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Chapter Fifteen - If You Only Knew What I Was Thinking....

"Report the nature of the complaint to the immediate supervisor..."  NRCan Safety Manual

Present Time

Frieda stared at Hargrove.  Hargrove stared at Frieda.  The ship, unconcerned, continued its downward plunge at an acceleration of c.9.8 m/s².

“WHAT?” she finally managed.  It had been, after all, neither the question she wanted nor expected.

Hargrove’s mind was undergoing a similar confusion, well mixed with dull agony from his perforated gut; it had not exactly been HIS game plan either.  I don’t understand, he thought desperately.  I’m sitting with the woman I love, about to die, I make up my mind to ask her if she loves me, and what do I say?  ‘Codeine, please.’  In horror and disgust at his own cowardice, he threw back his head to roar his rage into the sky.

The ship filled his vision.

His roar turned into a scream of terror.

His eyes-

Minus 7.0 seconds

The reverberation of shock and horror rippling through the system roused Hargrove’s subconscious from its ruminations.  It had been considering the unified field theorem, and snickering at Einstein’s more obvious mistakes; the man was a Hargrove in reverse.  All conscious, no subconscious, and therefore horribly fallible.  E=MC² indeed; what garbage! That bomb had been a complete fluke.  As for its own theory, a few more bugs to work out, and it would be ready for Hawkins’ subconscious.  The Marxist detective could be easily spurred into writing a nasty message for the physicist reviling the evils of modern technology and science, with the important information coded for the brilliant man’s own subconscious. It had worked before.  For a while they had kept up a constant communication.

But Hargrove’s shock of absolute terror caught its annoyed attention, disturbing it from the work.  ‘What’s he on about now?’ it wondered, moving to surf the optical channels with the idea that something interesting might be on. ‘Everything’s a bloody disaster to him.’  The screen flickered on.

The results were similar to those of an arachnophobia accidentally hitting a Tarantula documentary on Discovery.

When the mental screaming had died down, the metaphysical remote had been found,  and an analysis of the pertinent factors performed, a quick calculation flickered across the subconscious -

Kinetic Energy= ½ *(41730500 kg) * (2* 9.8 m/s^{2 *} 304.8 m)^0.5 = Bone powder and tomato paste.

This was undeniable. 

It was also unacceptable.

The approximately 7 seconds to impact was, to the mind, closer to five to ten relative minutes.  The subconscious wasted no time with the ridiculous cliche of flashing the more interesting times of life in front of the conscious with the hope it would decipher the code contained within and find a way out of the situation.  NOBODY ever got that, but subconsciences kept trying, year after year.  Not this one, though.  Natural selection wasn’t getting IT, no sir.

Besides, there was only one way out, and the conscious had no control over that, either (like so many things in its insipid life).

The subconscious took a full second to rev itself into High Gear, and took off at full speed for a little used mental pathway, snatching a few important pieces of leverage along the way.  The pathway lead to the roaring river of the imagination, and of possibility undreamed of by most humans outside the speculative fiction field.  Straining at full speed, the subconscious fought to mesh with the staggering flow, much like jumping a car from fifth to first without gearing down or use of the clutch.  It bounced alongside the furious torrent, gaining a few etheric friction burns, caught a fingerhold on a stray thought, and was jerked willy-nilly into the torrent.

Here in the imagination, time slowed further; thus, taking several picoseconds to reorient itself had no real bearing on the outside world.  When it finally regained full control, and was swimming comfortably in the imaginative river, it set out in the proper direction.  The journey took a full microsecond - it might have well as been several months.  ‘He’s going to owe me big for this,’ it considered, stopping on a huge, thickly misted island in the middle of the frothing stream of underconsciousness, that two to four aforementioned percent of the brain, privy to Things Humans Didn’t Know They Could Do.

There it lay, a vast golden figure, fast asleep; a thrumming came from its fiery heart, and wisps of thought, but its processes were slow in slumber.  Beneath it, under all of its limbs and huge coiled matrix, and about it on all sides stretching across the unseen rocks, lay countless piles of precious images, conceptually wrought and unwrought, speculation and cogitation, and conjecture red-stained in the ruddy light.

The subconscious shook its metaphorical head.   Then it opened its metaphorical mouth.

'Hey!  Wake the hell up!  We’ve got a situation here!’

A thin and piercing ray of red shone from under a slightly raised lid.  The figure considered him, and promptly lapsed back to sleep.

‘Hey!  Nanoseconds are ticking here!  I know you’ve only been sleeping for the last three YEARS, ever since Bombay, but don’t you think the equivalent of six or seven aeons are enough?’

