How Not to Rescue a Hippo - part 1
A silly scifi short story
How Not to Rescue a Hippo - part 1
Theo65 set everything up for me, like they always did. It was a simple job: transport a small box to Dome 17 on Happy Acres Moon and give it to Dyson. Sure, Dyson was a known criminal, but nothing was wrong with just dropping off something for him. The exchange was straightforward—the little box in my backpack for a little Hank the Hippo statue, supposedly from Old Earth—and simple enough to risk the statue being a fake.
With the box stashed in my backpack, I headed to the Centaur Ferry Line check-in kiosk. I put my hand in my jacket pocket to confirm my Emerg-Blast remained safely stowed there. The small device could create a localized but mighty electromagnetic pulse. If things went sideways, which tended to happen, it was way easier to use than any other weapon I’d tried.
As I stopped to check the departure board, a man bumped into me.
“Sorry,” he said without taking his eyes off the smiling centaur logo above us.
With dark hair, dark eyes, and an average build, nothing stood out about him, which doubled my suspicion. Using the new software on my AR goggles, I tagged him.
I grunted and strode off to board the ferry. Choosing a seat that gave me a good view of the main cabin, I settled in. The ferry pulled away from the dock a few minutes later and set a course to Happy Acres Moon—a name given to lure in farmers. It was a rock with the right amount of sunlight to grow food under domes. (Only Blue Moon Colony was better situated.)
Looping one of my backpack straps around my ankle, I set my proximity sensor and closed my eyes for what I hoped would be a three-hour nap.
Forty-five minutes later, something woke me. I remained motionless, my goggles hiding my wakefulness from others. That’s when I spotted him for a second time—the man who’d bumped into me. A knot twisted in my gut. Maybe this job wasn’t as simple as I’d thought.
The man took a seat near the snack bar a short distance from me. Despite his intense focus on his fingernails, my gut said he was watching me. His ordinariness was a clear indicator he was on the clock following me. Had Dyson sent him to make sure I brought the box? Or had a different criminal group tasked him? Worse yet, did he work in law enforcement?
I played it cool, not letting on that I’d spotted him.
When I disembarked the ferry at the primary settlement on Happy Acres Moon, he followed close behind me. (The tiny camera on the band of my goggles gave me an excellent view.) The crowd wasn’t huge, so I dodged to the side and slowed. He did the same and pulled out his datapad as if to check messages. Zooming in, I took a few pictures.
Next, I did what any sane person being followed would do and darted forward, weaving through the flow of people like I had somewhere to be. At the last minute, I sidestepped right and entered the nearest washroom, securing the door behind me.
Using code from a probably unsavoury source, I searched the population information from Indigo Station starting with the assumption that was where he was from. (I had to start somewhere.) Five seconds into my search, he came up.
Frank Dole was his name, and he lived with his husband in the Delta Sector of Indigo Station. Frank appeared to be a schoolteacher; of course, that had to be a fake job. The man was obviously an undercover agent of some sort.
After waiting a half hour, I poked my head out and looked around. Everyone who’d disembarked the ferry was long gone. Only a ticket agent and a janitorial robot (a repurposed TUD unit) remained.
My plan had been to take a train, delightfully climate controlled but fully wired for AIs with access to facial recognition algorithms, to Dome 17. If the guy following me—I rechecked his name was Frank—jacked into the local system, I’d be super easy to track.
Lingering would also raise questions, so I continued out of the ferry terminal and into the dome. It smelled good, like apples and sunshine. A cozy village was snuggled into the side wall, leaving plenty of open space for the orchard. It would be a nice place to raise a family of apple lovers. I snorted, picturing hordes of rug rats running around being extra annoying. This wasn’t the kind of environment I could live in, though; good thing I was only passing through.
I tested the handle of the first maintenance door I came to. Locked. Trying to look like I belonged, I used my Delock6000 device (not exactly legal, I knew). After a quick swipe, the door opened. Ignoring my urge to glance around, I entered and locked the door behind me.
Given the dome’s public nature, a map of all the maintenance corridors was available for download. I found an appropriate airlock and headed that way.
By avoiding the train, I faced a ten-kilometre trek across the planet’s barren terrain, a landscape devoid of breathable air. But I’d come prepared.
I wove through a maze of generic corridors to reach the airlock and pulled my fancy new nanite spacesuit from my backpack. All I had to do was put on the helmet and the nanites would disperse and envelop me. In space it was good for thirty-six hours; on a planet it would be even better.
The suit’s drawback was its inability to alter colour, and its colour happened to be Day-Glo magenta. At least I didn’t have to look at myself.
Spacesuit sealed, I let myself out of the airlock.
Outside the dome, a field of grey rocks reached to the horizon, which wasn’t that far away because Happy Acres wasn’t a big moon. (Have I mentioned how lame calling this place ‘Happy Acres’ was? It was like the place demanded its citizens be happy.) The water world this moon circled was out of sight. The system’s sun was just rising over the horizon, casting a blinding amount of light, forcing me to switch my goggles to their sunglasses setting.
My goggles overlaid a green line along the route I needed to follow. I couldn’t see the end, which meant I faced a long trudge. For entertainment (because I was already bored with the endless rocks), I started my Hank the Hippo program.
Hank, in his fantastic hippo form, appeared beside me. He looked up at me with his huge round nose and glossy eyes, and my heart almost melted.
“Shall we go?” I asked.
Hank wiggled his ears.
We started walking.
We reached Dome 17 three hours later. The structure was as a prefab marvel of interlocking triangles. Despite being big enough for a farming settlement, its panels lacked the required transparency. Whatever was going on here wasn’t agriculture. Not that I cared. All I needed to do was make the exchange and get out.
“Next we have to find a way in,” I said to Hank (who didn’t answer, because he was a hippopotamus—and an imaginary one at that).
Hank kept pace as I followed the dome’s wall counterclockwise away from where the train came in. By law, remote habitats were supposed to leave their airlock doors unlocked as a safety measure. Even though unsavoury sorts inhabited this dome, I hoped to find an open one. Besides, only a fool would arrive on foot, so why would they lock the doors?
“I wonder if the hippos of Old Earth were as big as you?” I said. Hank’s head reached my elbow, and I was a tall human.
He gazed at me with his liquid eyes, showing me why I kept him at my side as much as I did. (Humans only ever caused me trouble.) We continued on.
After another few minutes of walking, we reached an airlock. I tried the door, and to my surprise it opened. (My Delock6000 didn’t work on airlock doors.) Inside, as soon as the air had cycled, I removed the magenta spacesuit and tucked it in my backpack, but I left Hank running.
My contact, Dyson, waited for me farther inside. The exchange wouldn’t take long.
“Next step is to get to Diggers Draw,” I told Hank, who wiggled his back half—not a graceful move. “That sounds like a pub to me.”
To be continued…