The wrinkled, ball-shaped head was eyeless and earless, with only a thumbnail-sized hole in the center to suggest a nose. What it lacked in everything else, though, it more than made up for in mouth.
The bottom jaw was recessed behind the upper one, curving upward at either side in a way that gave the impression the thing was grinning. Its teeth had been inserted liberally, and with no obvious strategy involved. Some followed the tradition route of sticking upright from their sockets, while others freestyled by poking out sideways, jutting straight forward or, in a few cases, erupting through other parts of the head like shrapnel.
Size-wise, it was somewhere between a large tiger and a small rhino. A haphazard checkerboard of black and purple markings covered its scarred, pock-marked skin. All six ankles were ringed with cuffs of dirty yellow hair, and finished with paws that individually probably weighed as much as Cal himself, and certainly had more claws.
It padded back and forth in its otherwise empty cage, its tail occasionally twitching as it ejected blobs of runny black scat onto the floor.
“Usually, I’m not one to judge someone on their physical appearance,” said Cal. “But I can’t help but make an exception in this case. That’s… I mean… that’s one of the worst things I’ve ever seen.”
“You ain’t wrong,” said Mech.
“And, like, you’ve seen Loren naked,” Miz remarked.
“Hilarious,” Loren sighed.
“You mean you’re hilarious,” Miz retorted. She moved to thump Loren on the arm, but Loren deflected it without looking.
“Don’t,” Loren warned.
“You don’t.”
“Please, don’t make too much noise,” Bryman whispered. “We do not want to get the Sloorg riled up.”
Loren and Miz glared at each other, then returned their attention to the creature in the cage.
“Look at those teeth,” Cal muttered.
“They look scary, but actually a Sloorg’s bark is worse than its bite,” said Bryman.
Cal’s eyebrows raised. “Oh? So, what? They’re actually big softies?”
“Oh no,” said Dryman, shaking his head emphatically. “I mean their bark is literally worse than their bite. The sound of it can shatter bone.”
“Oh,” said Cal.
“It makes some people go blind.”
“Right.”
“In one episode, a guy shizzed himself inside out.”
“Jesus.”
“Its bite is horrible, too. I mean, it’ll eat a grown man in four-to-six bites. But the bark is what catches people off-guard.”
“Gotcha.”
“Is there only one of them?” Loren asked.
“No, we have eight at the moment, but we have to keep them separate,” Bryman explained.
“In case they kill each other?” Mech guessed.
“Not exactly,” said Bryman, blushing a little. “They’re very… sexually motivated. And, well, nobody really wants to see that.”
Cal turned to the others. “Is it wrong that a tiny part of me absolutely does want to see that?”
“Yes,” Loren confirmed.
“Ew,” said Miz, wrinkling her snout in distaste.
“That ain’t right, man,” Mech added. “That shizz ain’t right.”
Beneath Cal’s jacket, his breasts wobbled with disappointment.
“I said a tiny part!” Cal protested.
Bryman made a show of glancing around, then leaned in closer and placed the back of a hand next to his mouth. “You know something I bet you’ll all want to see?” he stage-whispered.
“The exit?” Miz guessed.
“Topa,” said Bryman, then he grinned excitedly and crammed a fist into his mouth as if to stop himself squealing with delight.
Cal glanced around at the others. “What’s that?”
Bryman’s excitement segued seamlessly into confusion. “Topa. Reduk Topa. The pirate? You must have heard of him.”
The expressions on their faces told him that no, they hadn’t.
“The Reduk Topa. Scourge of the spaceports. Commander of the Infidel Legion. Slaughtered millions on Piptush V.”
Cal checked the faces of the others for any indication they knew what Bryman was on about, but found none. “No, I can’t say we’re familiar with the gentleman you’re referring to. Sounds like a piece of work.”
“Oh, he is. He is,” Bryman confirmed. “I mean, technically he didn’t do the Piptush V thing, but it really fit with the show’s narrative, so we embellished a little. But still. We caught him and have him locked up, ready for tonight’s show. It’s going to be huge. We’re expecting record audiences. Topa’s horrible. Just horrible.”