GO AWAY.

The subconscious trembled under the impact of the vast mental wave.  It found stabler footing, and cocked its head.  ‘Maybe I didn’t make myself clear.  GET YOUR FREAKING ASS UP!’

The mighty force roused itself enough to quickly scan the conscious mind.  One picosecond.  Tops.  The vast eye slammed shut once again.  THIS IS OF NO CONCERN TO ME.  I REQUIRE ONLY SLEEP.  THIS HOST IS NOT YET EVOLVED ENOUGH TO ACCESS MY ABILITIES.

‘Like that stopped you in Bombay,’ grumbled the subconscious.  ‘For a goddamn bag of Cheetos, no less.  Okay, your ways are mysterious, blah blah.  You’ve been humoured.  Now make with the mojo.  Seriously.  The host is threatened, and you’re the only possibility.’

I HOLD NO CONNECTION TO LIFE.  MY EXISTENCE IS A PART OF A GREATER, MORE UNIVERSAL-

The subconscious promptly tuned him out and let him pontificate.  Why do I put up with this crap? It wondered.   It kicked at a metaphysical stone.  The rock morphed into a pink smurf in mid-flight and disappeared into the mist.  I hate this place.

When the Undermind finally ran down, the subconscious stepped forward.  ‘Okay pal.  You might not be afraid of death.  But as long as we live, you’re stuck here.  So with that in mind, what do you think of THIS?’  It whipped out the small box adroitly snatched on the way to the imagination flow.  Quickly it slapped the brightly coloured cube down on the rocky ground, and wound the crank.  A few discordant notes rang out, bringing to mind an off key version of the Internationale, then the top sprang open. Exploding out on the end of the spring was a tiny, and horrifyingly familiar figure.

'Religion is the opiate of the masses!  Arise, ye prisoners of want!  A tractor factory is a delight to tour!  No, Comrade, I do not wish to buy a pair of jeans!’

The eye cracked open again and stared down at the figure with a certain horrified disgust.  YOU HAVE BROUGHT ME THIS?

'I thought I might give you a piece of his mind,’ the subconscious smirked, exerting all of its will to avoid giving away its own discomfort.  Decades of familiarity had built up mental calluses to the diarrhea  of the Marxist Detective’s conscious mind; it was certain it could outlast the Undermind.

EFFECTIVE, BUT NOT SUFFICIENT.  MY PATIENCE, LIKE MY POWER, IS NEAR ENDLESS.

‘Don’t qualify infinity, moron.’  It bent over and whispered a word to the dancing figure.  ‘Anastasia.’

The tiny Hargrove puppet immediately began to weep.  “Anna!  My childhood friend!  Cut down in your prime by the forces of capitalistic greed!  I will avenge thee!”

IT BEGGARS THE IMAGINATION THAT HE HARBORS A SECRET LOVE FOR THE LOST PRINCESS.  IMAGINE, NAMING A DOG AFTER HER - A BIZARRE FORM OF TRANSFERENCE, ONE SUPPOSES..

“What flat and fuzzy roadkill you were, after chasing the ball in front of that Rolls Royce!  Ah!  The agony!” 

‘Well, sometimes the enemy, unobtainable as it is, becomes an object of desire.’  The subconscious puffed on an imaginary cigar as it studied the mountainous being.  “What do you say, Undermind?  It’s only been a microsecond or two.  We can keep this up for full SECONDS.  Well, only about 5.4 of them, but you get the idea.’

5.37762, TO BE PRECISE.

Pretentious git, thought the subconscious.

The undermind considered the hysterical puppet for a few more picoseconds, the loathing in its eyes plain to the subconscious.  ENOUGH.  YOU HAVE MADE YOUR POINT. 

'Good thing too.  The next name would have been Frieda.’

‘Frieda!’ screeched the puppet.  ‘FriedaFriedaFrieda!  My comrade in the battles of joy, my red sun rising, my manifesto of love!  How I crave to explore the wonders and delight of all of your nooks and crannies, your mountains and valleys, your-‘ Propelled by a metaphysical boot, the lid came down on its head with an audible slam. 

‘Sorry,’ muttered the subconscious ashamedly.  Both it and the Undermind took a picosecond for a shivering.   

PREPARE HIM, commanded the Undermind.  AT SUCH SHORT NOTICE, THIS MAY CAUSE A CERTAIN CEREBRAL DYSFUNCTION.

'Thanks, but we’ve an even larger cerebral dysfunction headed this way right now.  Can we just get to it?’

