffin. She saw a glimpse of white wires that reminded her of electrodes.
She hurried after Farnsworth. God, what had she been thinking, coming down here to play? Who knows what things she could have awakened down here, had she continued?
"Lola. Lola! Come in!"
Giving one final shake of her head, to Nibbler's distress, Leela groggily refocused on the present, and saw a spacesuited Amy waving at her. Behind her, in the distance, she saw flashes of laser fire. She pressed the side of her helmet, activating visual magnification, and caught her breath.
The PE ship had burst out of the starway into unprotected space, surrounded by shrapnel. The forcefields must be down again-. The Donbot's limo was nowhere to be seen. A rapid series of flashes blinked from the three nozzles of the ship, and then the engines fell completely dark. The ship, out of fuel, coasted away serenely from the starway.
Into the midst of a large pack of bounty hunters.
Green lasers flashed everywhere, and even from this distance Leela could see huge puffs of what looked like steam jetting from the ship's hull. Not steam, but the moisture in the escaping air is flash-freezing-
Hull breach. In multiple places.
"Lola! You OK? You awake? Your heart rate—"
"Yeah, I'm awake."
Over the subnet she could hear an explosion of chatter.
"Target the airlock!—Watch that $%* bucket of bolts over there—Hey, move out of our way!—Fuchsia leader, we are now approaching—Don't hit the engine—we need to get a holo of a body—"
And faintly, above it all, she thought she could her a faint pleading….
"Don't shoot -zzzt-not us you—"
"Amy," Leela said, "are you picking up anything on the transponder?"
"Nope," Amy said, "our spacesuits must still be inside the ship. They've still gotta be on board."
So there it was. Seven years after arriving in the future, this traveler from the Stupid Ages just might be finally joining the rest of his family in death. And all so casually…
"Lola-your heart rate."
"I'm fine. Just leftover adrenaline rush."
She was doing OK, better than she expected. In a sense, it was sad, but more tragic than anything. He had planted the seeds of his own destruction, and reaped the result. Like some sort of brain-damaged Hamlet-bot...
Like a thunderclap, a voice burst through on all monitored channels.
"This is the DOOP warship Nimbus."
Leela craned her neck upward, looking straight up out of her transparent helmet. A blazing array of stars was moving overhead. No, not stars—too regular—lights….
"All vessels within a radius of 5 km of our vessel must clear the area. I repeat…"
While the computerized voice boomed across the subspace, a much fainter, yet very clear voice, reached her, as if someone were whispering in her ear.
"Amy?"
"Kiffie?" Amy's voice rang over the radio. Leela glanced over at Amy. Like her, she was craning her neck to look at the outline of the Nimbus, now growing steadily larger overhead, and moving toward the distant fireworks of the firefight surrounding the PE ship.
"Oh love, I'm so glad you're OK. I've got a lock on you and your companion—Leela maybe? Give me a moment and I'll have most of your wreckage in the tractor beam too."
Leela felt a slight tug on her suit, and slowly but steadily the objects floating around her aligned and straightened, as one particular patch of rectangular light on the Nimbus grew larger and brighter—
"Oh Kiffiepoo!"
"Amiekins!"
Leela turned away from Amy and Kif as they embraced, to give them some privacy. She scanned the interior of the airlock/hangar, trying to tactfully ignore the kissy sounds emerging from behind her. Amy was greeting Kif really enthusiastically. How nauseating. Probably trying to cover up the guilt she felt about Fry... She shook her head, as if trying to knock away the memories of that awful day in the locker room, a scene that she very much wanted to forget. Shame on you. Can't you let others be happy? Jealousy was a character defect she did not like to admit to herself. And seeing the intern in a happy relationship made her feel wistful. Maybe, once this was over and things progressed with Gary, she wouldn't feel as lonely around Kif and Amy as she sure did right now. She thought of Gary's green eyes, and she let herself wander far away from her current position on the hangar deck of the Nimbus, standing next to the remains of Amy's Beta Romeo….
"Hello, Leela."
She snapped back into their present predicament.
"Hi, Kif. Thanks so much for helping us out."
"Oh please, I just wish it hadn't been such a close call. It's a real war zone out there."
The PE ship. Her mind crashed landed into the here and now.
"What's happening to the—"
Then she stopped, for in front of her she could see through the forcefield that comprised the fourth wall of the hangar. The Nimbus must be turning, because new stars kept shifting into view, sliding across her vision, and then vanishing behind the opposite hangar wall. What caught her attention, however, were a different set of lights that were now rotating into view.
It looked like a swarm of fireflies, the number of spacecraft and spacesuits surrounding the green hull of the one ship that was attracting all their attention. She counted at least twenty figures floating around the hull of the ship, no doubt probing for a way in. There were plenty of opportunities. The windows of the cockpit were gone, but more disturbing to her, green glowing vapor was pouring out of multiple gashes in the hull, as well as the cockpit.
