Maybe the dragon would drop the fucker. He could hope, but it appeared as though it held him securely. Nor did Winslow appear to be struggling—on the contrary, he almost appeared to be happy to go along for the ride.
“It almost looks like the lizard is cradling him,” the tech commented. “Maybe he adopted him as a pet.”
The dragon turned its head, and its beady yellow eyes stared directly into the hidden camera lens.
“Jesus! What a face.” The tech reeled, and Biggs checked his own instinctive recoil. He’d never seen an attractive dragon, but this thing took hideous to a whole new level. Grayish-green scales covered its face, its reptilian genetics further revealed in a snake-like neck topped by a lizard frill. Thorny protuberances poked out of its head, crowned by a ring of horns. If that wasn’t bad enough, its face appeared to be scarred. Shiny, black rivulets ran from its eyes down its snout.
Finally it veered off, carrying its human payload. He watched it move onto screen two then three. When he was confident it was leaving, Biggs returned his attention to the tech.
He’d throttle the idiot, except he’d hired the jackoff. It didn’t serve his purposes for employees to be too sharp. An excess of intelligence led them to question things they shouldn’t. They only needed to be smart enough to do their jobs.
But he was still pissed. “If I hadn’t come in, you would have been too busy watching Hicks fuck a whore to notice a dragon had entered our sector. Why the fuck do you think I have you monitoring the screens anyway? What you do off shift is your business. When you’re working, you keep your dick in your pants and your mind on the job. I’m putting you on an extra shift and deducting rations for the next week. Buzz Hicks and tell him to get his pasty white ass into my office.” He stalked out of the control room.
* * * *
“You wanted to see me?” Hicks asked warily.
“Sit down.”
“What’s going on?” Blinking rapidly, the ops manager perched on the edge of the hard wooden guest chair. The hot seat was about to get hotter.
“A dragon flew right overhead. He carried a man.”
“Shit! One of our workers?” Hicks sprang to his feet. “Do they know we’re here?”
“No. It’s the man who came in on the ship.”
“Jesus. The poor bastard.” He sank into the chair again.
Biggs grabbed a bottle of antacids from a desk drawer and popped four tablets. Damn things didn’t do any good. His goddamn belly and throat were on fire.
“Maybe you ought to see the doc about the reflux,” Hicks suggested.
“Who do you think prescribed this worthless shit?” He flung the bottle into his desk and slammed the drawer. “What I do know is that I happened to spot the dragon on the monitor when I went looking for you.”
“I’m off duty.” Hicks fidgeted.
Biggs would get to the hooker in a moment. “I heard you halted operations on the number two producer.”
An almost comical relief washed over Hicks’s face. “Fissures appeared overnight. I worried the tunnel could cave in, so I ordered stability tests. I was waiting for the results before I talked to you about it.”
“What about the workers?”
“I moved them to another tunnel until we have answers.”
“Good plan. We can’t afford to lose anybody.”
“No.”
Until ships could get in and out, he had no way to replace lost workers.
“If something did happen, what’s the plan for dealing with the bodies?” Previously, the few fatally injured on the job had been cremated, their bodies tossed into a lava pool, but since they couldn’t go topside anymore that wasn’t an option.
“Leave them in an unused, nonproducing tunnel, I guess,” Hicks said. “The ground is too rocky to bury them. I mean, we dig into rock all the time, but I didn’t think you’d risk breaking drill bits to bury somebody.”
“No, you’re right. Hopefully there are enough bacteria and bugs in this fiery hellhole to decompose the body.”
“Hopefully that won’t be necessary at all.”
Biggs didn’t reply, letting the silence build until Hicks began to squirm. “Now. Tell me about the hooker.”
A red flush stained the ops manager’s cheeks. “I, uh, I was off the clock, so I’m uh—”
“I don’t give a shit who you fuck. What I am concerned about is this one’s mental state. This planet is crawling with goddamn flying lizards—and now we had one in our sector. The broad could have exposed us all by wandering around. If she’s gone nutso, she needs to be neutralized.”
Hicks’s eyes widened. “No, boss. She’s solid. Her mind is stable.”
“And you know that because you were so interested in her mind?”
Hicks flushed again.
Jesus, Biggs thought.
“Initially, I had the same concerns you raised. So I talked to her for a while to get a sense of where her head was at. She’s okay, for a hooker, I mean. She’s nice. We talked a couple of times. One thing led to another, and…” He shrugged. “You know.”
Yeah, the fucking idiot had a crush on a whore. Which meant his judgment was compromised, and he might try to protect her. He’d have to assign someone else to keep an eye on her for signs of mental instability because he couldn’t count on Hicks to remain objective.
“If her head is screwed on straight, why was she wandering naked topside?”
“It only happened once. She said thought she saw a man and went to investigate.”
“Somebody else went to the surface?” Heads.
