Mongrel: Doomed?, #1

By Rita de Heer

Tardi Malko is a 22nd century Byron Bay truck-jockey. For his second job, he surfs for a never happy Virtual Surfing outfit. His ex-girlfriend refuses to accept they aren't a couple anymore and secretly signs him up for a job with her, and his brought-back-to-life brother wants to stay dead next time his CPU freezes.

When Tardi is infected with a sentient alien substance by falling against some coral, the Moogerah Monster comes alive in his mind. This alien, wanting to escape its prison in Brisbane, picks Tardi for its waterman.

Tardi begins his resistance by intending to stay himself. Quite soon he needs to work on how he will stay human. The Monster's control over him increases. Then the Stormies, a mysterious underclass, claim Tardi as their own. Tamer, they call him. Will they help or hinder his quest to find a cure?

As events unfold, Tardi Malko becomes a mongrelised cross between human, Stormy-kind and the alien infections he carries. Mongrel, Book 1 of the Doomed? Series, of about 105,000 words, tells of the beginnings of his trials.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Rita de Heer
• Release date: Feb 27, 2019
• ISBN: 9781386778684

Rita de Heer

Rita de Heer cut her storytelling teeth on inventing fantastical bedtime stories for her brothers and sisters, and intricate sagas for walking reluctant children to school. After a dozen years of teaching interspersed with bouts of travelling and motherhood, she studied creative writing at Southern Cross University (Lismore, NSW). Since polishing her speculative fiction ideas at the Online Writers Workshop for Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror, she’s been writing, writing and writing. There’s something very satisfying about building a world, inhabiting it with a people seemingly entirely unlike us, writing their lives and proving in the meantime their essential humanity. Originally from the Netherlands, she lives in the far northeast of NSW, Australia, surrounded by a wild nature garden. A fierce, black-and-white indoor guard-cat helps to keeps wild critters out of the house.

Book preview

2: The Nightmare

Tardi lay face down on an examination table. He could see the floor through a face-sized hole at the top end. The medi-staff searched his shredded back for coral splinters and tweezed them out. He ignored their exclamations on their finds and their chatter about their social conquests. With his eyes closed it was easier to see the hallucination. Red clouds bulked over the horizon. The top of a red-gold V-shaped wave glinted where its sides forever threatened to heel over. A vast grey creature, while it powered itself along just under the surface, caused that little bow wave by holding its snout with nose holes above water. Seen that, Tardi thought.

Now he rode an unshaped wooden surfboard. On and on over an unending ocean. Redwood splinters, loosened by the shifting of his soles on the narrow plank when he stood, stung his back and his butt when he sat and when a pair of tweezers missed its target. ‘Aah!’

‘Sorry,’ said a nurse.

Tardi twitched. ‘It hurt, but I forgive you,’ he said. ‘It’s a good pain, it grounds me.’ There was no time to explain. If dreams were a mishmash of memories and experiences, when had he ever seen a sun so nearby and so red? Or surfed a redwood plank? Or was it that just then the staff shifted him from the examination table to a bed? There was no hole to see through and he lay with his head sideways, on one ear.

I am wide awake. I am awake. I am awake. He closed his eyes and the hallucination reappeared. A fat fuzzy shadow and a sharp thin shadow trembled after him over the ripples. Two shadows mean that there should be two suns. One was big and red, the other little and yellow. There was still no land in sight.

#

He opened his eyes. He never got sunburned, but in the real night in a real hospital bed he felt hot enough that he might be as red as that imaginary sun. His skin stung.

The night nurse turned down the thermostat of the air conditioning until Tardi felt cool air rising to his hot face. She brought him a bottle of water with a clear tubing spout to suck on and told his bedside bot that she had increased the antitoxin.

Next day, more of the tweezing.

‘We’re done for today,’ said one of the nurses.

Finally.

She swung away the antiseptic sprayer on its concertina arm and pulled over a warming lamp. The second nurse puffed an antiseptic powder over him as his back dried. This time they rolled the examination table with the table’s undercarriage collapsing into a machine that resembled a giant eye.

