???
Drip.
Drip.
Drip.
Drip.
Another drop fell on Whitey's bald head, and his face twisted into an even greater grimace of irritation.
“Hurry up, lazy nitwits! Faster! Faster!” he yelled, urging his even balder henchmen, who were hauling boxes out of the slowly melting enormous igloo.
Barely holding back his rage, Whitey reflexively pulled a flask out of his fur coat and quickly brought it to his lips, only to remember that it was empty and shout in frustration. So loudly that the nearest henchmen grabbed their ears and dropped to their knees.
His huge foot lifted to deliver a powerful stomp in irritation, but even he had enough sense to realize that such a stomp was a very bad idea.
Turning around, he quickly walked away down the icy corridor, which soon became the steel insides of the almost 100-meter-long diesel-electric icebreaker. The best that money could afford.
After passing through a series of corridors, Whitey entered a lavish office where one of his henchmen was already waiting for him and yelled: “Report!”
“Yes, Boss! We found water, Boss! Lots of water!”
Whitey felt himself losing consciousness from anger.
‘No, no, no,’ the rational part of his mind warned him. And somehow, he managed to restrain himself from making his crew one henchman smaller.
“On the mainland?!” he roared.
“Yes, Boss!”
“A lake or a river?”
“A lot of water?” the henchman said uncertainly.
‘No, no, no.’
“What else?” he barked.
“Animals, Boss!”
“WHAT KIND OF ANIMALS?!!”
“Small ones, Boss!”
“GET OUT OF HERE, FAT STUPID PIECE OF SHIT! OTIS! BRING HIS UGLY EGGHEAD TO ME!!!” Whitey screamed, and just by the power of his voice, blowing papers off the desk.
“Yes, Boss!” the henchman cheerfully responded and ran off to carry out the order.
‘If I’d known that the army of clones, advertised by Upton as "all as capable as me," would be this pathetic, I’d have choked that bastard right then and there, in his office!!! For the grave insult and lies!’ Whitey raged in his mind.
His hand slowly reached for a desk drawer... but quickly pulled back. He stood up and walked to the window. Gazing at the distant shoreline with jungle, regretting his past decisions.
When, because of that upstart and bitch harassments, as always mumbling something about Tesla’s Death Ray, Otis had asked him to quickly conduct a “small experiment” on Isla Glacialis, Whitey didn’t think much of it.
Even when gyrocopters started delivering strange towers for the experiment, he dismissed it as just testing a new version of the Soundbeam Tower.
It wasn’t until the whole of Isla Glacialis turned yellow with light that he realized he had made the biggest mistake of his life.
At first, just for a short time.
After the strange teleportation and studying the unfamiliar jungle from the gyrocopter, which he initially mistook for the Amazon rainforest, it seemed like fate had finally sent him a chance to break free from Upton. No matter how many billions that lying bastard had, teleportation technology could undoubtedly give Whitey much more.
Even when he looked at the local fauna and flora, and even sun, more closely and realized that something wasn’t right, his heart raced with excitement for future glorious hunts.
But then, it suddenly hit him: those glorious hunts wouldn’t provide him with fuel, spare parts for the chambers, toilet paper, and WHISKEY! And he finally understood just how DIRE his new situation was.
After a knock on the door, a tall, dry, bald man entered the office, shaking even more than Whitey. But not from rage. From excitement and ecstasy.
“Incredible! Absolutely incredible! Mitochondrial membranes are so strong! So strong! Three! No, four! Soon I will…” Otis began, but Whitey abruptly interrupted him with a powerful scream.
“WHERE!? ARE!? WE!?”
Otis froze, taking a few steps back. Then it dawned on him what exactly Whitey had asked, excitement spiked anew, and he, incredibly joyful again, proudly declared, “We’re not on Earth!” And suddenly took a step back, pressing himself against the door, realizing that he might’ve just made the biggest mistake of his life.
Whitey’s eyes nearly popped out of their sockets, his face turned red, and his hands clenched the desk so forcefully that a loud, long crack ran through the wood.
“IF — YOU — EVER — SAY — TO — ME — WHat even the most defective henchmen could tell me — I will tear you apart — with these hands — into pieces,” Whitey growled, showing his massive hands to Otis.
“Y-y-yes, of course, Whitey,” pale and trembling Otis whispered, then added quickly, “We are... we... we’re not near an island! We’re near a new continent, on a new planet! With more sturdy, no, better, animals! Soon, very soon, we will know where! I already have tuna, its catabolic eff... it’s very fast! And a stork! And an octopus, a beautiful octopus!”
“Fatass mentioned ‘small animals,’ what’s that about?”
“Oh, yes! Hamsters, lemurs, sloths,” Otis quickly added.
“What’s currently loaded in the chambers?”
Otis hesitated and pressed himself against the door again.
“I... I ordered t-t-to r-r-refilt half to w-w-water a-and air c-ch-chamb—”
Suddenly, he surprisingly deftly dodged an ashtray which, after being thrown, stuck in the door.
“ARE YOU AN IDIOT?!!” Whitey raged.
