Levi's Rock - Prologue - The Man and the Monster

Prologue: The Man and the Monster

Premonitions are tricky things.


Recently released prisoner 8083426—what was left of the man who had once gone by the name Duwan Metrona—was having a very clear impression of what he should do. He felt that he should walk across the room and pick a fight with the tall man half-dozing in his seat. He felt that he should wait for the man to hit him a few times and then kill him swiftly. What is more, he felt that he could do it.


Time was on his side. For one thing, the off-world transport was delayed. There were already vendors from rival transport companies courting passengers in this terminal with vouchers for their own travel lines. In addition, a Pathways officer was leading a dog through the terminal carefully; even if the flight should finish its preparations, 8083426 felt certain that there would be another mysterious delay.


Metrona had nothing to fear from the officer. This ex-felon was carrying no weapons, no drugs, no bag at all—just some folded papers in his pocket that designated him a priority passenger with a one-way ticket to a distant rock out in space: his chosen home for however long he could hold out before making another mistake that would send him on the run again, or back to prison.


The tall man, with eyes closed and breathing slowly through his nose so that he almost appeared to be meditating, was an imposing figure. 8083426 noted the special boots, the blue color of his workshirt, the way his hair was matted down—and then looked under the chair to the dirty duffel bag, where he spotted the identification tag. It was red and had a disk attached to it of the kind distributed to mine workers; it was a sniffer for certain gases and a radiation level indicator.


A miner, he thought. Great.


He thought about the blows that a miner might dish out; he wasn’t sure he’d withstand more than a few before—


He gasped and clutched his face and forehead as the pain exploded between his eyes. Very like a migraine, forcing him into a penitent posture in his own seat, the mental image of him grappling with the miner asserted itself again. He gripped his head and squeezed his eyes shut, the ringing sound that always accompanied these visions now trailing off like a train in the distance.


He raised his head a little and peeked out between slitted eyelids. The miner was still asleep.
He stood up slowly and began walking over to meet him.



Gregor Fyodorim was not asleep. He could not sleep anywhere that was so brightly lit or widely open; he needed a cramped room and heavy darkness. For the last few nights, while he waited for his off-world paperwork to go through, he had slept under the bed in his hotel room, the blankets pulled down to block out the lights from the window. The phrase “city that never sleeps” no longer held any attraction to him.


Years working in mines had taught him the value of meditation—especially when the dangers of the profession reared their ugly heads—and he had spent many hours sitting in collapsed tunnels, slowing his breathing, concentrating on happy memories or math problems or even projects he would never have time to complete, all the while trying not to expend energy or air panicking or hoping for rescue.


He had been rescued a few times; other times, he had decided he could wait no longer, and he made the risky decision to claw his own way out. Risky because he could have forced another cave-in; risky because he could have used up his last oxygen over-exerting himself or hyperventilating; risky because he didn’t always know whether the tunnel he was digging into was just another sealed off section, a slightly larger tomb in which to die.


The meditation was not helping much in this situation. He was trying to keep from panicking, but fear gripped his heart. It was a fear for which there is no remedy, a fear every man must face—and face alone. The ring was in his pocket. What if Delynne had changed her mind?


He almost fell into rehearsing the proposal again, but he changed his focus, forcing her image from his mind, determined not to spend the next six hours—or more, he grimaced—dreading what might be the happiest moment of his life. He thought instead about the man in the prison-issue clothing sitting across from him.


Greg hadn’t had his eyes open in almost an hour, but he was sure the man was still there. He couldn’t have said why he was so sure, but he was certain nonetheless. The terminal was crowded, there were passengers, attendants, security personnel, vendors, even a couple of actual officers wandering about—and yet, Greg had a clear picture in his mind of this man, this ex-prisoner on his way to who-knows-where, and he was sitting across from Greg and staring at him.


He wouldn’t sit there for long, though. Just a few minutes ago, Greg had been trying to slow his breathing and the premonition came over him like a bucket of ice water: Greg saw himself ripping the guy’s head clean off his shoulders.


He would have been embarrassed to tell anyone about this. Even his crew would have been shocked to hear him describe it. He could see the whole fight playing out in his mind, starting with some petty provocation on the ex-con’s part and ending with Greg flying into a rage and twisting the poor guy’s head around.


He took a long, slow breath. He opened his eyes. Then he stared in disbelief.


