“Where you going, man?”
Screwball almost jumped out of his skin at the sound of Ditz’s voice. He thought he’d got out the back entrance without sticking out too much, just nodding to the guys on guard. “Oh, uh, hey. Just out.”
“Cool, cool.” Ditz strolled up and fell in beside him. “Not smart to go wandering on your own. Angelica’s people are around.”
“Yeah, I know. It’s just, I’ve got a thing to do.” Ditz kept walking, nodding amiably. “I mean, like, by myself.”
“Oh, it’s OK, I’ll keep you company.”
Screwball sighed. They were at the stairs now, and it took him a while to pick through the barricade of upended tables and broken hotel furniture. A mattress in the corner, and two chairs near it, were supposed to be for the guards, but nobody wanted to hang out that far from the hotel anymore. A single camera was glued to the wall up high, and it might have worked.
“I mean, I’m not supposed to take you with me.”
Ditz grinned, and Screwball realized with a start that he wasn’t actually high. “Sure, I get it. But, like, did anybody say you’re not supposed to let me be coincidentally but consistently, like, adjacent to you?”
“I’m pretty sure that’s what Feeney meant by not taking you with me.”
“Sure, sure. Only, here’s the thing. This seems secret.”
“Yeah, it is.”
“Right. And... I just don’t trust me not to talk about it. It just slips out, you know?”
Screwball sighed again. “Goddamn it, Ditz.”
“Goddamn it, Ditz, indeed.” He nodded sagely, and got over the barricade in one hop. “Listen, you’ve been pretty strung out lately, and believe me, I know.”
Ditz pushed the door to the stairs open, and Screwball followed.
“There’s been a lot of fighting. The old man seems to really trust me.”
“Yeah...” Ditz’s dippy grin faded, and Screwball was reminded that his friend was a lot older than him. Like, late thirties? Forties? Guy did a lot of drugs, made it hard to tell. “So, Feeney’s all right. I’d rather work for him than Angelica, who was always kind of an ice queen. But ‘all right’ isn’t always that great. He’s kind of a bastard sometimes.”
“You’re thinking about Nuke.”
“Yeah. I mean, no. OK, it was shitty what he did to Nuke. Like, his own grandson, man. I get it, they made him. Still. No, man, it’s more... Feeney only cares about people named Feeney. You want to work for him, and that’s not your name, you need to be careful.”
They took the stairs in silence. “Where are we going?”
Screwball sighed. “I’m supposed to plant this thing in the chop shop. It’s a police black box, like from their ships? If I set it off it calls for help, and then they’ll come and bust Angelica.”
“Huh. Cool. Never seen one of those before, let me have a look.”
Screwball pretended to mull it over, but had to admit that he was feeling pretty cool, on a secret mission for the old man. He took the metal box out of his jacket pocket. Ditz watched with curiosity as he undid the clasps, and then held it open.
“Holy fucking shit, man! What the hell!” Ditz’s eyes went wide and he stumbled back against the railing, clutching wildly.
Screwball fumbled the box, startled. It flipped over in his hands and he only barely caught it by grabbing it clumsily to his chest. “The fuck, Ditz? What’s the matter with you?”
“Me? What’s the matter with me? Fuck, man, shit, what’s the matter with you?”
“I asked you first!”
“Ah, shit, shit, shit.” Ditz groaned. He fumbled in his pockets and came up with a little cylinder of something. Flapping one hand, he calmed himself enough to hold it up to his eye and spray. He squeezed his eyes shut and swore a bunch of times.
“What?” Screwball watched in growing panic, clutching the box to his body and staring at his friend. “What are you… What??”
“That’s no police black box, you asshole, that’s a fucking atom bomb.”
“What?!” Screwball yanked it away from his stomach and almost dropped it again. “What the fuck are you talking about, atom bomb?”
“That’s the same bomb Nuke had, man! The hell are you doing with it?”
“Feeney gave it to me! He said it was a police… what the fuck, man!”
“Calm down, man, just calm down!”
“You calm down!”
“OK,” Ditz said. “OK, OK, OK. O....K.”
“Stop saying OK, you’re freaking me out.”
Ditz looked a little bug-eyed still, but kept his mouth shut.
Screwball’s pulse was starting to come down to a level where he wasn’t worried he’d keel over from a heart attack, and with the panic subsiding he started to feel frustrated. Ditz folded his arms and furrowed his eyebrows. Screwball wished he would say this was a bad idea so that he could deny it, but Ditz just stood there looking stupid instead of saying something stupid Screwball could argue with. And then, he realized he was angry.
“Look. Ditz. We’re expendable. Disposable. Nobody gives a shit about the grunts, but you know what? I don’t intend to stay a grunt. I intend to make something of myself. If I come back, Feeney will think I’m a loser. But if I do this… listen, Ditz. If I do this, I’m not just some grunt anymore.” He waited for Ditz to respond, but got impatient. “Look, you said before that Nuke told you this thing wasn’t that big a deal. Just like a little local explosion, right?”
“Yeah...”
Ditz frowned.
“So if I go all the way to the end of the bay and stick it on the outside door, nobody’ll get hurt. Right?”
“I dunno.”
“And they’ll lose the use of the mechanic’s bay. But there’s another one, on Feeney’s side of the station.”
“Yeah... He uses it for storage.”
“So where’s your friend Sparks going to go?”
“Huh.”
“You can distract her, right? Keep her away, safe?”
Ditz considered, then started slowly nodding. “I can get you in.”
“How?”
“There’s the emergency airlock. In case somebody gets stuck in the bay when it’s depressurizing and they’re, like, too far from the main one? It’s supposed to be impossible to get into from outside and there’s supposed to be an alarm, so nobody ever guarded it, but we used to have it hacked so we could get in and fool around. Get high, oxplay, that kind of thing.”
Screwball furrowed his brow. “You mean horseplay?”
“No, oxplay. Like, oxygen. It’s an airlock, dude, you can mess with the oxygen levels and screw. If you set it real low, you get these amazing orgasms. If you set it high you get this awesome energy and can go for hours.”
“Shit, man, people die doing that.”
Ditz grinned. “I’m immortal so far, dude.”