He didn’t even look up at Dan.
“Halek?”
“I’m busy. Trying to get all this crap you bring me to work. God… damn. ” He threw down a piece he was holding. “Junk, so damn old, and you expect me to get it to work, and-”
Finally, he did turn.
“You have got to be kidding me-an Ark survivor? Here?”
Raine first thought that perhaps Halek was impressed. Maybe being a man from the past was important.
But Halek’s face, frizzled with spiky hairs sprouting in every direction, and rheumy, bloodshot eyes, didn’t look pleased.
He stood up.
“Halek, Lieutenant Nicholas Raine… Raine, meet my brother, Halek Hagar.”
Raine stuck out his hand. Which wasn’t taken.
Halek rubbed his cheek instead, studying him like he was the strange new addition to a zoo.
Then he turned to his brother.
“And you don’t think that the goddamn Authority will know that you got ’im? That we have him here? Do you really think we can afford that?”
Raine wasn’t feeling too welcome.
In another world, another time, he would have offered to leave.
But here -now -where the hell would he go?
For now, he was tethered to Dan Hagar and this place.
He repeated the two operative words in his head. A personal reminder.
For now.
“I know,” Dan was saying, snapping Raine back into the situation, “but they were all dead. The bandits tried to grab him… he was the lone survivor. The Authority may think bandits got him.”
“You don’t believe that, do you? They know the bandits would deal for him.”
Halek turned back to Raine. Then he took a step in his direction, the man’s smell strong. Was water for bathing in short supply here, or was it just an option Halek chose not to elect?
“Which is exactly what we should do. Tie the bastard survivor up and sell him to the next batch of Enforcers that show up.”
Dan put a hand on his brother’s shoulder. Then he turned to Raine.
“My brother worries about the Authority. A lot.”
“Damn right I do.”
“But he forgets that we need all the help we can get here. Isn’t that right, Halek?”
Dan’s brother didn’t disagree. But the look on his face didn’t appear all that convinced, either.
“And this here survivor is a Marine lieutenant.” He looked at Raine. “I imagine you’ve seen things, Raine, hm? Done things? I mean, there were reasons they picked you, right?”
“Guess so. It all happened fast-the selection, that is.”
Dan nodded and then looked back to his brother. “I’ve already seen how good he is with a gun. I wouldn’t mind him by my side, especially with the Wasties coming closer every day…”
“Wasties?” Rain said.
“The Wasteland bandit clans. What you shot at out there. All independent, but they seem to be converging on our little settlement. Another gun”-Dan took a breath-“another set of balls? I definitely could use that.”
Halek’s tongue did a slow exploration of his lips, around the chapped flesh and cracked corners of his mouth.
“Hell, he might even know something about the pile of weapons you got there,” Dan said as way of appeasement.
“I know what I need to know,” Halek said fast.
But the point had been made.
Dan looked at Raine.
“Think it’s time you had a shot or two of what we like to call Hagar’s Finest.”
“Something to drink?”
Now both Dan and Halek started laughing, as if in on some private joke.
“Oh yeah-something to drink indeed.” • • •
Raine put down the glass of… whatever it was.
Dan looked at him. “Home-brewed stim juice. Packs a punch, so probably enough for now. You need a place to sleep. Food, maybe?”
He watched Halek shoot his brother a look. The reason for it then became clear.
“Halek-you got a place back in here that our friend from the past can sleep?”
“It’s way too crowded here, I can’t-”
“Just a cot, okay, brother? I know this isn’t a hotel. I’ll send over some food. We eat very simply. Things we can grow. Probably bland for you.”
“Thanks,” Raine said.
He looked around the room. It reeked of guns and oil and the man who worked on them. Raine wondered if he hadn’t been better off sleeping inside the Ark.
Halek stayed focused on his brother.
“ Then we talk about him?”
“Yeah. In the morning.”
“Talk?” Raine said to Dan.
“Don’t worry about it for now. It will be dark soon here. We’ll be beefing up our security. You may hear some gunshots. Perfectly normal.”
Halek took a big sniff, his last expression that he wasn’t too happy with his guest. Then he stood up.
“Got a space over there. Get you a blanket of some kind. Don’t know if I got any damn pillow.”
“I’ll be okay.”
Dan also got up.
“I’ll be back in the morning. Then”-another glance at Halek-“we’ll talk.”
Raine stuck out his hand. An off moment-Dan acted as though he didn’t know what to do with it. Then a grin. “Right. Yeah, a handshake.”
And he took Raine’s hand.
Was there a reason people no longer shook hands here? New diseases? Or maybe that pledge of friendship, what a clasping of hands represented… didn’t apply?
Raine couldn’t guess. But for now he was eager for whatever space Halek had for him. Even a sip or two of the foul liquid they gave him had him wanting to shut his eyes. Or perhaps it was the ironic fatigue from waking up decades after doing nothing.
“Dan. Thanks. For saving me.”
Dan released his hand. “Yeah. Well, we’ll see.”
And he walked out of the chaotic armory.
Raine turned back to where Halek was muttering as he pushed piles of metal around.
Raine stood there. Stranger in an ever stranger land.
And he felt that whatever the morning brought, it might be even stranger still.
He walked back, a bit unsteady, to where he hoped to lie down… and simply sleep.
TWELVE
He dreamt.
And even while Raine dreamed, he realized, in a lucid way, that for all those decades of deep sleep he hadn’t dreamt at all.
Now, though, he dreamt of the Ark station, the scientists milling about, looking at him with sideways glances as if they were in on a practical joke.
That gave way to images of the bandits who attempted to kill him. They screamed at him, making threatening gestures. Waving knives. One shot a gun that echoed hollowly in the aural caverns of his sleeping mind. A muffled shot into the sky.
Where he could look up.
Something coming. Covering the sun.
The asteroid. I didn’t miss it after all. It is coming right down on me.
Except he could see… this was far too small an asteroid. It was more like a hovering aircraft. Like a helicopter, but boxy, the engine sound roaring above the screaming bandits.
And the flying thing-whatever it was-started shooting at him.
He blinked. At the glare of the sun suddenly revealed. The gleaming metal of the strange chopper.
He blinked.
Awake.
And even before he took in the dingy light and foul smell of the place where he had slept, he saw something… within his eyes.
Like a screen.
First just wavy lines, as if fruitlessly chasing those floaters made by blood vessels crisscrossing the iris. But then resolving. Showing a thin red bar that rose and fell…
Rose and fell, he quickly realized, with his heartbeat. Then another bar. Immediately filling his point of view from the bottom of his eye to the top.
Green.
The nanotrites. The small biomechanical engines. One showing heart rate, the other… his body functions? His health? Could they show other things? Did the scientists who planted them know all they could do?
When he blinked again, their work done, they vanished.