Cave Ducks and the Art of Negotiating a Pay Raise
The life of a cave duck is a simple and blessed one. Being the biggest animal in the natural caves below the prospector tunnels in 1777 Du-ɛ, they enjoy the relative immunity of being an apex predator of sorts, even though they are more akin to a bottom-feeder.
They live in small groups in the shallow pools of water that collect deep within the inner asteroid layers, feeding off the sulfur-eating bacteria and biomass-eating fungi that thrive there. They walk along the pools’ bottoms with eight thin chitinous legs, keeping most of their hairy body out of the water, as if floating, with their pale fleshy sensory proboscis pointed upwards. In the dim light of a prospector’s torch, they may easily look like a duck that survived a fire.
Not that they can appreciate much of each others looks, being completely blind.
One particular cave duck had ventured farther out in the sulfur-water pool than usual that day, excitedly following the smell of fresh blood in the air, sure to be the first to happen across the inevitable corpse-fungi bloom. A banquet fit for a cave duck god.
With a barely perceptible noise, it scampered along the cold water, until it felt the liquids around its chitinous joints getting warmer and thicker with its food’s food. It crawled excitedly along the rocks, climbing on top of what felt like a softer kind of rock, its barbed legs scraping uselessly against ballistic plates, and finding purchase on fabric and flesh. Not having any concept of either of the three, the Cave Duck experienced a primitive emotion approximating fearful wonder.
With animal curiosity, the creature slapped its proboscis repeatedly on the human (not that it knew it was sitting on one) collecting incredible smells and marvelous flavors; a whole score of information its primitive neural network was ill-equipped to elaborate.
It froze there, immersed in roiling emotions that almost came close to being thoughts, sitting on the cusp of realization of the existence of something huge beyond its little wet world, something immense.
It then felt something even more incredible, a feeling of oppressive presence, as air moved around the animal and rained down on top of it, displaced by something incomprehensibly large. The cave duck twisted its proboscis in a panic, trying to grasp the enormity of this moving presence and failing.
Its simple mind defaulted to the description of “a cave-in, but it’s alive”, kicked all of the animal’s panic hormones into overdrive, and initiated the “run-for-your-life” response, but just a moment too late. With a snapping sound of impossible magnitude, a sudden front of pressurized air rushed against and around the creature, the pressure differential ripping apart its delicate respiratory tubes, dooming that blind little life to confusing end faced with an eldritch being of incomprehensible power.
“You didn’t need to kill it. It’s harmless” commented Hallken dryly, pressing against the geologist’s wound to stop the bleeding.
“Harmless my ass” grunted the muscular man, holstering his pistol “you saw it following my blood in the water!” he gestured to the red liquid dissolving into the clear cave pool, the occasional droplet still falling from his blood-drenched trousers. “Besides, i missed the shot”
“It couldn’t even scratch your vest” answered Hallken, hoping that the PanOceanian could somehow see his eyebrows raising disapprovingly under the brawler visor. “You should be much more worried about whatever is attacking us”
“Nothing is attacking us!” snapped the man immediately “These tunnels are absolutely uninhabited. Nobody’s here. Nobody.”
He put particular emphasis on that last ‘nobody’, as to remind to the Brawler the confidential nature of their contract. Escort, protect, bring back, no questions.
The former investigator could only sigh in resignation. “Still, you could avoid wasting ammo on the wildlife” he stated flatly.
“Makes no difference” panted the geologist in a wince of pain. “Once the mission is over, they’d die anyway”. He quickly rifled through his bag and produced a small remote, pushing one of the two buttons. A small red light flickered on and off at the top of the small device and a beeping sound echoed further down the tunnel “Ready to detonate, keep your head down, merc,” he concluded.
The dead cave duck twitched.
Hallken was about to take cover, but jerked himself abruptly backwards, his instincts (and his luck) taking over. Only later, recalling the event, he would realize he had saw a subtle shimmer around the cave duck, like a heatwave over asphalt, and heard the air being split by a sword, moving in a wide arc aimed at the geologist’s remote and at Hallken’s own head.
The ex O-12 agent found himself on his ass, looking at the PanOceanian Geologist screaming in pain, all of his fingers cut off, the remote sliced clean in half.
