“I feel sorry for you.” Jara finished her cognac-and-bacon and gestured for more.
“You can pretend that you’re still pure,” Sharon said. “But you’ve been enjoying that cognac-and-bacon way, way too much. What do you think The Vastness would think about that? How can The Vastness be everything when it doesn’t have cognac-and-bacon? When it doesn’t even know what cognac-and-bacon IS?”
“Shut up, Drone,” Jara said—falling back into her “Countess” voice as a way out of this conversation.
“Keep an eye on her, okay?” Sharon whispered to Kango. “I really think there’s a part of her that wants to be her own person, but she just doesn’t know how.”
He shrugged and nodded at the same time.
And then they were surrounded by a few dozen other servants and Fixers, who had heard that the Countess Victoria was going to the evening’s most exclusive party and were there to help her become as resplendent as possible in hopes of winning some favor. So, there was no further chance to talk about their actual plans for stealing the specs on the secret weapon—but lots and lots of chances to obsess over whether the Countess should wear the weeping dolphin eyes or the blood-pouches.
At last, the Countess was ready to go to the party, and Sharon was preparing to peel off and sneak back to the Spicy Meatball. “Wish me luck,” she whispered to Kango.
“You’ve got this,” he whispered back. “We’re going to open our restaurant. We’ll serve all the classic food items: handburgers, Ruffalo wings, damplings, carry . . . It’ll be great.”
“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves here,” said Sharon, kissing Kango on the cheek.
7.
The central computer core of the Pleasure Nexus looked like a big mossy rock floating over the city, between two giant esorotic spires of pure silver. But as the Spicy Meatball flew closer, the computer core looked less like a rock and more like some kind of ancient sauroid, with thick plates of spiky armor guarding its fleshy access points. They flew into its shadow.
Sharon was concentrating on navigating past the tiny guardbots flying around the computer core, while finding the exact vector that would allow the Spicy Meatball to come right up to the exposed patch of underbelly. And then Sharon and Noreen just had to hover there, directly underneath the computer core, where anybody could spot the ship’s impact-scarred hull, waiting for Kango’s diversion to happen. And obsessing about the thousand things that could go wrong.
“I’ve been telling the other ships about us,” said Noreen. “Our smuggling runs to the Scabby Castles, that time we conned those literal-minded cyborgs into thinking Kango was some kind of Cyber-King . . . They’re pretty jealous of us. The other ships might even give us a slight head start if it comes down to a pursuit. Although it wouldn’t make any difference, of course.”
“I appreciate the gesture,” said Sharon. She stared at the crappy little vidscreen, showing the undulating flesh of the computer core—just sitting there, a few inches away from their hull. She was regretting a lot of her recent life choices. She’d sworn for years that nobody was ever going to make her into an object again, but she’d willingly put herself back into that position—and the fact that she was “just pretending” didn’t make as much difference as she wanted. She felt bad that Kango, who’d had a rougher time than she had, was being forced to confront this awfulness again. And she was realizing that she’d projected a lot onto that Jara girl, as if a week or two of pretending to be a Countess would break a lifetime of conditioning and psychic linkage to a giant space glob. This was probably going to be a career-ending mistake.
“We got it,” Noreen said, just as Sharon was getting sucked into gloom. Their vidscreen was streaming some news reports about the Estimable Lord Vaughn Ticklesnout unexpectedly catching on fire and being chased by his own party monster. Some three hundred terrorist organizations had already claimed responsibility for this incident, most of them with completely silly names like the Persimmon Permission Proclamation, but the party had dissolved into total chaos. They picked up footage of the crowd scattering as a man on fire ran around and around, pursued by a bright blue naked woman who could have been Sharon’s twin sister.
“Great,” Sharon said. “I’m setting up the uplink. Let’s hope the distraction was distracting enough.” She started threading through layers of security protection, some of them newly added since she and Kango had escaped from Liberty House, and spoofing all of the certs that the computer demanded. There were riddles and silly questions along with strings of base-99 code that needed to be unraveled, but Sharon and Noreen worked together, and soon they had total leet-superuser access.
Sharon searched for any data on the new super-weapon and found it helpfully labeled “Brand New Excellent Super-Weapon.” A few more twists of the computer matrix, and she was instructing the computer to transfer all the data on the weapon.
“Uh,” said Noreen. “I think you might have made a mistake.”
“What?” said Sharon. “I asked it to send over everything it had on the super-weapon.”
“Check the cargo hold,” said Noreen. “Right next to the boxes of Rainbow Cows. The main computer just auto-docked with us a second ago.”
Sharon took a split second to process what Noreen had said, then took off running down to the cargo hold, where a squat red ovoid device, about the size of a human baby, had been deposited. The object made a faint grumbling noise, like a drunken old man who was annoyed at being woken up. “Oh, shit,” Sharon said.
“Please keep it down,” said the super-weapon. “Some of us are trying to rest.”
“Sorry,” Sharon said. “I just didn’t expect you to show up in person.”
“I go where they send me,” groaned the super-weapon. “All I want to do is get some rest until my big day. Which could be any day, since they never give me a timetable. That’s the problem with being the ultimate deterrent: people talk about using me a lot, but they never actually follow through.”
