Kangaroo Too Read online

The cage tumbles to the ground, falling over Klaus’s feet. One hand rests in his lap, clutching some kind of handheld computer. The snakes hiss and slither madly inside their clear plastic box. There are two bright red spots on Klaus’s chest.

  I wasn’t fast enough.

  I don’t have curses strong enough to express how unhappy I am right now. “Jesus fucking Christ, Lenny!”

  Lenny ignores me and dives forward, snatching the device out of Klaus’s dead hand and examining it. “Shit. We need to get out of here.”

  I suppress my desire to strangle Lenny and ask, “Why?”

  He shoves the device in my face. “Because we’ve got three minutes before every airlock on this station blows out.”

  I grab the device—it’s a remote control tablet, tied in to the station’s environmental controls—and look at the display. Lenny’s right. The three-minute countdown is a safety feature, the only one that Klaus wasn’t able to override from this tablet. He turned off the audio announcements and alarm lights. If we hadn’t found him in this tunnel, we might not have had any warning before the whole station was opened to space and we all got blown out into vacuum going every which way, and good luck to the X-4 transport pilot for having to decide who to try to recover first before we spun out of radar range.

  “Go!” Lenny has the snake cage under one arm and is pushing me back down the tunnel with his other shoulder. “Go! Go!”

  “Ajax, Bafford!” I call over the radio while scrambling backward. “Abort mission, say again, abort mission!”

  I hear a series of rapid, high-pitched tones: the abort signal. “Every X, this is Ajax: abort, abort, abort!” Radcliff calls. The radio clicks as she switches from the broadcast channel to her private link with me. “What happened, Captain?”

  “Countermeasures activated! All airlocks blowing in three minutes!”

  “Can we stop it?” Radcliff asks.

  “Let’s assume not!”

  By the time Lenny and I get back into the lab, Red team have already put Grumpy and Sleepy into wraparound torso restraints and are marching them down the hallway. I can’t get Klaus’s tablet to respond to any of my commands.

  “We’ll meet you on the hangar deck!” Stribling calls. “Station personnel are evacuating in escape pods. Our transport will recover us after the blowout.”

  I point at the prisoners. “Do you need a rescue bubble for those two?”

  “This corridor’s not wide enough to inflate a bubble,” Stribling says. “We’ll do it on the hangar deck.” She follows her team around the corner. On the radio, Radcliff is telling all the X-4s to assemble on the hangar deck to prepare for our surprise spacewalk.

  “Okay, I guess we need to carry these—what the hell are you doing?” I ask Lenny. He’s put down the snakes and is pushing the lower portion of his spacesuit into my hands.

  “Suit up,” he says.

  “We can do this on the hangar deck—”

  “Won’t make it in time.” Lenny grabs one of my feet and shoves it into the spacesuit. “Can’t run while carrying all this gear. There’s an airlock at the end of the corridor, we’ll get blown straight out, just need to get you in a suit.”

  “We both need to—”

  “No time! I’m expendable. You’re not.”

  I hate it when people remind me of that, but I can’t argue. Being the only person in the known universe with a superpower does come with some limitations.

  “Fine.” I let Lenny help me into the suit. I look at the control tablet before putting it down. One minute and twenty-eight seconds and counting. I blink a timer into my left eye.

  It usually takes a good five to ten minutes to get into a spacesuit by the checklist, making sure all the seals are airtight and verifying that the life support system is nominal. I’ll be okay if I’m leaking a little air or still waiting for the life support computer to wake up when the airlocks blow, but I need to have my helmet on.

  “At least let me pull a breather mask for you,” I say to Lenny. I always have emergency supplies in the pocket.

  “Secure the animals first,” Lenny says, fitting a glove over my left hand.

  “What?”

  “Cage got clipped.” He elbows the side of the enclosure, and I see a hairline crack radiating out from a bullet hole splinter even more. The structure clearly won’t survive being carried while we run anywhere, much less being bounced down a hallway by explosive decompression.