A second shimmer revealed a tight bodysuit, glowing thermo-optical disruptors, tensed servo-tendons, and a pure white triclopean’ mask. Hallken scarcely had time to aim his shotgun before the ninja disappeared again with a deceptive somersault, leaving behind a decapitated PanOceanian geologist, and some scarred rock where the brawler’s shots landed.
He jumped back on his feet immediately, cursing all of the deities he had ever heard of, and started to walk backwards, scanning the area around him, in search of ghostly shimmers to shoot at. At the same time his commbead had started beeping, alerting him that the rest of the Fiberwyre contingent was under attack as well.
He walked backwards two steps, then turned a sharp corner around a rock formation, where the third member of his fireteam was looking at his (and the geologist’s) back, or at least was supposed to. He was met with a dead Taagma instead, his porcelain-like face touched by a single drop of blood, with a couple of cave ducks slapping their weird appendages around his chest in dumb curiosity. Hallken could tell it had happened mere moments before, because the pheromonic scream of pain had just started emanating from the corpse, filling the tunnels with a sour fragrance.
The brawler felt a chill run down his spine, a sense of certainty that so many times he had felt in some of the worst slums the sphere had to offer, when he was still working for Bureau Noir. His feet moved without formal approval from his brain: he faked a running retreat, juked back, turning around, and ducked while making a sprint to the water pools, hearing a sharp sound where the ninja’s blade had just met stalagmites.
He ran along the narrow rock ledge that cut through the water ponds, jumping over the geologist’s corpse, all the way to the mineral column where the PanOceanian had planted the D-charges mere minutes before. He put his back to the giant stalagmite, the explosives’ red light quietly blinking a meter over his head, and scanned the cave in front of him.
The ninja could only use the narrow rock passage to reach him without disturbing the water in the cave, he thought, and having his own back against the wall prevented backstabbings, he believed. Turned out, he thought wrong, but believed right.
The ninja dropped from the cave’s ceiling with apparent ease, sword in hand. Hallken looked up just in time, his attention caught by the sound of air being split by the katana. Of course he couldn’t dodge in time, but he could shoot.
They both tumbled and splashed down in the water pools, in a bundle of limbs and blood, and there they stayed, perfectly still, blood quickly seeping into the water, calling upon more curious cave ducks. The small animals crawled with various degrees of success on top of the two men, slapping excitedly their proboscis on blooded polymers and fabric, entirely failing in the herculean task of understanding what they were.
Silence took over the cave, with only two exceptions: the soft clapping of the cave ducks’ appendages, and the gentle beeping of Hallken’s MedEvac beacon.
Hallken woke up with a sour taste in his mouth and the feeling of partial emptiness in his chest after each full inhale. Same as every day for the past two weeks. He knew his repaired lungs were working at full capacity, hell, even better than they were before he got the sushi treatment, but he still couldn’t ignore the feeling of pressure within his rib cage, where the biodermis plugs and the nanomesh oxygen exchangers had been installed. The sooner he could start smoking again, the better.
He carefully turned around and sat up in his small field-hospital bed, ever grateful for not needing the tubes and catheter anymore. Out of old habits he looked around the small room, scanning for details, escape routes, threats and such; finding the small pneumatic tent to be still the same windowless aqua-blue bubble it has been since they MedEvac’d him out of inner Dewey.
The almost perfectly hemispherical space, kept to shape by air pressure gradients, was strangely soothing to most patients, but Hallken couldn’t help feeling a bit anxious about the whole place collapsing if the air compressor malfunctioned. He could picture how easily the polymer films, designed to keep the sanitized air well-contained, would readily transform into a sweaty and uncomfortable coffin, the oxygen inside slowly depleted. His current contingency plan entailed dumping the flowers out of the small ceramic vase sitting on his nightstand, smashing it, and using a shard to cut himself free from the hypothetically collapsed tent.
His train of thought lurched to a grinding halt.
“You awake, Lt?” he asked, not turning around to face Kii’wa, who had been recuperating in the bed beside him “have you seen anyone enter the room while I was sleeping?”
“Yeah, a large blonde Caledonian man” the Taagma’s voice was completely monotone and emotionless, in typical Tohaa fashion “He told me to say hi to you once you woke up”
“He surely wasn’t the one who brought these flowers in?”
