Chapter 155: PB - #26 Yellow Hair and the Fortress of Steel

Yellow Hair and the Fortress of Steel

Chimes rang. Drowsy, Miles turned his head.

The new customer brushed his oversized yellow sweater. After wiping his shoulders, he shook his neck’s short red feathers, spraying the closest tables and framed black and white SASCAR pictures on the wall. The duck-man’s eyes flickered when he crossed Miles’ dubious gaze.

Nodding at the busy robot cook behind the zinc counter, the newcomer waddled towards the lonely pilot’s booth. Between his human fingers shone a golden trophy, which he slammed on the table.

A stinging pain melted Miles’ spinal cord up to his brain. His strange nightmare faded to dust.

Miles rolled over what seems to be a medical bed, and vomited the burning content of his stomach.

“Breathe deeply, buddy.”

He blinked back tears. In front of him appeared the amused face of a teenage nurse. Spots of bile stained her blue shirt, and a gob of spit had landed on her bulky mobile terminal.

“Don’t worry. I’ve seen worse,” she said.

Along her white coat, the strange nurse wore a badly adjusted bowl cut postiche over her long blonde mane. She smiled, revealing several missing teeth where a red scar running from his right eye to the bottom of her opposite cheek crossed her cracked lips.

“Congratulations!” she exclaimed ceremoniously, hand gesturing the Vulcan salute which made her left plastic point ear fall off. “You just passed the weirdo test, subject number 42!”

She bit her tongue, uncoiling a thermometer from her pad. “Doesn’t matter. My name’s Tatyana Zelenski—and you… you ain’t got no Marine dog tags implants, buddy. This is naughty. Very naughty.”

“Sh’yeah! I know where the Technos hide them—I looked up. Painstakingly.” She checked his temperature with the probe’s oxidized tip before closing his drooling mouth. “Your FID’s also mysteriously missing—alongside two of your fingers. Meaning, there’s a 89.813% chance you’re a Ringern deserter—or a pedo-criminal with a juicy bounty over your head. Or both. The entire system knows the rebels are just a bunch of sexually-repressed Democrats—my dad says so.”

Suffering from a growing migraine, Miles sat on the edge of the bed turned into a makeshift operating table. Blinded, he tried to shield his eyes from a flickering spotlight hanging from the ceiling.

“I’m still thrilled!” the teenager went on. She turned off the overhead lamp with an elbow nudge on the control console. “We fixed your heart. You’re the first who survived my new reanimation procedure.”

“Are you serious?”

Tatyana picked her nose. “About what?”

Miles noticed her shifty eyes beside her eloquence. He decided not to dig any further for the moment. “Slim—Slim Jim… My name’s Slim Jim…” he stammered.

“Like the beef jerky brand? That’s stupid.”

“Clever.”

Miles silenced the chatterbox by putting one of his still organic fingers over her mouth. “Tatyana. Who are you? And more importantly, where am I?”

“The Technos? Crap…” Remembering the events of Ymir and the following escape through the ice-fields, Miles immediately thought of Pierre Candide. But before he could ask about his comrade’s situation, an intense pain in his chest pulled him back against the operating table.

“Easy, buddy!” Tatyana reacted, holding up a syringe handed to her by a mechanical arm above her. “The magnet in your chestbox might be working again, that ain’t made to last long! Besides, Dr. Bitchy said there are still some adjustments to do, and—”

Miles coughed as the nurse gave him a monthly dose of coagulants mixed with antiseptic and dissolved g-sugar. “Where is Pierre?” he managed to ask, massaging the sore stitches barely covered by the Hechinger-made Band-Aid. “Where’s the man who was with me on the Soviet ship?”

“Your boyfriend?” Tatyana opined. She handed him clean, pressed pink prisoner clothes. And his flight jacket from the Dead Bunch.

“What—no.”

“Oh. I thought—because of the manly mustache. Y’a know…”

“You saw him! You saw Pierre! Where is he?” Miles insisted, growing tired of the girl’s shenanigans. “Is he on the ship?” On these last words, he grabbed her by the collar of her silly Star Trek costume.

“Sh’yeah… what’s left of him, anyway…” she replied, slipping like an eel through Miles’ feverish fingers.

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His sick heart stopped for a second. “Is he… dead?”

“Nah. He’s pretty tough, your copilot.” She gave him blue prisoner clothes, and took the old ones back. “Lost a lot of plasma. And limbs We—”

“Where is he? We gotta get out of—” Miles started, before realizing the mistake he was about to make.

Feeling his throat under his beard, Miles also discovered his own anti-jailbreak electronic device. “You’re a prisoner too?”

“Smart. You’re definitely above average for a guy named after a snack brand,” she mocked him. Whistling, she grabbed a screwdriver from a nearby bloodstained basin and fiddled with the small latch on which a red diode kept shining. The LED immediately lit up green, and the supposedly unbreakable lock of the slave collar popped. “The Technos caught me looting the dumps orbiting Ijiraq. The Juvenile Court sentenced me to death, so—”

“Not quite.”