  “Please do not break the snake cage!” I say. “Fine. I can put them in the pocket. Also? We need to talk about fire discipline in the field.”

  “Save it for the debrief,” Lenny grumbles. “And negative on the pocket. Snakes won’t survive in hard vacuum.”

  “Don’t reptiles go into hibernation?”

  “Hard vacuum,” Lenny repeats, fastening my second glove. “They need air. I’m going to put them in your suit.”

  He turns his back before my brain can process this information. “What?”

  Lenny turns back to me, holding the cage in both hands. He’s removed the cover, and some of the snakes are already slithering toward the top, anticipating freedom. “It’s only until we get back to the transport.”

  “No no no no NO!” I take a step back. “Those are snakes! Poisonous snakes! You are NOT dumping a whole BOX of SNAKES into my goddamn spacesuit!”

  Lenny glances down at the control tablet. “You’ve got fifty-two seconds to think of a better idea.”

  We stare at each other.

  There are a lot of fucking snakes in that box.

  But any number of spacesuit-snakes is still better than explaining to Paul why I wasn’t willing to do what was needed to complete my mission.

  I look around the lab and grab the first bag-like container I see that seems sturdy enough to stop a snake bite. “Snakes in the bag. Bag in the suit.”

  Lenny nods. “Hold it open.”

  “Worst idea ever,” I mutter as I watch what must be two dozen snakes cascading into a very thin plastic bag. I grab the spacesuit helmet and walk out into the corridor, looking for the airlock and then standing to face it. If I’m going to be blown out into space, I want to see where I’m going.

  Lenny drops the cage in the lab and joins me in the hallway with the bag full of snakes. “Thirty seconds.”

  “Fuck you.” I open the pocket, pull a breather mask, and hold it out. “Don’t die.”

  Lenny holds up the bag. “Same to you.”

  I close my eyes and try to ignore the squirming as he raises the bag to my face and guides it into the open collar of my spacesuit, down my torso, between the suit lining and my equipment vest. Lenny snaps my helmet on, then uses some kind of a strap or hose and attaches himself to my waist. Finally, he puts on the breather mask.

  The bag is still squirming. I hope it doesn’t slide down past my waist. Or, if it does, I hope they kill me. I really don’t want to have to explain to Surgical why I came home with two dozen snake bites on my crotch.

  “Ten,” Lenny says, “nine—”

  “Stop with the countdown.”

  Lenny shrugs. “Also, for the record, I hate snakes.”

  “I hate you.”

  “That’s fair.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  Cislunar space—aboard Earthbound shuttle

  2 hours before I get to go home

  Debriefings are my least favorite part of this job.

  It took Wombat and Lenny and me a solid sixteen days to get out of the asteroid belt and back to the Moon, even under military acceleration aboard the OSS frigate Torrance. The X-4s went back to their nearside Moon base, and Lenny and I transferred through the farside industrial spaceport onto an Earthbound shuttle. We brought Wombat with us, in a life support pod—but W still hasn’t woken up.

  Lenny and I spent the whole trip back alternating between tag-team interrogations of our uncooperative prisoners, peeking at the snakes to make sure they hadn’t died or anything, and checking in with the X-4 medic to see if there was any chang
e in Wombat’s condition. All vital signs seemed stable, and if there were toxins still in W’s system, the equipment we had couldn’t detect it.

  Once we got to the Moon, all those things became other people’s problems—the prisoners went with the X-4s, and two researchers from Science Division took Wombat and all the snakes into their care. Now Lenny and I need to account for everything we did out in the field before we get back to D.C. An Operations analyst, Ramírez, joined us aboard the Moon-to-Earth shuttle to start processing our after-action reports.

  “Tell me about the snakes,” Ramírez says for what feels like the hundredth time in as many hours. It’s probably only been an hour at most, but it feels longer, especially shut in this tiny conference area inside the shuttle.

  “I kind of miss them,” I say, just for variety’s sake.

  “What?” Ramírez frowns but doesn’t look up. He’s been studiously avoiding meeting my eye this whole time. It’s a little impressive and a lot annoying.

