Zero History

happened to run across the Taser. That was what Voytek had indicated, grumpily, on his
way out, when they’d gotten back here on the Yamaha.
But that wasn’t what Garreth had told him, in Hollis’s hotel room. Garreth had said that
he needed Fiona to operate the other drone, the one with the little helicopters, so he
needed Milgrim to operate the penguin. To keep an eye on the general area, he said.
When Milgrim asked which area that was, Garreth had said that he didn’t know yet, but
that he was sure Milgrim would do very well. Milgrim, remembering the pleasure he’d
taken in rolling the black ray, decided that simply nodding was the best course. Though
the idea of anyone wanting him to operate anything was new. Other people operated
things, and Milgrim observed them doing it. But, he supposed, he was really only being
asked to observe something, whatever it was, through the cameras in the penguin, and it
was best, as Fiona suggested, to regard the Taser as a random add-on.
It was harder to get the penguin to do anything, in the constrained space of the Vegas
cube, than it had been to get the ray to do those rhythmic somersaults, but he was starting,
now, to manage a repeated stationary roll. If he bumped the wall, Fiona noticed, and
didn’t like it, so he tried to be as careful as he could. She said that the robotics in the
wings were fragile, and the penguin was helpless without them. It didn’t really fly,
because penguins don’t, and it was a balloon; rather, it swam, through air instead of
water, and once you had it going where you wanted it to, it knew how to swim by itself.
He was careful to keep that overridden now. He wished they could take the thing out and
really fly it, the way he’d seen her fly the other one in Paris, but she said that they
couldn’t, because people might see it and get excited, and because Garreth had ordered
her to keep him inside.
Being kept inside with Fiona was an excellent thing, as far as Milgrim was concerned,
but he was starting to recall Hollis’s scary-looking shower with something other than fear.
“I wish there was a shower here,” he said, slowing the penguin’s roll, bringing the Taser
around until it was on the bottom, stopping it. There was something wonderfully
satisfying about this thing, something silky about the way it worked.
“There is,” said Fiona, looking up from his Air, where she sat at the table.
“There is?” Milgrim, on his back on the white foam, glanced around the blank white
walls, thinking he’d missed a door.
“Benny has one rigged up. Drivers use it, sometimes. It has a geyser so old that it has a
box that used to take coins. I could do with one myself.”
Milgrim was simultaneously aware of the stickiness of his armpits and what even the
briefest image of Fiona in a shower did to him. “You go first, then.”
“You can’t trust Benny’s geyser,” said Fiona. “Get it working, it’ll go once, then stop.
We should shower together.”
“Together,” said Milgrim, and heard the voice he only had in police custody. He
coughed.
“We’ll leave the light out,” said Fiona, who was looking at him with an expression he