Miami Pete 8:

Our destination coordinates were a short way from the road, up a ravine.  We parked the wheeled transport off the side of the road at the mouth of the ravine. The area was as uneven and rocky as we expected from when we looked at the topigraphical scan.  I was surprised to see what appeared to be a path heading up the ravine the way we needed to go.

"Ok, we'll go ahead.  You two stay with the truck" Boss monk bossed, indicating that he intended to leave Pete and I behind.

"No doing" Pete replied. "We're going with you."

"You maybe, but that thing isn't allowed in the holy shrine." said the boss monk, pointing at me. If I hadn't gotten to the point that I seriously disliked the boss monk yet, that sure did the trick.  Thing?  He called me a THING?!

There was a dramatic few minutes of silence as Pete and the boss monk squared off. I was afraid that they would come to blows, which is not an advisable thing to do while in survival suits, especially when surrounded by such a thin, unbreathable atmosphere.  One crack or split of a suit, and the wearer would be quickly dead.  I mentally located where my tool kit was. Patch kit, third pocket from the end, right hand side, and held my breath ready to act in case something happened to Pete's suit.  The boss monk, I decided, was on his own.

"Fine," Pete finally spat, then he took a breath to calm himself and said to me "Stay with the transport."

"but..."

"Please... stay with the transport."

I was dissapointed, but surely now that we found what the monks were looking for our business arrangement with them wouldn't last too much longer.  I sure was looking forward to leaving those two behind.  Well, boss monk anyway. Other monk ignored me too, but he never seemed to put quite the same amount of disgust into it that the boss monk did.

Pete walked over to the transport waving at me to join him. "Help me make sure my pack is ready."

We went through his pack, which I thought was odd since I knew Pete had carefully packed before we left Hauley in such a way as to know what he had and where everything was. It was a trick he passed down to me shortly after I joined him on Hauley. Always know what is in your kit, and where it is in your kit, so you don't have to search for something if you need it to save your life.  Then Pete did an odd thing. He got my attention and looked me straight in the eyes through our masks, then looked down at his hand patting a locked metal container and with his other hand, pulled something out of a pocket on his suit and placed it in my hand.  Then held a finger up in front of his face mask in the universal shushing sign.  He had his back to the monks, so that they couldn't have seen what he was doing.

"Stay with the transport."

I nodded, although I didn't understand what it all meant.

Then Pete turned, donned his pack, and began the climb up the ravine path with the monks.

I waited till they climbed out of sight and looked down at what he had given me. It was a key.

I spent a couple minutes fretting over what I should do. Pete had shown me a box and then given me a key, so obviously I was intended to open it.  Also Pete had hidden the entire exchange from the monks. But why? All that time, Pete had been palling around with the monks.  Befriending them. Eating dinner with them. Why would he be keeping things from them now?

I decided I had to open the box.

Have you ever been in one of those situations where you knew you needed to do something, and that something seemed like such a simple thing, but the outcome ended up being so far outside what you expected that you just stood there like an idiot afterwards?

Inside the box was a gun.

I knew that Pete kept a small cache of weapons in his quarters on Hauley. I had even done repairs and upgrades to some of them over the years. Why did Pete have a gun here? And why had he shown it to me? Didn't he trust the monks?

I sat and waited and pondered. "Stay with the transport." Pete had said. So I did.  I stayed with the transport.

One hour.

Two hours.

Three.

That was bad. Even if Pete and the monks showed up right then we would be hard pressed to make it to the safety of Hauley before the radiation started making it's way past our surival suits. I rechecked my survival suit's indicators. Yep, it was bad.

As I was fretting and pacing back and forth, my comm finally crackled to life.

"...elp, me.... hel....eee" It was Pete. His voice was raspy and gasping. I knew it. I started running for the path, then turned around silently cursing myself and went back to grab a rescue kit that I had put together that included extra air tanks, first aid supplies, and a rescue tent. The survival suits should have had plenty of air for the complete trip, but you know me, I'm paranoid. On a quick second thought, I grabbed the gun also. I don't know what I would do with it. Those things had always made me uncomfortable. In my life before Pete and Hauley, I had seen quite a few friends gunned down by the gangs and criminals on Deltos IV.

As I climbed the path, half carrying, half dragging the rescue kit, a ways off to the side I heard, then saw as I turned, the side of one of the bigger rocky hills collapse revealing a hanger door.  Then the hanger door opened and with a roar, a 'rus ship emerged.  I had seen a few 'rus ships up to that point. Even been followed by one for a while on Hauley if you recall.  They all look a little different, but they are all unmistakably 'rus.  I stared stupidly as the 'rus ship flew over head and then blasted for space.

Then I recalled Pete. "Pete! Pete! Are you there?" I yelled into my comm unit. What I got back was static. Just background noise? Or maybe it's Pete trying to contact me? Logicly, I couldn't tell.  It was just static, but my heart told me it was Pete, and I better had better move it because he was in trouble.

