Royal Flush Read online

Royal Flush

  by

  Michael D. Britton

  * * * *

  Copyright 2012 by Michael D. Britton / Intelligent Life Books

  Without hesitation, Gary Shamus stepped right past the yellow sign on the floor that pictographically warned of a surface that was slippery when wet, and squeezed past the janitorial cart into the Los Angeles Interplanetary Port’s men’s room. His nose was assaulted by an ongoing battle between ammonia and diarrhea.

  This wasn’t what he’d expected for his final assignment, but then, each one was always different.

  A maintenance worker finished wiping down the wide mirror. He wore a brown uniform with a tan apron, shirt sleeves rolled up to reveal tattoo sleeves, and a dirty blue baseball cap concealing a bun of black hair. He stuck his rag into his apron pocket and turned to Gary, speaking out of a shaggy goatee in a deep voice that reverberated off the stained tile walls.

  “Sorry, Sir, this restroom is closed right now.”

  Gary reached into the jacket pocket of his sharp blue business suit and pulled out a shiny black card with gold lettering that glowed and changed shape as the device transmitted a coded message to the other man’s cybernetic optical implants. “Not for me.”

  The maintenance worker took a moment to process the encrypted data stream, then his mouth formed a sly smile. “Ah, welcome, Sir. You have come to the right place. My name is Bench. I’ll begin immediately. Sit tight.”

  The worker opened what appeared to be a janitorial closet and stepped inside, pulling the door behind him.

  Gary was left alone in the smelly room with the hum of the fluorescent lighting overhead and the slow dripping sound of the lavatory. Above him, the lights flickered; Gary looked up to see that about a third of the rods were dimmer than the rest, probably near the end of their life span. He was surprised that a state-of-the-art spaceport like LAX still used the old-fashioned lighting.

  Feeling the urge, he stepped to one of the urinals and started to place his shiny black valise on the floor – but the grime beside the stall caused him to pull up short and instead tuck the bag under his arm. It was beyond him how so many men could miss the urinal by that much distance after practicing their whole lives. He found such obvious carelessness distasteful.

  As he unzipped and awaited the feeling of bladder relief, another man entered the restroom and pulled up alongside Gary. Gary heard the other man’s fly unzip, listened to him breathe out a heavy sigh. In his peripheral vision, he noticed him shrug his shoulders and roll his neck, then sniff sharply and clear his throat.

  “First time in LAX?” asked the man, after spitting into the urinal.

  “Nah, I fly through here a couple times a year on the Mach 15 Express,” said Gary. “You?”

  “Argh,” the man grunted. “I see this stinkin’ place more than I see my home, it seems.”

  Gary shook off, put it away, and stepped back from the urinal, which promptly autoflushed with the quiet rush of a miniature waterfall. “I know what you mean,” he said, adjusting himself and striding leisurely to the sinks. “I’ve been on the road quite a lot these last few years – that’s just the way it is in my line of work. Well, the way it was. I’m retiring.”

  “From?”

  “I’m a chemical engineer.”

  ““You’re kidding?” said the man, stepping over to the sinks alongside Gary and washing his hands. “So’m I - I’m with P3L, based in Silicon Valley. Name’s Harv Jeppsen.”

  The man dried his hands under the UV emitter mounted on the wall and offered his relatively clean hand to Gary.

  “Gary Shamus.”

  #

  Bench emerged from the narrow spiral staircase and prowled the bowels of the spaceport, headed to the temporary operations center that had been put in place by his employer.

  He reached a steel door covered in green paint, marked Authorized Personnel Only in a black stencil at eye level. He keyed the entry panel with his own little black credit card, and heard the bolt slide. He entered, clicked the door shut behind him.

  Inside, he got to work booting up the system. This should only take a few minutes.

  #

  “Weird that you travel a lot,” said Jeppsen. “I never travel much for my job. I live in San Jose, and I fly through LAX all the time to visit my son. My ex gets him during the week, and I fly here on weekends to stay with him at my place in Redondo Beach.”

