“It’s gone,” Loren said. “We don’t have it.”
Crack. The gun butt struck Mizette again. She hissed angrily.
“Will you guys just, like, stop talking, already?”
“I am aware that you don’t have it, or I would have taken it from you,” said Manacle. He sounded like he was growing impatient now, his voice coming accompanied by little hisses of static. “That is why I asked you where it is. I have no interest in where it is not.”
“You ain’t gonna find it, man,” Mech grunted.
Miz moved before the gun could strike her, leaning left and avoiding the blow. The soldier stumbled, off-balance, and suddenly her hand was on his throat, claws digging into his windpipe, teeth drawing back into a vicious, terrifying snarl.
Manacle raised a hand, motioning for the troops to hold their fire. With a tilt of his head, he drew Miz’s attention to Tallon. The Lieutenant had drawn his pistol and stood over Tyrra, the gun pointed between her eyes.
“Put him down,” Tallon instructed. “There’s a good doggy.”
Miz’s claws tightened briefly on the man’s windpipe, then she released him and shoved him back.
“Leave her alone. She’s just a kid,” Miz said.
“Oh, I know. They’re the best kind,” said Tallon. Bending, he used the barrel of his blaster to draw back one of Tyrra’s gums, showing off her teeth. He rubbed a finger and thumb together and beamed back at Miz. “The bids are going to fly in.”
“Final chance,” said Manacle. “Tell me where it is, or you will all die. Painfully. Over a period of months.”
His fists clenched inside his leather gauntlets. “Where is the Symmorium Sentience?”
“You know,” called a voice from the trees. Cal raised his hands as several blasters and at least one shoulder-mounted cannon swiveled in his direction. “It is funny you should ask.”
Twenty-Eight
“You,” said Manacle. There was no surprise in his tone, but some of the soldiers who had turned Cal’s way stared at him in wide-eyed disbelief.
“Sir, is that who I think it is?” whispered one of the men. A look from Tallon silenced him.
“Where is the Sentience?” demanded Manacle. “What have you done with it?”
Cal came closer, picking his way across the uneven scrub. His hands were still raised, but he was otherwise completely ignoring all the guns that were pointed in his direction.
“What, no ‘hello’? No Earth guy to Earth guy chit-chat?” he said. “No, ‘Whoa, awesome! You survived that explosion, too?’”
“Where is the Sentience?”
“That’s far enough,” Tallon said, leveling his own gun at Cal.
Cal stopped and studied the angle of the weapon. “Are you…? Are you deliberately pointing that at my balls?” he asked.
Tallon nodded to confirm.
“Jesus. So that’s the level we’re at, is it? Noted.”
Manacle’s voice was an electronic hiss. “Where is—?”
“Right. Right. The Symmorium Sentience. I’m going to get to that in just a sec,” Cal said. He scooped some slime off his shoulder and flicked it onto the ground. Most of it stuck to his fingers, and it took four or five increasingly violent snaps of his wrist before the stuff fell off.
“Can you believe this?” he asked, gesturing to himself. “You do the thing a favor, and how does it pay you back? Tries to drown you in slime. How’s that for fonking gratitude?”
Cal rubbed his hands on his pants, but they were equally as slime-sodden, so only made things worse. “Why do you want it, anyway?” he asked.
Neither Manacle nor Tallon responded.
“Is it a weapon thing? Are you going to use it as a weapon?” he guessed. “Because that’s what we do, isn’t it? Earth guys like us. We see something cool and we figure out ways to use it for ourselves. Something that powerful? Got to be a weapon. Got to be.”
“Where—”
“Jesus, change the record, Manny. I told you, I’m getting to that in a minute,” said Cal.
Manacle half-turned and gestured in Loren’s direction. Something long, brown, and vine-like snaked from his arm, wrapped around her throat, and yanked her toward him. She landed on her knees at his side, fingers digging desperately between the tendril and her windpipe, eyes wide through panic and an increasing lack of air.
“You may want to speed it up,” Manacle said.
“OK, OK, let’s get to it now! I’ll take you to it!” Cal said. “I’ll show you, just stop, OK? Just let her go!”
