Chapter 4.

How Bo and I Met

As I was watching the daisies moving along beside us and gazed at their waving brown and white wide and constantly-fluttering petal-type heads against the pink sky where bluish white clouds were now drifting, I thought back to how Bo and I had first met.

I was standing in the late afternoon shadows of a 200-foot Grandma tree and watching the locals walk by. I knew who I needed to find, but as yet, Bo had been very difficult to locate.

The city of Leis was right out of an Old Earth fairy tale. A golden sun warmed the air and the sky was a deep blue with a hint of scarlet.

The roadways are built of a soft surface which reminds me of rubber and gives a bouncing feeling when you walk on it.

I hadn’t seen any machines in the two days of living here, as everyone either walks or rides in horse drawn carts or carriages or wagons or rides alone such as the woman who was drawing near riding a large white stallion with a red saddle and harness.

I quickly grabbed my P tab and glanced down. Finally! This is Bo and she is alone! Mandy Mandy wants badly to talk to her and all I have to do is to grab her, and take her back…

I stepped away from the shadows.

“Hello there citizen, I am in need of some directions,” I called out.

Bo reined in her horse and looked over at me standing 20 feet off the roadway. She tossed back her heavy black hair with a flick of her head and slowly moved her right hand to her waist. Her stallion neighed and tossed his reins as he pranced about the road.

“I may be able to help but don’t ye move any closer!” she said as she calmed her horse with her left hand while still holding the reins and keeping her right hand free. That confirmed for me that she did have some kind of weapon ready or she would have used her right hand to pat down her impatient stallion.

If I could not get any closer, then my IMB would be useless and she would get away. IMB’s would freeze the target in their tracks but you needed to be within 5 feet radius max or nothing would work.

“Are ye not of the Leis?” she asked with a voice that had a silver timbre to it and the lilt of an island clan. The world of Gogl was made of hundreds of island chains with Leis being the capitol of the Markee Islands clan, built on the largest island of Kupa which stretched more than 100 miles long and 60 miles wide.

You learn a lot in two days of skulking about and asking around for information about your mark without giving yourself away to the locals, most importantly not alerting the Slj that a Station agent was out and about.

A long shadow passed over my head. I looked up in the growing dusk and saw the needle shape of a Slj patrol vessel. Damn! They were still looking for the source of the power surge that they had detected when I had landed two nights ago.

I found myself looking closely at Bo and realized that she was a beauty, not much younger than me. What the hell did Mandy Mandy want with Bo?

I had two choices. The first was to get directions and just let Bo go on her way and not draw the attention of the hovering Slj. My second choice was to run forward and activate my IBM to take Bo back to Mandy Mandy.

That would immediately also clue the Slj as to who I was. Being reasonably intelligent and somewhat older if not wiser, I chose the first and turned away from Bo, and walking a few feet further down the road called back, “I am looking for the Creasy Port Lane, do you know of it?”

“Ye are a good five hours walk from that, Citizen, and ye need to turn around and head the other way,” she said as she pointed me back down the road. I smiled and began to walk the way she pointed, realizing that my path was going to take me close to her after all. The Slj patrol had moved on. Perfect.

Bo halted her stallion and watched me walk past less than two feet from her whickering mount. Well hell, I said to myself… let’s do it while fate plays my way.

I triggered my IMB and the blue red field encompassed Bo with a hum of a hundred angry bees which pretty much matched Bo’s lovely face as she crumpled forward on her horse.

I leaped up and behind her in the same motion, grabbed the reins and kicked the stallion into a gallop towards the nearby woods. One more handy thing about the IMB field, it always places its victims into a deep sleep for about 3 days.

Mandy Mandy met me at the landing and Bo was quickly hustled away.

“Good work Ranko. Now go and get something to eat and write up your report. Then take the next few days off.”

I nodded to her and strode off to the kitchens and forgot about Bo as I looked forward to some much needed days of R&R.

On the third day I decided to check in on this mystery woman and found her sitting up in bed eating a hot bowl of crozin broth. The crozin grass grew wall high and had been analyzed by Mandy Mandy’s techs as the best reason to set up HQ on this planet.

Besides making long-lasting fabrics, the crozin grass was also amazingly healthy to eat. It cooked up like a thick noodle and other than the purple color of the grass, was very pleasant tasting.

Apparently Bo decided that as good tasting as it was, she had a far more important usage for the heavy clay bowl, namely a missile she aimed extremely accurately at my head.

“You!” she snarled as she made to leap from her bed but found herself stymied by the bed tray hooked over her knees. As I ducked the hurtling weapon, I noticed that she had said “you” instead of the “ye” she had been using when I met her.

Seemed to be more to Bo than met my eye but then again there was a lot of Bo that I was very happy to have my eye meet. Bo had succeeded in tossing aside the tray and was making to jump to the hard wood floor when she suddenly held her head and cried out in pain.

“Oh, my head!” she moaned as she fell back to the bed. The poor thing had a beaut of an IMB headache.

“Well,” I said as cheerfully as I could as I pulled a few strands of Crozin off my uniform, “I see that you made it through okay.”

Bo only shook her fist at me while moaning and thrashing her head back and forth on the pillows. I was going to say more, when I felt a hand grasp my left shoulder in a none too gentle grab.

“That will be enough Ranko,” whispered Mandy Mandy as she stood next to her pet giant Roto who was still holding my arm and smiling down at me.