‘We’ll leave your head sticking out so you can breathe,’ said a talkative one.

‘Why this rocket science thing?’ he said.

‘The tube? To draw the coral splinters to the surface. Tomorrow, another session.’ They snapped their penguin-beak tweezers toward him, laughing.

#

One whole day when he lay in the machine, Tardi rode the red wave whenever he forgot himself and relaxed. The next day he had company sitting near his head. Rowan. She had blond curls today, he noticed with a sidelong glance. Why did she even come? They’d broken up. She smiled as if he was still her special lover. If he ever was ... he closed his eyes to her. If he’d been well, he would’ve gone surfing. Stop the trance state with the real ocean’s requirement that he stay in the moment.

His father didn’t come. No surprise there. Herm would say that Steve, Tardi’s younger brother, couldn’t be left on his lonesome and that either Steve’s cyber add-ons or the hospital’s equipment, or both, would malfunction if he did bring him.

Tardi worried that he couldn’t contact Steve until the psychologist mentioned that the hospital was netted with signal-disrupters.

‘So ... if I have a hallucination constantly on the go,’ Tardi said. ‘It can’t be caused by any signals coming from outside?’ He was only half joking.

The dude was instantly on his case. ‘Have you had hallucinations?’

‘On and off. A red world. A red fish bigger than a whale by a couple of football fields.’

‘Your copper and zinc levels may be out of kilter due to the toxins,’ the psychologist said. ‘Hence the red dreams. I’ll organise some supplements. Try to steer your thoughts into pleasant places. Your dreams will surely follow.’

After delivering the zinc capsules, the psychologist didn’t come by again. The zinc capsules disappeared. The tutting night nurse, Tardi suspected. Not that she’d steal them. A lot of people still didn’t believe in zinc’s healing powers. The antitoxin injections had no effect on the trance. The labs, trying to trace the coral, had hit a legal injunction supposedly stopping people from approaching the silver coral. More like somebody was trying to stop people collecting it.

Every time he tried to imagine something he knew, such as him surfing a wall of blue green water, the wave would morph into a weeping red mountain range.

My colours are gold and blue and green.

In his imagination, he dived down a column of blue-green light. The blood-red sun doubled in size and covered the sedate round of Earth’s golden sunlight trembling on the sand below. Otherwordly swimmers like giant waterlily leaves died of extreme sunstroke and rotted while shoaled along the edges of continents rising from waters evaporating in the red sun’s death throes.

He knew the stink of rot. He refused to take in the scent of the rotting shallow red waters and desperately breathed in the hospital’s astringent smells. To no avail, the hallucination pulled him down, and he slid into his own night-and-day-nightmare that began eight years ago, a few days after he turned fifteen.

It was the height of summer. Steve was ten. Herm drove them deep into the hot hinterland then stopped by the side of the road. The dirt track, though it was graded, must be the reason they were in one of the vintage petrol-burning vans. Tardi was proud to have worked out at least that, for he had no idea where they were or why they were there.

Tree canopies woven together by vines shaded both sides of the track, but with no sea breeze the scene was hotter than Hades. Immediately they all three dripped with sweat.

Herm motioned Tardi into the back of the van. ‘Hand down the boxes marked with S.’

After stacking the four boxes on his hand trolley, Herm checked the time on his vintage wristwatch. ‘They’ll invite me for a mug of tea. I can’t say no. I’ll be gone for about an hour.’

He didn’t tell Tardi and Steve who ‘they’ were, or why he couldn’t say no to a cup of tea.

‘Can we go down to the creek in the meantime?’ Steve said.

‘I want you to help Tardi pump up the rear tires a bit. They feel soft.’ Herm rolled the hand trolley into even narrower path that Tardi hadn’t noticed up until then.

‘Can I come?’ Steve said to Herm’s back.

‘I need you to be here when I get back,’ Herm said without stopping.

Tardi shrugged at Steve, commiserating. Herm normally never snapped at Steve. He set up the foot pump. ‘Want to have first go?’

‘Do all the hard work? I don’t think so. I’m going for a swim.’ Steve fetched his towel from the shelf in the cab.

