The Shaft

He knew she was trouble the first time he saw her. But like a deer transfixed by the headlights of an on-rushing car, he was powerless to avoid her.

He was in The Shaft, in Rocky Bar, New Idaho. The Shaft had originally been a small time silver mine, but the silver had played out nearly a century ago. During the Years of Trouble it had been a shelter/bunker refugee camp. Now, the upper gallery had been turned into a bar. He was drinking again. Surely a bad sign. He was not even sure how long he had been drinking, or how long he had been there.

He had reached that point of clarity beyond drunkenness: he was trembling on the edge of a vast and deep precipice, and he liked the feeling. He felt sure that the bartender, a nearly bald man, with a strange white streak through his otherwise black beard, understood.

"Yo, fill me up," he stood up on unsteady legs. The bartender nodded at him from beneath a flickering fluorescent light. The rough-hewn rock walls of The Shaft had been painted in totem-like swirls and whorls of graphite, which shone in the light of myriad black light tubes. The whole place looked like some dim Aboriginal hell. The wall paintings seemed to flicker and writhe, as he made his way into the men's room.

The Godfather sayz, Watch yer ASS! This strangely profound legend was scrawled on the wall above the urinal. Somehow Scorpio seemed to think that it was a message meant specifically for him. "Always," he muttered, as he drained himself, "you always watch your ass."

His drink was waiting for him when he got back to the bar. So was she. She was small and dark, and even sitting she seemed full of restless energy.

"Are you Scorpio," she asked, eyeing him critically.

In answer he rose his glass and took a long drink.

She reached into the bulky fatigue-style jacket she was wearing, and pulled out a thick manila folder. "Because if you are I have a job for you. Twenty-five thousand new-dollars now, twice that when the job is done."

He grinned. "Then I'm Scorpio."
 

"Follow me," she got up from the counter, began to walk towards the lift that lead up to the surface. Her heavy clothes did little to conceal an unconsciously sensual walk.

"Gladly," Scorpio said, "to hell if need be." He finished his drink, and picked up the packet she had left on the counter. Fishing inside he pulled out a handful of colorful bills, which he slid towards the bartender.

"We're not going that far," she said.

In an overhead mirror Scorpio got a glimpse of the bartender shaking his head, the money on the counter untouched.
 
 

The Job

Laying on his belly among the rocks and the sagebrush Scorpio tried to keep his mind on the ribbon of blue highway shimmering under the heat-mirage below. Try as hard as he might though he could not get Synthia out of his mind: her darkly intense eyes, her small, pointed breasts, the way she parted her lips when she was deep in thought.

After they had left Rocky Bar they had driven together to the garrison city of Fort Boise. He had left his car behind, forlorn and discarded: he would not need it anymore. That night he and Synthia had made love in an expensive hotel room, and gotten giddily drunk on imported champagne.

Between sex and alcohol she had explained the job to him. The job he was having such a hard time keeping his wandering concentration on. In just seventy-two hours Synthia had become his addiction: he felt a craving for her touch that was almost painful.

For what must have been the twentieth time he pulled his Heckler and Koch MP-8 to him, absently fingering the safety: its phallic weight and presence seemed to momentary assuage his sexual cravings. The tall grass around him whirred with the sound of grasshoppers on some ceaseless migration.

"Scorpio," his radio headset crackled, "the truck just passed the first checkpoint."
He grunted in affirmation. "You got that Scrum!"

"Yo boss," the man he knew only as Scrum answered, invisible in his position by the road. "I'm ready to go."

"Same here," the Geek radioed.

Scorpio rose his field-glasses to his eyes, swept his gaze towards where the road
described a gentle curve among jagged basalt. There! The unwinking lights of the
Micro-Tech pilot car. A hundred yards behind the transport would be following.

He knew pretty much nothing about the men he had with him. Synthia had said that they were reliable, and that they would do their job. He snapped the safety off his sub-machine gun, and began whistling tunelessly.