  “Well, I’m an engineer as well as an executive, so I wear two hats at my firm. Keeps me busy and takes me away from home a lot,” said Gary. “But not for much longer – I’m calling it quits.”

  “Well, good luck on your trip. And good luck in your retirement – the chemical business has become so dog-eat-dog lately – so competitive – it’s not fun anymore.”

  Jeppsen turned to leave but stopped dead before reaching the privacy corner leading out.

  “Oh my . . . ugh,” he said, wincing and covering his nose and mouth with the crook of his arm. He staggered back and waved his hand in front of his face as his eyes started to well up with tears.

  A deep voice came over the PA system in the rest room. “Is there anybody in there, in the men’s room?”

  “Yes, two of us!” called Gary, looking up at the tiny speaker in the ceiling.

  Somehow, the person speaking through the PA heard the reply and continued, “Two of you? Okay. Please do not attempt to leave the men’s room! There has been a chemical spill – the janitor’s cart was tipped over and a large volume of cleaning agent has poured across the entrance to the bathrooms. Some chemicals were mixed, and harmful vapors created. Do not breathe the fumes. A hazmat team is on the way. We’ll let you know as soon as it’s safe. Hang tight.”

  “Ah, great!” sighed Jeppsen. “They better hurry up or I’m gonna miss my connection.”

  #

  Bench removed the microphone headset from his head as someone knocked the door urgently. A muffled voice came through the door between volleys of pounding.

  “Open up! What are you doing in there? This is LAX Security. This is a restricted area!”

  Bench slipped on a gas mask and pulled a pair of copper tubes out of the ceiling. Near-invisible vapors poured from the end of the tubes. He stuck the tubes on the floor at the door, forcing the vapors under the threshold.

  He heard the security personnel start coughing, then run down the corridor away from the room.

  “That oughtta keep ‘em at bay for a little while.”

  #

  Gary went back over to the wash basins and splashed some cold water on his face, looking into his own pale blue eyes as he spoke to Jeppsen. “Well, you know chemicals as well as I do – and I’d say, based on that smell, that we have some dangerous stuff on our hands. The wrong mixture of these new cleaning agents can be so corrosive it eats your flesh clear to the bone. It may be a while before we’re clear to leave.”

  Jeppsen wiped his open palm from top to bottom of his unshaven jowels in exasperation, then began to pace around the enclosed space of the rest room. “You’re right, you’re right. The new solvents are harsh – a guy at my company had his whole arm eaten off last month. Friend of mine saw it happen.”

  The PA crackled to life again. “Gentlemen, the hazmat crew has arrived. They’ve assessed the situation and I’m told it will be a half hour or so before it’s safe for you to leave the rest room.”

  “Might as well get comfortable,” said Gary, heading for a toilet stall and sitting on a toilet fully clothed.

  Jeppsen mumbled some profanities under his breath and strode into the adjacent stall, lowering his mildly overweight body heavily onto the hard toilet seat. “This is not good. This is not good at all,” he said.

  “In a hurry?” asked Gary through the dividing wall of t
he cubicle.

  “You could say that,” said Jeppsen. “My employer doesn’t like to be kept waiting, and I have an important delivery to make.”

  “Delivery?”

  Jeppsen didn’t respond immediately. “I uh – my boss only trusts the engineers to carry the compound formulas for our experimental stuff. Since I was heading this way, he asked me to handle it. We’ve used couriers in the past, and we’ve fallen prey to espionage. And electronic transmission can never be secure enough. You know how it is – trade secrets and all that. Well, this one,” he said, patting the handheld computer in his breast pocket, “is really something else. We’ve finally made a major breakthrough in synthetic propulsion fuel.”

  “Hey, that’s great,” said Gary. His voice was smiling, but his face was serious as he carefully pulled several tiny vials out of his valise and placed them on the graffiti-ridden tissue dispenser. He pulled out a small test tube rack and placed it on the floor between his feet, then quietly loaded it with six tubes.