“Just how ultimate a deterrent are you?”
“Well, actually, I’m very ultimate. Ultimately ultimate, in fact.” The super-weapon seemed to perk up a little bit as it discussed its effectiveness. “If anybody tries to interfere with Liberty House’s sacred and innate right to seek amusement in any form they deem amusing, then I send a gravity pulse to the supermassive black hole at the center of the galaxy, causing it to, er, expand. Rather a lot. To the size of a galaxy, in fact.”
“That’s, er, pretty fucking ultimate.” Sharon felt as though she, personally, had swallowed a supermassive black hole. This was getting worse and worse. Added to her own low-single-digit estimation of her chances of survival, there was the realization that her former owners were much, much worse people than she’d ever fathomed. She was so full of terror and hatred, she saw two different shades of red at once.
“Hate to ruin your moment,” said Noreen, “but we’ve got another problem.”
“Don’t mind me,” said the super-weapon. “I’ll just go back to sleep. My name is Horace, by the by.”
Sharon rushed back to the flight deck, where the vidscreen showed Kango and Jara in the custody of several uniformed Fixers, as well as one of the senior Courtiers, a man named Hazelbeem who’d been famous back in Sharon’s day.
“We have captured your accomplices.” Hazelbeem’s lime-green coiffure wobbled as he talked. “And we are coming for you next! Prepare for a wonderfully agonizing death—accompanied by some quite delicious crunketizers, because this party left us with rather a lot of leftovers.”
“We have your bomb,” said Sharon into the viewscreen. “Your ultimate weapon. We’ll set it off unless you release our friends.”
“No, you won’t,” said Hazelbeem, who had a purple mustache that kept twirling and untwirling and twisting itself into complex shapes, “because you’re not completely stark raving mad.”
“Okay. It’s true; we won’t. But what does that say about you, creating something like that?”
Hazelbeem’
s mustache shrugged elaborately, but the man himself had no facial expression.
“Leave us,” Kango shouted. “Get out of there! Take their stupid bomb with you. We’re not worth you sacrificing your lives to these assholes. Just go!”
“You know I can’t do that,” said Sharon.
“There are fifty-seven attack ships, approaching us from pretty much every possible direction,” said Noreen.
“Can we at least disable their stupid bomb permanently before they capture us?” said Sharon. “I’m guessing not. We’d need weeks to figure out how it works.”
“Hey,” Jara said, pushing herself forward. “I wanted to say, I guess you were kind of right about why I stowed away. I always wanted to be special, not just another one of a billion servants of The Vastness. And when I saw your ship about to disembark, I thought maybe I could help spread the word about The Vastness to the whole galaxy, and then I’d be the best acolyte ever. But it turned out the only way I could be special was as a fake Countess.”
“You were a great fake Countess, though,” Kango said, squirming next to her.
“Thanks. And thanks for taking me to that party,” Jara told her. “I got to see all sorts of things that I’d never even imagined. And it started me thinking maybe I really could find a way to reinvent myself as an individual, the way you two did. In fact, I’m starting to realize that . . . You are everything!”
“What the hell? You just said—”
“I can’t control it,” said Jara. “It’s like an instinctive response whenever—You are everything!”
And then they lost the signal, because a voice broke in on every single open frequency. The voice was shouting one thing over and over: “I am everything! I am everything! I am everything!”
“Uh,” said Sharon.
“So, you probably already guessed this,” said Noreen. “But sensors are showing that a Temporary Embarrassment the size of several planets has just appeared on the edge of the central pleasure nexus of Liberty House. The weather control systems on Salubrious IV are all working overtime.”
“You’re right; I did actually guess that,” said Sharon.
“The good news is, all the ships that were about to attack us have been diverted onto a new heading,” said Noreen.
“We gotta go rescue Kango,” said Sharon. “And Jara, I guess.”
“I have some excellent news,” came a plummy male voice from the cargo hold. Horace, the super-weapon. “My activation sequence has been initiated. It’s the moment I’ve been waiting for my whole life!”
8.
Hazelbeem, whose full name was Hazelbeem Sternforke Paddleborrow the XXVIIth, was standing in front of the Grand Wilding Suites and Superior Fun Center, where the party had been held. He had a half-dozen Fixers with him, and they were holding Kango and Jara in chains as the Spicy Meatball landed on the front lawn (which screamed and tried to bite the Meatball’s landing struts).
“So! Not only did you steal our top secret ultimate weapon,” said Hazelbeem, his mustache knotted in anger, “but you brought the wrath of the most revolting giant monster in the galaxy down on us. Were I an existentialist masochist, this would be my happiest day ever. Too bad I am an objectivist sadist instead.”
“Just let my friends go,” said Sharon. “We can help. We know what The Vastness wants.”
“You are everything!” shouted Jara.
“We are past the point of negotiation,” said Hazelbeem. “We have already activated the weapon on board your ship as soon as we detected a major threat to our way of life. If we cannot continue the absolute pursuit of amusement, with zero limitations, then there’s no reason for this galaxy to continue existing. I must say, when we created you and your friend here”—he gestured at Kango—“we did not imagine it could ever lead to so many unamusing incidents.”