I am a solid 6 feet and one inch or so. I consider myself to be in good shape and no one to trifle with, but next to Roto, I always felt diminutive. He had to be 7 plus feet with shoulders about as wide.

Standing next to Roto, Mandy Mandy with her long thin body always looked like a stick propped against a boulder.

Mandy Mandy whipped her long gray hair back from her face with an abrupt upper thrust of her hand. She wore a black trailing gown with red embroidery and held a Gi staff in her left hand. The red stone set in the pommel of the black stone wood, glowed with excitement.

“You will have to forgive Ranko’s bothering you. He has your best interests at heart, as do we all, Bo Re Malauri. You have led us quite the chase but now is the time to cease your holiday and take your rightful position with us. Time is of the essence.”

As she spoke, Mandy Mandy moved closer to Bo’s bedside and slowly held out the staff to Bo’s forehead. The stone was now a brilliant eye-piercing light and I could no longer look directly at it.

When the stone touched Bo, she stiffened and then fell back to the bed, unconscious.

For a moment, Mandy Mandy looked down at her with a fond look on her face and then gathering herself back to the present, looked directly at me.

“She will sleep for a day Ranko and when she awakes, will remember her old life, and together you and she will achieve what must be done.”

Saying that, she grabbed her long gown and whipped it around as she pivoted and left with Roto trailing her like a rolling boulder.

For a moment I stared down at the sleeping Bo and realized again what a beauty she was when she did not have a scowl on her face. I then walked out and thought that in a day or so I would finally find out what Mandy Mandy was being all mysterious about. Time to stop off at the kitchens and see if there was still some Eibelberry pie I could pilfer.

A day later I was in a stone wood-paneled room with only Mandy Mandy and Bo and myself present. Roto was missing and that in itself was an amazing event. What could be so secret that even Roto was not allowed to hear?

The far corner glass was filled with chipped colors and the morning sun slanted through casting light everywhere. Mandy Mandy sat at a big thick slab desk and Bo and I sat in chairs before her, occasionally glancing at one anther like two school children brought up before the principal.

Today she was wearing a wide floppy red hat and a red dress with yellow and purple steel studs. If she was not so serious looking, I would be collapsing in laughter. I glanced out of the corner of my left eye at Bo and could see that she too was struggling to not laugh.

Oblivious to our mirth, Mandy Mandy proceeded to hit us both over the heads with stunning reality.

“Bo ne Cosa… meet your fellow agent Ranko ne Cosa. You are both working on the Slj problem, and we have had a breakthrough.”

Turning her back to us, she keyed in a screen and there were Bo and I in living color.

“Yes, to answer your question, there was third agent taking images of the whole proceedings. For the first time, we now have a good internal understanding of a Slj ship.”

“You set us up!” we shouted in righteous anger.

“Yes, yes I did. But you both needed to be unaware of the true purpose or the ruse would not have worked as well as it did,” agreed Mandy Mandy as she looked over at us with a half smile.

“I thought I knew every agent here at the Station,” I complained in a hurt voice.

“Oh Ranko, stop whining. Focus on what amazing detail we now have. This is a major breakthrough on understanding Slj technology. Now that we know what they have, we can finally develop our own technology to match theirs. We will no longer be second-class Lessers as they call us. I don’t see Bo whimpering.”

Bo was sitting rigidly in her seat, her back sword-straight. Only the clenching and unclenching of her hands gave away her inner turmoil.

“Chief, how many secrets do you have that we need to know about?” She held up her hand as Mandy Mandy was opening her mouth to reply.

“Never mind. I don’t think I want to hear.” Looking over at me, she smiled. “Well Ranko, I guess I owe you an apology.” Her raven hair was pulled back with a blue headband and long thin silver earrings dangled from her ears.

I wanted to respond but I really could not take my eyes off the pulsating crystal in Mandy Mandy’s Gi staff. I felt mesmerized and dimly noted that Bo had stopped talking.

“All right, agents Bo and Ranko, this is your new assignment.” Her voice was hundreds of miles away as if she spoke to us through a deep fog. Part of my working mind now knew what the Gi staff was capable of but I was unable to move or to even open my mouth.

“You will take this vital Slj technology information and bring it to Station HQ. Hold out your left arms.”

Suddenly a very beefy hand descended and pulled back my sleeve. I saw some kind of capsule being inserted into a very large syringe and felt the needle enter my arm. Roto was back and doing the grunt work. I could not even say ouch but I sure as hell felt it.

Bo was also receiving the data.

Mandy Mandy stood back and surveyed her handiwork.

“You each have identical data. Hopefully you will both survive to deliver this information, but if only one of you makes it, then we will have struck the first of what will be a winning attack against the Slj. You must rub your arms once per 24 hour cycle in this manner.”

She pulled back her sleeve and showed a surprisingly lean and muscled forearm.

“Like this, agents. Once up and once down. No more and no less. If you fail in doing this, the information will be deleted by a small explosion within your arms. You will not lose your arms but you will require medical care, of that you can be certain.”

Mandy Mandy then motioned to Roto who walked behind us and pulled us both to a standing position.

“Now show me you understand.”

Like automatons, Bo and I ran our hands up and down our left arms. Mandy Mandy nodded and then walked away calling over her shoulder, “I expect good results agents. Good luck to you both.”

That was the last thing I remember before slowly collapsing and being thankful that Roto was catching both of us in his log-thick arms. Then it was nighty night.