GO.

‘If you really want to keep him shut up, you might want to grab this,’ it shot as it prepared to leave, flashing the image of a crate in the air.  Then the subconscious stepped back out into the stream, and from there to its customary place in Hargrove’s head.  It took a moment to adjust itself to the change in relative speeds - minutes became instants, hours became seconds - then rapidly began sending out feelers into the consciousness’ terrified and thus vulnerable mind.  ‘Oooo....a question.  Sorry, Hargrove old vessel, but that will come in useful.  After all, doesn’t Frieda carry codeine?’

It continued its programming while a vast amount of ominously crackling energy began to build behind it.  Behind it, metaphysically speaking.  Seconds passed, and the message went out, with predictable results.  Hargrove, confused, furious, and terrified, threw back his head.  His eyes -

Present Time

-erupted with a golden light.  Power stabbed deep within his body, spiking down his spinal cord and linking him to the heartbeat of the world.  Power blasted through his limbs, suffusing them with the strength to crush boulders, shatter glaciers, bend pennies and tear phone books.  Power blazed forth, for an instant, from the fist sized hole in his stomach.

Power also knifed through his mind, temporarily liquefying his thought processes.

? screamed his conscious mind, pulverized under the hammer of psychic energy.

[----] thought his subconscious in pained disgust as it Went Away For A While.

WHAT TO DO?, considered the Undermind.  Blast the ship apart?  Shred it molecule by molecule?  Transform it into liquid nitrogen, and let it dissipate?  It disregarded all of these as wasteful, and quite showy; besides which, the nitrogen, if translated mass for mass, would fill 0.347036 cubic kilometers, at current barometric pressure and absolute temperature.  Asphyxiation from oxygen deprivation would be the most likely result.  

No, sometimes simple is best.

At the last instant the ship simply stopped, frozen in time, 1.000001 meters above the tallest hair on Hargrove’s head.

DAMN.  It had been trying for 1 meter exactly.  BETTER LUCK NEXT TIME.

The air above the ship warped and twisted, and a tremendous sonic boom staggered the city as the kinetic energy of the ship was harmlessly shunted into the sky above.  Weather patterns in Albania would take a full week to return to seasonal levels.  A shield formed around the small group, swirling hemispherically outwards in an instant.  Time resumed around the air-going vessel, and the ship hammered down (at the comparatively slow velocity of 6 m/s), the hull giving way and punching their protection up into the bilges, now emptying of water and sundry wastes.  The shield vanished, leaving them on the pitching and rolling ground.  As an afterthought, the Undermind reached out with a flick of its power, and a crate appeared in the air, hanging for an instant before falling.  GOOD RIDDANCE.  MY WORK HERE IS DONE.  It retired in silence to dream its vast and terrible dreams of lovecraftian physics, the endless void between stars, and tasty orange cylinders.

The crate hit the broken and heaving ground, and promptly split open under the impact.  It rolled and tumble, disgorging a Ruger GP100, a P90 (same company), a silenced Walther P5, a suppressed MAC10, a 4.7 mm H&K G11 AAR, three Kalashnikovs (AK’s 47, M, and 74), one H&K PSG1 (there had been a sale on West German weaponry), a USAS12 autoshotgun, an MM1 revolving 40mm grenade launcher, grenades for the same, the 5'6" length of a Barrett Light 50 rifle (not the bullpup version), the bullpup version of the same, and countless boxes of ammunition, mostly .455 in calibre.  The odd way the cracked container bounced during the aftershocks suggested there was still more weaponry cradled within.

Hargrove, eyes glazed, gave a little sigh of satisfaction, raised one index finger pointedly,  and keeled over unconscious with copious quantities of blood streaming from his nose.

Frieda, Paddy, and MacGuiness could only stare at each other in complete shock.  From somewhere far away, they could hear voices babbling in Armenian.

“What the hell just happened?” screamed Frieda.

MacGuiness, for once, was speechless.

“I just saw a flash of light. Sure, we must have been lucky,” Paddy whispered, staring around the dark bilge, dimly lit by improbably functioning emergency lighting.  “God must be happy with us for gettin’ rid o’Bitchup Serapion.”  He sighed, seating his small frame on the pile of ammunition.  “But how will we be leaving?”

“We’re nae guin to be popping out through the cracks in the ships hull,” MacGuinness snorted, blasting a fouled clot of blood from one nostril.  “We’re likely burried pretty deep in the bloody earth.”