Now the transport was visible, a white behemoth lumbering down the cracked and pitted asphalt. Down below Scrum would be sighting in the trailer's rear tire in the scope of his of 10 mm heavy-barreled rifle. The Geek would be preparing his grenade launcher for the pilot car.

Now the pilot car was directly below him. Scorpio waited until it was just a little past him, and then he jumped up to his feet, began running down the gentle incline of the hill he had positioned himself on. There was a loud crump, and he saw the pilot car leave the road, lifted on petals of flame. The transport was screaming past him, its airbrakes shrieking. The pilot car, engulfed in flames, was tumbling down the road, rolling over and over.

The transport's trailer was fishtailing madly, and Scorpio checked his stumbling run down the slope: certain for a moment that the trailer was going to topple right over onto him. Then the transport was past, somehow it had stayed on the road. It plowed through the burning wreckage left by the tumbling pilot car, before screeching to a halt, half on the road and half off.

There were shots: the transport driver and guard firing out through their firing ports. There was a rattling noise as the Geek answered their fire with a burst from his machine pistol. Scorpio ran back to the trailer, unclipping the magnetic mine from his equipment-web. He slapped it on the trailer doors, slapped the arming switch, then rolled beneath the trailer.

Thump! There was a teeth-jarring detonation. Scorpio scuttled back out behind the trailer. The rear door was torn open: like a beer can ripped by a shotgun shell. Scorpio was halfway up the loading deck when he saw movement in the smoke-filled dimness of the trailer-interior. A shot rang out, and Scorpio felt a shell rip past his face.

Damn! A guard inside the trailer compartment! That was a surprise! Scorpio opened up with his H&K: the sound of the caseless rounds cycling through at 1000 rounds per minute was a high-pitched whine. The pulsing muzzle-blast strobed light all over the compartment walls. Like an epileptic marionette the guard shuddered in the lethal hail, before crumpling bonelessly.
 
 

There trailer compartment was spartan. There was the box-like cradle of the containment unit directly in the compartment's center. The dead guard's station occupied the trailer's nose: a seat semi-recessed into one wall of the compartment, and a small console with a tiny closed-circuit TV monitor. The air inside was cool, and the whir of the powerful air-conditioners could still be heard. Scorpio located the keypad atop the containment unit, quickly punched in the code Synthia had given him. It had been a near thing: had the trailer flipped this part of this operation would have been infinitely more complicated.

The top of the containment unit irised open. There, floating suspended in the magnetic field of a quartet of super-conducting magnets, a black sphere about the size of a pomegranate, a casing of super-dense carbon-fiber filaments: inside, no larger than a grass seed, the Zero Chip. He did not particularly know what it was, or what made it so valuable. He was not paid to know that. He was just paid to get it.

He thumbed the switch on his communication's headset that activated the radio beacon for the helicopter, already enroute, that was to pick up the precious chip. He reached into his jacket, and pulled out the non-conducting gloves: slipping them on before he gingerly reached into the containment vessel, feeling a curious tingling in his hands as they penetrated the magnetic field. Then he had the sphere, he dropped into the pouch provided to him for carrying it, then he stripped off the gloves, tossing them onto the body of the dead guard.

Outside of the trailer, he toggled his headset, "I'm out, and I've got the Item, let 'er rip!" With that he threw himself down on the gravel shoulder beside the trailer. Seconds later there was another blast, as the Geek sent another rocket-grenade into the transport cab. Scorpio stood up, dusted himself off, even as the transport wreck convulsed with secondary explosions.

The job was nearly done. Scrum and the Geek came out from their firing positions, joined him at the back of the trailer. Together they watched the transport burn for a minute, in a thoughtful, awed silence. Then it was time to head for the spot picked out for the helicopter landing zone. As they trudged through the sage-brush, a black column of smoke raising behind them, they made small talk. Scorpio smoked. They hunkered down by the clearing, Scrum pulled out a rag and began cleaning the stainless steel barrel of his sniper rifle. The wiry Geek squatted on his haunches, grinning, and rattled on at length about what he was going to do with all the money deposited onto his credit chip: most of his plans centered on very expensive women and the very indecent things they could be paid to do.

