Infernal Bromine

“Who’s that guy,” the grizzled, steely-eyed mayor of Effer Vesicant¹. jerked his thumb at me, standing back from the table he and my partner were sitting at in the Sphincter, probably the dingiest, most squalid, and most menacing speakeasy I’ve seen in my life. I felt myself skewered on the daggers of the eyes of loiterers in the stairwell leading down from the street as we descended to its entrance lit by dim, flickering red neon sign, and I’m pretty sure one of them tried to lift my wallet from me. “He’s my friend and my partner. We do business with him or we do none at all,” my partner coolly replied and after a few seconds of sizing me up with a cold glare the mayor grunted and jerked his head slightly, inviting me to take a seat with the social grace typical of an Ionian. Without any preamble he slid a worn Jimmy² across the battered, grease-smeared gunmetal gray table, its iridium-titanium rectangle glowing softly sylvan like a stray moonbeam falling onto the wreckage of an ancient destroyer. My partner attached it to the input-output panel of his pom³ and the three of us soberly watched images and text the color of St. Elmo’s fire flicker into being above the middle of the table as room darkened suddenly as a scramble field blossomed around us.

I leaned back and stared at the mayor and blurted out incredulously “Earth?”. My partner restrained me with a hand on my forearm and I stood up shaking my head and headed over to the bar, carefully avoiding the eyes of a couple lanky n’er do wells casually slumped over its much-abused metal surface. Nice décor, I had to keep myself from wrinkling my nose in disgust as I ordered a New Amsterdam. After a few minutes the mayor and my partner came up to me and after the mayor shook my hand brusquely, grinning sardonically, he strode out of the speakeasy and my partner sidled up to me and said “It’s a lot of money and you know we need it” while mopping large beads of sweat from his brow with a tattered and stained blue bandana. I nodded silently and finished my drink. We left quietly, and again felt the brush of mischievous fingers on my pants during the ascent up the stairs — good thing my pants were magnetically sealed and encoded to my fingertips’ electromagnetic resonance and heat-signature patterns. |[call it "hot-boxed!!! :D ]|

(After their footsteps receded into silence a dark corner of the speakeasy ripples like plastic wrap caught in the light of a large blue neon sign, out of which a shadowy figure steps away from a table and leaves quietly in pursuit. No one, not even the enormous bartender, so much as glances out the corners of their eyes at the silent stranger.)

It took us over a newstandard month⁴ to get there, even with the advanced navigational AI⁵ and military-grade sensor array: flying through the radioactive wreckage of all the interplanetary wars of the past that fill the middle of the solar system is so dangerous that for a hundred years only salvage bots have braved the peril, and only seldom because few cities can afford the Pyrrhic economics of the business. Gingerly picking our way through the dense cislunar⁶ debris field, my partner was grumbling about the task that lay before us; so much for needing the money, I couldn't help but chuckle softly. My initial unease welled up again for the umpteenth time as we dipped below an impressively massive hulk of a still mostly-intact carrier and hurtled out of its shadow on our approach to the assigned search sector, my partner confirming coordinates and vectors as I readied the ion cannons. We were to strafe a sector of the desolation until we blew away a false rockery that sealed an access tunnel leading to a vault that stored the object we'd been tasked to retrieve, an object we knew almost nothing about but were to be paid handsomely, likely in part to ensure we remained incurious about it. A special Jimmy²-rigged thermal-signature algorithm was piggy-backed onto our sensor AI for the purpose of locating it.