An explosion shook the ship, rattling beakers and other utensils on the magnetized carts. Tatyana immediately tidied them up.

“Is this normal?” Miles asked.

Tatiana placed her necklace on a console, careful not to trigger the fiery charge. She then washed her hands in a bowl before wiping them on her vomit stained lab coat. “Define ‘normal’.”

“I want a simple answer, girl.”

“I heard talkings about an assault to take back Saturn XLIV. Hyrrokkin.”

A more intense explosion shook the surgery room, turning off the monitors and an EKG at the end of the table.

“Tatyana? I really need to get out of here. And with Pierre.”

“Why? Space battles are fun,” she responded, reaching for her Dirty Pair backpack on a rack.

“Escaping a Techno-fortress in the middle of it would be funnier, right?” Miles said, playing his card right judging by the teenage nurse’s following reaction.

“Oh! Sounds like a thrill! You, sir, are very good at understanding women. Wait! Are you hitting on me?’ She stopped, eyeballing him. “You’re a perv. I knew it.”

“You’re twelve.”

“Say that to Roman Polanski… Anyway, I can help you run away, with your boyfriend. On one condition!”

Miles jumped on the shaky floor. “Which is?”

“I analyzed the implants along your body. Well… the new military-grade ones. Not the ones partially extracted a couple of years ago, leaving you with more scars than a potato beetle has stripes. Oh! I’d love a sweet potato pie. Anyway, you’re a pilot. And I need a pilot. Because I sure wish to get out of here too!”

“I don’t follow.”

“Can I trust you?”

“No—but, yes. You want out?”

“I like this place. But you know what I like too? Reese’s. That doesn’t mean I’d eat those all day long. Wait. I would. There must be something else then. Why did I talk about Reese’s? Oh… I’m lost.”

Miles heaved. The girl appeared to be a nutjob with a mind as slippery as a fish covered with soap.

“So you did plan to escape after all.”

“Apparently, a version of me from the past did.”

“Glad to hear.”

Miles smiled. “With extra loops.”

“My mom said I’m special, okay?”

“You’re indeed one of a kind. Let’s go get Pierre!”

Tatyana huffed, heading to the landline. “Get him? Geez! I’m half American—dad’s side. I’m too lazy to fetch anything!” she joked as she brought the handset to her cheek. “Allo? Operator? Got me Dr. Bitch, right away. Oh! Hi there, doc!” She bit her tongue. “What’s happening?”

On the other side of the wire, someone seemed pissed.

“You trust that doctor?” Miles asked as the teen rushed towards her backpack.

“Who wouldn’t trust a doctor? Doctors can’t be bad. They ain’t no therapists.”

Holding the flap of her bag with her chin, Tatyana rummaged inside. Among countless protein bars and several questionable sci-fi pulp magazines with torn pages, she pulled out a folding computer keyboard. Once the latter plugged in via a long jack cable to a wall socket, she searched the ship’s data core on a small holographic screen located above the number pad. Wiping her brow, she explained: “Bypassing the security protocols, I can get your friend secured. Then I’ll unlock direct access to the maintenance bay where they store some old boats for us to use.”

“Is it smart to steal a ship while they’re prepping for battle?”

“We ain’t no carrier. I’m talking about flying ambulances—not the ones with guns. We usually take them after the skirmish to pick up the injured floating in space as frozen as a third class Titanic passenger. For our plan, we’re gonna borrow a small boat during the skirmish. As explained.”

“Excellent.”

“I’m done! Still have to make a detour… and walk…” she complained before unplugging her gadget. “Follow me!”

“You sure about this?” asked Miles as Tatyana struggled to open the heavy door.

Short-circuiting a simple outlet at the exit of her makeshift operating room, Tatyana managed to disable almost all of the cameras and automatic doors on their way out. With the few patrols diverted elsewhere by fudging the round schedule, escaping the OR decks felt like a bucolic walk—organic waste and recycling body bags filling the corridors aside.

“Would you hold this for me? It’s heavy.” Tatyana had barely gotten her arms out of the straps of her pink and blue backpack that she was already tapping on the vending machine juxtaposing the emergency elevators of the pharmacy deck. “I won’t be long…”

“What are you doing?” Miles whispered, glancing behind. “Shouldn’t we rushing towards—where’s the doctor, by the way?”

“That’s the rendezvous point! I hate the word ‘rendezvous’. Can you stop saying rendezvous?”

“Rendezvous?”

“Meeting Dr. Bitch? Here? In the open in the middle of the landing?”

“I see no Starbucks around, buddy.”

“Your plan’s dangerous. I dunno where to start. First, it rests upon trusting a rebel pilot you and your Dr. Bitch don’t even know. Then—”

A beep made them jump. Miles turned around as the doors of an elevator creaked. He feared to see Technos soldiers, but instead, he met the gaze of an old friend from Enceladus wearing dark blue scrubs.

“Fate?”