The Adventures of Mirror Mott, Part One

Posted on 29 Feb 2016 @ 4:56pm by Lieutenant Olsam Mott

2,222 words; about a 11 minute read

In the Mirror Universe...

The alley was dark, illuminated only by the holographic sign at one end. He hated that f--king sign. The owner was too cheap to fix the holoemitters so it made a kind of buzzing sound; of course, he was so thick-skulled that he probably couldn't hear it, but it kept Olsam up at night. Drove him crazy. That constant buzzing. Bzzz. Bzzz. Bzzz. It was enough to make you want to slit your carotid artery.

There was a shadow in his doorway, somebody waiting for him. But then again, he knew that. He'd known that for the past five minutes thanks to the device in his pocket. It ran on some pretty remarkable predictive software that tapped into the city's traffic sensor network. It identified and tracked humanoids and calculated the likelihood that they would need to use his alley as a shortcut or that might be accessing one of the back entrances of a business on the block. Anything over 75% probability that they had no business walking down his dark alley triggered an alert for him. Half the time they were drifters or some clueless f--k who didn't have the sense to know not to turn down a dark alley on Lithios Prime. But sometimes they were the kinda people that just needed to eat a disruptor bolt, so in those cases, he was thankful for the device. And thankful, too, for the man he'd gutted to get it.

At the doorway, he stopped. Two men huddled in the corner. Mott pulled something out of his pocket and stuck it in his mouth. He pulled a tab on the end of the Lithian smokestik and the flash briefly illuminated the two faces - one looked like shit, and the other one really looked like shit. Two of Dijkstra the Funhouse's boys from the look of the tattoos on their temples.

He never got the point in inking yourself like that. Why'd you wanna roam the streets announcing your allegiance to everyone and their mom? Only kids wanted to do that shit, strut around with their ink and their chests puffed out like they had a pair of balls the size of a Tarkalian fantax. Nah, better to play it safe, keep your cards close to your chest. Longer nobody knew who you belonged to then the longer it'd taken 'em to decide whether or not to shoot you, gave you the opening to shoot first. And people like Mott? They always shot first.

He took a long drag on the smokestik and exhaled the waste product through a small opening made between his lips. He punched in the code to open the door, scanned his thumb, scanned his retina, all the other bullshit that didn't amount to anything for a dedicated software jockey and grunted at the two men once the door slid open.

"Bring him in. And don't let him bleed on my f--king floors."

---

"Told you boys to quit dusting up with Jonah's street sweepers. They don't play fair, you know that. Look at this shit." He reached over and ran a gloved hand down the arm of one of the men; burned skin and tissue accumulated ahead of his finger and eventually splattered onto the plastic sheet on the floor when Mott shook it off. The man was screaming bloody murder the entire time as the strong, rough index finger mercilessly ran across burned, raw, and exposed nerves. Finally, Mott punched him in the neck with a pistol syringe full of sedative. That probably hurt like hell, too, but he wasn't conscious long enough to let 'em know about it.

"Screamers..."

"They was the ones that started it," the uninjured man said defensively. "Then they pulls out that plasma grenade. Who mess with that kinda shit, man? Out in a market? Burned Biberveldt real good, I didn't know if he was gonna make it. I put a dermacool patch on him and get him outta there before the Pentarch's darksuits showed up." The young man's chest puffed up proudly. "Carried him straight here, like they told me."

"You want some kinda f--kin' medal, kid? Ask him when he wakes up, probably saved his stupid life. Now he can live another day with extensive nerve damage in his left arm and leg and excruciating, mind-numbing pain for the rest of his life unless he can afford to go into the tanks or slip into one of those derma-clinics. Yeah, real good job."

The young man almost didn't seem to hear Mott, as he proceeded to talk in a quiet voice. "I don't know what that guy was thinkin', doc. With that plasma grenade, you know? I saw civvies goin' down in green flame. Pentarchy's gonna be shittin' bricks. I mean, what kinda people does that?"

"Probably the kinda people who like to end things," Mott grumbled. "You wanna end something you end it. Ever heard of Pi Ecliptis III? F--kin' full-on planetary bombardment. Sixteen days, non-stop. Total annihilation. Never seen anybody move to the negotiating table so fast in my life. Jonah's trying to strong-arm Dijkstra."

Mott's muscular bulk moved over to a dormant device, and he flipped a switch, obviously expecting the machine to come to life. It did not. He scowled, balled up an enormous fist, and slammed it into the side of the machine where a small indentation marked the site of several previous such impacts. The outer casing of the machine shook and then it finally came to life; he'd cannibalized a heavy duty sarium krellide power cell from a non-functioning isomagnetic disintegrator to run the damn thing but the waveguides were shot and sometimes needed a little "encouragement." He fed it some information and then stepped back to wait for it to print out what he needed.

"Open that box there, the red one. Lift up the second tray. Got two Tal Shiar pistols in there. Just don't get caught with 'em," Mott said, taking a moment of pity on the young man and his wounded companion, Biberveldt. The pistols were illegal twice over - once for being illegally imported and again for having only one setting: disintegrate. Some part of him was even thankful to be ditching them.