I felt like a ghost drifting back into a forgotten past as we slowly fell down the remarkably unscathed shaft, guidelines glowing a blue reminiscent of depictions of the undersea lights of the fabled Devil’s Triangle illuminating our passage and crisscrossing the walls of a spherical vault in which assorted objects were tethered to its edge by lines of force of the same color. Who’d have imagined such a pocket of now-legendary marvels of prosperity and power could still exist on a world that had had its oceans and air lanced away in the last war waged by almost-forgotten gods hundreds of years ago? Thanks to the sensor modification it took us surprisingly little time to locate our treasure, a small cylindrical metal canister that we retrieved with our tractor beam after we gingerly yawed around a central column to avoid rear-ending a couple of the larger objects suspended near the entrance. After we drew it into the hold and slipped furtively out of that eerie sepulcher my partner turned to me and grinned, his face covered in sweat, and sardonically remarked “Now the fun part again. Let’s hope the money’s waiting, and good.” God, no kidding! The AI⁵ reported it could only detect indeterminable quantities of boron, barium, and copper in all its scans of the cylinder’s interior; I shrugged.

We arrived back home without mishap and it was a great relief for me to sight the comforting beige cracked cue-ball of Europa filling the viewscreen and the pearl blisters of Minos’⁶ boroughs blinking their green landing lights in friendly welcome to us. We both joked about how we’d forbear on showering at home, instead reserving a week at the Phoenician Princess and lounging first thing in the luxurious baths there that once saw patronage by the mighty princes of Earth’s colonial empires. Our pom³ reported a balance transfer of half the sum into our business account after we reported the sought object’s retrieval and our arrival into Minos’⁶ space was confirmed, eliciting a gleeful furor of grins, laughter, and congratulatory back-slapping from both of us. As we descended toward the almost-dry canal that ran through the slums of Epsilon Borough⁷ and that passed conveniently close to our office and which we often used as an illicit shortcut, our maglev hover unit started losing power. After a sudden exchange of terrified glances I said I’d go to the hold to retrieve the object while my partner fought with the controls to make an emergency landing, to which he nodded. I thought I broke my ankle as the stern of the car suddenly dropped, sending me tumbling into the hold, but I was thankful not have heard the crash of impact; he must have managed to divert power from the directional auxiliaries. I grabbed the cylinder roughly and opened it to reveal a small canister containing what looked like sodium crystals suspended in a ruddy mist and hobbled painfully up the incline of the resting car to fall ingloriously out the front driver side onto the ground.

We sat at the top of a concrete embankment in front of a chain-link fence puzzling over the object for a bit while my buddy took off one of his boots and gently rubbed his ankles. It was everything he could have done to have landed as he did; he was lucky not to have suffered worse injuries. Someone sabotaged our car! That couldn’t have been a mere mechanical failure, not considering the unheard-of odyssey we underwent and the amount of money just transferred to us. We had to get out of here, and fast, because no doubt a welcoming committee would be on its way soon, and not only that but we landed next to a bramble and the vespers get extremely aggressive during the summer mating season — already they’re starting to swarm over the car! I helped my partner onto his feet, took the strange container and tossed it into my satchel, then boosted him up the side of the fence and watched him shimmy slowly down a thin birch tree and lope down the side-alley between a couple shanties and the security wall of our apartment complex. I was swatting at the vespers, now in a thick cloud around me and stabbing an anti-venom ampule into my leg — suppressing a scream of pain from the fire shooting through my body — when I saw a rusty groundcar approaching in the distance on the road opposite the fence. I immediately forgot about the vespers and slid down the embankment and ran through the brackish water up and scrambled up the other side to an abandoned warehouse where I slid hastily beneath a mostly-dilapidated loading dock that reeked of urine, concealing myself behind rubble and garbage.

