“You don’t say. Now who’d do that?” Regers said with a somewhat sour twist to his mouth. “Something you ain’t telling me, Dez?”
Dez swallowed, as if fearing the sharp edge of Regers’ wrath. “Thought you’d be interested in knowing, the tip came from a good samaritan out in The Dim Zone. Our own, Yul Vrean. NOA was here questioning us, the Colonel, in person. Soon as they heard of this Vrean fellow announcing himself as working for Cyber Corp, they came knocking at our door. Quenrix is lost, the planet dead, the people enslaved. Vrean tipped off to the NOA that Xares is the next target on the fringe of The Dim Zone. Vrean’s commandeered some bug ship and is acting as a spy. With others. We don’t know how he got there or engineered this. He hasn’t been made yet according to NOA.”
Regers whistled through his teeth. “Ain’t that pretty? Guess Xares is our #1 destination then. And when were you planning to tell me all this, Dez?”
Dez ignored the threat in Regers’ eyes. “Since you’ve helped me secure this mechno which is worth a bit of money to us, I’m giving you this tidbit for free. I’d ask, in return, that you bring Vrean in alive. We didn’t leave on amicable terms. He’ll know what happened to Mathias and the others—him and his crew led by his cyber-ghoul captain-bodyguard, Goss. Like it or not, I can’t run this company without the help of that bastard Mathias.”
“You’re too modest, Dez. Not a problem. Happy to help out. I’d go into the bowels of hell to get back my old dear ‘friend’ Yul.”
“No doubt.”
Deakes gave a strangled cry and grabbed at Regers’ arm. “Now hold on. Are you loco, Regers? We’re talking about flying off to a nowhere zone and taking on an enemy fleet, not just some day trip to some abandoned planet in The Dim Zone.”
“Let go of me, Deakes, unless you want a metal knuckle dental job.”
Deakes backed off. Jennings stood silent.
“We’re going to The Dim Zone, whether you like it or not, bug fleet or not, then we’re gonna spend our reward money, ie Dez’s money, in as flamboyant a manner as possible. On booze, broads, flashy casinos, high-risk bets, everything under the sun. It’ll be a lark, like Mekeroid on steroids.”
Deakes grumbled. Jennings’ fist worked, his other hand clenching tight.
“What’s the matter, Jiminy?” asked Regers. “Got a bee in your bonnet?”
“No,” said Jennings, “I don’t know this Yul fellow from Adam, yet he seems a decent enough fellow tipping off the NOA. Not to mention the insanity of us flying off again into the zone of those brutes.”
Regers gusted out a sigh. “No wonder you were stuck in that bug tank with no hope of escape. You’re a pansy ass. Gotta break you of that habit.”
“Come on, this way,” said Dez. On a signal, one of the guards prodded Regers along.
Regers’ mood did not improve as they mounted some steps, passed through various electronic fields and check points with red-eye scanners then piled into a small elevator. They dropped more floors and exited into a concrete command booth about thirty feet square, furnished with a load of high tech equipment and four engineers: two men, two women who sat around a luminous circular holo display offering a panoramic view of a war-torn street in startling clarity. The four scientists, headsets circling ears, tapped fingers on holo keypads. Regers was unaware this was the same command booth that Dez had attended earlier, inviting the colonel to witness a demo.
Artificial yellow lights mimicked a daytime solar glow from the domed ceiling. Regers’ eyes roved over a ruined parkland to the right of the bombed out street. At its edge, about twelve feet off the ground, hovered two vertical-standing, coffin-shaped mechnos like that back on Remus, but considerably smaller. “What the fuck is this?”
“In this demonstration,” Dez began, ignoring Regers’ crude outburst, “we pit one enemy against the other. The mechno armatures you see before you are deliberately made smaller than those of Hresh’s. That’s a sealed war room, ten feet thick of hypertilized titanium. We can watch their interactions from this sealed command booth as they cannot break out and cause mischief here.” He signaled to the holoview. Jennings’ eyes opened wide, clearly daunted but impressed. The holoview zoomed in to enhance details.
Regers stared down upon the scene with undisguised amazement. He hadn’t realized Dez was running such a high-end operation. That the scientist had rigged something up of this caliber this quickly was a testament to his expertise and resolve. Obviously the man and his team of eggheads had been working non-stop days and nights on the project.
The two mechnos lifted higher into the air, alerted by some stimulus. A scavenging bird?
“Each mechno has been infused with a Xesian moth,” Dez continued, “an insect similar to the feral dragonfly that assaulted us on Remus. Both are live specimens contained in protective titanium shells, as you can see. Some have been bred and formed into quasi moths and butterflies. We have a dozen so far in secure vaults.”
Jennings pawed at his brow. “You kidding? You deliberately spawned these monsters? Do you like flirting with death?”
“I think not. They’re an asset to be used by those who can harness their power.”
Jennings shook his head in disapproval and shock.
“These creatures drive the armature of Hresh’s cutting-edge, experimental technology. My team of researchers enclosed them within these apparatuses where they perceive each other as a protector of their common habitat. At no time in our experimentation has any moth displayed hostility to the others, a good sign.
“We’ve simulated war conditions similar to real life—notice the bombed street and ravaged parkland. We’ve even gone so far as
