The Outpost (26 page)

Big Red’s computer screen came to life.

“Einstein says you’re all wrong,” said Big Red. “Only one person could have beaten either Mahoney or the Kid.”

“Who was he?” asked Gaines.

Big Red transmitted the question, then smiled as the answer came onto his screen.

“It wasn’t a
he
at all.”

“An alien?” said Gaines.

“No,” said Big Red. “A woman.”

“I don’t believe it!” scoffed Gaines.

“Einstein’s never wrong.”

“He is this time.”

Einstein tapped away and a new message appeared on the holo screen.

“He wants to know if you’ve ever heard of the Cyborg de Milo,” said Big Red.

“The Cyborg de Milo?” repeated Gaines. “Is he making this up?”

“No,” said Achmed of Alphard from across the room. “I knew her. She exists.”

“And she’s called the Cyborg de Milo?”

“Now she is. I knew her as Venus.”

“I’m not going to even ask what her full name was,” muttered Gaines.

“Who cares about her name?” said O’Grady. “Tell us why Einstein thinks she was capable of beating Backbreaker Mahoney and the Penjak Kid.”

“He doesn’t
think
it,” Big Red corrected him. “He knows it.”

“And he’s right,” added Achmed.

“Still why?”

The Cyborg de Milo

Her real name (said Achmed of Alphard)—or, rather, her
original
name—was Venus Delmonico, and back when I first met her, she was as pretty and polite and refined a girl as you’d ever want to know. She had passed the entrance exam for Aristotle—that’s the university planet, you know—and she was specializing in something terribly esoteric. I can’t remember exactly what it was—Poetry of the 3rd Century of the Galactic Era, perhaps. Anyway, she was supposed to already be such an expert that there were only two people in the whole of the Monarchy who could teach her anything more, and both of them were professors on Aristotle

But three weeks before she was scheduled to leave for Aristotle, thieves broke into her parents’ home. Her father tried to stop them and was killed for his trouble. Her mother fled, screaming for help, and they killed her too. Then, to cover their tracks, they set fire to the house, destroying everything she and her parents owned, including her collection of incredibly rare volumes of poetry. The only reason Venus herself wasn’t killed was because she was studying at the local library.

I was a neighbor, and I was there, looking at the smoldering ruins, when Venus arrived. The police told her what had happened. I expected her to become hysterical, or perhaps to faint, but she did neither. Her face became expressionless, her voice became softer, and she questioned the officer in charge until she realized that she had nothing to learn from him.

Then she spotted me, walked over, and asked me to contact Aristotle and tell them that she would not be attending, neither during the coming semester, nor in the foreseeable future.

“But what will you do with yourself?” I said. “You mustn’t withdraw from society because of this tragedy.”

“I’m not withdrawing,” she said calmly, almost coldly. “I have work to do.”

“Your studies?”

A look of contempt crossed her pretty face. “No, Achmed,”she replied. “
Important
work.” She paused and took one last look at the ruins of her house, then turned back to me. “I will see you again before it begins.”

And then she was gone.

I didn’t hear from her for almost a year. I made some inquiries, but nobody else seemed to know what had happened to her either. Then one evening she showed up at my house without any warning.

“Venus!” I said. “Where have you been?”

“Preparing,” she replied, as I ushered her into the living room.

“You haven’t changed a bit,” I said, staring at her.

She chuckled. “Thank you, Achmed. That is the first time I’ve laughed since my parents were slaughtered.”

“What did I say that was so funny?” I asked, confused.

“I have changed more than you can imagine,” she replied.

I looked her up and down. “I can’t see it,” I said. “I doubt that you’ve gained or lost as much as two pounds.”

“I’ve lost more than two pounds,” she said. “I’ve lost two arms.”

I stared at her arms. “I don’t understand.”

She tapped the fingers of her right hand against her left arm. They made a strange, clicking sound.

“I had my arms replaced,” she said.

“But
why
?” I asked, shocked.

“Because I didn’t need them,” she replied. She held her arms out. “I needed
these
.”

“For what?”

“For my work.”

“I thought your work was studying poetry.”

“My work is killing people who deserve killing,” she replied. She spread out the fingers of her right hand. “This finger shoots lasers. This one shoots sonar. This one is an energy pulse gun. And this one shoots bullets.” Then she displayed the fingers of her left hand. “Flamethrower, atomic drill, spring-loaded knife, and a light that will not only illuminate the darkness but also pierce through fog and opaque alien atmospheres.”

She tapped a finger against her beautiful blue eyes. There was that same noise.

“My eyes not only see everything you see, but they can also see into the infra-red and ultra-violet spectrums. The left one is also telescopic and the right one can become a microscope.”

“My God!” I exclaimed. “What have you done to yourself?”

“I’ve circumvented millions of generations of evolution and become totally efficient,” she answered. “From this day forward I am no longer Venus Delmonico. I am now the Cyborg de Milo. Like the Venus of old, I have lost my arms—but unlike her, I have replaced them with something better.”

“We have police to hunt down criminals, and out on the Frontier there are bounty hunters like Gravedigger Gaines.”

“They work for money,” she replied. “I work for justice.”

“But—”

“The police have been hunting my parents’ killers for a year. Have they made any progress?”

“I don’t know,” I admitted.

“I do. They’re no closer to solving the murders now than the night they occurred.”

“I don’t know what to say,” I told her. “I feel that you have thrown your future away.”

“Perhaps you have thrown yours away,” she suggested, walking to the door, “by not doing everything within your power to guarantee that you live to
have
a future.”

