Anton's Odyssey Read online

  The image on the big vid wavered as Cotton put the glasses back on. “Hey look at this!” Cotton said, holding up the bayonet. Allen and I gasped. Stuck to the point was a human eyeball, hunks of red flesh hung from the sides.

  Allen turned green. “I think I’m going to be sick.”

  The image of the enucleated globe caused me, at worst, minimal distress. “Did you see the guy who attacked you?” I asked.

  “Sort of,” Cotton replied. “I didn’t get a good look at his face, but I could tell he was bald just like the piety-freaks in the cryochambers.”

  “You better get back here quick, before he comes back with his buddies.” I commanded.

  “Yeah, good idea,” Cotton agreed.

  Chapter 6: Jackass Bob

  Allen put his glasses back one while Cotton disrobed. After removing the suit, Allen inspected it closely for tears or holes. Cotton’s face, hands, and feet were completely soiled from his escapade in the ductworks, but the suit was immaculate.

  “Its surface is impregnated with titanium oxide nano particles,” Allen explained, “makes the suit nearly impervious to dirt and grime.”

  Allen gave Cotton the code to the Officer’s washateria so he wouldn’t have to walk very far to go shower. At Allen’s request, Cotton took the eyeball with him so that he could flush it down the toilet. Allen couldn’t bear to look at it.

  “Do you think the guy who attacked Cotton is the same person who smuggled Fiona Mammalot onto the ship?” I asked.

  “I’m sure of it,” Allen said.

  “How do you think he figured out Cotton found her cryochamber?”

  “My guess is that he stashed a vibration sensor somewhere underneath the chamber. Cotton probably set off an alarm when he climbed up top to look down her bib.”

  “I suppose it will be pretty easy to figure out who the guy is,” I said. “All we have to do is look for the crewmember missing an eyeball.”

  “No, it won’t be that simple. No doubt he’ll call Dr. Zanders, lie about sustaining some freak injury, and have a new eyeball in just a few hours. If he doesn’t need pain medications, he might not even miss his next shift. Eyeballs are pretty easy to transplant. I mean the guy’s vision will be off for a few weeks while the optic nerve re-nits, but it’s not like getting a new hand or a foot, which requires weeks of therapy.” As he spoke, Allen fiddled with the jano-bot, inspecting the damage Cotton had caused several weeks prior.

  “Maybe we could send the jano-bot into the ducts to spy on the clinic.” I suggested.

  “Normally that would be a good idea,” Allen explained, “but some of the circuit boards are damaged beyond repair. So are the camera and the left appendage. I’m not even sure if I have all the necessary parts to completely repair the robot.”

  Allen placed the jano-bot at the bottom of his closet and hid it under a pile of dirty laundry. “We do need to figure out who Cotton’s assailant is, though. We should get Jim Boldergat to detain him before he comes after us.” Allen was silent and scratched his head. “Do you think your brother could return to the ductworks again tonight? We could have him spy on the clinic.”

  I shook my head. Cotton had an angry-looking red line across the front of his neck where the bald man tried to strangle him. “He’s had enough for tonight. I imagine he’s very tired. He’s bound to make a mistake that will get him caught.”

  Allen nodded. “You don’t think he’s too traumatized from the attack do you?”

  Most normal people would experience strong negative emotions following such a savage assault. By the way Allen’s hands shook and his voice quivered, I could tell the fleshy part of his brain was exhibiting signs of distress from simply witnessing the attack. However, when I opened the door to let Cotton back into Allen’s living unit, the expression on my brother’s face was downright gleeful. “No,” I explained, “this will be an adventure he will relish forever.” Honestly, I felt the same way. I was basking in a stupor of post-adrenaline euphoria.

  “Do you think the guy got a good look at Cotton?” I asked.

  “It’s hard to say,” Allen replied. “It was pretty dark. I didn’t get a very good look at the guy when Cotton held up my glasses. From what I saw, he kind of looked like Fred Chaucey.” Allen scratched his head. “It works both ways, though. If we couldn’t see the guy very well, there’s a good chance he didn’t get a good look at Cotton.”