The appearance of the helicopter, sleek and insect-like, was almost sudden, so quiet was its muted turbofan engine. It gently bounced down, and a hatch was flung. Synthia, all in commando black, gestured them in. With eager hands she took the bag containing the chip from Scorpio, gently removing the black spheroid from within and placing it inside the miniaturized version of the containment unit built within the helicopter. Scorpio and his cohorts belted themselves to the narrow benches that ran along the helicopter's curved and sloped hull. With a hiss of well-engineered hydraulics the outer hatch closed.
 

Final Act

The flight to Rocky Bar was a dizzying, skimming, rocket-ride flown below radar and just above the tops of the pine trees. Scorpio felt sick. He had been too long without a drink. Synthia, beside the pilot in the co-pilot's seat, was tauntingly out of reach. He wanted her so badly. The flight seemed to last forever.

He could see Synthia and the pilot in agitated conversation. He could not hear what was being said, over the engine noise and vibration, but he could imagine what was being said. The pilot was no doubt questioning the new coordinates Synthia had given him, and she was invoking her authority: if she said they had a new rendezvous point the pilot would simply have to accept it. Scrum and the Geek grinned slyly at each other.
Scorpio wanted a drink.

Then, barely a half-hour later, they were on the ground, clumsily squeezing out the narrow hatchway, gear banging and rattling against the hatchway sides. There were two four-by-four vehicles, massive things with mirrored windows, parked in the muddy meadow that the helicopter had landed in. Scorpio dug in his fatigue pockets, produced a keycard which he passed to Scrum. "Yours is the one on the right," he announced plainly. "The credit chip issued to you both has been activated. You are now very rich men." The two trotted off towards the waiting vehicle.

Synthia was clambering out of the 'copter, clutching the Zero Chip tightly to herself. The pilot was right behind her.

"What the hell is going on here?" The pilot unsnapped the flap of his holster. "We were supposed to go directly back to headquarters! The chip is supposed to go straight to director Simplot!"

Synthia nodded to Scorpio, who lunged forward, slamming the hatch on the surprised pilot: one corner of the hatch caught him square in the face. He reeled back into the interior of the 'copter. Laying on his side he tried to get at his sidearm, but Scorpio had swung himself up into the crew compartment: with one booted foot he stamped down on the prone pilot's arm.

"Sorry pal," Scorpio said, "but there wasn't time to cut you in on the deal." Kneeling on the pilot's chest he threw a short punch into the pilot's already bloodied face.
The pilot went limp.

He began to lift the pilot's body. In his peripheral vision he could see Synthia kneeling among the wildflowers, a black ruck-sack spread out before her. "Hey babe," he said, "before you set those charges and blow this crate straight to hell let me get this flyboy out of here: he doesn't deserve to be barbecued."

Then he felt something, in the small of his back: like a mule-kick. He went down, slumping over the pilot's body. Scorpio felt his blood pooling underneath his fatigue jacket.
Twisting his neck he saw the bartender from the Shaft, thinly smiling over the white streak in his beard. There was a small pistol in his right hand.
 

"You bitch!" Scorpio spat, "You set me up!" Synthia said nothing, as she fastened the magnetic mine to the side of the helicopter. Scorpio tried to pull himself towards the hatch.

"The charge will be set for 45 seconds," Synthia said. "You may have time enough to get away from the copter before it blows. Then of course you've got to stop the bleeding, and all this before my employers get here looking for the chip. Good luck." She toggled the arming switch on the explosive, "Bye now!" She and her confederate trotted off towards one of the waiting vehicles.

As Scorpio struggled towards the helicopter hatch, with a mouth full of the acrid taste of his own blood, he watched Synthia running through the alpine meadow. God, how he loved her!