A smartly-dressed young woman with shoulder-length auburn hair stepped out of the car stopped at the end of the road on the other side of the canal and peered in my direction with her hand held up to shade her eyes, then shrugged and called out “Well, I see that I missed you — a pity. I propose we reschedule our appointment for next week and I trust you’ll keep our procurement secure and bring it with you when next we meet,” and walked casually back to the car, reversed it, and drove off in the direction she came from. I was terrified: she had the confident, genteel insouciance of a professional killer. I was way out of my league. After a few minutes I crawled out of my hiding spot and dusted myself off, almost retching from the stench wafting up from my clothing; no shower at the Phoenician. My partner was in the office kitchenette when I arrived, his leg up on the table, swollen ankle beneath a bag of ice wrapped in a towel. “I bet I lost that boot, didn’t I?” he asked, to which I only nodded in reply; the squatters camped nearby would have it long before we returned to our landing spot, though the car’s security system would keep it safe enough. I related to him what happened and his face grew grave; we had to get a hold of the mayor of Effer Viscerant¹ somehow and get that damned thing off our backs, and soon.

It took a couple days for Sergei, our mechanic and underworld liason, to fix our car, days we spent at a nearby safehouse and during which we spent no other money than the cost of repairs because we knew from experience in the business that our transactions were being monitored by whoever had subverted our car’s hover units. We also knew that if we remained where we were hiding out for much longer that our luck would run out, and my partner knew that by being injured he’d managed to make matters worse; it was no one’s fault, of course, but I was effectively a lone operator now and saddled with the added worry of him as a potential liability, at the worst possible time. We had to part ways, but I knew he wouldn’t allow that and would endanger himself because of his loyalty to our friendship. Worse yet was when we received news of the mayor’s death, delivered by an ashen-faced partner when he returned from Sergei’s one afternoon; I’d never seen him look so defeated, like he’d sunk into himself and was propped up only by some mindless, autonomic survival function. The mayor had died in an “accident” and when my partner pressed city security for information they coldly informed him to expect a summons to a criminal investigation, though as yet he wasn’t considered a suspect.

We both knew that that meant: it was over for us — we were trapped. I sighed, grabbed a bottle of Sarpedonian⁸ vodka from a shelf, and we sauntered desolately down a long-abandoned set of railroad tracks in an ancient, crumbling, mostly-abandoned industrial district that was floundering in an increasing tide of ramshackle flophouses and shanty communities. We were soon joined by a shirtless middle-aged scavenger with wild hair and a long beard who offered to help me find a replacement boot for my partner if we shared some of our booze. I shrugged and passed him the bottle as we walked told him our tale of how we came to be there while he rummaged through piles of refuse. “Ah! Maybe you found the legendary bromine!” he exclaimed. When we asked him what he meant by that he shrugged his shoulders and explained that it’s an ancient word that meant some kind of medicinal elixir, but it could also have been an acronym of some kind; it was something a forgotten, ancient Terrestrial power was rumored to have been researching, something which could have been a fantastic weapon or drug, or anything — no one knew, because it was never used, had never even turned up, and so became one of the many fables that sprang out of the ruin of Earth, like the one of the artificial world in orbit near Venus or the one about the ephemeral Transcendents⁹ who fled the solar system in gossamer ships of light. We were joined later that evening by a teenage girl who shared with us half-rotten potatoes she’d found, and only then did the reality sink in that we were fugitives, probably for life.

---

1. Effer Vesicant: a city-state on the Jovian moon Io.
2. Jimmy: a slim metal or plastic data strip, like a disk or flash drive.
3. Pom: short for "personal intermediary", a sort of personal computer.
4. Newstandard Month: the rotational period of the Jovian moon Europa, rounded up to 36 days.
5. AI: artificial intelligence, an advanced computer.
6. Cislunar: the space inside the orbit of Earth's moon.
7. Minos: one of three city-states on the Jovian moon Europa.
8. Epsilon Borough: One of Minos' six habitat modules.
9. Sarpedonia: another of Europa's three city-states.
10. Transcendant: a human who has transcended biology.