"I looked at the scans before I ran down here," Kiff said quietly, behind her. "They've had multiple hull breaches, as well as a reactor failure. The whole ship is going to have to be decontaminated before we can search inside."
Leela watched, silently, as the disabled ships and the scavengers grew larger in her view. Kif, not sure what to make of her behavior, cleared his throat and continued.
"Umm, Bender, being a robot, will be fine. And I'm sure there were protective spacesuits on board, right? So maybe the hostages and the –others—will be just fine. Yes, everything might be just fine. We'll be pulling in the whole ship in a moment, after we brush away these bounty hunters."
He looked over at Amy, who seemed to be paler than he seemed to remember human skin to be. "Kiffie, I think there was only one suit on board," she said quietly, stealing a glance at Leela's back.
"Yes, there was." Leela said in a normal voice. "We were doing an inventory before the ship was hijacked."
"Well," said Kif hesitantly, "maybe it will all work out—"
"I hope so too," Leela said, pulling out her gun and staring at the tagger. "Maybe the bounty is still good. I haven't heard anything over the Guild network announcing a capture or a discovery of a body. Most likely Bender is still functioning, so at least part of the reward is still available."
She turned toward the DOOP officer and Amy, both of whom where staring, nonplussed, at the cyclops. "Kif, what is the DOOP going to do with the ship when they get it?" Slightly unnerved by the mismatch between the casual tone in Leela's voice and the glint of determination in her eye, Kif hesitated for a moment.
"What are we going to do? Well as I said, we've got to vent it, decontaminate it…"
"Is Zapp going to try to get the reward? Does the DOOP have a tagger?"
It was very rare to see Kif indignant, but now was one of those special times, Leela thought.
"DOOP military officers do not indulge in private lifehunts for personal gain. Why, we'd be no better than bounty hunters…" He saw Amy's tagging pistol, caught himself, then blushed green.
"Yes, I'm sure the DOOP prefers the noble art of war," Leela said dryly, recalling the mass slaughters she had been unlucky to witness under Zapp's command. "So then, if somehow we managed to hide away in the hangar here and get a clear shot on that gangway…"
"Errr…" Kiff said. Amy swirled onto Leela and said, "But that could get Kiffie in trouble!"
"I'm concerned about that too," Leela replied gently. "But the more I think about it the more I doubt that'll happen. We just need to tag the … targets, not steal them from Zapp. A loophole in the rules. We can do it without getting Kif involved. And it would really save our jobs at Planet Express, Kif. I mean, I know Amy doesn't really need the job, but …"
Why am I pleading? She wondered. Try as she might, she could not mask the note of urgency in her voice. Somehow, she needed to see her former co-workers again, whether alive, dying, dead, or just a pile of ashes swirling on the bridge. She had tried to hard to suppress the past over the last year, and somehow over the last two days the past had exploded back into her life again. She needed to contain it once again, symbolically. She needed the closure. Somehow, she needed to see… him…, so that she could rest assured that she would never see him unexpectedly again.
There was also the small matter of pride. She had never accepted failure well, and when the world expected little from her, she had compensated by expecting a lot from herself. Her former coworkers had left a terrible mess, and she wanted…needed… to clean it up. But how could she convey such a jumble of thoughts to Kif, when she didn't fully understand her thoughts itself?
Fortunately, as she stood there, mute, the DOOP Amphibiosan came to a decision, just as the sound of fanfare started to drift into the hangar.
"I wasn't around Planet Express last year, when apparently a lot of … this… happened." He glanced at Amy. "All I know is what Amy has told me, which was actually, very little."
All Leela could do was nod. She looked at Kiff, avoiding Amy's pleading stare. She knew why Amy had told Kif so little about Fry's departure.
Although Kif did not, technically, possess a spine, he seemed to gain one as he straightened up.
"But what I do know tells me that you need to do this. Follow me."
Leela emerged from a side entrance to the hangar, onto a metal staircase that descended to the floor, flush against the wall. The PE ship sat in the center of the hangar, tilting to one side, due to a damaged shock absorber. Ceiling fans whisked away the bulk of the green, glowing radioactive gas streaming through the open cockpit windows of the PE ship.
The large space felt cold to her; maybe it was, but her discomfort surprised her. Life from the Orphanarium on had inured her to minor things like personal discomfort. She didn't like staring at the damaged cockpit, which caused her stomach to clench. She focused instead on the gangway, which was slowly starting to open.
