IMPORTANT NOTE BRIMSTONE READERS: My INN debut story GOLIATH was initially written as a stand-alone piece while the Brimstone arc was being created. The events of that story have been fully inter-woven in the fabric of Brimstone, so if you are following along and haven’t yet read GOLIATH, now is the time. Consider it as “Part 2-and-a-half” in terms of sequence. That said, may I offer you Part 3, “A Second Head”

“A SECOND HEAD”

Brimstone

Eastside Industrial Quad

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“A second head? Like, what… a mutant?”

“No, like a guy dat brought a spare. C’mon Doc, Boss’s waitin.” Gort laid a beefy hand on my shoulder, steering me towards the door when I tried to turn back for my jacket. “You won’t be needin’ dat.”

I felt my stomach sink. “Tell me it isn’t in the Nek.”

Gort shrugged, his thick features scrunching like they usually do when he tries to think. “Not so much in the Nek as right up against it. But plenty warm.” He patted me firmly on the back, a gesture I took to be half-reassurance, half-propulsion. Gort wasn’t a bad guy, but standing well over two meters tall and a hundred-eighty kilos, with an IQ on par with his shoe size, he wasn’t a guy to challenge if you didn’t have to. Or if you didn’t have a bazooka.

We plodded through a series of airlocks, some of which were propped open. We had the Xi’An to thank for that, those new domes covering sections of town where the atmo recyclers churned out breathable air. Even with the sulfur smell it was better than life in an oversized habitrail.

We cut left, Gort nudging me along an elevated walkway over one of the more intact corners of the Nek. I could feel the heat rising from the blackened structure below. It had been a Revel & York pre-fab center, turning out modular steel frameworks that would get bolted together on-site to become some rich guy’s high-end hangar. Half a dozen roughnecks were in the yard when it happened; three got melted into a T-beam they were lifting, another one sat fused into the seat of a forklift. I knew two of them by name. A shiver ran up my spine as I looked down, as if the silent figures were looking back.

Tired of pushing, Gort passed me by and led the way down a staircase to a cavernous factory bay. I blinked rapidly as we entered, trying to adjust to the bright lights that had been parked around the workshop floor. Most of the beams were aimed at a body sprawled on the concrete floor. A body which, thankfully, had but one head and that in rather unremarkable configuration. Well, aside from the smoking hole where a left eye had been.

I threw Gort a hurried glance wrapped in a shrug of confusion. He rolled his eyes towards the workbench where what was left of another human head hung in some sort of stainless steel halo apparatus.

I grimaced. Well, now it all makes sense.

‘So whadda ya think?” Like Gort, Lazlo had the local Brimstone way with language, an inarticulate pattern akin to talking with a mouth full of gravel. But Lazlo was no average street-mutt hired for the muscle in his arms. Lazlo was the Alpha Street Mutt, a beast of dubious breeding who, despite his smaller stature, had a bite that kept the bigger dogs in line. From extortion to bookies and drugs, even actual dogfights, if it ran in Eastside, Lazlo had a toe in it.

I ruffled fingers through my hair, wishing I had grabbed for coffee instead of my jacket. Patting my pockets for a stim to flush the residual haze out of my brain it struck me, ‘I’ve been vertical for six minutes, here for six seconds, and you want to know what I think?’

“Who’s the stiff?” I asked instead, hoping to fill in some of the bigger blanks while I pulled my shit together.

“Some pink,” Lazlo spat the word. “Traveling on diplomatic creds. Hit planetside a couple weeks ago, looks like somebody kept him under wraps until yesterday afternoon. That’s when a factory security guy hears shots, comes gallopin’ to find this.”

I circled the body, noting details. Dead guy’s white labcoat was pocked with two circular burnmarks. No blood, so whatever did it self-cauterized. The gear on the workbench would have been shiny new as well, had the various components not been equally riddled. Neat round holes lipped in bubbled black. Even in the Brimstone air I could pick out the smell of fresh-burned plexan. Definitely not a slug gun; a beamer of some kind.

“OK, this guy,” I muttered with a nod to the corpse, “was running some kinda… science experiment on…” my hand waved off in the direction of the head as I struggled against a wave of hangover nausea.

Lazlo snorted, turning to his assembled thugs with a derisive laugh. “For this bit of brilliance I need a Doc?”