‘Dad said to stay here,’ Tardi said.

‘Dad said he needs me to be here when he comes back in an hour. He said for me to help. When I get back, I’ll help you by putting away the pump. There’ll be a creek at the bottom of this slope.’ He gestured. ‘I’m going for a dip.’

It was too hot to argue and far too hot to tussle Steve into some sort of crybaby agreement. ‘Fine,’ Tardi said. ‘Go away then.’

Steve pushed through the overgrown lantana at the track’s edge and crackled away through the bush, leaving Tardi alone in the zinging heat of the track.

Tardi thought he was sweating before he started the pumping, but he was dripping in seconds. His clothes stuck to him, and he had to keep blinking to keep the sting of salt from his eyes. By the time he’d done the two tires, his hands were so slick he kept dropping the pieces of the pump. He deserved a swim. He left the pump pieces on the ground at the back of the van for Steve to pack away.

Tracking Steve by the broken branches and scuffed-aside leaves, he was halfway down the hill before he heard the creek’s gurgling and burbling. ‘Steve!’ he shouted. ‘Which way? Up or down?’ He meant upstream or down. Then realized Steve wouldn’t hear him through the noise of the water.

He ran the last few metres over the boulder-strewn overflow. The water fell from a height to the right into a black pool. Boulders overhung the sides. Tardi saw Steve trying to lift his leg up over the rim of the pool near where the creek overflowed to the left. Even from a distance, Tardi could see how hard Steve tried. His bottom lip was a red streak where he’d bitten it.

What was this place? A dam? A cistern? The water was so dark that Tardi couldn’t see into it.

Steve fell back again and splashed weakly to the surface. He’d be tired out from trying. Tardi scrambled down the rocks, dropped his towel and sloughed off his jeans. He slid into the water. It was colder than he would’ve thought possible on a midsummer’s day. Four strokes. He grabbed Steve by the back of his shirt.

Steve screamed. ‘Tardi! Help! Help!’

‘I’m here, mate. It’s all right.’ Steve clamped onto Tardi. Tardi ducked out from under Steve’s strangling arms and resurfaced. ‘Steve, listen. Feel my hands on you. I’ve got you.’ He turned Steve in his arms. ‘Breathe easy. Float on your back.’ He cupped Steve’s chin and with one foot pushed Steve’s butt toward the surface to make him float flat on the water.

Steve screamed. His voice rang like a bell along the water and echoed within the cupped pond. ‘No! No! No! There are eels! Longer than I am! They’ll eat me!’ He turned himself over like a dumpling in hot fat, and with stretched arms wallowed blindly back to Tardi’s neck.

This time Tardi pulled Steve underwater to force him to let go. There was no bottom, not even any mud. He felt himself being felled by Steve’s hysterical squeezing and the unnatural cold; his kicking to get them back to the surface was sluggish. He gasped for air. ‘Steve, please. Let go of me a little.’

Steve stared unseeing into Tardi’s eyes. Their noses bumped, Steve’s hold was that close. But he was unreachable. Worry squeezed Tardi’s gut. Herm sometimes turned the hose on Steve when he was like this. He let himself sink just a little this time.

Steve clambered hysterically toward Tardi’s back. Tardi got his hand up under Steve’s just in time to not get strangled from the back, then had to spend half a minute just treading water to hold them both up and to get his breath back. Now to get them out. It could only be where the creek poured over the lip of the pool. He swam to the overflow. ‘When we’re out, we’ll warm-up on stones hot from the sun,’ he promised.

Steve clung to him, not acknowledging that he’d heard. They bumped against the pool’s side. It went straight down and was slippery with algae. The pool had to be a water supply of some kind. Tardi tried to loosen Steve’s hands from each other, to place them onto the rock rim. His plan was for Steve to hold on with Tardi’s one hand on Steve’s hands, never letting go of him. Then, after he hauled himself onto the side with his other hand, he’d drag Steve up after him. But telling Steve the plan was no use until he could listen.