  “Yeah, but if it was that Fred guy, he saw Cotton earlier when Cotton knocked off the grate to his living unit. He might put the two scenarios together and figure out that Cotton got into the cargo hold auxiliary by crawling through the ductwork.”

  Allen frowned. “I need to hack the computer in the medical center. We need to find out if it’s Fred or somebody else who’s getting a new eyeball right now.”

  Allen fiddled around on the keyboard. There was a knock at the front door, so I left to let Cotton back in. Cotton was clean, but his hair was still a little wet. The red line across his throat was very conspicuous.

  “You’re going to need to wear a turtle neck until that bruise goes away.” I said.

  “But I don’t have a turtle neck,” Cotton complained.

  “Don’t worry. I know where I can find you one,” I said. In the ordinary starmen’s washateria, people frequently left their clothing unattended on hooks while showering.

  Preoccupied with hacking, Allen wouldn’t talk to us, telling us to “hush,” or “be quiet” every time we tried to talk to him or ask him questions. About a half-hour later, Allen finally gave up. “Security is just too tight at the medical center. I bet that Dr. Zanders has been trained to follow federal protocols.”

  “So you can’t get in?” I asked.

  “No, I’ll have to hack a password by brute force. I’m going to have to dedicate at least two of my backup computers to try every possibly password imaginable. To stop the medical center’s computer from locking us out and notifying security after three failed attempts, I will have to alternate between Mary’s and Doctor Zanders’s log-in identities and also my point of attack from my two computers. It’s pretty complicated!”

  “How long will that take?”

  “Let me see… up to eight characters long… up to 45 different characters…. That’s roughly seventeen trillion possibilities. I can write a program that will let me try uninterrupted repeated attempts… 3600 seconds an hour…. It will take me about three days to write the code.… We should have a successful hack in about four months.”

  “Four months!” I said. “Cotton will be murdered by then! Why don’t we just ask Dr. Zanders who lost an eyeball?”

  “Because it would be against the law for him to tell us, but not against the law for Dr. Zanders to tell Fred, or whomever, that we asked about people missing eyes.”

  “Oh.” When it came to the law and medical ethics, I was a complete ignoramus.

  “You know, if you give me a couple days, I could write a program that could send Jim Boldergat a message about what we saw today.”

  “Yes, but why would you need to write a program?”

  “So he can’t trace the message back to us. I don’t think Jim would be too happy if he found out Cotton has been crawling around in the ducts and poking out people’s eyeballs.”

  “No that’s not what I mean,” I said. “Why waste two days writing a computer program when we could just slip him a note.”

  “You mean a hardcopy? Like on a piece of paper?”

  “Yes.”

  “Oh, that would save us time!”

  Allen insisted on writing the note with his left hand in case Jim Boldergat tried to identify the author with some sort of forensic handwriting analysis. The final note was a bit too cryptic for my tastes. Allen insisted the note had to be cryptic in order to arouse Jim Boldergat’s sense of intrigue. I doubted the fat man had much of a sense of intrigue, but I didn’t want to spend all night with Allen wordsmithing what should have been a very simple note. Exhausted, Cotton and I had no trouble falling asl
eep that night.

  At breakfast, I waited for Jim Boldergat to go back for seconds and then discretely placed Allen’s note next to his tray. He came back with another serving of tatertots, and only after wiping his face with the note did he realize that it wasn’t his napkin, which had fallen on the floor. His lips moved as he read the note silently. “The woman in cryochamber 65549288403541 is not who she is supposed to be. The man who lost an eye last night put her there.” Mr. Boldergat shrugged his shoulders, balled up the note, and tossed it in the trash on the way to get another napkin.

  In homeroom, Allen asked me if Jim got the note. I told him that Jim read it but that I didn’t think he would do anything about it.

  “Oh don’t worry,” Allen said confidently. “Eventually he’ll work out the message and crack the case.” I didn’t share Allen’s optimism.