Manacle continued to strangle her for a few more seconds, then released her. Loren sank back into a sitting position in the mud, rasping and gasping for breath.
Cal wanted to run to her, but knew that he dare not. He wanted to hold her, to tell her it was going to be OK, but he couldn’t. He’d be dead before he was halfway to her. They all would.
The vine from Manacle’s wrist moved to tighten around Loren’s throat again. “The Symmorium Sentience,” he said. “Where is it?”
“OK, OK, OK,” Cal said. “Fine. You want to know where it is? Fine. Like I said, I’ll show you.”
He pointed down at the ground directly in front of him. “It’s here.”
All eyes went to his feet.
“Where?” demanded Tallon. “In your shoe?”
“No, not… You’re standing on it, shizznod,” Cal told him. “It’s the planet. The planet is the Sentience.”
The EDI soldiers shuffled uneasily, eyes darting to the ground.
“The bit we had—the thing we all know and love as the Symmorium Sentience? That’s only, like, a fragment of it. This place—all this—that’s the rest of it. Or, I don’t know, like the Mothership, or something. The point is, now that it’s home and all powered-up, it’s going to bring the Symmorium back to life, and they’re going to kick your collective asses.”
He glanced into the trees on either side of him, hoping to see movement there in the shadows.
Instead, he frowned. He put a finger in his ear, as if listening to a voice on a comm-link.
“What? No? What do you mean, no?”
Everyone present heard the voice’s response inside their heads.
“I cannot bring back the Symmorium. They are gone, beyond even my reach.”
While the other EDI troops all looked around in a sort of terror-stricken surprise, Lieutenant Tallon bowed graciously. “You’re welcome,” he said. “The pleasure was all ours.”
“But, you said you could,” Miz protested. “You promised.” She looked down at the inert Tyrra. “I promised!”
“Bring them back,” Tallon snorted. “There ain’t no bringing them back from what we did to them. Right, boys?”
From the ranks came a mumbled confirmation, but it wasn’t enough for Tallon’s liking.
“I said right, boys?”
The confirmation came again, a little more enthusiastically this time.
“Assertion: Rejected. I did not say I could bring them back,” the Sentience insisted. “I said I could restore the Symmorium. Return it to what it once was.”
The voice hesitated, just for a moment.
“A promise that I now keep.”
Down in the mud, Tyrra gasped. Her eyes, which had been a dirty, muggy charcoal, became black and shiny.
And angry. Very, very angry.
The middle section of Tallon’s left leg, from his ankle to a few inches above his knee, went in one bite. His finger instinctively tightened on his trigger as he fell, and Cal yelped as a blaster bolt skimmed past half an inch below his scrotum and exploded on the ground behind him.
Tallon’s shoulder went next. He was still screaming when Three Hundred Juvenile Symmorium Teeth – (Near Mint - Rare) bit through the top of his head, severing everything from the lips upward.
Spinning, Tyrra flicked the blaster with her foot, catapulting it in Loren’s direction. Snatching it from the air, Loren shot through the tendril that had her held by the throat, then turned and to
ok out the two soldiers standing behind Mizette.
Several things then happened at approximately the same time.
Tyrra launched herself at the closest available human and relieved him of his gun, three fingers, and part of his ribcage.
Mech helicoptered his top half around, spinning his arms out and shattering the hips of the two soldiers unlucky enough to be standing within reach.
Cal opened fire with his blaster, hitting absolutely no one, but sending the already spooked soldiers into a sort of panicky chaos that made several of them break ranks and retreat into the swamp.
And then, there was Miz.
Unleashed, and unrestrained, she had eviscerated three of the troops before she’d even made it to her feet. Once upright, she pirouetted neatly, drew her claws across the face of the guy who’d kept hitting her, and watched as all the individual parts flopped off onto the floor.
A blaster bolt tore past her, missed her by inches, then exploded the man’s exposed skull.
“Sorry! My fault!” called Cal.
He danced frantically as a volley of gunfire came whistling past him, but then Mech was opening fire with his arm cannons, sending EDI guys spiraling into the air as various bits and pieces.