Panting from the cold now, Tardi wrenched loose from Steve’s legs and turned to face him. Steve had his eyes squeezed shut. He slid a hand into Tardi’s hair, not yet in dreads. With the other he felt the rock above him. He set a foot against Tardi’s knee and levered himself up.

Tardi only barely managed to hold onto the slippery stone lip when Steve kicked him in the balls – pain lanced through him – on the way to a knee-hold in Tardi’s gut. Then onto his shoulder, from where Steve flopped himself over the rock above them, his arms out wide, his fingers scrabbling for a hold.

Tardi seethed with understanding. ‘You little bastard! No way are you so out of your mind that you don’t know what you were doing!’ He saw red. ‘And you’ve probably been shamming these fits all your life!’ He swung out from under Steve’s feet on his shoulders, from under Steve’s almost successful effort.

Steve’s fingernails scrabbled uselessly at the stone. Tardi, knowing at once what he’d done, tried to support Steve rounding himself to the boulder’s shape. But Steve slid down with his head juddering over the ungiving stone.

Crack, crack.

Steve slipped between Tardi’s hands and sank with hardly a splash. Tardi dived and dived, at first without taking proper breaths. He didn’t notice the cold or that the visibility was less than night.

He felt the eels looping below him by them skimming his feet when he hung from the surface getting his breath, or when they swam by his searching hands. They were all over an inert shape that Tardi feverishly felt for arms and a head. Yes. Could only be Steve!

Tardi fisted the eels where he could reach them and smacked them from his brother’s head. Water made that so slow! He towed Steve to the surface, having to stop to kick away the more persistent of the predators.

He screamed when he saw Steve’s face without his cheeks or lips or nose. Even his eyes were gone, empty sockets. He screamed with crying, roaring, grieving fear. His brother’s face was a mess of raw flesh. How could he live? Tardi wanted to let him descend. Let the eels finish their work.

A bubble of blood expanded and burst at the end of a pale, torn tube, as wide as one of his fingers. Another bubble formed. Tardi sobbed in horror. This was what was left of Steve’s nose? That bubble burst too. Another bubble began. Wait a minute, Steve still breathed?

Tardi put his shoulder under Steve’s head and with that hand held the edge of the pool. He trod water and steadied his brother with his other hand. He aimed and connected hard kicks at the blue-black eels to convince them he owned their prize.

A long time later Herm appeared at the top of the waterfall. He shouted with such horror that Tardi heard him above the sound of the falling water. His heart lurched. His father ran ineptly over the boulders. Four thin, wild-looking, sleep-in-their-clothes sort of men leaped past Herm like mountain goats. One of them grabbed Tardi’s jeans from the rocks and draped them over the boulder. With two mates holding his legs, he wriggled down until he could hook the pants over Steve’s chest.

With his own arms heavier than lead, Tardi raised Steve’s arms one by one and put them over the pants seat. Steve’s rescuer crossed the pant legs behind Steve’s back to keep him from slipping through. The men dragged their mate and Steve sideways until limp and lolling Steve could be pulled onto the stone lip. They lifted him into Herm’s arms.

Tardi felt himself weighted down under his father’s accusing gaze and let his water-wrinkled hand slide from the stone lip. Fingers twisted into his hair and stopped him from sinking.

‘Your father’s in shock,’ said the face that belonged to the hand.

Tardi noticed the clear, blue-green eyes. The face looked like grooved brown leather with grey stubble. The man pulled at Tardi, helped him slide stomach-down onto the lip of the hole. ‘They’ll need you if he’s aiming for what I suspect. Your father and your brother both.’

Tardi gasped crying. ‘He’s dead. The eels. Dead but breathing.’

By the time he sat up, helped by the man, the medi-evacuation helicopter hovered above the waterfall.

‘I called them right away. They’re stationed not far from here as a vehicle such as they will fly,’ the man said. ‘And when they know it’s us ... well, there are still a lot of useful superstitions.’

Tardi glimpsed his father clambering toward the helicopter, cradling Steve to his chest.

‘I’m your uncle Ace,’ the man said. He signaled one of the men to start a fire on a flat place away from the water. He sent another to fetch blankets.