  “Yeah, we’ve been working on this one for years. Looks like we’ve figured out how to make a gram of solid waste provide sixty teranewtons of thrust.”

  “Sixty teranewtons?” asked Gary. “Wow. That’s impressive. So, you could feasibly take a kilo of crap and turn it into a fuel supply that could launch a five hundred passenger liner to Mars?”

  “Yep. Well, no. I mean, you know, the catalyst is the key. And that’s the formula I’m delivering.”

  “Well, of course,” said Gary, “it’s always in the catalyst – that secret ingredient that makes it possible to unlock the power of the compounds. Isn’t chemistry beautiful?”

  “Sure is,” Jeppsen nodded, despite the fact that Gary couldn’t see him from the next toilet stall.

  #

  Bench got to work on programming the displacement apparatus for the desired coordinates. Hopefully the LAX Security people would leave him alone for long enough to get everything set up. Gary was bound to be ready soon. Word was he never wasted time with these things.

  The pounding on the door and the yelling resumed just as Bench was inputting the destination codes.

  Here we go again.

  #

  Gary slipped on a pair of titanium-film gloves and slowly opened his vials, one at a time, pouring carefully measured volumes into the different test tubes, holding them at eyelevel to avoid parallax. Mixing up three different solutions, he titrated a few drops of one solution into a fourth fluid and watched the color change from blue, to yellow, then to a deep blood red.

  Royal red.

  “I’ve actually been thinking that after this run,” said Jeppsen, “that maybe I’d cash out, too. Retire, that is.”

  “Oh yeah?”

  “Yeah. I hold a fair amount of stock in the company, and once this product goes to market, my stock’ll be worth millions – if not billions – if I play my cards right. This is revolutionary stuff, Gary.”

  “Don’t I know it. My company’s been chasing that dream since I started with them twenty years ago. The guys in R&D always called it the Crap Barrier. Always trying to break the Crap Barrier. If they could just unlock the energy, find a way to bust fifty or more teranewtons out of a kilo of crap, we could corner the market on solid propulsion fuel.”

  “So you know exactly what I’m talking about then!” said Jeppsen.

  “Not really. That wasn’t my department. I headed up the matter-energy department at GravX Corp.”

  “Matter-energy, eh? So you guys tinkered with chemical-based teleportation and what-not?”

  “That’s right. Interesting thing, it takes energy to move matter-energy. So what we found was that although it’s a cinch to teleport something a hundred meters once you know how, it takes wildly copious amounts of energy to do so. The system is unsustainable without a sufficient supply of energy.”

  “Yeah, I think I read something about GravX’s work in last month’s Chem Age,” said Jeppsen. “But it also said that once you break the thousand-kilometer range, the energy curve flattens out and you get increasing returns.”

  “You’re well-read,” said Gary, gently warming a test tube with a hand held gamma ray laser.

  “You know,” said Jeppsen, “P3L should get together with GravX – we could apply our Crap Barrier-busting catalyst to your work in chem-teleportation. Who knows what we could achieve!”

  “That’s a great idea, Jeppsen. Unfortunately, it’s too idealistic. We’ve already made overtures - once we heard you were making progress - but P3L refused to come to the table. They don’t want to share the pie at all.”

  “Hmm, that’s too bad.”

  “Yes, yes it is,” said Gary, blowing a little steam off the top of his test tube. He ran a small Fourier transform reader across the top of the tube, and the readout on the display indicated the solution was a perfect mix.

  Royal Death was its name.

  All it needed now was the catalyst.

  Human flesh.

  #

  Bench broke off from his console and stepped to the door. He pressed a button on the wall to activate the intercom that led to the outside.

  “I suggest you step away from the door,” he said. “There’s been a chemical leak – as I’m sure you’ve smelled – and we’re working on containing it. Please clear the corridor and seal off section 1-6-J. Will report our progress in twenty minutes.”

  He shut off the intercom before they could ask any questions, and heard them run off once more.

  #

  Gary stood and stepped up onto the top of the toilet seat and peered over the cubicle wall at Jeppsen.

