by RyFT Brand
Intergalactic, Insectiod Assassin in:
In Sheep’s Clothing
season one, episode two
RyFT
This is a work of fiction. Any similarities to
persons living or dead are purely coincidental.
Copyright 2010
In Sheep’s Clothing
RyFT
Some say your entire life flashes before your eyes just as you gasp your last, wretched breath. Well, they’re right. Only it doesn’t play out in a neat, sequential order; it comes a little at a time and all scrambled around. Like some stupid clerk dropped the script to your life and just shoved all the loose pages back together, collation be damned, and passed it to the director. I should know; I’m dead…or dying…or something. I don’t know where I am, how long I’ve been here, or where the hell I left my astro-buggy keys. Maybe I’m in some kind of purgatory, one where the evil villain is forced to relive all his past indiscretions over and over again to learn some kind of lesson. Well I don’t know anything about learning, but whatever this is, it’s entertaining.
At the moment I seem to be reliving a somewhat unpleasant Tuesday. Man, I’ve always hated Tuesdays. That particular Tuesday hadn’t started off so bad, which should have been a red flag; never have a good Tuesday, that’s my motto.
I was leaning against the statue in front of the Menthol “the decapitator” Simpson museum reading a copy of the Earth Times. Anybody half alert would have realized that the Earth Times had been out of print ever since the fembots revolted, a hundred twenty years at least. Apparently there’s a monument on a large asteroid that drifts in what was approximately the Earth’s orbit. I’ve never seen it; I wasn’t long out of the hive when the Earth was destroyed. The asteroid isn’t even rock or ice. Word is it’s really a ball of radioactive fast-food wrappers, soda cups, and loosing lottery tickets.
Sounds like the Earth I remember.
So I was standing beside the statue, leaning on a beacon post, pretending to read a long defunct newspaper. A voice pulled me out of a light snooze.
“What?” I shuffled the paper in my top pair of claws, my lower pair rested on the handles of their respective weapons.
“What’s on the television tonight?” Her voice was deep, and smooth, and smoky, and sent a quiver through my lower abdominal plating. But her question wasn’t a come-on, it was a code. Television was some kind of pleasure technology earthlings had been addicted to.
I gave her the response, “F-Troop.”
“Too bad, I really like My Mother the Car.”
So far she seamed legit, but I never assumed.
I lowered the paper and caught a first gawk at my potential client, and what I saw straightened my antennae. With a nudge from my claw I shifted the brim of my fedora away from my complex eyes. She was tall, and stout, and hard all over, an armadillo dame, a freak. The ‘Dillos were genetic failures—waste left over from an experiment to produce the best front line an army could want. They followed orders without question, were as strong as a Marvainian rinelephant, and were heavily armored, like really tough; almost indestructible is what I’d heard.
The problem was that at the first sign of danger the entire front line would drop and curl up into tight balls. Once rolled up they were impossible to get to uncurl. Some were so terrified, and stayed balled up so long, they starved.
The experiment was written off as a total loss and the remaining specimens were dumped into empty space. But it seemed that ‘Dillos, balled up, could survive quite a long time, even in the vacuum of space. Apparently a passing scow picked them up thinking they were discarded junk and possibly of some value. Now, seven foot tall armadillos with fluorescent orange stripes painted across their backs pick up most of the garbage in the quadrant.
So what was this one doing standing in front of me? She didn’t have a stripe. Her parts seemed to be in all the right places. In fact, with the exception of a long scar running from the base of her neck all the way down her trunk and out of sight, she was the vision of female genetic perfection. I wasn’t sure how she curled into a ball with those giant lobes on her chest, but I had a feeling I might find out before this was over.
“Well,” she said in her husky, alluring voice, “can I hire you or not?”
I didn’t answer. I looked her over a moment more, absorbing all the nooks and crannies in her thick armor plating. I had little doubt that it was even tougher than my exoskeleton. She huffed and rested a hand of long, sharp fingernails on her hip, letting me know she was growing impatient.
Good.
I folded the paper and tucked it under my arm. I pointed toward the entrance with one of the antennae sticking through my fedora and started walking without checking to see if she was following.
She was.
I strolled the museum’s central aisle, scanning the victim portraits—not sure how they got to call them portraits considering their lack of faces. I’d checked them out a dozen times before, but it was still impressive. The story goes that the Earthlings had this villain under lock and key once. In spite of overwhelming evidence against him, they let him walk little knowing that he’d eventually be exhumed and zombified to play in the NFeL, the Necroamcer’s Football League, a game where one of the players’ feet are used as a ball, and that said walking corpse would go on one of the galaxy’s most infamous killing sprees. Turned out in life this cat had a fancy for removing other Earthling’s heads, and reanimation had driven fancy into obsession. I figured that’s how he got his nickname, Oh Hey, as in, Oh hey, please don’t cut off my head.
In retrospect, the primates letting him walk seems awfully stupid, but then again I’ve weaseled my way out of a few murder raps, so who’s to say we’re that much smarter?
I took my time, enjoying the artwork. She shuffled along beside, doing her best to keep her beady, black eyes cast downward. I guess a museum dedicated to a serial killer would be upsetting to a race of cowards; though they preferred to be called pacifists.
The Mollusk guard watched us through a slit between his shells. I’m sure we made a sight, standing next to the headless wax figures, a ‘Dillo and a bug. Bug is what beings call us Kacekans. Most consider it a slur, I find it descriptive.
“Can we go somewhere else, or is this your twisted idea of a joke?” she snapped at last. I guess she really was upset, gooder still. She was squirm’n like she had nanofleas in her armor joints. Even thinking about nanofleas makes me itchy. But while she was twitching uncomfortably, and trying to avoid looking at the collection, I got a chance to check her out better. No sign of any weapon, except for those from the female arsenal.
“Sure, but you keep your hands where I can see them and do exactly as I say. It’s unwise to play with PeeDee3; got it?” As I asked I slipped my trench coat back revealing the Hashwalla toad-sticker tucked in its holster. I always show my smallest weapon first.
“Whatever, I just want to get this over with,” she said in a near whisper, eyes cast to the floor.
I cocked an antenna and led the way through the back door and into the alley. As soon as I did I got a warning spark in my central complex nerve cluster. My well-trained lower-left claw reacted, drawing the Drilling, an antique triple-barrel shotgun/rifle, a crude explosive weapon from ancient Earth. One of a thousand lenses in my left eye caught something slithering down the alley.
Squirming his way toward the only way out was a slimy, little worm, an Anguilaiean, an eel. Not just any eel, this slippery twerp was called Benny, Benny the worm. I
n my time I’d bought a lot of good information off that little creep, in fact he was almost indispensable.
Almost.
I brought a few hundred more lenses into focus and squeezed one of the triggers.
After a boom like thunder I heard two screams, one was the eel’s gargling cry of pain, the other was a high-pitched shriek from the dame.
I marched through a cloud of smoke and up to the fallen eel. He was leaking bad, curled into a pupil ball, whimpering.
Benny thought he was smart. He wasn’t.
Anguilaieans are tough. Aside from us Kacekans and the maggot whales of the Assious Cloud Nebula, they’re about the only other species that could survive a flatular holocaust.
Benny rolled over on the ground; one biotronic hand was trying to hold back the life oozing out of him, the other, with a whir of servo-motors, pointed a splatterday-night special at my head. He was pretty