“Enjoy every moment, Miss Lulah. They’re fleeting and Time … well, she’s a relentless bitch.”
She spied his plate. “I should leave you be and let you eat your supper before it gets cold. Would you care for anything to drink?”
“Well, you wouldn’t happen to have a glass of cold buttermilk, would you?”
She grinned. “Mister Pettigrew, I may look citified. But I grew up in the hills of Eastern Kentucky. One frosty glass of buttermilk comin’ right up!”
***
“Goddamn! I can’t believe I’m doin’ this!” Tiger muttered as he crouched with Dee beside a wall of an outbuilding inside the old Possum Works complex. “We gotta get in there?”
He was still quite unsettled from the gator incident, and now he was inside the most heavily-guarded area in the SEEZ, risking prison on Penal One if they got caught. Or worse, simply being shot on sight like a rabid dog.
How did he get himself into these situations?
“Really? We gotta get in there?” he asked again, knowing the answer wasn’t going to change. “That’s the only way? Hell, it’d be easier to go down to the spaceport and jack a ship,” Tiger scoffed, both knowing how absurd that remark was. Forget anti-theft measures of old, like voice recognition, fingerprint or retina scanning. A sentient ship would recognize its pilot the way a person would know an old friend or lover. A thief would never even succeed in getting the engines fired.
“I had no idea it was like this now,” Dee’s voice reeked of despondency. “We’d have a better chance at getting in Fort Knox.”
The place was a virtual fort. Whatever had happened here on Weird Wednesday … it had to have been bad. Real fucking bad! Tiger knew that from all the different badges and emblems plastered on vehicles, buildings and personnel, Space Authority, United Nations, Department of Defense, CIA. Some high-G shit had gone down here! And he’d stepped right into it, all wet, smelly and steaming.
The main complex was almost unrecognizable from the last time he’d been here. The small fabricating shops had been bulldozed down, and portable barracks brought in to serve as living quarters. The administrative building was still standing, but Cap’n Reb no longer stood at the large picture window in his office, staring out toward Final Assembly and the construction of his beloved Chargers, the hot rods of space. Portable light towers had been set up around the perimeter and searchlights crisscrossed the tarmac. Troopers toting very nasty-looking pulse rifles kept a wary watch on the comings and goings of civilian workers in lab coats and dress suits.
The most significant change had been the massive magnicrete dome that rose into the sky where the Propulsion Testing Lab once stood. Fifty stories high, it looked like a tremendous white boil swelling from the earth, malignant and foreboding. A large, heavily guarded entryway, big enough to drive large hover ships or aerocraft through, protruded out from the bottom.
The first thing Tiger noticed was not all the cannons on the gunships aimed outward. Most were aimed directly at the cavernous door. Granny’s Jesus! They weren’t just trying to keep prying eyes out. They were trying to keep someone … or something … in! But what? What needed a fucking army of black-coated troopers armed to the damned teeth to keep it at bay?
He had no idea … but he had an inkling who just might.
He reached and grabbed Dee’s shirt by the back of his collar. With a yank, he pulled the crouching man back hard on his ass. His pistol was out and in his friend’s face before he even realized he’d drawn. “What the fuck is going on here, Dee?”
“Have you lost your goddamned mind?” Dee was beside himself, and it was all he could do to keep his voice down.
“Tell me how deep a pile of shit we’re wading into … now!”
The black man was livid, his teeth clenched so hard Tiger thought that might crack and shatter like glass from the pressure. “Some thanks I get for tryin’ to help you out!” he hissed through them.
“There’s at least a company of Space Guard at the front of that fucking, big bubble!” Tiger came back hotly. “And they ain’t there just checkin’ bags! Maybe it’s just me, but they seem more concerned with what’s inside there than they do with what’s out here! Wanna tell me why?”
“I ain’t gotta clue, man!”
“Too thin! You were here that day! What kind of Twilight Zone shit you leadin’ me into?”
He pressed the barrel of the Krueger Spacehawk into the man’s cheek. Dee held up his hands, waving them frantically. “Whoa, now! Get that motherfucka outta my goddamned face ‘fore I shove it up your ass so far it gives new meaning to shootin’ your mouth off!”
“Talk to me, Dee! They got fuckin’ tanks over there! How we gonna get by tanks? Show ‘em our union cards?”
“Look! All I know is Schmidt was developing some kind of new technology for deep space travel for the Authority. The Cap’n had a research contract with them for the New Exodus project.”
Tiger was stunned. “You telling me the Cap’n was working with the Authority?”
“It was Schmidt’s baby! He talked the Cap’n into it. It’d been that fucker’s dream since they were kids to be the first man to develop a faster-than-light technology. As part of New Exodus, the funding was unlimited, so were the resources.”
Tiger shook his head. Maybe Cutter had been right about that German fuck all along. That unsettled him even more. Cutter was right about far too much.
Dee’s voice brought him back to the present. “Hey, asshole!” He looked down to see Dee nodding tentatively toward the gun still at his jaw. “The gun?”
Tiger lowered it. What the hell had he been thinking? Dee had risked his own life to get them here. “Sorry, man. That was an ass move on my part. It’s been a rough couple of days, but that’s no excuse.”
“No, it sure isn’t.” Dee gave
