BABUSHKA: The Warrior's Angel

Chapter VIII. Never Look Back

VIII. NEVER LOOK BACK  

Whilst this was something of a monumental event as they faced off against each other either side of the door – Gabby 9er balancing on the fire extinguisher she had dragged over from the stairwell, Solomon 9er shaking in his unlaced boots – the attention of Special Operative Villa R. Carrera (Jr.) had drifted across the video-wall from his two principal subjects to the window displaying the scantily clad creature in the bathroom doorway. Polishing off his last cookie with a quick dunk in his coffee, he slid his feet off the surveillance desk and lent forward, using the workstation’s slinky metallic glove to push in nice and tight on the window.

                Boy that Bot was hot…

            At the expense of the hundred other windows – some displaying satellite feeds and CCTV angles on the exterior of the subjects’ homes, others displaying various interior angles – Carrera enlarged the window on the Bot, watching those deep dark eyes as they watched the show unroll. Not that there had been much to watch for the last few minutes. The girl repeatedly pressing her ear to the door then peering through the wrong end of the peephole, occasionally rapping as hard as her little knuckles could, ringing the bell every now and then for good measure. While all the time The World’s Greatest Warrior had been cowering like some poor defenceless little lamb.

           As far as Carrera was concerned this family was way beyond dysfunctional, but what was far more interesting to him right now was the effect that the Bot’s vulnerable look was having on him: the way she seemed so confused by the scene, you could just imagine yourself… But then he heard his superior’s throaty cough at the door, cutting short all hope of further impure thoughts. You had to give Jack his jacket though, some of these Bot designers were goddamn artists.

           Entering the dark surveillance room in his customary dark suit and holding his customary plate of breakfast pastries, Special Operative Miguel Huerta (Sr.) was confronted with the gigantic close-up of the Bot’s cleavage in a window spanning the entire width of the video-wall. Having seen it all – and eaten most of the leftovers – he sighed to himself as he put down his plate next to the coffee pot then cuffed Carrera’s brilliantined head, prompting the whippersnapper to resize the windows, returning prominence to their principal subjects.

           In one of the CCTV windows – a wide angle from the top of the stairwell – Huerta noted Gabby 9er’s position as she wobbled on the extinguisher, forcing her to unglue her eye from the peephole so she could recover her balance. Gyros quickly re-stabilized though, she glued her eye straight back again, giving the door another hard knock and voxcasting, <Papa, it’s Gabriella,> in a tone about as stable as the extinguisher. Out of the corner of his eye, Huerta also noted that Carrera was leaning for one of the pastries, the one with glazed sugar and raisins and cinnamon: the boy had to be dreaming, he thought, and so woke him up with a swift rap using the back of his hand, the one with his heavy signet ring on.

           Back up on the video-wall, clearly struggling to maintain a constant tone, the girl tried again, this time casting the vox, but it looked to Huerta like she was wasting her time. Making a show of nursing his bruised knuckles, Carrera piped up:

           <Shouldn’t we be waking Her Highness for this?>

        <No clear or imminent,> Huerta replied matter-of-factly. <Madame Governor to you,> he added, settling into his workstation’s well-worn chair and the plate of pastries.

           Still unsteady on her toes, trying once more to peer through the wrong end of the peephole, Gabby voxed her father again, trying to ignore the pain as she knocked even harder. When she had first knocked she was sure she heard the chain but now she was wondering if she had imagined it because the door hadn’t budged since. She figured it had to be the right apartment though, as it was the only one on the top floor that was on the street-side of the building.