It took her three days to track down her parents’ murderers. I don’t know what she did to them, but I heard that there wasn’t enough left of them to bury.

She stayed in the Alphard system for another month. Then, after she’d hunted down our most wanted criminals, she decided to seek greater challenges, and she left for the Inner Frontier.

From time to time I read about her, or hear rumors of a cyborg woman who has killed men that even Catastrophe Baker would think twice about facing, but I do not know for an absolute fact that she is still alive.

But if she isn’t, I sure wouldn’t want to be in the same room, or even on the same planet, with the man who could kill her.

“Einstein says she’s alive, all right,” said Big Red, reading his screen. “He met her just last week on Greenpasture II.”

“Why?” asked Max. “What could either of them possibly want with the other?”

“She wanted his advice, of course,” said Big Red. “Why does anyone meet with Einstein?”

“What kind of advice?” persisted Max.

“She still has two very human legs. She wanted his opinion concerning what to replace them with.”

“How the hell many more built-in weapons does she need?”

“She has enough weapons,” answered Big Red. “But that doesn’t mean she can’t improve her efficiency. Does she want legs that can stand up under four gravities? Legs that can let her jump forty feet into the air? Feet with suction cups on the bottoms, for walking up walls and across ceilings? Legs with compartments to hold energy packs, or possibly with refrigeration units to store food when she’s away from civilization?”

“Okay, okay,” said Max irritably. “I get the point.”

“You know,” mused the Gravedigger, “I
have
heard of her. I never knew her name—and some of the feats she pulled off sounded like tall tales. But I’ve been hearing about a cyborg woman for years now, a woman who can do all the things that Achmed says that this Cyborg Venus can do.”

“Cyborg de Milo,” Achmed corrected him.

“Yeah?” said Max, still looking for someone to argue with. “Well, if she’s so close, how come she hasn’t shown up at the Outpost?”

“Maybe she’s not thirsty,” said Nicodemus Mayflower.

“Or maybe she planned to, and either the navy or the aliens blew her ship to smithereens,” added Little Mike Picasso. “There’s a war going on out there, you know.”

“If anyone took a shot at her, I hate to think of what would happen to them if they missed,” said Achmed.

“How long has she been a cyborg?” asked Nicodemus Mayflower.

“Eighteen years,” said Achmed.

“That’s a long time to go around with a mad on,” said Hurricane Smith. “Maybe she just needs someone to love her.”

“She’s not your type,” said Catastrophe Baker.

“How do you know?” asked Smith.

“She’s human.”

Langtry Lily began hissing at Smith.

“It was just an academic question, my dear,” he said quickly, prepared to duck if she spit at him again. She glared at him, and he took her hand in his and began stroking it gently. After a moment she relaxed and went back to scouring the table for those few grains of sugar she’d missed.

“Anyway, she sounds like one tough lady,” said Little Mike.

“Can’t argue with that,” agreed the Gravedigger. “I thought I’d met the toughest women on the Frontier, but this Cyborg de Milo sounds like she could wipe up the floor with them.”

“Who were they?” asked Willie the Bard, looking up from his notebook.

“You ever hear of the O’Toole Sisters?” asked Gaines.

“Nope,” answered the Bard.

“I did,” said Nicodemus Mayflower.

“Me, too,” said Baker. “Weren’t they named something weird, like Silk and Satin?”

“I thought it was Rubber and Lace,” said Nicodemus.

“Close, but no cigar,” said the Gravedigger.

The Romantic Tale of Velvet and Leather O’Toole

Nobody knows when they came out to the Frontier (began Gaines). Hell, they might even have been born out here. I do know that they grew up in Nightmare Alley, which was the criminal sector of Port Raven, a nondescript little world in the Willoughby Sector—and anyone who can stay alive in Nightmare Alley for more than a day or two has developed some real survival skills.

They weren’t the brightest girls I ever met—there’s no way they could ever have gotten accepted on Aristotle like the Cyborg Venus did—but they obeyed the laws, worked hard at their jobs, and saved their money.

As a matter of fact that’s how I came into contact with them. Seems we were both using the same bank at the time. I wasn’t thrilled with Port Raven, but it had a branch of the Bank of Spica, and that’s where I kept my main account.

The girls were pretty in a plain kind of way, if that makes sense to you. Nothing wrong with either of them, but they didn’t make you want to bay the moon or go slay dragons the way that, say, Silicon Carny does. One always dressed in velvet and the other always wore leather, and after a while any other names they might have had just faded away and they were Velvet and Leather, the O’Toole sisters.

The bank was run by a skinny little runt who went by the name of Throckmorton Lewis Frothingham. I’ll swear his name weighed more than he did. He was a precise little man. He always looked like he’d just come from his tailor, even when it was hot and muggy out. There are still a few people here and there who wear glasses, but he’s the only one in my experience who wore a
pince-nez
—you know, the spectacles that fit on the bridge of your nose. He always had a silk handkerchief stuck in the cuff of his left sleeve, and his shoes were polished to within an inch of their lives.

I spent a lot of time at that bank, waiting for various bounties to be wired to me—well, to Spica, actually, but then they’d notify the Port Raven branch—and I saw a lot of the sisters. I don’t know what kind of jobs they had, but they were paid in cash on a daily basis, and every night just before the bank closed they’d stop by and deposit their money. And little Throckmorton Lewis Frothingham was always there to greet them, and exchange a few pleasantries, and personally handle their transactions.

Then one day, with no warning at all, the Bellargo Gang showed up, seventy-three members strong, to rob the place.