  “So what are your plans for retirement?” asked Jeppsen.

  Gary stepped back down and sat on the toilet. “I intend to get away from here – from all this,” he said truthfully. “I bought some land in the Western Provinces of the New Tokyo settlement on Mars.”

  “Really? I’ve heard that’s a beautiful piece of terraforming. Well, you do realize that’s a two month trip if you leave at this time of year? Better to wait until the planets are more closely aligned in the summer.”

  “Actually, I plan to be there by early afternoon.”

  Jeppsen laughed aloud. “Today? You’re nuts.”

  Gary did not answer. He was once again standing on the edge of the toilet, looking down on Jeppsen’s convenient bald spot. He tipped the test tube to nearly horizontal, then gently allowed gravity to pull several drops of the Royal Death toward the unsuspecting Jeppsen.

  The first drop hit his scalp with an audible sizzle. Jeppsen’s hands flew to his head and he screamed. His flesh had already begun to dissolve, and his hands came away wet. He looked up, his mouth agape and screaming, just as a stream of Royal Death poured from the test tube, into his eyes and mouth, melting his face away like red paint from a brush dipped in thinner.

  His screaming quickly became a stifled gurgle as his throat disintegrated. His head imploded, collapsed, melted. As the reaction accelerated, the rest of his body started to give way like a time lapse image of a snowman disappearing in the heat of the noonday sun.

  As soon as the test tube was emptied - a cascade of doom upon Jeppsen’s cranium - Gary leapt down from his perch and raced around to Jeppsen’s stall. He reached into Jeppsen’s coat pocket and retrieved the data storage device with the fluid efficacy of a professional pick pocket.

  Then he took a step back and watched coldly as the man became a gelatinous pile of quivering red goo that filled the toilet bowl. The hissing sound of the reaction faded away irregularly, like the final few pops of popping corn kernels.

  The only recognizable remains were Jeppsen’s feet, which Gary cautiously picked up by the pant legs and tossed into the toilet atop the smoldering red jelly. They quickly started to melt into the mass, too.

  #

  Bench moved back to the console and finished entering the codes, then headed to the back of the small, dark utility room, climbed a step stool and placed a titanium bucket near the ceiling.
Then he pulled a lever and a quivering blob of red goo flowed through a three-inch diameter pipe in the ceiling and into the bucket.

  It smelled like barbecued dog hair and rotten seafood.

  “Welcome, Mr. Jeppsen,” said Bench, carefully climbing down the step stool, bucket in hand.

  He carried the bucket to a small, well-lit cubicle and set it on a glowing disc in the center, then entered some commands on the console.

  Now all he needed was that catalyst formula.

  #

  Gary flicked on Jeppsen’s data device and was met with a security wall. He pulled out his own data pad and held it to Jeppsen’s like a pair of mating turtles. After thirty seconds of humming and buzzing, Gary pulled them apart.

  He’d cracked the code.

  Gary opened the formula file and transmitted it to his own device, then relayed it to his employer.

  He went back to his stall and sat down. Within twenty minutes GravX and Bench would have installed the catalyst formula in the Mover, and he’d be able to leave.

  He decided to take that time to empty his bowel – after all, it would come in handy shortly.

  When he was done, he got a message – just a single tone and a blinking light on his hand held.

  Bench was ready.

  He pulled a scoop out of his valise and extracted several ounces of his own waste matter from the bowl of the toilet.

  Carrying it out of the stall, he glanced into Jeppsen’s stall. The red goo had been evacuated. He stepped in and flushed the remaining stickiness from the sides of the bowl.

  Then the janitorial door opened and Bench returned. “It’s ready,” he said.

  “Nice job with the chemical spill and the PA thing. You actually convinced him.”

  “That’s what I’m paid for. You ready?”

  Gary stepped into the janitor’s closet and followed Bench back to the operations room.

  He carefully placed his own crap into a clear tank beside the Mover. He sealed the vat and entered a code. The sound of vacuum suction accompanied the sudden disappearance of the crap. Moments later, a green light appeared on the display.