The slightly dreamy way in which Bryman said the word ‘horrible’ suggested he felt quite the opposite.
“We generally don’t let people meet the Prey, but… Well, we’ve saved a lot of time by skipping out the other floors, and I like you guys, so… You interested? I can make it happen.”
Bryman shifted his weight from foot to foot and chewed a knuckle in excitement. “He’s the most anticipated Prey we’ve ever had. Once-in-a-life-time opportunity. You interested?”
“I mean, I guess it could be cool,” said Cal. “He sounds pretty famous.”
Loren shrugged. “Meh.”
“I don’t give a shizz,” said Mech.
“Oh, wow. It sounds, like, totally awesome!” gushed Miz.
Cal and the others regarded her with suspicion.
“That was sarcasm,” Miz continued, her enthusiasm evaporating before their eyes. “I want to leave.”
Cal turned back to Bryman. “Is it on the way out?”
“Kind of,” Bryman replied, in a way that suggested it was a very tenuous ‘kind.’
“You hear that? We practically have to pass right by the guy. Let’s just pop our heads in and say hello,” Cal suggested to the others. “We could get an autograph. It might be worth something.”
Splurt rippled beneath Cal’s jacket, straining the zipper.
“Relax, buddy. It’s fine. He’s under lock and key,” Cal said, giving his left boom a reassuring pat. “Trust me. Nothing bad is going to happen.”
Cal stood with his hands up, surrounded by the bodies of several security personnel, trying to come up with a scenario where none of this was his fault.
His best defense so far was that the door control button had been fixed to the wall in a very silly place. Specifically, directly at his eye-level. Whoever had made it bright red and marked, ‘Do Not Press,’ on it had been asking for trouble, too, and he felt that they should share at least a portion of the blame.
“Everyone stay calm,” pleaded Bryman, tears spraying from his eyes and showering the floor at his feet. “As your guide, it’s my duty to protect you, and I will. I swear, I will. Just, please, stay calm!”
Reduk Topa had been something of a disappointment, pirate-wise. He had no eyepatch, no peg leg, and both hands were present and correct. He was roguishly handsome, with a crop of fair hair, a squared-off jaw, and piercing blue eyes that made even Cal go a little weak at the knees.
He also now had a gun, which he’d taken from one of the guards immediately after snapping his neck. It was currently pointed at Mizette, who Topa had identified as one of the two most dangerous people in the corridor, and the least blaster-proof of them both.
“Look, we don’t really care if you escape,” Cal said. “I mean, obviously we’d prefer it if you didn’t, because I just know I’ll somehow get the blame.”
“You pressed the button!” Bryman sobbed.
“A button was pressed. Who or what is responsible is open to debate,” Cal argued. “The point is, we’d rather you didn’t shoot Mizette. It’ll only make her angry.”
“Oh, I’m totally angry already,” Miz snarled, shifting her weight onto the balls of her feet.
“See? And that’s just going to get messy,” Cal said. “So, how about you lower the gun, go make your escape, and we’ll sit on Bryma
n here so he can’t trigger the alarm?”
Bryman’s sobbing intensified, but he offered no other objections.
Topa flicked his tongue back and forth across his lips, weighing up his options. “Or, maybe I shoot you all now so you can’t follow me.”
“You could try that. I wouldn’t recommend it, but you could try,” Cal said, shrugging. He lowered his hands. “Trust me. My plan’s better.”
For a moment, it looked like Topa might be in agreement, but then he tightened his grip on the blaster. “I never leave witnesses,” he said. “Sorry.”
Loren moved before he could fire, swinging her leg up in an arcing outward kick that redirected his aim just as his finger tightened. The blaster bolt missed Mizette, ricocheted off Mech’s shoulder, then exploded against the ceiling.
While this was happening, Loren had bent Topa’s wrist, twisted the gun from his grip, and followed up with a punch to his throat.
Topa caught the blow before it could land, drove a headbutt into the bridge of Loren’s nose, and spun her around so her back was pressed against him and his arm was across her throat.