The makeshift skinprinter he'd been leaning on beeped and a compartment lit up with a dim light, revealing a line of sickly colored flesh that had been printed out using a protein encoder he'd stolen from a hospital. He lifted the compartment's lid, removed the translucent slab of flesh, and admired it for a moment. It looked delicious but experience showed it tasted like shit, not worth much to him beyond its actual purpose.

Over the next few minutes, Mott set about cleaning up the unconscious man's wound and then grafting the printed skin on. It wouldn't look right - he didn't have the equipment for that. And he couldn't do anything for the nerve damage - he didn't have the equipment for that, either. But he could, at least, make it look halfway decent, restore some motor function, and keep it from getting a massive infection from one of the bacterial strains floating around this shitty rathole.

After finishing up and reviving the man from his unconscious state, Mott started to take a moment to admire his handiwork but the device in his pocket beeped insistently, interrupting him. It was too coincidental to be anyone other than Jonah the Flower's men, probably following the sloppy trail left by the two idiots in his shop. Maybe it could have been one of the Pentarch's goon squads, but the government usually wasn't sharp enough to catch up this quickly. Either way, it was trouble in the form of six humanoids.

From his earliest days on Lithios Prime, the good doctor had declared neutrality with the street gangs. But Jonah the Flower had never wanted to observe that. He had an in-house doctor, meaning he didn't have a use for Mott. That the Bolian agreed to patch up whoever visited him for a pound of flesh - literally - was bad news for Jonah in his never-ending quest to control the Lithian underground. Right now with Dijkstra's men in his shop, it must have seemed like a prime time to kill two birds with one stone. The Flower could easily claim they were after the opposing gang members and Mott was collateral damage.

The door to his place blew open, and the first man ran at him like a complete amateur, energy baton outstretched in one hand. Mott almost laughed as he caught the hand by its wrist and used it as a pivot point to bring the rest of the man's body closer through momentum. His elbow came up and smashed into the man's face; he felt the bones crack and inhaled deeply of the fragrance of fresh blood. It smelled like life. A knee to the stomach seemed to remind the man that he should disarm himself as the energy baton went clattering to the floor, soon followed by the body. Mott picked up the baton and stuck its point against the base of the man's skull, ruthlessly pushing against it while the man's body flopped violently and helplessly.

He'd violated Mott's personal space, and Mott didn't appreciate that.

Two disruptor bolts flew past his head; motion in his peripheral vision and sound told him Dijkstra's men had opened fire to cover their way to the alternate exit. They were cowards, but, at least, they pulled attention away from the burly blue doctor so he could make his way over to one of the failsafe devices tucked away in the cramped, low-ceiled room. Now or never to see if those repairs actually work, he thought to himself as he slid down the side of the skinprinter and landed roughly on the floor. He jammed his hand underneath, scraping his knuckles in the process, and pushed a button.

There was an audible increase in noise from the inside of the skinprinter as the power cell fed energy into the concealed isomagnetic disintegrator. And then suddenly there was a hole in the outer casing where none had been before. The packet of energy that had erupted from the "medical device" struck the first man in the chest, passed through the one behind him, and dissipated somewhere outside in the alley. Both men had vaporized almost instantaneously as cellular bonds broke under the sheer power generated by the now drained sarium krellide power cell.

Around the corner of the skinprinter's casing, Mott could see the remaining three men engaged in a firefight with Dijkstra's men. The Bolian dropped to his belly and began crawling, using powerful arms and legs to push himself toward his computer station. Another button pushed, this time under the desk, and all his data storage devices fried. He'd actually paid for those, so it pissed him off having to go this route. In the final moments before all the circuitry had met its end a software spike hijacked the Pentarchy's nearby subspace communications beacon long enough to transmit a few terabytes of data off-planet into data storage at the Bank of Bolias. It wasn't a total loss, but it pushed him into that zone where he was starting to see blue.

"Please state the nature of the medical emergency," he heard himself say.

A holographic Olsam Mott had popped up on the other side of the room, cheerfully ready to serve anyone's medical needs despite the total lack of access to any sort of medical database. The program had arrived as a joke from one of his brothers, who was always ribbing him for his sour disposition and total lack of bedside manner. Instead of laughing, Mott had incorporated it into his personal countermeasures, and it was performing admirably. Fresh volleys of disruptor bolts flew as the remaining three Flower Boys opened fire at the hologram. Seeing it, Mott actually cracked a smile, then made a mad dash for the exit.

Someone must have had enviable peripheral vision, spotting him in just enough time to lay down a spray of gunfire in his direction. A lucky bolt caught Mott in the leg; he could feel the bone shatter inside. The appendage started dragging uselessly behind him as he made it through the door, pissing him off enough to give him the strength to make it the extra distance through the pain. Biberveldt gave him a wide-eyed, unseeing stare. He was shaking, not even holding his Tal Shiar pistol anymore, just standing there jabbering to himself.

"They're gonna f--kin' kill us, doc, they're gonna-"

"Shut up, Biberveldt," Mott growled, clinging to the doorframe for support.

A few hasty commands into the control pad slammed both this door and its companion shut, sealing the room. Another one flipped on Mott's Final Solution. And while he wasn't a man to shy away from the gruesome or grotesque, he started to limp away from the door. Even he had no interest in hearing what was taking place inside as a package in the ceiling opened, a ventilation fan kicked on, and billions of nanites flooded the room, programmed for only one thing: the consumption of organic material.

 

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