  Hammond overheard us talking about our sergeant at arms and asked if we got into trouble after he left us the previous night.

  Allen said “no,” which of course aroused Hammond’s suspicion even further.

  To Allen’s horror, I told Hammond in a hushed tone that there were major complications during the operation and that we hadn’t been caught yet, but when we did eventually get caught we would be in huge trouble.

  “What kind of trouble?” Hammond asked, intrigued, “in house suspension trouble?”

  “No, much worse,” I replied. “More like brig trouble. Maybe even prison trouble when we get back home.”

  Hammond’s street smarts quickly overrode his sense of intrigue. “In that case, don’t tell me. Leave me out of it!”

  “We will.” Allen said. “We’ll say you and Ellen were never there last night. The less you know the better.”

  “Yeah, you got that right!” Hammond grunted. The bell rang and Hammond left without saying goodbye, looking a little worried.

  Math was a painful lesson about imaginary numbers. Time itself seemed to flow backwards as Mrs. Hallisworth went on and on about the significance of the square root of negative one.

  To my surprise and delight Ms. Gross subbed in for social studies because Mr. Fox was sick. She had us watch a video, which was the usual course of action during a substitute teach. Ms. Gross was clever enough to tell us there was going to be a quiz at the end so that we would pay attention rather than whisper to one another after she turned down the lights.

  As documentaries go, the video we saw wasn’t overly tedious. The production stuck to eyewitness accounts and reviews of official documents rather than relying on re-enactment by terrible actors who lacked the talent to appear in infomercials or skin flicks.

  The events took place on Gliese 436, and Ms. Gross paused the video to let us know that this planet is in the same star system as our destination. She pressed play.

  The narrator explained that, shortly after the planet was colonized, the Space Marine Corps of Engineers dug a giant hole in the ground as part of an early infrastructure project to improve the spaceport. By chance, they came across this giant metallic rectangular prism, which they called “the Obelisk.” They had no idea how it got there as it didn’t seem to match any known form of interstellar technology and had no discernible markings. To further complicate matters, radioisotope dating revealed the Obelisk had been imbedded in the surrounding strata for at least ten thousand years. The engineers moved it into a hanger nearby to study it. Preliminary analysis revealed the structure was composed of an unknown alloy less dense than lithium but with incredible hardness. Filings were completely inert and would not react even in the harshest chemical environments. A few days after they unearthed it, the obelisk began transmitting brief pulses of extremely long wavelength electromagnetic radiation. The engineers concluded the Obelisk was likely an artifact from an intelligent non-Earth species, and, in accordance with written protocols, contacted Central Command at the Octagon.

  Ms. Gross paused the video again and said that, contrary to what we may have seen on TV, we have yet to discover an alien species more intelligent than a housecat. Somebody meowed, and we all laughed. She pressed play again.

  Central Command dispatched a star frigate with a company of special operation Space Marines to recover the artifact, but while they were en route a nearby colony of expatriate piety-freaks found out about the Obelisk and demanded access to it. When their request was denied, they mounted a surprise attack. Because the space marines weren’t on a combat mission and the unit was mostly comprised of civilian contractors, they were armed only with gyrojet pistols and a few auto carbines. Overwhelmed by firepower from phased plasma rifles in the forty-watt range, the marines surrendered to avoid a complete massacre.

  The video showed some old pics of the cult, which had the ironic name “Saviors of Terra.” Men weren’t bald like the Brethren of the Celestial Heavens. Rather they wore long bushy beards with a red streak painted vertically down the middle.

  The frigate arrived a few days after the ambush, and the captain tried to negotiate with the piety-freaks. The Saviors of Terra demanded that the artifact be destroyed. They tried destroying it themselves but had done little more than mar the surface. Apparently the Obelisk offended them. Their rationale was that only humans were created by God in God’s image, and the beings who constructed the artifact were not God’s creation. Therefore, the artifact had to be evil, demonic even.