“I’m a Nobel laureate!” Otis Ganglion suddenly retorted with anger and indignation.
“A Nobel laureate of stupidity?! MORON!!
HALF OF THIS ISLAND IS MELTING GLACIER, FOOL!!!
RIGHT NOW, OUR COAL AND IRON ARE BEING FLOODED, CRETIN!
AND WE NEED TO FIND IT QUICKLY ON THIS UNKNOWN CONTINENT AND PLANET, DEGENERATE! HAVING SHIT LIKE RAMS AND LOBSTERS!
WHAT’S OUR BEST FAST TERRESTRIAL?!” Whitey Hooten screamed.
“J-j-jungle c-cat.”
“Load all the Creature Chambers with them and send them to search for coal and iron.
Once we have enough resources to take on armies — when we find the chameleons, gorillas, eagles, WHALES — only then will you load something new into the chambers. DO YOU UNDERSTAND?
AND NO MORE EXPERIMENTS WITH SIGMA ENERGY!!! DO YOU UNDERSTAND?!!”
“Y-yes W-whitey...”
"THEN GET OUT OF HERE, NOBEL'S IMBECILE!"
Once his office was empty, Whitey Hooten opened the desk drawer, pulled out the second-to-last bottle of whiskey, and gulped down half of it in one gulp. Then, holding the bottle, he walked to the window.
“Maybe everything’s not that bad,” he muttered under his breath. “No rich bastard, no whore, no second whore, no annoying daddy’s boy. Yeah, maybe it’s not that bad... Whiskey... Whiskey…”
Then a brilliant idea popped into his head. He smiled, walked to the desk, and pressed the intercom button.
‘Let’s see what this egghead’s Nobel Prize can do,’ he thought.
???
“We’ve double-checked the equipment; it’s working properly. The telemetry is legit,” the elderly man reported, glancing at the others sitting at the table: two men and a woman.
“Checked, but not by the blueprints, right?” asked the second man.
“No, by comparison and tests,” the first man, dressed into hooded black robe, curtly replied. “But the likelihood that we missed something is negligible. This was definitely an FTL tachyon burst.
Our most plausible theory still the same - explosion of the Hyperpulse Generator which reverberated from earth to our direction. But now we are more sure about this. The second theory is a collision ship with a planet during warp or a try of it. But modeling showed that this is two orders of magnitude less likely. No additional records found about sector. Only a few, statistically insignificant, disappearances.”
“This is serious. We need to notify the others,” the woman with a scar on her face and a black mohawk said gravely.
“And we will notify them... when there are reasons to,” the second man replied.
“Yeah, reasons. Which we will have after you will pay for expedition and find them, Brandon,” the third man said sarcastically.
“I’m not paying for it. Leo Showers will,” the second man replied.
“Great! And once he agrees, we’ll invite all the other clans to celebrate with us,” the third man joked.
“Brandon is right,” the first man addressed the third. “Jaguar’s corridor is going to pass close to the anomaly. We can’t miss this opportunity. If we find the right leverage, we will offload almost all risks and costs onto them, but take at least half the profits.”
“Yeah, just find the leverage... and profits... which of course exist... and thereafter secure half of them from Jaguars, of course, of course,” the third man said sarcastically.
“And what do you propose?” the woman asked in a displeased voice.
“Nothing. My guys are getting agitated, and I don’t like it. This could either be terrible timing, which is a bad omen in itself. Or there’s something big and bad for us.“
“So you are in favor of notifying the clans?“ the woman asked.
“No. I suggest we either sell the information to the highest bidder. Or wait until the first wave is over and then send one warship to the sector without explanations.”
“We can’t,” the first man replied. “The first option would make us a laughingstock if the buyer finds something valuable. The second would increase the search price too much due to outdated coordinates. Proposed by Brandon two years it’s the limit of what we have.”
“Rather a very convenient limit, isn't it, Oathmaster? But this is probably just another happy accident.” the third man said false-optimistically.
“Such risks - exactly why I proposed using Smoke Jaguar’s as a shield,” the second man responded. “It’s theirs corridor, not ours. If something goes wrong this will quickly attract everyone else's attention.“
“A shield that somehow should be controlled,” the third man retorted. “Are you willing to pledge your regiments for this, and somehow rearrange your patch closer to theirs? If so, it’s your business. But I’ll keep my guys at a distance.”
“Brandon?” the first man, Oathmaster, asked the second.
“Fifty five percent for me, and twenty-five for Sarah’s backing. Of course, with termination clause in case of related fire-visions.” the second man replied after a brief pause, looking at the woman.
“Sarah?” the first man asked.
“Thirty five — for logistics and safety net, no more — and I’ll agree.” the woman said thoughtfully.
"No, it's too little profit for me for a such a great risk," rejected third man.
After a few hours of negotiation Oathmaster finally received nods from everyone at the table, and sealed the deal, “Then we have two years to convince Leo and quietly shift Smoke Jaguar’s and Nova Cat’s REVIVAL’s corridors closer to the anomaly.”