She dropped to one knee on the staircase grating, and drew a bead from her laser pistol onto the black gap that was growing above the staircase. Her considerable peripheral vision noted two sliding doors opening into the hangar, through which Zapp Brannigan marched onto the floor, accompanied by Kif , four other crew members, and sixteen members of a marching band. While the band seemed unarmed, the other crew members were carrying laser rifles. She risked a direct glance at their weapons. None of them had taggers on them. So Kif was right. Her eye lingered on one of the crew, a Neptunian. He looked very familiar. But not time to think. She flicked her attention back to the expanding portal—
Figures appeared on the steps. Leela caught her breath, and flicked the tagger tip so that it shone green—nonlethal "stun".
Bender and a spacesuited Fry were descending down the steps, Bender pimpwalking as if his being caught was merely a natural consequence of his greatness, and Fry walking haltingly down the steps, as if in a daze. Her arms relaxed as she saw the two figures. So they had survived the radiation—the spacesuit would have protected Fry from the worst of it. She was relieved about that, since his bounty would still be valid. Then she frowned. She couldn't get a clean shot on Fry with no exposed skin—hell, she couldn't even see clearly through the faceplate. She could tag Bender right now, but then that would blow the chance to get them both. She waited as the two walked down the stairs, where Zapp and crew stood waiting. The band struck up a victory march, and Zapp swelled up to full heroic posture, sucking in his gut as tightly as possible.
Finally, at the base of the stairway, Bender pulled out a cigar and lit it, unperturbed by the rifles lowered down at him, while Fry reached up his arms and unlatched his helmet. The headgear brushed his white moustache on the way up.
Leela's heart skipped a beat. Moustache?
An old man with a red cap stared nonchalantly at the rifles lowering in front of him. Leela blinked, and noticed that Zapp had deflated somewhat, and Kiff had motioned the band to trail off.
The old man wasn't Fry. No spacesuit transponder had been activated, and only one spacesuit was working, so Fry hadn't left the ship. So either he had to be still on board or he was, he was-
He still had to be on board, that was the only explanation. Yet, she found herself drifting down to the base of the stairs, straining to hear the conversation.
"On behalf of the united DOOP armed forces, I, Zapp Brannigan, Captain of the Nimbus, Linchpin of the Fleet, hereby place you, Bender Rodriguez and –umm—"
He leaned over to Kif.
"Does radiation age a man that much?"
"No sir, I don't know who that is."
"You there. State your name. Speak it, even."
The old man shuffled his boots.
"I'm Scruffy," he muttered. "The Janitor," he added helpfully.
"Odd last name," Zapp said.
There was a pause, and Leela froze midway along the hangar wall, fifty feet away from the conversation. Zapp leaned back to Kif. "Who's it supposed to be?"
"Phillip J Fry and John Zoid-"
"Scruffy Dejanitor. Where's Phillip J Fry?"
Bender spoke up. "He's toast. Or maybe I should say, bacon?"
Leela was having a hard time hearing, because her heart was pounding so loudly that she was worried that the band members at the back of the small crowd would hear it.
"Or maybe he's more like a fried egg. I dunno. Whatever you wanna call it when someone's face peels off his skull from a blast of radiation? Geez, I never knew you organ sacks could shrivel away like that."
It was hard to see. The hangar went blurry. What the hell was wrong with her? And why was she now striding up to the robot, elbowing Zapp aside, headless of these guns around her?
"You're lying," she said. "Lying through your circuits! Where is he?"
At the sight of Leela, Bender's bravado seemed to dissipate slightly, and he leaned forward, eyes toward the floor. "I'm sorry, Leela, but Fry is dea-"
She shot the robot with the tagger.
"Shot confirmed. Miss confirmed. No target match."
The voice from the tagger echoed away across the chamber. Zapp cleared his throat, experimentally.
What the hell? Leela thought. No target match? Hey, wait a moment. Did Bender just say, "I'm sorry?"
She stared at Bender, intently. And then saw the small inverted triangle "beard" underneath his mouth. As comprehension dawned on her face, Flexo the Bending Unit slapped his knee in mirth.
"Ha, just kiddin'! You're all right, for a meatsack and all."
Dimly, Leela was aware of two other robots walking down the stairs. Clamps and whatshisface—Joey Mousepad. Meanwhile, Flexo stubbed out his cigar on his chest.
"What's going on here?!" she thundered.
Mousepad shrugged.
"Truth be told, lady, we have no percepacity wherse our quarries' has slipped off to. We accessed this here ship, only to find said quarry absent."
Somewhere behind Leela and Zapp, someone furtively tried play a piccolo.
"Well, well, well, " rumbled Zapp, as he turned his attention to the lithe Cyclops.
Leela closed her eye and hissed in fury.
"If it isn't the lovely, lascivious—"
She punched him. Really, eventually it was going to happen anyway, why not just get it over with?