World War Two Skirmish

I was losing my nerves and on the verge of going AWOL, jumping off the train in enemy territory and fending for myself in winter with nothing but the clothes on my back and in my rucksack, a Walther P-38, some K-rats, and a half-empty bottle of Cognac. The rocking of the train we sneaked onto didn't help to assuage a fear that was veering into terror, nor did the fact that it was black as Hitler’s soul in our ass-numbing and kidney-tenderizing box car, a palpable darkness illuminated only when the ruddy glow of a cigarette flared up to reveal the floating head of a devil staring vacuously into perdition whenever one of us took a drag. My platoon was heading into Axis-held territory, given the task of halting the retreat of local Nazi command and its escort forces; we were part of a brigade advancing up Italy that met with unexpectedly fierce resistance as we approached Tyrol. We haven’t had any leave time since that weekend we spent pillaging and fornicating in the Eternal City nearly six weeks ago and as a result our morale was straddling the edge of a bayonet, mine especially because the mantle of command had just recently fallen on me and I was reeling under the burden of responsibility. Bedraggled and bleary-eyed we stared at each other, faces sunken into hapless ghouls radiating sullen resignation, smoking cigarettes and sipping on flasks and bottles. I was sharing my sergeant's flask of whiskey, my psyche gritting its teeth while with eyes the color of dragons’ scales I tacitly made a pact with him that I'll somehow keep it together long enough for us to piss away our filthy lucre on whores in Venice. Or long enough to die.

Dawn didn't so much break as it desultorily slunk over the Alps, creeping through a thick slate-colored mist that congealed in white pools on the ground — and froze our asses off. It wasn’t even the end of the year and already it felt like February: to stave off frostbite I commanded the platoon to do jumping jacks for five minutes at the top of every other hour. We deboarded the train last night in the inglorious manner of tramps and marched overnight to set up an ambush at a sprawling country estate adjacent to one of the roads the Nazis were expected to retreat along when our parent battalion attacked Verona to the south. The world was a forlorn shade: white with frost and mist, bleak, cheerless, and still and cold as death itself. But things were going to heat up and liven up soon enough and I wasn’t going to live long, let along make first lieutenant, by staring idiotically at impromptu German military parades: weapons and ammo had to be distributed and squads concealed in tactically advantageous positions. The tactical bit was a frustration because our intelligence was nigh useless: two hour's of a gaggle of brass in starched uniforms and smelling of Old Spice® delivering in crisp militarese in front of maps something to the effect of "You're fighting Germans! Somewhere! Who have guns, and maybe other stuff!". My mind’s horizons were darkened by images of us getting run down by a mechanized infantry troop. To make matters worse, we were running low on rifles and ammunition and only had two bazookas with five rockets between them, so even two tanks — or just one Panther — could roll over us and chew us back into primordial soup with their machine guns. But, no time for morbid ruminations, especially since the Krauts would certainly oblige me. I sent alpha squad to a position behind two abandoned trucks and a low stone fence in front of the manor, armed with a Beretta, a Tommy gun, and one of the bazookas with two rockets; command squad bravo lay in wait closer to the road in a small stone building, wherein I was armed with my Walther P-38 while the other two each had a Beretta sub-machine gun; in an old stable on a low rise farther out from the road squad charlie lurked in an old stable with the last of our Garands and a bazooka with three rockets.