  The captain was charged to recover the artifact “at all costs,” so he was pretty much at an impasse from the start. Inevitably, negotiations broke down, and when the piety-freaks started murdering hostages, the frigate charred everything on the ground with neutrinos. After the radiation cleared, the marines landed and disposed of all the corpses. When they recovered the artifact, they found it was no longer transmitting pulses of radioactivity and its surface had taken on a peculiar reddish-brown patina. Scientists back on Earth concluded the Obelisk was damaged by the neutrinos. They cut into it, but never found any circuitry or transmitter. As far as they could tell, it was just a solid piece of metal. To the present day, leading engineers have no definitive idea what the artifact is, how it works, what it was supposed to do, or how it was made. They suspect it may have been an unmanned probe sent out by an alien species as some part of an early deep space exploration program; their idea being that we, as humans, sent probes out to the far reaches of the galaxy long before we sent manned spacecraft. Just as we can account for only a small fraction of our own probes, the aliens never managed to recover the Obelisk. The narrator clarified that this theory, of course, was highly speculative and lacked definitive evidence.

  After the video, Ms. Gross grinned and said that she lied about making us take a quiz. The class groaned. Ms. Gross asked if we had any questions, and this prosperous looking kid in khakis asked, “Why do piety-freaks always dress funny or have funky hairdos?”

  Ms. Gross prefaced her answer by stating that the term “piety-freak” was derogatory and we ought not to use it. We should use the term “person of faith,” or in extreme cases “cult member.” “As for the beards, clothes, and hairstyles,” she said, “they are simply an outwardly visible demonstration of conformity to a rigid set of rules that transcends mainstream norms.”

  Ms. Gross asked if anyone else had a question, but was greeted only with unenthusiastic looks of extreme disinterest. I put my hand up, and Ellen gave me a disapproving look.

  “Yes, Anthony.”

  “Why do piety — er I mean cult members — always seem to have phased plasma rifles in the forty watt range?”

  “Well, I’m not sure as to the exact weaponry, but I suspect that cult members often feel the need to arm themselves because of a sense of persecution from the general public, which does not share their ideals.”

  I was satisfied with her answer. She asked again if there were any additional questions, but again, no one had any. Again I raised my hand. Ellen rolled her eyes.

  “Why does the government always fry everyone with neutrinos when negotiations break down?”

  “That seems to
have happened fairly frequently in recent history, and I’m not sure of the exact answer. I think it is a result of poor leadership which has adopted, as a flawed philosophy, that a strong show of force will deter future groups from engaging in similar antisocial behavior.”

  “Yeah,” I replied, “but if they do it over and over again, they’re obviously not deterring anything.”

  “Like I said, it’s a flawed philosophy.”

  Ms. Gross tried to focus her attention elsewhere but I couldn’t help but interject, “The government always tells you to sit tight if you are taken hostage, and not to try to fight or escape. But if the government is just going to fry you with neutrinos instead of negotiate your release, wouldn’t you be better off taking matters into your own hands?”

  “Well, I don’t know about that Anthony,” Ms. Gross said, obviously trying not to endorse vigilantism. “Chances are you will never be taken hostage, so try not to worry about it.”

  I raised my hand again, but Ms. Gross dismissed us five minutes early. At her desk, I tried to get her attention but she expressed a sudden interest in a gaudy jeweled broach some prosperous girl was wearing.

  I caught up to Ellen in the hallway. She looked kind of annoyed. “Ms. Gross,” she said trying to imitate my voice, “if I ask you questions over and over and over again, will you go out with me?” I had intended to tell Ellen that I was going to talk to Hammond to stop him from following her around, but after she mocked me I decided I was going to let her fend for herself. Unfortunately, in the days that followed, Hammond eventually gave up his pursuit of Ellen completely on his own, so the more vindictive side of me never achieved satisfaction.

  A loud rumble woke us up in the middle of the night. The ship shook so violently Cotton was tossed out of the upper bunk onto the floor.

  “You okay?” I asked.

  “I think so,” he said, looking more confused than injured. “Was that supposed to happen?”