“Stop.”
Manacle’s voice came amplified from somewhere inside his helmet.
He stood in the center of the chaos, one hand holding Loren by the hair, the other pressing a blaster to her temple.
Cal snapped his gun up, taking aim. “Let her go, shizznod!”
“Fonk, don’t you try and shoot him!” Loren protested.
Cal sighed and lowered the gun. She was right. Maybe he’d hit Manacle, maybe he’d hit Loren. Maybe he’d hit the ship. Maybe he’d hit himself. It was always something of a guessing game when it came to his blaster accuracy.
Tyrra crouched to spring, but Miz caught the girl and held her back. Around them, the EDI soldiers—of which there were considerably fewer than there had been—pulled themselves together, gathered up their weapons, and formed a circle.
“Mech, don’t,” said Cal, gesturing to the cyborg. Mech stood with both arms raised, wrist-cannons locked onto Manacle.
“I’m prepared to bet that my reactions are faster than yours,” Manacle said, his voice hissing and popping with barely constrained rage. “Shall we put it to the test?”
“Mech,” Cal said, his voice pleading. “Don’t. OK? It’s fine. I’ve got this.”
“How the fonk have you got this?” Mech asked, glaring around at the circle of soldiers.
“Just trust me, OK?” Cal said.
Mech kept his arms raised. Loren grunted in pain as the blaster was pressed more firmly against her head.
With a whirr, Mech lowered his arms to his side, his face a picture of mechanical contempt.
Cal scratched his head and gave an apologetic half-shrug. “Actually, truth is, I haven’t got this,” he admitted. “I lied.”
Mech moved to raise his arms again, but Manacle’s voice came as a harsh, buzzing crackle. “I wouldn’t.”
Cal raised his hands and shot Mech a pleading look. “Mech, please.”
He waited until Mech had dropped his arms to his sides, then continued. “Like I said, I lied. Because that’s one of the things we’re good at, isn’t it? Earth guys. We sure know how to spin a story.”
He wiped a smear of slime from his arm, regarded it for a moment, then rolled it up between his fingers and flicked it away into the undergrowth. “The Sentience, it told me a story,” Cal said. “Or showed me, maybe. Whatever. The point is, I know what you did. The EDI, I mean. I know what you did.”
“We have done a lot of things,” Manacle said. “In such a short space of time.”
Cal nodded. “Right. Right. You certainly have been busy,” he said.
His eyes met Loren’s. Wide. Terrified. And yet, defiant, too. She wasn’t going to let Manacle see her fear. She wasn’t going to let anyone see it, in fact. She never did.
And yet, she was showing him. She was letting him in.
There was no holding them back, even if he’d wanted to. The words came on their own. It was, he accepted, high fonking time.
“I love you,” he told her.
Loren stopped breathing, but voluntarily this time. She stared back at him, saying nothing. Cal had a horrible sinking feeling that she hadn’t heard him, and an even more horrible sinking feeling that he might not be able to work up the nerve to say it again. His mouth began to backtrack.
“What I mean…”
She smiled at him. Her reply, when it came, emerged croakily through her damaged throat.
“I know.”
Cal blinked.
Wait.
Had she just…
No.
No!
Yes. She had. She’d just fonking Han Solo’d him.
“No,” he said. “You’re supposed to say—”
“This is all very touching,” Manacle barked. He flicked the gun away and pulled the trigger. A blaster bolt erupted just inches from Loren’s head, making her stiffen in fright. “The next shot kills her,” he warned, jamming the muzzle up against her temple again. “Bring me the Sentience. Now.”
“Were you even listening, Manny?” asked Cal. “I can’t bring you the Sentience.” He stamped a foot a few times into the mud. “This is the Sentience. Even if I could give it to you, how would you even fit it on your ship?”
He shook his head. “No. I can’t give you the Sentience, but I can finish telling you what the Sentience told me,” Cal continued. “It said it was giving me peace, and at first I thought it was trying to kill me, but then—well, then it covered me in slime and I still thought it was trying to kill me—but then I realized what it was doing.”