Tardi shivered by the fire despite the blanket around him. Uncle? What uncle? There were only Herm, Tardi and Steve in their family. No uncle that he knew of. When his overloaded mind threatened to forget his crime for a minute, he’d only have to remember his father’s expression of blame and disgust. Ace fed him bread and jam and hot, sweet tea.

#

Every time during the night that Tardi woke in the dark, disoriented, Ace’s hand comforted his blanketed shoulder. In the morning, with Ace next to him directing him along secret bush tracks and firefighter roads, Tardi drove the van illegally to his father’s driver’s house. Two more years before he could get his driving license.

Tardi stood by, downcast, remembering his father’s hate-filled stare. Ace explained how Tardi tried to rescue Steve.

‘Trying isn’t succeeding,’ Jack said. He was Herm’s best friend. Normally, all that Tardi would be thinking when standing around Jack Fusel listening to the man’s verbiage would be how long it still was before he was old enough for him to drive his father’s trucks. But now? With him only fifteen, he wouldn’t be old enough for a Heavy Vehicle’s License for another four years. And anyway, he couldn’t see himself in any future without his father’s hate.  

Ace frowned as Jack shrugged in a way that said don’t blame the messenger. ‘It’s what the kid’s father will say,’ Jack said. ‘That medi-vac go to the School of Human and Alien Biology in Brisbane?’

‘They have the best medical facilities for this sort of injuries,’ Ace said.

‘I’ll get the kid there, of course. Favour to you,’ Jack said.

‘Favour to you,’ Tardi said when Jack had gone to get ready. ‘What does that even mean?’

‘Jack is a man who does not want to get on the wrong side of the Stormies,’ Ace said.

‘You’re a Stormy?’ Tardi said. A couple of things about Stormies flashed through his mind. They were said to be the only sustainably living people in the world. They weren’t human. Or they were sub human. Or super human.

Ace didn’t say yes or no. He pulled Tardi around to look at him. ‘Remember what I said last night?’ Tardi shook his head. His barely dammed-up crying overflowed. ‘I remember Steve. The eels ate his face. He’s only ten. Why didn’t they eat me?’

Ace gripped Tardi’s shoulder. ‘Repeat after me: I take after my Uncle Ace. He is a Stormy and he is the Tamer.’

Tardi repeated the words without recalling them when he was done.

#

Tardi stared at the nighttime sea-patterned hospital floor. For the first few years after that day at the waterfall, trying to puzzle together what Ace had said and what Tardi was meant to repeat, were the only things that kept him from ... don’t go there. He and his father had cobbled together a life centering on Steve. But still ... every day since, Tardi remembered the heat under his breastbone. The pounding in his ears. His need to hurt. Anger is my curse.

3: Possessed!

After the last coral fragment find, Tardi was helped back into the normal hospital bed. This time, the staff sat him up, his back resting gently against the pillows. It didn’t hurt that much. He tried blinking away the alien eye in his mind. The iris was silver and the elongated pupil showed a section of a starry sky within it. Then the whole eye was gone. What? This was nothing like the hallucinations so far.

A stream of images started with each one lasting a half second or less – an amount of time he’d learned about for making his video clip featuring the coral. He saw a hairy jaw that dripped saliva. A large hand that cradled a golden ball. A lavender-colored knee. All of them, even the knee, were bits of the aliens he saw at SoHAB when he was there. A giraffe-sized gate. A curved brick-red wall, a half-metre thick.

Dry-mouthed, he tried to think it through. The coral I hit was silver and was planted. I saw the aliens in their cage in Zoo Hall at SoHAB when I was visiting Steve getting fixed up there. In the foyer of Zoo Hall, he’d attached himself to a crowd of kids on a family ticket, and he’d oohed and aahed with the rest. All these snapshots are things I remember from that time, that the something sharing my mind is parading before me? Why? Or even, how?

Who is in my head with me? Whatever it was felt like a congestion. Was he going crazy? He’d heard of hearing-voices crazy. Though this was only one voice and it wasn’t talking. As in, it used his memories to ...? Is it an aggregation of the damned coral toxin? Is that even possible?