  “I mean, yeah, I didn’t like them much when we first met,” I say. Now I’m going for entertainment value. “Too intimate too soon, you know? I usually wait until the second or third date before I let someone get into my space-pants.”

  “Let me rephrase the question—”

  I don’t let him talk. Ask a stupid question, you get the whole stupid answer, pal. “But it all worked out okay. We came to an understanding. I know people say relationships formed under stressful circumstances never last because everyday normal life can’t compare to the thrill of an extraordinary meet-cute, but there are exceptions to every rule, right?”

  “Kangaroo—”

  “And it was pretty thrilling, flying out into space like that—well, it wasn’t great having Lenny tagging along as a third wheel, but he was polite enough to give us some privacy when we needed it. And then it was like we were all alone, just me and the snakes drifting peacefully among the stars.”

  “Are you finished?”

  “Nope!” I say. “It was nice while it lasted, but we all knew it had to end eventually. As you know, my particular line of employment doesn’t exactly keep regular hours. Plus I was headed to one place, the snakes had to go somewhere else, and maintaining a long-distance relationship is difficult under the best of circumstances. You know how it is.”

  “I actually don’t.”

  “Well, it was mutual. No hard feelings on anyone’s part. Besides, we had a whole two weeks to ease out of it, traveling from the asteroid belt. You know, nice spacious X-4 transport, separate bunks, we didn’t have to keep bumping into each other. It all worked out. And we’re still on good terms, me and Felix and September and Kobe—”

  Ramírez sighs. “You named the snakes?”

  “Wow, imperialist oppression much?” I say. “I discovered their names. Felix had this very distinctive black-and-white pattern to his scales, just like the cartoon cat—you know, the one with a bag of tricks? No? Just me? Okay. Anyway, that was Felix. Then September was, like the month, the ninth one out of the bag…”

  After a minute or so, I run out of steam, and Ramírez says, “Please tell me about when you first met the snakes.”

  “Sure.” He’s been a good sport. I start recounting the service tunnel incident again.

  My debriefs do tend to run longer than most other field agents’. And it’s not just because I can’t resist messing with uptight debrief officers. Apparently I incur more “variation” during my missions than other agents.

  “Variation” is the official agency term for when something doesn’t go exactly as planned. But come on, of course things never go precisely as planned. That’s why we’re all trained to deal with unexpected circumstances, why we all carry emergency equipment, why it usually takes several hours to load up my pocket before I go out. When you’ve got an infinite amount of space in which to hide things, your superiors tend to want you to be overprepared for every possible contingency.

  “Variation” is a catch-all term, and pretty meaningless: it could be something as significant as an agent being killed—which is never expected or desired—or something as trivial as your wake-up alarm not going off in the hotel one morning, which causes you to miss your scheduled rendezvous with a contact on the ground.

  Even if you were able to meet with that contact just a few hours later and it didn’t affect the mission at all, it’s still a “variation” and your debrief officer still has to spend a good fifteen to twenty minutes reviewing why your alarm didn’t go off and whether that indicates some kind of subconscious desire to sabotage the mission, which might in turn indicate some kind of deep-seated longing to eventually betray your country. Which, again, is very unlikely and would seem pretty ridiculous to any normal person, but as events keep reminding me: I don’t deal with normal people.

  I finish telling my story—again—and Ramírez nods, still staring down at his tablet.

  “And just to be clear,” he says, tapping at the touchscreen, “you do not believe that Mr. Carrozza was targeting the snakes with his weapons fire?”

  Well, at least this is a new question. “Why would he do that?”

  “Just answer the question, please.”

  “I don’t read minds,” I say. “All I can tell you is what I saw and heard.”

  “You used to be an analyst, Kangaroo,” Ramírez says. “I’m only asking you to draw the most reasonable conclusion based on your observations. That’s well within the scope of your skills and training.”

  “Fine. What I believe is that Lenny didn’t know what Klaus was reaching for, and he reacted as he was trained to by attempting to stop the guy.”

