The Forgotten Planet

The heist that set this story in motion started out the same way as any of our other paid contracts. That’s because there wasn’t anything special about the job itself. The item our client hired us to lift was just an ancient souvenir from a dead and mostly forgotten world. The trouble would come later.

“Are you sure there’s no one home, Galen?” Adan asked as he slipped the bootie over his right shoe. He was already wearing the matching glove that was the other half of my proprietary and recently updated HotMits® technology. I came up with the idea while baking cookies.

We both had on the black night gear with all the pockets – though I’m pretty sure Adan had his custom cut to fit his muscular frame. Mine was still waiting for bigger muscles to fill out the shoulders and chest, and somehow there was already a black-market chocolate stain on the right sleeve.

My partner in crime this evening was, as always, my big brother Adan. He’s the bigger brother in many ways: height, muscle mass, ego. I planed the jobs and ran the tech, while Adan did the messier, adrenaline-junkie portion of the work.

“I already told you Adan,” I replied with only the slightest hint of annoyance in my voice. The night was young, leaving plenty of hours for my tone to devolve into full-blown passive-aggressiveness. I’m not exactly what you’d call a people-person. “I hacked the mark’s system and read his daily calendar. He’s gone for another week.” I’d also generously given his staff a paid night off from what appeared to be the homeowner’s email account.

“I could run this op just as easily from the car you know?” I said as I shivered in the cold of the crisp autumn evening.

Adan practically snorted. “There’s no way I’m testing out these baking mits or whatever again with you offsite.”

I’d tested the ’Mits® under lab conditions and they’d passed almost every single time. I decided on the fly that he’d probably take the glass-half-empty view of that fact, so instead I said, “It’s not like you always need medical treatment after testing beta versions of my gear,” which in hindsight didn’t sound as great outload as it did in my head.

That earned me a raised eyebrow. “Tell me again why you can’t be the one opening shield little broski.”

“You know how many calculations I have to run based on the specific frequency of the plasma shield?” I asked in reply. He grunted and rolled his eyes. The answer was zero, but big bro didn’t know that.

While Adan began his usual pre-job warm-up – consisting of pelvic thrusts and jerky chin and shoulder movements that he generously labels dancing – I took a moment to look around enjoy the surroundings. This was night-and-day to view of industrial Oasis I’m usually subjected to from the window of my second story bedroom. The target was a commodities trader for a Vox-approved megacorp, which explained how he could afford to maintain a lush estate. The water-cost alone for his three acres of grape vineyards this close to the edge of the Great Desert of Ix must have been astronomical. So was the cost of the charged plasma field generator that powered the transparent blue bubble that covered the house, carport and the garden-filled courtyard.

Past the vineyard, there wasn’t much to see outside of sand dunes and scraggly Mance trees. The mark had all sorts of privacy – which suited our plans just fine. I looked back to Adan, who was using the video on his wrister as a mirror while plastering-back a loose strand of his dirty-blond hair with his free hand. As he did this, his hips continued their gyrations.

“Are you ready, or what?” I asked.

Adan smiled down at me as he flipped the screen off. “I was born ready, bro. Besides, there’s nothing wrong with looking your best,” he replied. He gave me a quick once-over and followed that up with a look that implied that perhaps I should do the same.

“There’s no one here to see you except me, you know,” I answered, perhaps a bit defensively. “That’s the whole point of doing a nighttime raid on an empty house.”

He shrugged. “You never know,” he replied, turning towards the opaque shield.

Only my brother would hold out hope that, hot, eligible females would be available to hit on while he was in the middle of a job in the middle of nowhere. He reached out and gingerly touched the shield with the tip of one gloved finger. I let out my breath as the charged plasma field parted around the tip of the glove like a drop of oil splitting the surface of still water.

“See,” I said, adding more confidence to my voice than I actually felt, “I told you it would work, you big baby.”

“Whatever hermaño,” Adan replied with a sideways glance back at me. He wiggled his pointer finger at me and added, “You weren’t the one that had to re-grow a finger last time.”

That, of course, was the reason for the latest upgrade. Using a grain of plutonium to power the compact magnetic field worked much better than the ancient hydrogen cell technology I’d been forced to work with in the past. The energy output was more even and efficient, and now Adan didn’t have to wear a backpack to transport the bulky power cell. That raid we’d made on the Vox mechanical-plant last year gave me all the fissionable material and modern molten sulfur batteries I needed to power my inventions into the foreseeable future.