Now a cascade of images stormed at him. He ducked and wove – in bed, in his mind. Cold sweat pricked his scalp under his dreads and dripped down his face. The golden ball swayed through the scenes without any evidence of a flight mechanism. At the time, he never saw the damned ball except for the once that the father of the family he’d joined, pointed it out telling his kids and therefore Tardi, that some of the scientists believed the golden ball to be in overall charge. I didn’t believe it then and I don’t believe it now.

‘Are you going to open your eyes at all today?’

What? Who? Tardi opened his eyes. Poul sat beside the bed. A blond Scandinavian, as narrow as a greyhound, Poul was one of his surfing buddies.

‘What are you still doing in here?’ Poul said. ‘You look no different to your usual latte self. Been doing any weird dreaming?’ Tall, skinny Poul made the visitor chair look child-sized.

‘Why do you ask?’ Tardi tried to read Poul’s face. Poul’s eyes, blue, were set on twinkle-or-be-damned, with his usual secret but fierce merriment.

‘I went and got some of that coral. Gave it to a customer of mine to check out,’ Poul said. ‘She’s a chemist. The poison is alien.’

‘Really.’ The way Poul’s eyes lit up when he talked about his chemist friend bothered Tardi. What about Threen? Threen Jason was Poul’s best beloved, or so Poul often said. Threen was Tardi’s other surfing buddy.

‘Well, come on! Give me a bit of excitement!’ Poul sat poised as if for triumph.

‘You told me the reason for my hallucinations and you want me excited?’

Poul slumped.

Tardi felt like he’d saved himself. ‘So, she probably means the bunch of creatures the army dragged from the Moogerah Swamp fifty years ago? That everybody calls the Moogerah Monster as if they are all one organism?’

Poul perked up. ‘Zebe, my chemist friend, works for Procyon Products, the company licensed to work on the monster.’ He laughed. ‘Would you believe that some of the idiots running around in white coats believe that one of the creatures in the bunch has a brain like a fly’s eye where each bit works independently? And so, with the creature having a brain and therefore a mind also made up of bits capable of working independently, thousands upon thousands of them, even a speck of that alien’s dust is said to have awareness. I ask you, how would that even work?’

Tardi hoped Poul didn’t see him shudder. How could he now say what the coral, aka the monster’s dust, aka the monster’s fly’s eye awareness, was doing to him? He hardly believed it himself after all. ‘Did you ask why they’re calling it a monster?’ he asked instead.

‘At the time of its capture, they didn’t want it confused with fictional aliens,’ Poul said. ‘But apparently the silver barbs on that coral do shoot out the same stuff that’s in the dust they’re collecting from the monster’s cage. Toxins that are now floating around inside you. I bet you’ve been having blood tests round the clock?’

‘Needles in, coral shards out. All feels the same,’ Tardi said.

‘And would you believe that Procyon Products approached your father for your body when you die?’ Poul said with the unfriendly merriment again.

Tardi stared him down. ‘You should go and brush up against that wreck yourself.’

‘Did you know that Virtual Surfing has got wannabes lining up to surf with you?’

Total change of subject! I bet Poul has gone and infected himself. Tardi acted clueless. ‘I haven’t even applied for the job yet. I was doing my video when this happened.’

‘I believe Rowan shamed them into taking you,’ Poul said.

Tardi’s heart sank. He did not want to be beholden to Rowan. For crying out loud, how long will it take her to accept that we’re no longer a pair?

After Poul left, the monster in his mind took Tardi to a cave where it transformed him, along with all its people, into egg-shaped data pods, loaded them into a starship and shot it into space. Tardi went along for the ride. He didn’t care. He wasn’t going crazy. A long way behind, the blood-red sun exploded.

That night, he wondered why he hadn’t heard from Steve yet. He pressed the Steve-dedicated ComTooth with his tongue. Hey brother.

No answer.

Steve was never not at home in his head! Tardi’s thoughts went into a spin. What was Herm doing about it? Were Herm and Steve on the way to Brisbane for treatment, with Herm driving them?

