"Does your daughter have any medical training?" the woman at the clinic asked Rally as Shanti sat aside with her arms crossed and looking rather contrite.
"First aid," Rally said. "So far she hasn't had much call to use it."
"That's...good," the woman said before leaning over and looking toward Shanti. "But I think you'll be out here mostly. Can you work as a receptionist?"
"I do that for Rally a lot," Shanti said. "Name, contact information, weapons license number, ID number, model, what work needs to be done..."
"Pardon me?" the woman asked.
"I'm a gunsmith," Rally said. "I do custom work for sport-shooters and law enforcement mostly."
"Oh, I see," the woman said vaguely. "Well, we won't have that much paperwork here. A lot of the patients don't have contact information, some don't have IDs. So the list of questions will be a bit different. But it's good that you have experience in this sort of thing."
Rally looked out of the clinic at the area of Down Below it was set in and noted that most of the people she was seeing were desperate and down on their luck, but didn't look violent. Still, Shanti had been told not to wander out of the clinic and to wait to be picked up before leaving.
Shanti could handle herself against one or two of most of the common thugs out there, but really, Rally didn't want her to have to handle herself. Especially given the temptation that was proving for her more...reactive nature.
"Where's Doctor Franklin?" Rally wondered.
"He's up in medlab," the woman said. "Can't be down here all the time, after all."
As far as Mariah was concerned, she'd gone to bed only the day before and now it was a hundred years later and her husband had died in the cryonic tube next to her in some strange, mysterious way.
She walked alongside the Doctor as he started moving out of the clean, shiny parts of the station.
"Are you sure you want to come down here?" he said. "This isn't exactly the best place in the world to get a bit of relaxation in."
"It's rather sad that we haven't escaped this sort of thing in the last hundred years, either," Mariah said cheerfully, putting aside her own discomfort.
"There's always going to be people that have and people that don't have," Franklin said cynically. "It's like seeking perfection, we're never going to reach it, but doesn't mean we should stop trying."
"I guess that's so," the woman said doubtfully. "You run a clinic down here?"
"Right," Franklin said. "And I've got a teenager starting community service here in a bit and I want to be on hand for her first day...just in case."
"There are kids here?" Mariah said. "I hadn't noticed that many."
"There are a handful," Franklin said, thinking about the bunch that Garibaldi set to clean the garbage reclaimers for running a pickpocketing ring. "And from what I can tell, this one in particular is a handful on her own."
"Oh, so she's not a volunteer then," Mariah said.
"No, in the past two months," the doctor said. "She's caused a broken arm, a concussion and a broken nose. All in self-defense."
"Must be a real tough girl," the woman out of time said, shaking her head.
And then they were walking into the area of Stephen's clinic and she was faced with the image of a small, Indian girl wearing a green dress and a tasteful display of makeup as she hummed prettily and attacked the almost uniformly charred and dirty walls of the Down Below room.
"Hello, Doctor," Shanti said politely, waving with her cloth.
Jack stood up and listened carefully at the door, still fixated on the thought of getting out and seeking out Rally Vincent. Part of his mind insisted that the thought was ludicrous, that the bounty hunter had nothing to do with the people he represented and wasn't important at all.
But it was impossible to pay much attention to that thought.
No, he had to find a way to escape and seek her out. And while he did that, he had to keep up appearances make them think he was insane.
Was he? He saw strange things sometimes.
Monsters and ghosts. Things that couldn't be real.
Goldie's followers were nowhere near as skilled as she was at breaking a person and it showed in Jack and the way that he was losing his ability to tell apart reality from kerasine induced hallucinations.
"Things are starting to get creepy over here Rally," Becky said quietly. "We had an...incident over here recently and Roy's almost positive he caught a glimpse of Mary Anne, or someone that could have been her."
"How long ago was that?" Rally asked.
"Friday before last," Becky said. "So couldn't be the one behind your problem."
"Great," Rally said, shaking her head. "What suddenly brought them out of the woodwork?"
"If I had to guess," Becky said. "They're running short of kerasine. I mean, Goldie pretty much took the formula with her, so there's nothing new being made. I'll bet she had stockpiles around the Alliance colonies and they're starting to run dry."
"Which means they're getting desperate," Rally said bitterly. "And maybe think it's their last chance to fulfill their mistress's desires."