The guy was gone. There was no one in the whole row of seats across from him. He sighed with visible relief—


A smack on the back of his head and a voice in his ear sent a trickle of cold water down his spine. “I’m right here, genius,” the voice hissed, and Greg turned quickly to find the prisoner sitting in the row of chairs behind him.


Greg got up out of the seat and turned to face this dead man walking. What he saw should not have made him feel threatened. The ex-prisoner was a scrawny man, shorter than average—which made him puny next to Greg—carrying no bag and apparently hiding no weapon, for his shirt and jacket were both open, and wearing boots so old that Greg could only come to the conclusion that they had belonged to the man before his stint in prison and now they had been returned to him.


Just below his collar bone was the number designating this guy prisoner number 8083426, and Greg repeated this number to himself reflexively, perhaps meaning to file a report with Pathways. The irony of this thought would give him a chuckle later.


For his part, 8083426 just lounged in his chair as though waiting for something.


“What’s the matter, caveman, scared?”


Greg snorted, the idea both ridiculous and too true to be anything but funny. “I’m only scared of one thing,” he confessed, “and that’s me ripping your head off. Who are you, anyway?”


The little man in the prison-issue clothing traded the smirk for a scowl. Greg waited, but no introduction was forthcoming. So much for talking his way out of it.


“Not much for conversation?” Greg pressed.


“I’m not much for girls like you becoming miners when you’d be more useful servicing real men, if you know what I mean,” the ex-con chuckled, and finished with a gesture that shocked an older couple sitting nearby.


Greg shook his head, grabbed his bag, and turned to sit somewhere else. Behind him, 8083426 vaulted the row of seats and stepped up behind him.


It looked like he was not going to be able to get Greg to fight him, and he could feel the migraine starting, so it was more than just serendipitous that at that moment the Pathways officer guiding the dog through the terminal stopped right in front of an apparently newly-wed couple returning from a vacation. The wife managed to look thoroughly confused; the husband panicked and took off running, and suddenly there was shouting and barking ringing through the terminal.


8083426 took advantage of the distraction, tapped on Greg’s shoulder, and took a swing at the miner’s jaw.


Greg had been hit before—many times—and usually while drinking, so he knew what it felt like to be hit when your guard was down. He shook it off well, but he lost his cool; in less than a minute, he went from ‘completely in control’ to ‘runaway train.’ What he didn’t realize until too late was that, after that initial punch, the ex-con didn’t make a move to defend himself or to strike a second time.


Greg, on the other hand, rang the guy’s bell with the first punch—an eye-mashing blow from the right—and then followed up with a left to the jaw that should have knocked the guy out cold. He did fall down, apparently out for the count, and Greg turned back to his bag, nursing his own jaw a little.


A security officer was approaching—the only one not trying to assist in the arrest of the drug-smuggling couple—and Greg raised his hands, ready to explain the whole thing—


With no warning, Greg was suddenly staggering under the weight of his opponent—who had jumped on his back and was now trying to get a hammerlock around Greg’s neck. The two men careened one way and then another—then as they neared the security officer, 8083426 swung one foot out, connecting neatly with the officer’s throat, and as the officer choked and blacked out, Greg gave up hoping for outside help.


He used his vice-like grip to extricate himself from the headlock. In another moment, Greg had the man up in the air and pitched him into an empty row of seats—landing him approximately where he had been when Greg first laid eyes on him. Then Greg started to go to the security officer’s aid, but decided to keep an eye on his dancing partner instead.


Although he shouldn’t have gotten up—again—it was no surprise to Greg this time when he did. Launching himself at Greg’s midsection, 8083426 managed to knock the wind out of Greg, but in a moment Greg had turned him, clamped an arm around his neck, and begun tightening the hold.


Greg was waiting for his friend to pass out—or for the decidedly lax security to return and zap them both—but at about the same time that he realized the strangle-hold wasn’t working, he was assaulted by the vision he’d had earlier. He realized that if he applied just a little pressure it would look like an accident; he could say he was just defending himself, and he would have plenty of witnesses to the repeated attacks. He couldn’t seem to get the guy to pass out, he couldn’t understand it, and if he just leaned forward on the guy a little he would probably snap his neck.


He looked around at the bewildered crowd, most of whom had probably never witnessed the type of drunken brawls where Greg had learned to fight guys like this. What would they say later? Probably something like, “He was a madman, officer! He just wouldn’t stop!” But would they be talking about 8083426 or Gregor Fyodorim?


He made his decision quickly, and hoped he would not regret it later.