“Well, this is fantastic!”  Frieda snarled, somewhat hysterically.  “We’re stuck down here, Hargrove has a hole in him, I’ve only one leg, and you two can’t possibly carry us both!  It’s like that old movie, with the upside down ship, with Gene Hackman, and Borgnine-“

”The Poseidon Adventure,” put in the Ninja^TM, helpfully.

“The Poseidon Adventure,” finished Frieda.  She slumped, an easy task with only one leg.  “But a little different since....”  Her voice trailed off, as she and the other two turned to stare at the shadowy figure, lurking at the edge of the light. 

“Since the ship isn’t actually upside down, and you are sitting in the middle of Armenia, rather than-“ The Ninja^TM froze, suddenly realizing the focal point of his audience’s eyes.  “Shit.  Well, the Master always said the whole movie trivia thing would get me in trouble one of these days.”

Frieda’s derringer magically reappeared in her hands.  MacGuiness clutched his wrench, twirling it thoughtfully.  Paddy hefted up the bullpup Barrett L50, remarkably resembling a marine struggling with a recoilless rifle.

“Fire that thing and you’ll put yourself through the bulkhead, little man,” remarked the black clad figure, moving into the light.  “If I were here to kill you, I’d have yadda yadda yadda.  You know the drill, you aren’t stupid.”  Weapons were lowered; rather, the derringer disappeared, the massive rifle was dropped with a crunch, and the wrench continued to twirl with considerable force.  Apparently, since a more than a minute had passed from the last time MacGuiness had brained someone, with or without the wrench, he was feeling the effects of withdrawal.

“I’m actually here to help you.  If you think back, you’ll realize I’ve been with you all along.  And a nice freakin’ ride you moronic gaijin chose to take me on.”  The Ninja^TM began quickly searching through the small area around them where the hull peeled back to reveal cracked bedrock.

“Y’speak the yank’s english fer a black-clad angel’s fart,” MacGuiness spat.  “Ye goin’t’flip yer hands in t’those obscene Krishna - curry things, and use yer foul sorceries t’fire us all oot o’here?”  The sheer volume of apostrophes drew a collective wince from the rest of the bilgegoers.  Even the Ninja^TM’s face wrinkled under the mask, almond eyes narrowing..

“I learned it in Hawaii.  Sue me.  My name is Bakuhatsuinu, but you can call me Fred.  It saves me cutting off your finger every time you mispronounce my name.”

“What,” inquired Frieda, “exactly does that mean?”

“I’d rather not say,” returned Fred, squirming uncomfortably.  “Magic.  Load of carp. [Editors note - the Japanese, by and large, are obsessed with carp.  Heaven knows why]   During the early 80's the Master, in a wonderful state of enlightenment brought on by a six month Suntory Scotch bender, decided the ninja as a whole needed some ‘free advertising’.  He sold the story to Hollywood.  Thus resulted such screen gems as Ninja III: the Domination.  What a mess; we tried damage control but Lustbader was the only one who earned his money, in my opinion.  Truth be told, there’s some mysticism, maybe-“ and his eyebrows wiggled suggestively, “-some magic, but by and large we’re pragmatists, not wizards.  Aha!  Here it is.”  He stood up and set Trotkov’s fallen neutrino accelerator to Leave No Evidence.  The Indigo beam lanced out and blew a 16 foot hole in the hull of the ship.  “Better and better.  Now, if MacGuiness will pick up Hargrove, AND KEEP HOLDING HIM RATHER THAN DUMPING HIM ON HIS HEAD, we can be off - and should be.  We’re in enemy central, you know.”  The smaller man swept Frieda up, and staggered to the hole. 

“I see the grace of the Ninja is as overrated as their preternatural powers,” she commented archly.

“Look lady.  I’m a Silent Warrior of Shadows, not a frigging powerlifter.  Besides, with all the hardware in you, Louis Cyr would have a tough time.  And the drugged fox under my shirt doesn’t help.”  He stepped through the wound in the ship into the light, blinding her.  “By the way, you forgot the Trademark.”

“But WHO d’ you work for?” screamed Paddy in frustration, scampering along in their wake, sweating under the weight of the Barrett.

“Why, The Other Side, of course,” the Ninja^TM Fred replied smugly.  “The Iga ninja have ALWAYS worked for The Other Side.  You should know that, O’Lan; it’s your bosses that sent me.”       

The mysterious Other Side sends another agent!  But who are they?  What do they want?  When will Fred begin making obscene Ninja hand magic?  The wound is cauterized, but what will happen when Hargrove tries to eat?

On to Chapter 16