"How the hell are they going to make you Goldie's slave if she's dead?" Becky asked.
"Do you really think they're that rational?" Rally wondered.
"I guess not," the hacker said. "By the way, Rally, I'm going to be taking up stakes soon. You'll get word about how to contact me, but it ain't going to be easy."
"What's up?" Rally asked.
"I said things were getting creepy, I wasn't just talking about our personal problems," the information broker said. "We're starting to get something called 'Night Watch' over here that's very much shades of Orwell."
"Wouldn't you be Orwell?" Rally asked.
"What?" Becky asked. "Oh, right, not the fictional 21st century Hacker, the 20th century novelist. You know, Big Brother is watching you...1984?"
"Right, got it," the Gunsmith said, shaking her head.
"It's a good thing you think you can trust these people," Becky said. "The outer colonies and places like Babylon 5 are probably the safest place for you right now. I'm signing out."
"See you later," Rally said.
She signed off and then twisted about, drawing her PPG to aim in the direction of a faint sound. Slowly, she calmed down and sheathed the weapon again as she kept her eyes open and headed back to the service tunnels to head for her quarters.
"Getting jumpy," she muttered.
"Janos is going to win this race," Keffler said confidentaly as the old-style stock car racers started to line up on the track. "He's got this track nailed."
"I'm looking at Waschowski," one of the other officers watching the race said.
"You're just saying that because that's the name everybody knows," Keffler noted. "Don't you pay attention to the races at all? There's no way that Waschowski is going to win this race, he's barely recovered from that broken collarbone when he wiped out a while back."
"And Janos is going to do better?" the other officer asked.
"Care to make a wager on it?" Keffler asked.
"I wouldn't mind," a young voice declared.
The two officers turned to look at the speaker and found a fifteen year-old girl with short brown hair and wearing a tight pair of jeans along with a practical t-shirt and biker-style faux leather jacket. They'd seen her around the Dugout the last month or so, but they hadn't found any interest in talking to her yet.
"And who would you bet on?" Keffler asked.
Vivi looked up toward the race screen and thought for a moment.
"Well, this stuff is usually up in the air," she said idly, "but I'll bet that Takano is going to better than either Janos or Waschowski."
"And what do you have to bet?" the other officer asked with a snicker.
"Vouchers for a custom weapon modification at Gunsmith Cats," Vivian said with a guilty shifty eyed expression.
"Well, that's interesting," Keffler said, nodding. "And what do you want?"
"I want permission to go into Earhart's," Vivian said instantly.
"Earhart's for officers," Keffler said.
"I like swing music," Vivian explained simply. "And Rally, my foster mother, doesn't want me hanging around outside the restaurant doors. So, if I want to listen or dance, I have to get in the restaurant."
"All right," Keffler said with a smile. "Looks like we have a deal."
As the pack of cars got started, Vivian watched eagerly for the direction the race was going.
Thirty minutes later, she was walking towards the door of Earhart's with a pair of handwritten notes securely in her pockets.
In just a moment, she was going to be stepping inside the room for the first time ev...
"We're all going to die!" a shout came out of the blue just before someone grabbed her and twisted her about to face him. "There's a soldier of darkness here! It came off that ship from the past..."
Amis did not carry many objects with him, from the past or otherwise, but the scarf around his neck was one item that he had for a long period of time and as Vivian reached up to push him away, she pushed her hand against the scarf.
A series of disjointed images flooded into her mind of monsters and demons out of the darkness.
She released the scarf quickly and stepped back with a sharply drawn in breath before stumbling over her feet to the floor.
"Man, you love living dangerously," Garibaldi said, coming by to grab Amis's arm and start to pull him aside. "Are you all right? Vivian?"
"I...I think I need to talk to you in a bit," Vivian said quietly.
"I'm not crazy this time, it did come," Amis said. "It came off that ship from the past."
"What did?" Garibaldi demanded.
"A monster," Vivian said quietly.
"You saw it too?" Amis asked eagerly.
"All right, let's go talk this over," Garibaldi said.
A wandering lurker, one of the few non-human lurkers, shambled around a corner and saw a great form towering over him.
Intently but casually, the lurker shuffled forward and reached out his hands as if asking for a little money.
And then the figure he was appealing to reached down and grabbed him.
The screams reverbrated through that section of Down Below.
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(Posted Fri, 14 Jan 2011 11:29)
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