His own trip to SoHAB eight years ago was with Jack Fusel needling him about every little unimportant thing. When they finally arrived, his father had seemed relieved to see them but thinking about it afterwards, Tardi realized Herm would have been relieved about Steve’s condition. ‘The news isn’t all bad,’ Herm had said. ‘Steve’s procedural memories are fine, according to the doctors. Stuff he can do,’ Herm said to Jack Fusel’s fuddled look. ‘He’ll still be able to work on the trucks, something he could already do as a little nipper. They’re surrounding those parts with some devices to fix our stories of him into him, to help rebuild his conscious mind. Will you help, Jack?’

Herm did not once acknowledge his elder son. That still hurts if I’m honest, Tardi thought. And so I spent a couple of weeks wandering around SoHAB while Herm and Jack input their stories into Steve’s central processing unit.

When Steve was well enough, he asked for Tardi and Tardi was given full sibling visiting rights. They both had a tooth converted into a ComTooth. They went home, all three, when Steve’s implants were mostly operational. Jack Fusel not in that picture as Herm had asked him to go back to the Bay to keep the business running.

A starship rushed closer and closer and closer from within the back of his head into the front is what it seemed like ... Then ...  whoomph!

Waiting. Waiting.

Nothing more alien slid into his mind.

Tardi grinned. The end of the alien’s story coincided nicely with his discharge from hospital tomorrow. He also remembered that the hospital was netted with signal disrupters and so there’d be no talking with Steve until he had checked out.

#

As he passed through the foyer, the girl at the reception desk stopped him. ‘There’ve been a flurry of calls about you over the last couple of days.’

‘In relation to what?’

‘Not really for me to say.’

‘What?’

‘Could you sign my VS shirt, please?’ She spread a bio-skin shirt over the counter and presented him with a laser-pen.

He laughed. ‘Burn it in?’

She giggled. ‘It’ll be like a tatt.’

‘I’m sure my agent would say to charge you,’ Tardi said.

‘You don’t have an agent. And I am paying with information.’ She slid over a data cube. She put her hand over his fist signing her shirt. ‘I read them and felt quite threatened on your behalf.’

‘Should have told me after I signed. Look at that, worst signature I ever did.’

‘I like it. Go away and read your messages.’

Tardi clicked the cube into a spare slot in his wrist deck. His deck would sandwich up to six cubes between the two layers of technology – CPU at the bottom and monitor screen at the top – with each cube being one centimeter a side. The elastic wristband was as wide as the deck but nothing special, they wore out too fast to keep paying big money for them, in his opinion.

He slid into the first cab in the rank. ‘Wategos Apartments, please. Charge it to TLC, The Local Freight Company?’ He’d been in hospital for a week not making any money but not costing TLC anything either. His account should be fine. As always, he rolled his eyes over the mismatch between the acronym and the business’s actual name. Most locals said they didn’t notice it. Or if they were acquainted, they laughed about Herm’s legendary misspellings.

He clanged up the steel stairs to his new apartment, a freight container in the second tier of the Watego Slummery, the local name for the apartments. The only thing classy about the apartments was the view from the top of the levee. The Watego Beach residents had built the levee to keep the still-rising seas from their gold-plated palaces. The apartments were piled three-deep against the inside of the wall as rentals to pay off the communal bank loan.

First thing he saw looking through the glass door entrance into his apartment was the double mattress on the floor. He could fix the privacy issue with maybe a sarong cut in half and glued to the glass somehow. He stacked his bags into the storage at the back, along one side. The short back wall was lined with a shower stall and kitchen bar.

Waking his wrist deck, he counted the calls on the data cube. Seventeen. The hospital appeared to have been fending off both Procyon Products and SoHAB. He knew what Procyon Products wanted, but SoHAB? Suddenly he sweated everywhere except through his newly repaired skin. What the hell did SoHAB want? He read again, concentrating harder.

SoHAB, or rather a certain Whit Smith purportedly speaking for SoHAB, wanted Tardi isolated until further notice.

Tardi grinned as he read the hospital’s final comment on the report. ‘Discharged without