He smiled. It was a wide, beaming, toothy grin, and the first actual real one in days. “It was showing me the truth. It was telling me how you fonks took a wide-eyed innocent kid, and turned him into propaganda.”
Cal took a pace closer. “Cal Carver didn’t wipe out the Greyx, or kill the Symmorium, or fight in the battle of fonk knows where. Cal Carver was just a kid who wanted to see the stars, and you used him. You used him, and then you killed him, and then you kept using him to recruit more people to your cause.”
He looked to the soldiers standing with their guns in their hands. “Those recruitment videos you’ve all seen? Those legends you’ve heard about the great space warrior, Cal Carver? They’re all fake. They took the most famous kid in the world, and they fed him into their propaganda machine. And you shizznods lapped it up.”
He held his arms out in a shrug. Loren, Mech, Miz, and Tyrra all watched him in a stunned, solemn silence.
“So, there you have it. That’s what the Sentience gave me. It gave me the truth. You used him, and you killed him. You killed me.”
A tear trickled down Loren’s cheek, cutting a thin line through the grime. “Oh, Cal. I’m sorry,” she whispered.
Cal’s smile grew. “Sorry? Shizz, no, don’t be sorry? Don’t you see, guys? Don’t you get it? I’m not sad about it—sure, I’m angry, maybe—but I’m not sad. It turns out you were right. I’m not a genocidal maniac. I never was! I didn’t kill you all. I didn’t kill anyone. I died standing up to evil fonks like this guy. For what I believed. For what he believed.”
He rocked back on his heels. “Honestly? I’ve never been happier. It’s like a weight has been lifted off my shoulders. I’m honestly feeling so much better.”
“I’m sure we’re all very pleased for you,” said Manacle. “Now—”
Cal raised a finger to silence him. “I wasn’t finished. Because, you see, Manny, if I’m feeling much better…”
He pointed to the ramp leading up into the Currently Untitled. A small, unassuming green blob sat there, bobbing gently.
“…then so is he.”
Somewhere in the circle of troops, someone snorted.
“Ooh, scary. A sentient booger.”
Splurt didn’t move. Not exactly
. Not in any traditional sense of the word, at least.
Later, were an observer to slow down the footage, they’d be surprised to discover that he did in fact move, after all. To those gathered at the time, however, he instead appeared to co-exist in two places at once. The first being on the ship’s ramp, the second being halfway through the sternum of the soldier who’d made the booger remark.
Splurt emerged from the soldier’s back not as an adorable green blob, but as veteran WWE wrestler, ‘Hacksaw’ Jim Duggan. The force with which he exploded through the man’s torso, wearing only an ill-fitting pair of blue trunks and swinging a two-by-four piece of timber, caused some consternation amongst the troops, who all immediately started screaming and opened fire.
‘Hacksaw’ Jim Duggan didn’t appear to be all that concerned as round after round of blaster fire slammed into him. Each blast punched a neat hole through his barrel-like bare chest, which then promptly closed over again half a second later.
The two-by-four swung, striking a soldier with enough force to lift him off the ground and send him catapulting into the swamp.
Ker-ack! Another swing. Another strike. Another EDI guy was sent sailing off toward the trees.
Cal raised a fist triumphantly, and bellowed Hacksaw’s catchphrase. “Hooooooo!”
Loren’s eyes narrowed. Cal smiled weakly. “No, again, that’s also a catchphrase. That wasn’t aimed at—”
He flinched as Loren twisted out of Manacle’s grip, and watched her pummel his kidneys with a flurry of ineffectual punches.
Manacle’s head, which had been pointing squarely at the winner of the 1988 inaugural Royal Rumble, rotated two-hundred-and-seventy-degrees to look at Loren.
He moved to grab for her, then staggered as the last remaining survivor of the Symmorium race drove a shoulder into his waist, her jaws clamping onto his hip.
Manacle delivered a hammer-strike to Tyrra’s back, flooring her.
“Get your fonking hands off her!” Mizette roared, throwing herself at the masked tyrant. He caught her with one hand, hoisted her over his head using her own momentum, then drove her face-first into the mud.
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