Once satisfied he wasn’t in danger of losing another of his manicured digits, Adan slipped his right hand and foot into the shimmering-blue field and opened a hole big enough to step through. I pulled a Rover® out of my right thigh pocket, and with a thought from my Mercury-Seven cranial implant, sent it through the opening in the shield. Adan stepped through after my Rover® and let the hole seal closed behind him.

I watched Adan through the opaque shield with my less-than-stellar organic eyes while scouring the area through the Rover’s crystal-clear camera feed. I could focus in on the visual feed from the rover if I looked up and slightly to the right. I’d had four artificial feeds going once on a job that required multiple drones, but I was flying high on Cincy at the time. That left me with one hell of a migraine. One extra signal was easier than walking and chewing gum.

Adan smirked at me and said, “You’re doing that chicken-neck thing again,” before turning and ambling down the garden path towards the house.

The audio signal bypassed my ears entirely and went straight to my left temporal lobe, and I had my usual French House mix by those ancient punk robot musicians on in the background. I continually have to stop my head from bobbing to its own personal beat – especially since my body’s sense of rhythm, according to Adan anyway, doesn’t synch with reality.

I’d discovered a broad musical genre called Alternative in a data cache of turn-of-the-21st-century audio-visual entertainment that I appropriated from a hapless technology hoarder three years prior. That job had ended up being a colossal failure and we didn’t get paid, but the music, books, and video I scored were far more valuable than a few lost credits. Not that that was the consensus family opinion, mind you...

As Adan ambled through the lush courtyard, I bobbed to the beat of Around the World thumping inside my cranium. The combination of music and chocolate helped calm my nerves about half as well as the Cincy I used to pop, and without the rebound depression that predictably followed after the drug metabolized. My ’Seven did what it could to limit the cortisol and epinephrine my nervous system supplied by the gallon, but the Mercury line is known for its lack of effectiveness with the Terran adrenal cortex. I chose the Mercury Seven for its processing capacity and have put up with its organic limitations ever since.

“Oh, little brother,” Adan said, “I like these statues.”

Past the shield and surrounding tree line was a courtyard filled with both marble statues of scantily clad women with what appeared to be oversized butterfly wings on their backs, and leafy Nagranga bushes shaved into the shapes of strange woodland creatures. Crushed granite walkways and an artificial creek cut paths haphazardly between the strange displays.

“Why am I not surprised?” I replied. “Let’s keep it professional. There’s a fortune in security equipment in this place.”

He waved a dismissive hand at my probe’s camera as he paused next to a kneeling pixie or whatever it was supposed to be and snapped a selfie with his wrister. He always just assumes that I’ll take care of all the unseen problems with my technological wizardry. The fact that I always do is beside the point.

“Make sure your scrambler’s on,” I said into Adan’s earpiece. My rover’s was already on, but that was also beside the point.

“Of course it’s on,” he said conversationally. “Quit micromanaging me little brother.” I didn’t need to watch the feed to know he had that irritating smirk on his face. That’s because our relationship is a series of comic scenes, replaying on an infinite loop. He was right of course – I was micromanaging him. Justifiably so I might add.

“You know I’m monitoring your feed on my ’Seven, right?” I asked. “I just watched your scrambler activate.” Trust me, it was hard to miss the flashing red warning text on my heads-up display above my forehead flip to green.

“Probably just a shorted wire,” Adan replied.

I allowed him to hear my sigh over the com before adding, “It’s a wireless network.”

I heard his boots crunching on the crushed granite walkway as he replied. “I don’t know what to tell you, Galen. You may want to run a diagnostic when we get back home.”

I decided to stop talking at that point, because I could feel my blood pressure starting to rise, and losing focus wasn’t an option. My attention to detail was the reason why we were still living as free men seven years into our illicit career. With the scrambler now on, Adan was free to move about the property and beyond my Rover’s wireless range without fear of hidden recording devices sending his stupidly handsome face to every po-po in the province.

While Adan continued his clinical inspection of the statuaries anatomically correct anatomy, I ran the camera along the outside of the mark’s villa. The house itself was styled to look like one of those old country homes that, if the old vids I’ve seen are true, used to dot the pre-war countryside of a place called England back on Earth. The exterior was red brick facades and white stone archways. It was two stories tall with a steeple peaked roof, and the genuine wood door was decorated with geometric patterns and framed by purple bougainvillea.