“He was.”
“Pink roses, Lilacs, Erikas, and Basil?”
“That’s the smells, yeah.”
Halken picked the large bouquet up, surprised at how well the faux flowers were made and immediately getting even more surprised, realizing they were actual living plants
“Impossible” he exclaimed “no way he has the money to buy LIVE plants, out HERE, for such a small gift.”
“Who said he bought them,” asked Kii’wa without vocalizing the question mark (Hallken could smell her question by the slight aroma of cinnamon she emitted). “There’s many at the entrance biodome of the Fiberwyre camp. We do grow them.”
The former O-12 investigator put the flowers back on his nightstand in surprised silence. While Tohaa biotech was surprising and uncanny to him, he still doubted they also grew the handgun cleverly hidden within the foliage.
He made a mental note to thank Alec when he got out of the hospital.
“Curious” he said out loud “flower growing is not the kind of activity I would expect from the likes of our organization” He didn’t bother turning around to face Kii’wa, since trying to read a Tohaa’s facial expressions was a fool’s errand, their nonverbal communication being pheromonic.
“What do you mean” Kii’wa’s monotonic response was punctuated by a tinge of lemony smell, closed out by the usual cinnamon for the question mark;
“I mean, we are a company that gets hired for… more unsavory business than the -normal- unsavory.”
Cinnamon and lemon continued to infuse the air while Kii’wa kept silent.
“I mean” continued Hallken “that I don’t think we were hired to escort some innocent geologists”
The lemony smells covered the cinnamon tones. Hallken decided to turn around, facing his (current) Lieutenant. She was half seated in her bed, as motionless as a tree, a small datapad in her hands, her long and slender fingers no longer poking and prodding at it. She was looking straight to Hallken, her black scleras and glowing yellow Irises piercing through him from that perfectly sculpted porcelain face. The citrus smell assaulted Hallken now that he was facing her.
“What do you think we were hired to do?” she asked, accompanied by a touch of cinnamon.
Hallken re-positioned himself, pretending to get comfortable, but actually steadying himself in case he needed to reach for the pistol in the flowers. “I think we were acceptable sacrifices in a mission to collapse the tunnels,” he whispered, “and possibly crush whatever those Ninjas were defending.”
He could smell only lemon now. Practically an open admission.
“What do you think you’ll gain from this?” commented Kii’wa. “What do you think you’ll gain by telling me?”
The monotone in her voice was still perfectly even, but the smells were starting to get chaotic: a hint of lavender, a bit of way-too-sweet-strawberry, the slightest hint of cinnamon.
Hallken sniffed the air and answered just as flatly. “You don’t seem worried.”
“Why should I be. You are not as dangerous as you think you are. Typical human behavior.”
“Dangerous? I’m not threatening you.”
“You couldn’t if you wanted to. Even now you are laughably transparent in trying to destabilize me, regardless of your… limitations.” Even in the monotone, she managed to let some contempt filter through the last word.
“Yeah, you are right, we are indeed limited.” Hallken paused to take a theatrically deep sniff, still feeling his lungs not working as they should. “Yet, I can smell Lemon, Lavender, Strawberry. You are unsure and disgruntled about something. May I try a guess at what?”
“Isn’t it obvious?”
“It is, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg: it’s not –just– me you are unhappy at.” Hallken allowed himself a sly smile, wondering if Kii’wa was trained in facial expression reading. “You are obviously hating the fact that Tohaa lives were cut short down there. You are incredulous as to how many of you left your skin – oh, sorry, your bark- in those tunnels by the hand of such inferior creatures as humans. Those are not hard to guess, but those are not the point either. You know more. You know a couple of the whys and that’s what’s bothering you.”
Hallken made a small pause and, sure enough, he felt the slightest smell of saltwater creeping into Kii’wa’s bouquet. “You are very disapproving of how Tohaa vital lymph was spilled so that PanOceaninan agents could try to collapse key tunnels that lead to a Japanese civilian settlement on Dewey. They wanted to extend their claim on that area of the asteroid by denying they ever found previous occupants.”
Kii’wa didn’t move an inch, a burning glint of spite in her eyes was the only hint at her being even alive. She reminded Hallken of his ex-wife.