  Ramírez rubs his chin. “And you opened the pocket—the ‘portal’—in Carrozza’s line of fire.”

  “Yes.” I’m not sure where he’s going with this. “I was trying to catch the bullets. I didn’t want him to kill Klaus.”

  “Is it possible that the vacuum of the pocket deflected Carrozza’s shots from his intended target?”

  This is the other reason my debriefs take so long. Everyone wants to talk about the pocket. They’ve always got some technical question about how it works, or why I used it the way I did on this mission and not some other way, or something. I wish Science Division would just start sending out an agency-wide newsletter, but of course my ability is classified top secret and “Sensitive Compartmentalized Information,” so we can’t just go around telling everyone the good news. Sometimes I feel a little too special.

  “The muzzle velocity of his weapon was, what, two thousand meters per second?” I say. “No amount of wind would have deflected those bullets significantly in that small a space. Besides, I didn’t open the pocket in time anyway. The shots had already connected.”

  Ramírez looks at me with a blank expression. “And Carrozza did nothing else that could be interpreted as an attempt to harm the snakes?”

  I gape at him. “He saved the snakes. By putting them in my spacesuit. Did I not emphasize that in my report? The snakes were inside my spacesuit.”

  “Understood,” Ramírez says. “But you also say that Carrozza advanced this course of action over your”—he taps at the tablet—“‘strenuous objections’ is how you worded it. Is that correct?”

  “Yes. I didn’t actually want him to put a whole bag of snakes inside my spacesuit.”

  “Isn’t it possible that Carrozza thought you might damage the specimens somehow?”

  I’m not sure I’m hearing him right. “I might damage them?”

  “Yes.”

  “No.” I feel like I’m talking to a crazy person. “I was actually a little more concerned that the mutant snakes might bite me to death.”

  Ramírez grunts. “I’m just saying, isn’t it possible that you might have become anxious and responded physically by thrashing or convulsing? Which would have smashed some of the specimens up against the inside of the pressure suit, and could have injured or killed some of them?”

  I finally understand what he’s getting at, but my comprehens
ion doesn’t make me any happier. “Well, if that was his plan, it didn’t work out at all, did it? Everyone’s alive and well, except for Wombat. What are we doing for Wombat, by the way?”

  “That’s outside my purview,” Ramírez says. “I’m just here to assess how well you and your partner worked together during this operation.”

  “We were fine.”

  “But not optimal.”

  I frown at him. “Is that what this is all about? You’re matchmaking?”

  Ramírez puts away his tablet. “I think I have everything I need. We’re done here.” He stands up and moves toward the door.

  “We’re not done,” I say, stepping between him and the door. “Look, I know I’m not the easiest person to work with. That is not entirely my fault.”

  “Psych evals are also outside my purview,” Ramírez says. He points at the door. “Do you mind?”

  “We’re stuck together on this shuttle for another couple of hours,” I say. “You really want to bring this outside?”

  Ramírez sighs. “Kangaroo, I’m just doing my job. You know Lasher’s been extra paranoid ever since Sakraida flew the coop last year.” Terman Sakraida, our former director of intelligence, pretty much nuked his entire division when he bailed, and everyone in the agency is still dealing with the fallout. “I don’t know what he wants to do with you. I just write reports. You remember what that’s like, don’t you? Being compartmentalized?”

  “I’m still compartmentalized.”

  “You know what I mean.” He holds up the tablet. “You want to see my report? Help yourself. I’m sure reading all that will make the time just fly by.”

  I stare at the tablet. I feel like I want to know, but maybe I don’t actually want to know.

  “Okay, then.” Ramírez tucks the tablet back under his arm. “Shall we?”

  I step aside and let him open the door, then follow him out into the main cabin, where Lenny’s enjoying a transparent drink bulb of what looks and smells like whiskey while pretending to watch a vid on his own tablet. I know he’s pretending because he looks up as soon as Ramírez and I walk out of the conference room, and he immediately swirls the bulb even harder, making the liquid look like gelatin in the shuttle’s half gravity.