After we finished our preparations — clearing fields of fire and setting up obstacles in the road to slow the enemy down — we sat down for a break to eat some rations and have a smoke, when a bird call signaled us approaching enemy forces. One: good, just infantry. Those Krauts were no fools, though: a small platoon of them flitted like riled hornets from cover to cover in twos, wisely operating under the assumption of a trap. Despite their vulpine tactics it was just a protracted skirmish and we prevailed without suffering any casualties. At its conclusion I assembled squad leaders around me, about to assign men to strip the bodies of weapons and ammunition, when I heard two bird calls just as I made out the telltale rumbling and squeaking of tanks. We wasted no time in returning to our positions, and just in time: as soon as my squad settled into our firing positions the dark silhouette of a tank became visible in the mist not more than fifty yards ahead. A moment later a jet of smoke lanced out from alpha’s position followed by a thud and an explosion, igniting a chattering furor of small arms fire and sending soldiers scurrying into my line of sight. We shot them down as soon as they rounded the burning Panzer IV. My elation drained down into my boots, however, the instant I saw a Panther bypass the wreck and head in our direction while firing its machine guns at alpha’s position. I had to keep my squad mates from fleeing, knowing full well they’d get cut down before they made it halfway to any cover: “Wait, damn it!” I screamed at them as I hastily tied a couple grenades together and slathered mud on them. I instructed the them to circle the building opposite the Panther as soon as it was about to pass our position, to attack the inevitable soldiers advancing behind the rolling cover. After they left I leaped and ran up to the Panther — pissing myself as I saw a machine gun swivel toward me — pulled the pin out of one of the grenades and shoved the bundle into a space between one of the rollers and the tracks, then leaped immediately back to follow my squad mates just as a burst of machine gun fire struck the ground where I stood just a second ago. Time froze and a wall of sound struck me numb as I almost tripped over one of my squad mates holding his leg with one arm and trying to raise himself up on the other, teeth chattering and eyes already glazed over like a marble head stone, thrashing his other leg in vain to gain purchase on a ground made slick by a steaming pool of blood; beside myself with fury I roughly shoved the surviving squad mate aside and emptied a clip into two Germans directly in front of me, my heart beating in time to the flashes erupting out of the muzzle of my gun. I glanced back at the Panther and saw smoke explode out of its cannon just as a bazooka from squad C's position slammed into it; my adrenaline dove from fight to flight like an attacking Thunderbolt when I saw the stable collapse into a smoldering heap at the same time as a wall of flame blossomed up the front of the Panther. Just as I was about to break into a run I saw another arc of smoke crawl out from the rubble of charlie's position and slam into the Panther. Secondary explosions in the Panther hurled the main turret into the air like a crumpled paper cup toward the road and opened up a chasm of towering flames wreathed in diesel smoke, flinging me into the stone building behind me; “Someone survived!” I thought giddily as I blacked out.

I came to feeling arms hoisting me up onto my feet and turning me around to a corporal’s beaming visage. Men were pouring out of the manor and from the now-burning stable; I counted, only one casualty! And we took out a Panther! Looks like we’ll be drinking up my Cognac tonight. We sat down and slapped each other on the back as we opened up our rations and passed around cigarettes, white as sheet rock, covered in grime and soot, but grinning like kids at a baseball game. As the ringing in my ears subsided and the blood started returning to our faces I was about to review the tactical situation and resume our interrupted corpse-pilfering, for though the sun was already westering (where had all the time gone?) there was at least two hours of daylight left — the day was by no means over — when out of the corner of my eye I detected movement. Without thinking I crouched behind the burning Panther to fire on ... oh, my God! What have I done? There was four of them, perhaps the owners of the commandeered estate stealing away the moment they deemed it safe to; a young man in a black coat crumpled at once to the ground, causing the rest of the family to run across the road toward the field, the keening despair of a woman splitting the air like a knife tearing through a burlap sack while I stood dumb with incredulity and rapidly escalating remorse, my arm still outstretched holding my smoking Walther P-38. A hand fell on my shoulder and when I slowly turned and saw the mournful expression on my sergeant’s face the dam of self-reproach broke, its waters pulling my body down onto a bale of hay as they flowed in rivers out of my eyes, wracking my body with sobs as I dropped my gun and covered my face. Sweet Jesus, I shot a child! More refugees filed past us down the road, most of them on foot but a few piled onto horse-drawn carts, not even noticing us. When I pulled myself together enough to look up I could see columns of smoke in the distance where our battalion was advancing. Suddenly, among the refugees I spotted a silver Mercedes laboring through the muddy ruts followed by a couple SS officers on motorcycles, whereupon I immediately picked up my Walther P-38 and turned to fire on them. As did my entire platoon; this is what we came here for.