“But it goes even further than that. We have been losing personnel since we landed. We… You… you are stretched thin. You risk losing the capability to complete whatever your real mission is because of us retrograde primates bickering and scheming at each other.”
Saltwater smell wafted over all others, filling the room. Hallken had hit the mark.
“You asked what do I get from telling you all of this. I get better earnings and career advancement,” he lied, readying his pitch. “You need some support in negotiating with clients and avoiding bad deals. It’s obvious that whoever is your human-interface Tohaa, is not making enough of a good job at it. You need someone with the skills and the experience to sniff fishy deals out in advance. You need someone that can read beyond human nonverbal cues. You need someone that other humans wont assume is easy to swindle from the get-go. Last but not least, you need someone that you can easily cut off if you need to.”
He took a short dramatic pause, as good manners dictate in this kind of situation.
“You need me as your face **in the Ducktail’s VIP rooms.”
Kii’wa didnt answer or move at all, but the way the sea smell subsided assured Hallken he’d hit home.
He only wished he could light a celebratory cigarette.
Throughout human history the passage of time has always been subjective.
Everyone has heard at least once of the phrase “time flies when you’re having fun,” and at least a couple people have heard of the phrase “time flies when you’re traveling at a speed that’s a significant fraction of the speed of light with relation to the system you are observing, which is traveling at a speed that’s a significant fraction less than your own.”
While both phrases had been put under serious scrutiny by the infamous “inverted well with non-inverted bucket and bees” experiment of 2123 (the scientific community was still out on the verdict, the body count had started to rise the past three years), Hallken was sure of his own opinion on the matter: time passed as fast or as slow as it needed in order to impose the maximum possible inconvenience on the observer.
His objective personal belief turned out to be true once again as time had been slowing down more and more since Lt. Kii’wa had been discharged from the hospital, no more than six hours before, leaving him alone in the room.
He turned around in the bed, trying to find the merciful relief of sleep, and checked the timekeeper holographically projected on the polymer surface of the room’s bubble.
2:21 am SST
He had to correct himself: only four hours had actually passed since Lt. Kii’wa had been discharged from the hospital. Right again about the speed of time.
He sighed and sat up, giving up on trying to sleep. He fumbled around the many small object on his nightstand in search for the night globe, but found instead Alec’s secret-gun-flowers, a small bottle of re-purified water, his medicine vial… he checked the flowers a second time, then his datapad. “Where the hell…”
“Do you need a night light?” purred a warm, full voice from the shadows.
Halken froze at the words and at the sudden sight of a woman standing at the feet of the his bed. She activated the night globe with a soft click, the amber colored light suddenly painting her shapes from below, highlighting sultry curves and toned muscles, plump lips and sharp cheekbones, flowing hair and cold, deadly eyes.
The Brawler immediately recognized her: she first caught his attention at the Ducktail Pub, together with a masked Exrah. She still had the same unnaturally perfect beauty, an excess of symmetry and proportions that magnetically attracted gaze and desire, while being unsettling at the same time.
She let go of the night globe, letting it float free in the small room, adjusted her Fiberwyre jumpsuit to the perfect position to show the exact amount of skin she intended, and then smiled the most beautiful, most false smile Hallken had ever seen. “Hallken, I presume?” She purred at him with a perfectly harmonized deep voice. “I hear you’re gunning for my job.”
Still half-sitting, the former O-12 investigator briefly wondered whether to lunge for the pistol that surely must still be hidden in the flowers. He quickly took stock of the woman, purposefully avoiding her eyes and cleavage (not to mention her brand-name Whole Protein Perfume), which she obviously used as distractions. His gut told him that his only chance at getting the upper hand of this encounter was to find the right clue.
“I’m not sure,” he stated, getting into a more centered position on the bed. “Would I be still alive if this was really your job I’m gunning for?”
“You’re not entirely wrong,” the woman chuckled, leaning over the bed’s railing, showing him the exact amount of cleavage she intended to. “You are more perceptive than you look.”
By the orange light of the night globe Hallken could read her Fiberwyre nametag: “-HI! I’m D.Bob. Scan the QR code to give a report about my performance-.”