I’m not a Doc— I choked back the words before they came off my lips, that argument long since past and lost. Flushed out of residency with two dead interns on my permanent record, I couldn’t get a job as a prison nurse back home, much less as a doctor. But out here, snatch one flatliner back from the dead in a back alley and everybody acts like you’re God. Well, it helps if it’s the right flatliner.

So now Lazlo thinks I’m the brain surgeon, the coroner, the crime scene investigator. The guy who can just look at things and ‘do science shit’ to pull answers out of thin air. Reality doesn’t much matter, Lazlo is not a guy to disappoint and I sure as shit don’t wanna be the guy to do it.

I patted down my pockets, cursed, then reached blindly towards Gort with a ‘gimme’ gesture. He pulled a smoke from his pocket, lit it up and handed it over. I sucked in a lungful of Tevarin Green, blinking hard as the first dazzle swept across my vision. Then clarity hit me like sinuses opening. The cobwebs burned away and I took a second deep breath, pacing now, focusing on the fine print. Might as well start with the head on the workbench.

“Ok, this guy saw some hard miles.” Aside from the obvious —the whole decapitation thing — the head itself seemed largely free of mortal trauma. No GSW, no caved-in skull. The skin had that freeze-dried texture that bodies get after a long time in space. The stainless steel halo supported three scan bars equally spread around the mummified melon.

I looked at the severed neck; a perfect cut. “This…” I pointed at the neck, then made a slashing motion across my own, “this happened last, long after he was frozen.”

But why cut a head off a frozen corpse? I chewed on the question. Gotta be the most identifiable part; if you were able to ditch the rest, why not send it all to the same fate? Unless you needed to demonstrate to somebody that the guy was dead. Maybe this is a trophy. But that wouldn’t need all this other shit, not unless…

I turned back to the parade of gear and dataprints scattered down the workbench. Until they’d been shot all to hell this had been top-notch shit. Bioscanner, biopsy station, DNA sequencers, spectrograph, hell some gizmos I didn’t recognize at all. Half a dozen screens hung askew on an articulated rack.

I pulled out my phone and pointed it at the central screen, then punched the monitor’s power button. For just a heartbeat the panel flickered, stuttered, sparked violently and settled back to dead.

Lazlo squinted at me, watching closely as I tapped the video app into playback, frame-by-frame. At 12K rez the phone could only grab a few hundred frames per second, but that was enough to catch the fleeting ghost of the last image still caught in hardware. Despite some breakup from a bit of bad interlacing, the image looked like a 3D scan of a brain, with an ugly-ass tumor spidered through the frontal lobe.

“See,” Lazlo said to his guard dogs with obvious pride. “Science shit.”

He might have been impressed, but as I glanced back at the body on the floor, I was more confused than ever.

What the fuck were you thinking, I silently asked the dead guy, not expecting a reply. But the question was a valid one; when somebody hands you a frozen severed head, it’s a little late for oncology.

My eyes narrowed, mental gears grinding against one another. Presuming the dead guy wasn’t some wandering, over-equipped idiot with a head fetish, what the hell was he up to? I slid my gaze down the assembly line. What would someone be doing… sequencing the DNA… of an old frozen tumor?

I peered at the device at the end of the line, a dark, olive-grey box largely devoid of interface. Unlike the blue-white hues of lab gear, this thing had a ruggedized military vibe. I spun it around, looking for some sort of manufacturer’s ID plate. My eyes fell on a narrow strip: Origin Cryptosystems, a division of Origin Inc.

Crypto? Some kinda code?

I picked up a crumpled datasheet and saw what looked to be a breakdown of DNA. It had the usual suspects, cytosine, guanine, even a couple of the new DNA components we’d come to find in the alien races. But I noticed other stuff, chemical components that had no place in living tissue, malignant or otherwise. I picked up a second page, a third, then turned to look at the head.

The mass behind that withered forehead hadn’t grown, it was engineered; built at a molecular level to hide a message that would pass any known scan. The volume of data you could bury in a DNA construct was… shit, it was staggering! Hundreds of terabytes, maybe thousands. I turned right, my gaze returning to the decryption gear. Military decryption. Unless I missed my guess, the DNA in that head was a blueprint all right, but not for something living.

A secret somebody was willing to go to a lot of trouble to conceal.