“That’s more like it, Dez. Well, guess we’d better set a course for this secret lab and get a head start.”
The CEO gaped. “What do you mean, we? Are you crazy?”
“I’ve been to hell and back, Dez. Crazy has no meaning for me.” He reached in his spacer’s jacket and lifted a device, a small, glinting pellet, the size of a prune pit. A maniacal grin spread over his features. “Now before you get any idea of summoning your pretty synthetic secretary or security people, let’s get a few facts in order. This here’s a flash flare. Make mincemeat of your face. And this here’s a spinner.” He held up his other hand, showing something similar, but smaller and silver. “We’ll get to that one in a second.” He moved toward the desk while the sweating Dez made fish gulping sounds and Ramra, the horn-headed Jakru, stared bug-eyed. “We’re going to need to go over the details of Mathias nice and slow. A few questions, that’s all.” His eyes gleamed. “I remember you now. A puffier face, longer hair to the shoulder in a white lab coat, running around that mechno lab, spewing numbers and chemical formulae like a high school geek. Who are you to take over Mathias’s job anyway? Thought you were just a lab rat.”
“There was nobody else, what with Hresh, our senior scientist and geneticist, gone. I was next in line.”
Regers blinked, thought for some time. “Hresh, that other brainiac who set us on that voyage to The Dim Zone to collect samples? This poses an inconvenience to us, Dez. Provided you’re not lying to me.”
“Why should I lie?”
“Why indeed?”
“Ask around,” Dez protested. “There’s the door.”
Deakes swore. “Wasted trip here, Regers. This is bad.”
Regers whipped back his unruly mop of black hair. “Maybe not. Think about it, Deakes. Why not just beetle out of here? We can take Dez along as collateral, in case we have more questions for him, or he’s lying to save his neck.”
“Wha—what do you mean?” Dez laughed. “You’re joking, right?”
“Do I look like it?”
Dez squirmed out of Deakes’s grip. Fast as a rabbit, he made a break for the door but Vincent hammer-locked him and twisted the executive’s arm behind his back. Dez howled as Deakes grinned and Regers exhaled an explosive breath. “Control this fool!”
He scanned the room, looking for more cameras. None that he could see. “Hold him, Vincent. Me and the Jakru have to get this spinner down his gullet.”
“No, wait!”
Deakes and Vincent forced the struggling executive to the rug while Regers and the Jakru got the spinner into his mouth.
“W-what the hell are you doing—?” His bewildered cry was cut short. Regers chopped him on the back of the head.
“What you can’t know, Dez, can’t hurt you.”
Regers worked Dez’s larynx in a jigsaw pattern then plugged his nose. “Swallow your medicine. Attaboy.”
Dez gulped with horror. Regers fingered the remote. “Let’s give it a little test. Oops.” Dez nearly keeled over as something smote him from inside.
“So, reckon the stun is working. We got a day before our boy shits it out,” he murmured to Deakes. “Should he try anything funny, we blast him. That said, I have a whole bag of these spinner devices to keep feeding him. Consider it an incentive to answer when I tell you, Dez, or we shove more down your throat. For example, when we pass through these cameras at checkpoints out of here, you better make it real casual, or your liver’s rat fodder. One touch of this button and it goes into kill mode.”
Dez nodded, a strangled noise issuing from his nose. He licked his pink lips and scowled.
They walked out of the office, Deakes to one side, Vincent and Ramra to the other. Regers brought up the rear.
The secretary lifted her coiffured head and frowned, removed her headset. “Sir? Going out so soon? There’s a file on Veramax that needs a signature.”
Dez waved it off, his face a pale shade of wax. “I’ll be away on business, Clara, for a few hours—” Regers gave him a painful nudge in the ribs “—I mean for some time with Mr. Regers and his colleagues. Keep me apprised about the files and the upcoming roster on the universal holo. We’re expecting new shipments of robot parts from Rangenkro any day soon.”
“As you wish, sir.” Clara flashed Regers and his grimy ruffians a dubious glance, but she donned her head gear and went back to her work, furrowing her brow, scanning the intra-holo roster.
The unlikely group walked down the hall, an opulent spread of chrome, modern art, aquaria filled with tropical fish, flanked by holovision corporate ads and slogans. Dez’s knees were shaking.
“Slow down, Dez, you’re getting ahead of us. Keep smiling and don’t look back like a frightened mouse. Tends to alarm the security people. Uncle Regers and his boys’ll take care of you. My itchy finger might swipe this here activator by accident if you try something cute. I’m fidgety, nerves not as steady after being dunked in a bug tank. Oops, sorry, slipped again.”
Dez doubled over in pain.
A security guard approached from down the hall. Regers didn’t fail to notice the compact black E2 hanging at his belt and the stilted stride and nodded at Dez. Dez made an odd motion and grimacing face which aroused the guard’s suspicion. The guard halted in midstride.
“Afternoon, sir. Anything wrong here?”
“I—” Dez hunched again in pain upon Regers’ finger movement.
“You okay? You don’t look well.”
Deakes shouldered his way in. “No worries, chief. Mr. Yadley here just got some bad news—a death in the family. We’re in from out of town, trying to comfort him.”
The security man frowned and flashed Dez a quizzical glance, as if demanding corroboration of such
