Path of Ranger: Volume 1 (53 page)

“Wow, it can’t be!” Josh got pleasantly excited. “Is it an iPhone?”

His hand reached out for the phone and stopped right before touching it. He looked at JB.

“It’s not exactly an iPhone,” the ranger cleared up.

“May I?” Skyman asked.

“Yeah, sure,” JB replied. “Just don’t touch the silent mode switch,” he supplemented at the last moment.

A minute of playing with that old device fulfilled Josh’s interest. He put the phone back and returned to the game.

“Do you still use that phone?”

“As a personal notebook mostly. It doesn’t connect to any of today’s standard interfaces. I have to put all data in and out manually…”

“Hm… Not that convenient.”

“Hacker-proof,” JB explained. “So what is this place really, Josh?” the ranger tried to change the subject to something that he was interested in.

“Are you asking me about the place where you’ve come with a planned business? To buy some reed, if I recall right?” Skyman replied with a question of his own.

“To sign a contract on a muhtionian reed supply, actually,” the agent stuck to his cover. “I asked you about the place where an undiscovered creature attacks people out of the blue, in the middle of a greenhouse.”

“This place is a rahtiongian reservation, as far as I know. A specialized facility, plant garden for breeding the fitoxes.”

Hearing such disrespectful words about another intelligent kind, as if fitoxes were some just dumb plants, JB felt a spark of contempt towards his companion. His brief severe look laid on all three of them.

“You think all such reservations breed those lethal species and do the tours during the hunting seasons?”

“What are you talking about?” Josh played out innocence.

“You know what I mean!” the ranger’s tone got much harder. “What exactly was your plan? To lead me deep into the bushes, where some of your minions would have fed me to the wild plants? So why didn’t you just destroy my boat right in space?”

That very moment JB remembered his recent encounter with the corsairs and those strange ship malfunctions. When the realization come to him, he smirked slyly.

“JB, look. I think you have quite an imagination there,” Skyman attempted to calm him down.

“So you were the ones behind it! You had infiltrated your rat in Gibson’s surroundings to cover my death… You hoped to disarm me, and then kill me out of everyone’s sight.”

“JB…” the colonel wanted to make another try of settling the ranger, but it was useless.

“An imagination you say, Cap? Oh, my bad! You’re not a captain anymore, right? Now you’re a Colonel Josh Skyman! A brave man of the Secret Service. Commander Brix Adamy’s finest! Sounds important, don’t it?” the agents exchanged looks. They were trying to figure out how the ranger could know so much about them since their files were classified. “Let me guess, you thought that I had left you back there, in Atlantis, in twenty-nine sixty-five, then I never checked on you?”

“You don’t know anything, ranger!” Eugene threw impatiently.

As a reply, all he got was a short meaningless look from JB.

“Your move, Josh…” the mutant reminded his opponent of their game. Then he looked at the communicator’s screen again. “So what about imagination? What is the limit of your imagination, gents?”

“JB, if you suspect us of something, I assure you that…” this time Fred tried to be sensible.

“Didn’t you hear the question?!” the big guy pulled the talk back to the subject, to keep his dominance over the conversation. “Is your imagination enough, let’s say, to initiate a massive military operation? Huh?”

“A military operation?” Josh clarified in a calm manner. His eyes snapped back to the chess board.

“Okay, let’s take chess for example… Or no, something more specific. Let’s say, Arturukv planet, Capella system, twenty-nine sixty-seven,” the attention of the five elevated to its peak. As for JB, he was looking exclusively at Skyman. “You had enough imagination then, right? Enough to send a several thousands of your people to certain death. You also showed your courage then. When you had left your friends there to die.”

“Stop it, JB…” Skyman pushed out through his teeth.

“Why, Joshy? Do you even remember their names? Alex, Vitaliy, Ellison… Huh? Or you think that twenty-four point seven grams of UP-3.4 sedative stimulators will block the nightmares forever?” the smirk on the ranger’s face was making the agents more and more angry. And his stone confidence seeded up their own sense of insecurity. “I see all of you have toasted your brains with that quantity of stimulators a long time ago! Or, perhaps, you blame the war for all of your problems?”

“What the hell do you know about the war?!” Eugene shouted out nervously.

“So if it’s war, then all methods are good, right?” JB said and checked his device once more. “But still, you’re the colonel, Josh. You know better. Indeed. What do I know? I’m just a ranger…”

“Pf-f-f… Ranger…” Eugene expressed his contempt.

The mutant looked around with another crookish look of his and stopped at their equipment.

“I didn’t recognize you then, you know. Despite even my premonition… Those were you, whom I encountered on the Magnonium planet, Menkar system, sixteen days ago. Right? And those are what was inside that container I had lost…” JB pointed at the memory units, which were in El’s and Tina’s use. JB met El with eye contact. “How do you feel, by the way? As I remember, you took most of the damage there…”

“Stop it, JB,” Skyman said firmly. “You’ve lost!”

The colonel nodded at the chess board. Where a holographic animation was jumping around over the figures, it displayed the name of the winner.

“You still don’t get it, Josh? I’ve never played with you. Not now, not earlier…” Everyone paid attention to the ranger’s personal screen projection. He uncovered it for them to watch. There were countless lines of a program log which JB was interested in. Not related to chess in any way. “While you were playing with the AI, I’ve snatched the archives from the station's central server. I probably have to apologize for my manners, but it was the perfect opportunity to get direct access. But, you may be really pleased with the job on the game you did. Next time I may even set your AI-opponent to the ‘middle’ difficulty level.”

JB looked at the communicator for the last time, to ensure that data transfer was complete. Now he could fully get back to the conversation.

“So what did you want with me all this time?” JB wanted to close the last unresolved question before leaving.