“Wait!” he warned the others, pressing the blade of a home-made shiv against Loren’s cheek so the point of it was directly below her right eye. “Make a move, and I gouge this bedge’s heart out through her face.”
His blue eyes blazed cruelly as he pulled Loren more firmly against him. “When are people going to learn? You don’t fonk with Reduk To—”
One of Cal’s breasts exploded from inside his jacket and cleaved an L-shape through Topa’s skull, entering through the crown and exiting a millisecond later below the left ear.
Topa’s arms became limp and flopped to his sides. The shiv slipped from his fingers.
He gurgled faintly, as approximately one quarter of his head slid sideways, dangled from a flap of skin for a few moments, then fell to the floor with a clonk.
Loren fired a kick behind her, launching the wheezing Topa backward off his feet. By the time he landed, he was dead.
Almost certainly before he landed, in fact, but definitely after.
Cal rushed to Loren’s side. “You OK?”
“Fine,” she replied, clearly annoyed. She dabbed at her nostrils and came away with the faintest smear of blood. “I shouldn’t have let myself get grabbed like that. It was reckless.”
“Are you kidding? You saved Miz,” Cal told her.
“Uh, no she didn’t,” Miz insisted. “I could totally have ducked.”
Bryman shuffled past Cal, his hand over his mouth, his eyes wide and staring at the body on the floor. “He’s… He’s dead. You killed him.”
Cal grinned and tucked his boob back into his jacket. “He is. And you’re welcome.”
“Welcome?” Bryman spat. “Welcome? What are you talking about? Do you have any idea what you’ve done?”
“Uh, saved your life, for one thing,” Cal said. “So, there’s that.”
“You idiot,” Bryman hissed. “You absolute cretin! You don’t get it, do you? You don’t understand? The Controller has been building up the Reduk Topa narrative arc for years. He’s invested millions in financing. Countless hours. This was his baby. This was to be his crowning glory.”
He gestured to the corpse on the floor. “And you’ve killed him.”
“Hey, it was him or us, buddy,” Cal said. “Would you rather we’d let him kill you?”
Bryman grabbed him by the front of the jacket, his face white, his eyes wide and blazing. “Yes! It was part of the narrative! He was supposed to kill me. He was supposed to kill all of us! We were going to capture him when he tried to steal a ship. We were giving him one final killing spree to cement his reputation with the audience. To make them hate him even more.”
His eyes were drawn to Topa’s body again, just as the pirate’s brain oozed out onto the floor.
“But you ruined it,” Bryman whispered. “You broke the narrative.”
He looked at Cal again, his voice coming as a throaty whisper of fear. “And now, you’ve doomed us all.”
Twenty-Four
For the first time since Cal and the crew had first seen him through the forcefield, the Controller was perfectly still. Not an arm moved. Not a thumb twitched. Not a patch of his silver skin ebbed or flowed. He just sat there in the center of his desk, staring at Bryman as if frozen in time.
“I think you broke him,” Cal whispered.
He waved a hand in front of the Controller’s face. “Hellooo?”
Cal snapped his fingers a few times.
“Anyone home?”
He waited to see if this would elicit any response, then shrugged. “No, you killed him. Way to go, Bryman.”
“What? No! I didn’t… He isn’t… This isn’t on me!” Bryman spluttered.
“Well, you are the one who insisted we tell him the truth,” said Mech.
“Exactly,” Cal agreed. “We were happy to pretend we had no idea what happened, but oh no. Someone—naming no names, but it was you—had to go telling the truth. And now look.”
He waved a hand in front of the Controller again. “Totally dead.”
A hand came up and caught Cal by the wrist. The Controller’s features twisted into a mask of fury.
“OK, maybe not totally dead,” Cal announced.
The doors at either end of the office opened. Juggacrush was the first to come through. This involved quite a lot of ducking and maneuvering before all available parts of him were fully in the room.
Behind him came a purple-furred creature wearingly only a dirty brown loincloth. The new arrival had an ape-like face, a hunched back, and arms that ended in two long rusty blades. He grunted out a series of animalistic noises as he loped along behind Juggacrush, leaving a trail of moulting fur behind him.
