Chapter 5

This little adventure reminded me of how I wound up with this job in the first place. I had been looking for Osama Bin Laden when I took an IED (Improvised Explosive Device) up the ass and would have been killed if it were not for my current employers. This time I was looking for a certain Blogmor Geste who was hiding in an office building on an artificial planet that was, for all practical purposes, nothing but one big office complex.

This structure was much too large to be considered anything but a small planet, even though it was constructed from scratch with no "organic" rock at its base. The whole planet, called Isfor, is close to 2,000 miles in diameter and is only 62% occupied by sentient beings. The rest is empty space waiting for new tenants to show up.

Mr. Blogmor Geste, an agent for The Octopoid, was wanted for masterminding the destruction of a planet in the Hindor system that had been inhabited by approximately eight billion souls. I use the term "had been" advisedly, since he had crashed a planetoid into the planet Hindorin for what appeared the sole purpose of trying to intimidate the people on other nearby planets. The people of Hindorin owed their demise simply to the fact that they were in a convenient place for Geste's minions to attack.

The word was that Geste was calling for the surrender of the seven planets to The Octopoid, or risk being destroyed in the same manner as the people of Hindorin. The agents of The Center, of which I was one, had succeeded in capturing or killing all of the senior employees of Geste, and, in the process, had found out that Geste was currently hiding on Isfor. Well, that was some help, because we could keep him from escaping from Isfor, but he could live for the rest of his life in sumptuous comfort on Isfor if I could not find him.

Fortunately, I had some very sophisticated AIs (Artificial Intelligences) to help me search, and they could track a bread crumb through a bird's digestive system if there was enough incentive. In fact, that was how we narrowed down Geste's location—by tracking his source of food and drinking water to his current living quarters.

I had hope of finding him and capturing him alive for questioning. We still did not know who or what The Octopoid was, and we were very anxious to find the answer to that question. We also wanted to know where to find them, but that was number two on the priority list. We figured that we could answer that by simple deduction once we had the answer to the first question.

I had Geste's location narrowed down to about a cubic mile of office and apartment space, so I was feeling pretty good about my chances of finding him in a reasonably short time. The AIs were still hard at work on getting a finer bead on Geste, but I was ready to stick my own nose into the chase. I was simply bored with waiting for the AIs to come up with the final answer. My two eyes might be able to do things that the computers couldn't manage, since I had a lot more freedom of movement.

I'd had so much luck with the chameleon act on some of my other investigations that I thought that I would use that here. I had built in all of the weapons I thought that I could possibly need. I was especially comfortable with using my plasma jet "flame thrower." My use of the chameleon technique had given me the nickname among my peers of "The Specter." I was especially amused by that since my last name on Earth had been Specter.

Anyway, I stripped off my clothes and retracted my cock and balls into my body cavity after reducing their size as far as possible. This removed an easy and sensitive target from ready access by enemies, and made it somewhat more comfortable to move around. The walls of the various rooms I passed through had a wide and varied coloration and pattern, so Honeybunch, my internal AI, was going to be a very busy little bee keeping up with the changes.

I started out in one corner of the cube in question and aimed diagonally across to the far corner nearly a mile and a half away. I had Honeybunch turn all of my senses to the maximum so that she would be able detect anything that came near me. The sensors fed the signals directly into Honeybunch in parallel with my brain, so that my subjective awareness was pretty much the same as it would normally be. Only Honeybunch would have to wrestle with the maddeningly high level of input, and she was adapted to be able to handle that.

We had gotten about 25% of the way along our projected path when Honeybunch mentally nudged me. Ham, bear off to your left. There is a strange combination of odors and sounds coming from that general direction, but I am not yet able to pin anything down.

I acted immediately on Honeybunch's suggestion. She has never led me astray, yet. I moved even more carefully now that Honeybunch had detected something. I must be doing something right, there is the third mouse that I have caught unawares. As I got a little bit farther in the direction Honeybunch had suggested, I began to hear and smell strange goings on.

I was finally able to get a good look at the source of the sounds and smells. Damned if it didn't look like an alligator with fur! I had finally found Mr. Blogmor Geste! The sounds were coming from a device that looked something like a Turkish water pipe, except that it seemed to be music. Geste had a length of tubing in his mouth and the other end of the tube was connected to the weird device. The odor was produced by smoke that was curling from the top of the thing. I have no idea what the thing was, but it looked like it was having some sort of narcotic effect on Geste.

Geste swayed back and forth in time to the beat of the "music" coming from the device, and all four of his eyes appeared to me to be somewhat glassy. I wanted to capture Geste without doing any more damage to him than I could help, but I was also aware of how much damage a 14-foot-long Earth alligator could do to a person, even somebody as relatively impervious as me.

Geste was balanced on his two hind legs and his long tail, and he was holding some sort of container in his forelegs or hands. I couldn't see what was in the container, and I was in no position to make an educated guess. Right then, I wished that I was carrying some sort of non-lethal weapon. Everything I had with me was as lethal as a nuclear bomb, so I was forced to attack Geste with just my bare hands. Even then, I had to be careful not to do him some permanent damage before he could be questioned.

I decided to try to sneak up on him from behind and stun him with a blow from my fist on the back of his head where is brain was stored. His skull was damned thick, so I had to be prepared to hit him as hard as I could. Moving slowly so that Honeybunch had no trouble keeping up with the changes in skin color as I moved, I crept nearer and nearer to Geste.

I don't know, maybe he heard me, but when I got within reach, he let out a ear-piercing scream and slapped me on the side of my head with his tremendously powerful tail. The blow spun me completely around and came close to rendering me unconscious—something that I really didn't think was possible for a creature to do with its bare skin, no matter how it was protected by scales, or whatever. The fact that Geste's tail was covered with fur made the feat doubly surprising.

I was conscious, but dazed, so I was really not prepared for the ferocious attack that hit me just moments after the initial blow. Geste jumped onto my body and seemed to be trying to mash me flat against the hard floor. Fortunately, there was no way that he could do that with only his weight to help him, since my cyborg endoskeleton was not that easy to crush, though he did achieve some bruising of my skin.

Geste was lying at full length on my body and pounding on my head with his hands. These hands were attached to relatively short arms, so he could not get the full leverage to go with his remarkable strength. As it was, he might have broken my head open if he had been able to pound on it much longer. However, Honeybunch dumped a full load of adrenalin and other marvelous things into my bloodstream, and they were enough to bring me back to full awareness of the unhappy things that were happening to me.