I caught a flash of brown from the east, and I sent the Rover® over to investigate. I quickly spotted the potential problem lurking behind a cherub fountain that appeared to have prostate problems. Adan was too busy photo bombing a naked pixie on a mushroom that had her arms and legs situated in such a way that her naked bits were just barely covered.

“We’ve got a problem, Adan,” I said carefully.

That at least got Adan to stop violating the defenseless nymph. “I don’t like problems, bro.”

“Guard dog, nine o’clock,” I told him.

He immediately turned to the three o’clock position. It was a big dog – closer to images I’d seen of a wolf than one of those designer breeds that were popular among the upper class. The canine’s coat was a mix of black and tan, and the beast must have weighed close to forty kilos.

“The other way doofus,” I hissed. “And hit your cloak.”

On the feed, I watched Adan blink out of existence. Well, mostly anyway. Making an object invisible involves wrapping photons of light around the object, rather than letting those photons bounce off and smack the looker in the eyeball. My WaveWrapper® reduced Adan to a very slight distortion against a still backdrop. Thanks to the universal speed-of-light constant, that was the best anyone could do without pulling in a bunch of bulky, refractive equipment.

“Stay still,” I warned. “If you move around, you’ll burn out the battery in a few seconds.” I thought about powering everything with plutonium, but some of my inventions required so much energy that the plutonium would degrade too quickly, and changing out nuclear material on a regular basis isn’t on my top-ten list of things I want to do.

Adan snapped rudely back at me via sub-vocal that he already knew this fact – the sensor in his ear bud decoding the silent lip and throat movements and turning them into digital speech. It’s possible I inferred the rudeness, though I’m positive from prior experience that rudeness was intended.

With all of the high-end security equipment nowadays, guard dogs are a rarity – which is a good thing as far as I’m concerned. Getting around technological obstacles is what I’m paid to do, and honestly, I’m damn good at it. Dogs, well… they’re just a pain in the ass.

First of all they bite, which necessitates special puncture-resistant clothing. Also, the barking usually brings all sorts of unwanted attention. And the worst part? A dog’s sense of smell is essentially a second sight, a sense I can’t trick with optical illusions. So, when the dog got within two yards of my brother and started sniffing the air and growling, I knew we had a problem.

“Uh, Adan…”

Before I could finish that sentence, the dog lunged at Adan’s throat. My Rover® caught the massive fangs and fine particles of dog-slobber in crystal-clear detail, but before I could even exhale, Adan plucked the animal out of the air pinned to the ground by its neck. The dog thrashed and growled for a few moments, but then gave up the struggle and rolled over, offering his belly and batting sad, puppy-dog eyes at my brother.

Adan put himself face-to-face with the bipolar canine and said, “We’re going to be a good little poochy now, aren’t we?”

In answer, the dog wined softly and licked Adan’s lips. My brother stood up and straightened out his clothes. After looking around nervously for a few seconds, the dog popped up and sprinted away from the house with his tail tucked between his legs.

“How the hell did you do that?” I asked. I had a bad feeling that he confirmed a moment later.

“Didn’t I tell you, hermaño? I got my nerves juiced last month,” Adan stated matter-of-factly.

He sauntered over to the front entrance and looked over the door’s card reader. It was built into the brick wall next to the decorative door handle.

“Why would you do something that stupid?” I asked, though I already knew the answer. It was either vanity or shortsightedness – or perhaps a combination of the two.

He grinned and said, “Now I remember why I didn’t tell you.”

Adan removed a white card from his breast pocket and slapped it against the reader. The card is a generic piece of brute-force software that I use for simple locks. I write code that’s more elegant when faced with a challenge, but since I knew this operator-friendly brand of reader only required a four-digit sequence, that level of preparation wasn’t necessary.

“You know nerve treatment like that takes years off your life,” I said. Now I’m strictly a mechanical tech guy, but I have a passing understanding of the biotechnology field. I mean, who doesn’t want to have enhanced speed and strength? The science itself seems solid – at least when performed in a clinical environment with state-of-the-art equipment. By some slicer in a back-alley dive with jimmied, off-label junk, the results can be a little too iffy for my taste.

“Better to live a moment as a lion than a lifetime as a lamb,” he told me for about the millionth time. So, shortsightedness and vanity.

“Keep telling yourself that, Leo,” I said. “Ah, time to earn your keep.”

The numbers on the reader came up green and the heavy wood door swung open on hydraulic hinges. My heart skipped a beat in anticipation. Showtime.