The figure who appeared through the other door was the closest thing to a space cowboy Cal had ever seen. He had it all—the big hat, the long coat, and two ornate blaster pistols that he expertly twirled around his fingers as he moseyed toward the Controller’s desk.
“Oh, no, no. Please, no,” Bryman whimpered. “Not them, please, not them!”
“Like, who are these clowns?” Miz asked.
“And why is the furry one making sex noises?” Cal added.
“J-Juggacrush, Eviscerator, and Plasmoid. They’re the Hunters,” Bryman replied, instinct driving him to remain as helpful as ever. He turned back to the silver figure behind the desk, his tone beseeching. “Please. It wasn’t my fault, Controller, sir. It wasn’t my—”
Two blaster bolts punched holes clean through Bryman’s eye sockets, and out through the other side.
Still held by the Controller, Cal twisted to look behind him. His eyes met Loren’s through the holes in Bryman’s head, then the tour guide toppled sideways onto the carpet.
“Kill them,” the Controller instructed, his voice dull and lifeless. “They’ve ruined everything.”
“Hey, hold on there, Silver Surfer,” Cal managed to say, before he was jerked off his feet, launched backward over the desk, and sent crashing through a display case containing a little red hat with a feather in it.
As Cal struggled to untangle himself from the wreckage of the case and remove a few rather large and uncomfortable shards of glass from his face and neck, the room was filled with the sounds of violence and death.
Guns fired. Blades clashed. Flesh tore. Liquids of some description spurted, although Cal could only take an educated guess as to what they might be. From the sounds of things, it was a decidedly one-sided battle, and over in a matter of moments.
“No, no, no,” he hissed, kicking free of the broken display cabinet. His breasts grabbed the edge of the desk and dragged him toward it across the floor. Cal jumped up in time to see the last of the bodies hitting the floor. The legs landed first, the top half landing a few seconds later, several feet away.
“Well, they all sucked,” said Miz, picking something purple and furry out from between her teeth.
“Seriou
sly, those were your top guys?” Mech snorted. “What the fonk was the big one made of, paper mache?” He gestured to the rubble that lay strewn across the floor. “I ain’t never seen no one explode like that.”
“The gun guy was a pretty good shot,” Loren said. She shrugged as she returned her blaster to its holster. “I mean, not good enough, obviously. Not by a long way. But still. He showed promise.”
Grinning, Cal clapped his approval. “Holy shizz. Nice work, guys. Seriously, classic Space Teaming.” He shouted in the direction of Mech’s forearm, where he assumed the comm-link was located. “Kevin, if you can hear me, can you record all that audio? I want to listen to it again later.”
That done, he turned his attention to the Controller. “Looks like your tough guys weren’t so tough after all. Now, you’re going to pay us what we—”
The Controller spun up out of his seat, helicoptering his arms wide. One of them smashed into the side of Cal’s head, twirling him several times on the spot before sending him crashing to the floor.
Mech raised his arms to open fire, but the Controller was suddenly on him, his multitude of limbs wrenching Mech up and over his shoulder, before smashing him through the desk. The sudden flight and the impact jerked Mech’s faulty arm from its socket again, leaving it hanging from coils of colorful wire.
Growling, Miz pounced, but two of the Controller’s other hands slammed into her ribs from either side. They connected like pneumatically powered sledgehammer blows, crunching her ribcage and dropping her onto the plush carpet, squirming and gasping for breath.
Loren tucked and rolled, avoiding a grasping silver hand. Springing onto her knees, she drew her blaster, only to have it torn from her grip by the Controller and crushed to pieces before her eyes.
She spun, sweeping a leg toward the towering figure. Her heel made contact just below one of the Controller’s knees. Pain exploded through it as her foot came to a dead stop against the living metal.
The Controller’s foot tucked in beneath Loren, then flicked her across the room. She tried valiantly to correct her flight, but then tumbled through the glass of another display case and lay groaning on the floor.
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