“That one was easy enough, but it’s bit harder to figure out why you’re here. Are you going to give me some orientation material, Senpai?” countered Hallken.
“You could say that.” She walked away slowly towards the back of the room, showing all of the distractions she could, then she stopped and spun graciously around, her auburn locks whipping about in a camera-perfect trajectory, framing her piercing gaze, alluring and dangerous like an exotic carnivorous plant. Hallken noticed her discretely pulling something out of her pocket during the spin, hiding her hand behind her over-engineered backside.
“Spiral knows you have an ulterior motive, Hallken. You want something, or someone, in the Ducktail Pub’s VIP room. Not that they care, as long as you keep your end of the bargain to them, BUT, they suggest you ought to have some support.“
She slowly unzipped her jumpsuit, letting out a wholly superfluous wave of perfume, and revealing almost all of her upper distraction capabilities, all of it a bit too perfect. “So here I am, offering you what you asked for. You’ll be promoted to Lieutenant, have the company’s command, at least on paper, and a matching pay. Kii’wa is still in charge, of course. You will then get a personal aide.”
“Great. Who are you going to saddle me with, then?” griped Hallken.
“Oh, someone who will follow you around everywhere, and help you. Whatever. you. need. she. will. be. close. very. very. close.” She punctuated each word with a perfectly measured step, stalking towards him. She sat beside him with a fluid motion, stopping her most deadly weapons mere millimeters from unprofessional contact before playfully touching a manicured finger on Hallken’s nose.
Her touch sent a shiver down Hallken’s spine. Or at least she thought she was the cause. In reality, a realization had hit the former O12 inspector like a lightning bolt. Her perfume, which had dominated the whole room since she appeared, hid some other notes. He could barely smell them, they were just echoes really, even this close. Lemon. Rotting Roses. Acacia.
Tohaa.
“That’s a tempting offer,” he managed, trying to buy time. He noticed her reposition slightly, ready to use whatever she was hiding behind her back.
“I know,” she said, accompanied a hint of rose. “So do you accept?”
-now-
He felt the brevity of an instant, the quickness required to reach a decision.
He felt he was on the cusp of understanding the true meaning behind this woman’s presence. He only needed time for his mind to connect the dots.
-time-
That treacherous thing, always running contrary to what he wanted, too much or too little, too fast or too slow.
-slow-
The very concept of slowness unwrapped under the folds of his brain, thoughts expanding in all directions at the same time, instincts doing the job of thoughts, meaning and images flowing through his consciousness in a spark of absolute relaxation
-flow-
He felt the flow. Went with it, his own theory about time shattering upon a moment that stretched wide enough for an entire train of thought to pass through.
-hints-
The nametag had a balding man’s photo – not her jumpsuit? not her face? The perfume – a Tohaa. A tohaa pretending not to be one. Not her face.
The hidden movements – a small thing. A pistol? – she’s Tohaa. Pheroware. Venom.
Will she kill me? – no, she would’ve done it before. The weapon is insurance in case I refuse the offer. I’m either in or dead, no backing out.
The proposal – she’ll be always close. To help? To watch? One step further. To kill me in case I proved untrustworthy? No, I’m not that important, they would kill me now. Not about me then. About the Pub. Something to do with VIP access.
About the Pub, or someone in the pub? – A Tohaa that changes face – an assassin. Killing someone in the Pub.
-clarity-
He could have VIP access to the Ducktail Pub, try to get better contracts, get the Fiberwyre team closer to the pub’s VIPs, and then this Tohaa impersonator had her own target to kill. Hallken could only hope she was not after the same person he was.
Time snapped back into focus as Hallken suddenly became all too aware of just how good Kumotail Bioengineers were, pushing a simple plastic surgery into the realm of Platonic ideals.
“What’ll it be, big guy?” she asked softly. Was she pressing her weaponized assets against him? Was this insatiable urge and pressure pushing down on on him and rising up within him just a pheremonic assault? It didn’t matter.
“I’m in,” Hallken slurred.
“Take a girl out for dinner first,” she purred. The pressure disappeared. It was all Hallken could do not to gasp for air with his new lungs. He spared a glance at the clock projected on the hospital bubble, hoping enough time had passed that the morning nurse would pass through and save him.
2:26 am SST
Right again about the passage of time, sadly.