Silently cursing myself for wasting time gawking, I ran on.

At the end of the path, I found a half open door.  Squeezing past, I entered a dark complex. There was a little light from the doorway, so I could see a path in the dust that Pete and the monks had come that way. I turned on my light and followed the path made by their passage.  The trail lead through an entryway, It must have been from before the planet lost it's atmosphere becuase I noticed the lack of an airlock.  The walls could only be described as 'rus-like. You know how I said that while all 'rus ships were different, there was no mistaking that a ship was 'rus? The walls, and doorways, and floor, basically everything I saw had that same 'rusy-ness to it.

The trail turned from the entryway to a grand hallway where it turned into and came out of various doorways. I peeked into some of the rooms. There were varying levels of rubbish strewn around in the rooms. Furnature, tables, and other things I couldn't identify, but it was all in pieces.  It all looked to be so old that it had just collapsed.

Just as I was about to move on after looking in a room, I saw movement. Shining my light in that direction, I saw Pete.  Lying in a pool of blood.  His suit had been torn from his head and... something... had been attached. Pete was desperately holding the mask of his survival suit to his face.

Not good.

I pulled the survival rescue tent out of the rescue kit, quickly kicked some debree out of the way to make space, and pulled the chord to activate it.  Whitin a second the tent was up.  I dragged Pete in with all my strength and sealed the door. In next to no time, we had atmosphere.

Pete didn't look so good. I pulled his survival suit away. He was barely concious, bleeding, and had a device, somewhat like a helment, on his head.  No, it was attached to his head. Mounted there. Pete didn't usually have a thing on his head, maybe he was balding a little and sometimes wore a hat, but never anything like this thing.

"kid... kid..."

"Don't talk Pete, we have to figure out how to stabilize you and get you back to Hauley and into the autodoc."  I was paniced and found myself crying.

"The monks double crossed us. They hit me from behind and tried to put this thing on me. They tried to make me like you." Pete said.  What was he talking about?

"What is this thing?" I asked crying as I tried to figure out how to get it off.  I couldn't even see out how it was attached.

"It's a cyber device. A primitive one compared to yours, but it didn't work. For some reason it didn't hook up to my brain. I don't think they knew what they were doing." Pete answered.

"Cyber device?  I don't have a cyber device! What are you talking about?" I reached up and touched my head as if to prove him wrong... but there it was.  Smaller and smoother than the clunky thing that was attached to Pete's head, but there none the less.

Pete must have seen the confusion on my face. "I found you on a refuse pile behind one of the cyber factories on Deltos IV.  They must have thought you were defective so they threw you out.  We were there to do a job, but the whole thing went south.  I was the only one who survived, and the Haul-o-caster was in real bad shape, so I was stranded.  I found you while scrounging for parts.  Took you back to the Haul-o-caster, and you started fixing things.  When you got the ship repaird enough to leave, I took you with me."

"That's silly, I'm not a cyborg.  I can't be.  Those things are clones that had no life before.  I'm a girl. I had a family."  I replied. "besides, people hate cyborgs.  They freak people out.  That's why they don't make them anymore."

"Why do you think I kept you away from people?  Why do you think our pasangers didn't want to acknowledge you?"  I could tell that Pete was fading fast.  He'd lost a lot of blood.

I was crushed. I didn't know what to say, or how to feel.  How could I be a cyborg and not know it all this time. There is this thing on my head!  How did I not notice this thing on my head? But logically it answered a lot of questions.  I fix things, but I have no memory of learning how to do that, except for the one or two shortcuts that Pete had taught me, and lets face it.  Most of those were death traps.  I didn't sleep.  I basically learned how to navigate and fly a ship in less than a week.

Soon, because I'm not a crybaby, my thoughts got back on the problem at hand.  A check of the sensors built into the rescue tent showed that we were far enough under ground that we weren't being bombarded by quite so much radiation.  It still wasn't perfectly safe, but we weren't in imminent danger of dying from it.  This was all helped by the rescue tent being resistant. I had packed a spare survival suit, and a backup to the spare for that matter, in the transport.  Hey, it's designed to haul cargo.  It wasn't like we didn't have the room.  So I could get Pete into a freash suit.  I thought I could get the suit over the big thing on his head, but I wasn't absolutely sure.  Then I could... what?  No way I could carry him down that rocky path without risking a tear in one of our suits.  Carrying Pete on a light grav space station was one thing.  Carrying him on a planet with just a bit more than standard gravity, not quite a heavy world, but more than earth normal.  Impossible.

Pete coughed, and blood came out, which caused more coughing.  Once he was able to get air "This thing is killing me.  I can feel it still digging, I won't last much longer.  Get back to the ship, it's yours.  The paperwork is in the safe in my office, it's all nice and legal.  Go, have a nice life.  Don't let anyone give you any crap."  With that, Pete went into another coughing fit.  I tried and tried to get him more air.  I tried everything I could think of.  I cussed at him to stop, to breathe.

Then he was gone.