It wasn’t easy for Josh to swallow his pride when he had to give it up to JB for the sake of the job. He turned to the women agents so they would join the big circle. El and Tina came closer to the men. The chess board projection vanished.

“How well do you know your body, JB?” El started.

“Was there anything that might have happened to you that could cause a genetic change in your organism?”

Thousands of pictures of memories from the island flashed before the mutant’s eyes. Then he remembered Dr. Gibson with his treatment, hundreds of shots of biostimulators, and countless cans of Ranger Juice, one of which he was holding that very moment.

“Not that I could remember, no…” he casually shrugged. “Well, who knows what you might catch in that damn cosmos,” he added to lead them away from the thoughts of the island.

“Have you or your ship ever been exposed to a massive amount of radiation?” El continued.

It was sort of odd for the mutant to watch those people with his glowing eyes and still hear those clueless questions. When all there was to that mystery lay on the surface of his appearance. Yet, JB put on an innocent grimace and shook his head.

“The thing is, we have studied that sample of your blood, which we got from you on Magnonium. And the conclusion was that that sample had in common with a human’s blood not more than the beast which you met earlier today.”

“So you do know what that was, right?”

“The blood…” Tina got back to the main subject. “Your blood is the most conductive organic material known to man. Our instruments went nuts when we started testing that sample!” the monotone talk of hers gained more excitement. “What’s the secret?”

“Yo! Bitch, I don’t really know what you think you are. But let’s imagine for a second that you’re talking to a dude from the streets… Wait. You don’t have to imagine that, since I am,” JB pointed at himself with both thumbs. “Don’t you use those fancy words when talking to someone like me.”

That tactic of showing himself as a retarded thug used to help JB out a lot. Since he didn’t have much of a choice, he hoped that it would work once again.

“This place, JB. Getting here was your destiny. This place is quite unusual. Unique things happen here. Things you might not believe in even if you saw them with your own eyes!” El went on with a narration full of excitement.

“Try me.”

“What do you know about the space-time continuum?”

“Street thug…” he reminded her.

El rolled her eyes ironically as if she was talking to an idiot. And since she and the others stuck to that cover story of the ranger’s for so long, seeing that reaction of the woman was odd. JB had noticed a long time before that a continuous usage of biostimulators make people degrade. Those five seemed as live evidence of that theory.

“Making a long story short, here, on this station, the scientists have opened a portal to another dimension,” El tried to pick up her words carefully.

“Fuck you!” the ranger replied cynically, but calmly.

“It’s like a hyper tunnel…” she continued.

“Oh, shouldn’t you show me some kind of a visual reference now? Something like you drawing two spots on the piece of paper and then bending the paper joining the spots?” JB played a fool again.

“What?” El asked in return.

Others exchanged looks, trying to figure out his last words.

“Never mind… Go on.”

“So it’s like a hyper tunnel, but based on another basis. We don’t use any kind of engines to go through it. Theoretically, the portal transfers an object by the force of its own current. All it needs is coordinates.”

“Coordinates?”

“A piece of our world, stable and conductive enough to handle the reading…”

“Reading?” JB attempted to clarify.

“It’s scientific stuff, you won’t understand,” El said.

“Fuck you twice.”

The initiative was pulled by Tina again, letting her partner have a break.

“You see. The scientists tried to use rubidion crystals as markers. But all they have reached was just a ‘noise’ in the ‘ether,’ and just for a few seconds. In some cases, they even managed to transfer some amount of energy into our world. That energy made some animals mutate…”

“So that monster I encountered…”

“Yes, it was a bug once… Before the experiment,” Tina confirmed. “To establish a reliable connection, which may withstand a transfer of matter, we need a better-suited coordinate. Your blood.”

“My blood?” now in place of that regular smirk of JB’s came a genuine mocking smile.

Despite the awareness of his inhuman abilities and the power of gibsonium, the mutant still couldn’t believe what he was hearing. Nevertheless, he didn’t rush to break the play yet.

“What is so important in that dimension that you want?”

“Do you even have an idea what a potential that is?!” Eugene said judgmentally.

“A potential for what? For developing weapons?” JB clarified. “The frolls aren’t enough for you, so you want to piss off someone else? Don’t the world have enough problems already?”

“We may finish the war?”

The ranger smirked and gained back that arrogant expression of his, after all.

“Look, no offense, but… I wouldn’t trust you to finish anything…” he spoke to Eugene. “And you know what, I guess I’ll stay out of this one. I don’t want to be the one responsible for another cataclysm. Here on Earth especially.”

When the mutant let the agents know about his attitude, he got up and walked towards the soda machine to get another can of the beverage. The next stages of his plan were supposed to be: a quick getaway from the station, reporting to the agency on the mission’s results and quitting the job for good. The main obstacle on JB’s way was those five. He had to keep fooling them just a bit more, just to get to his ship.

Yet, they needed him badly and it was a problem. The ranger couldn’t tell how far they would go to hold him there. He needed more time to think. That sprawling routine of his had to gain him another few minutes.

Fact 1: they are much more dangerous than they seem.

Fact 2: I have no leverage there but myself.

Fact 3: they will hunt me down, even if I manage to get out.

Fact 4: just one side is going to leave this station alive: them or me…

The conversation dragged for too long, JB could sense the growing tension. His old gangster hunch recognized a will to kill. They were ready, so was he.

The third can of juice didn’t go as smoothly as previous two. Something was wrong. The first two servings had a metal flavor in it, JB didn’t pay much attention to that. But the last one was just disgusting. The liquid inside felt too thick and too cold. While the mutant was consuming half of it, he glanced a couple of times at the refrigeration machine, thinking about some kind of malfunction.