“This just proves that amusement is subjective,” said Kango, struggling against his chains. “I’ve been highly amused by many of today’s events.”
“You are everything!”
“You were made as a brothel extra,” said Hazelbeem to Kango. “You weren’t even supposed to have a mind of your own. You’re a single-celled organism, are you not? Made to appear like a beautiful young man, to stand in the background of the crowd scenes at a brothel. Something must have gone very wrong—perhaps you received too high a dose of neuropeptides in the vat.”
“I may only have one cell,” said Kango, “but you’ve just been nucleused.”
“I don’t even know what that means.” Hazelbeem’s mustache crinkled.
“It was supposed to be a play on the fact that I have a single nucleus, and I’m . . . Oh, just forget I said anything.”
“Already forgotten,” said Hazelbeem.
“You are everything!”
“Can you stop shouting that?” Hazelbeem said to Jara. “It’s giving me a headache.”
“We’ve been trying, believe me,” said Sharon.
“It’s a reflex,” Jara told Hazelbeem. “I belong to The Vastness no matter what I do. I was foolish to think anything mattered except for The Vastness. I’m probably going to be punished for doubting even a little, in my heart.”
“You are a very tiresome little person,” Hazelbeem told her.
The sky was churning with angry black swirlies, which reminded Sharon of one of the first parties at which she’d been the designated monster, when the Marquis of Bloopabloopasneak had set off some kind of weather bomb left over from one of the old galactic wars. Five hundred-odd people had died in the hurricanes and blizzards before the Pleasure Nexus’s weather-control systems had regained control, and the Marquis of Bloopabloopasneak had played really loud glam-clash music to drown out the screams and the roaring of the elements.
Hazelbeem was looking at the big fob hanging from his inner jacket (which was made of tiny living people, all of them squirming in a vain attempt to escape from the stitching that stuck them together). “That hypertrophic organism and its fleet of ships have torn through our planetary defenses in the worst disaster since that all-you-can-eat buffet escaped from its trays and grew until it devoured an entire planet. I blame! I really do. I blame.”
“Just let my friends go, and we’ll deal with The Vastness for you.” Sharon shouted to make herself heard over the howling in the sky. “There’s no need for any of this.”
“This is what happens when playthings try to think for themselves,” Hazelbeem snorted. “First they start trying to act like people, and before you know it, they—”
Sharon ate Hazelbeem. This happened too quickly for anybody to react. One second, Hazelbeem was working himself up into a tirade about toys that get ideas above their station, and the next, Sharon’s mouth expanded to several times its normal size and just gobbled him up. She spat out his boots a second later.
“Ugh,” Sharon said. “I promised myself I would never do that again. But there’s provocation, and then there’s provocation. I’ve had a lot of pent-up rage these past few days.” She looked at the gaggle of Fixers who were holding her friends prisoner and yelled, “Let my friends go, or you’re next!”
“Whatever you say!” the head Fixer stammered as she unlocked Kango and Jara. “We all just want to be with our families—or possibly go to an end-of-the-galaxy blood orgy. One of those. Bye!” The Fixers all took off running in different directions, leaving Sharon, Kango, Jara and Hazelbeem’s boots.
Sharon looked down at the boots. “He just pushed me too far.”
“It’s fine,” Kango said in her ear as he touched her arm. “Just because you eat the occasional horrible person doesn’t prove you’re actually the monster they tried to make you into. I promise.”
“You are everything!” Jara said, then added, “That guy was asking for it. As an official Countess, I pardon you.”
“Thanks,” Sharon said, still raising her voice over the awful din. “Now we just gotta save the galaxy. Any ideas?”
They all looked at each other, then at the pair of boots on the groun
d, as if the boots might suddenly offer a helpful suggestion.
9.
The Vastness had somehow taken over the festival speakers all around the Superior Fun Center, and was shouting about the fact that someone had dared to steal from its all-encompassing magnificence. And that nobody escaped The Vastness! To underscore this, a flotilla of The Vastness’s Joykiller-class ships were swooping down over the surface of Salubrious IV and firing Obliteron missiles at every freestanding structure. The ground shook, the sky churned, and the Superior Fun Center and several other buildings collapsed as Kango, Sharon, and Jara ran back to the Spicy Meatball—stumbling and falling on their faces as The Vastness shrieked at top volume.
“You are everything,” said Jara, face in the dirt.
Kango flung himself into his pilot seat aboard the Spicy Meatball and tried to lift off, but the entire airspace consisted of pretty much nothing but explosions, dotted with the occasional deadly warship. Barely a few hundred yards off the ground, the Spicy Meatball was forced to go into a dive to avoid a huge chunk of burning debris. Kango and Noreen screamed in unison.
“You know,” said Horace. “I’ve heard it said that death is what makes life meaningful. In that case, I am about to create more meaning than all of the artists in history combined.”
Kango was a blur as he tried to steer through the flaming obstacle course.
At last, they reached the upper atmosphere . . . just as some terrible presence appeared directly beneath them. It was just a dark shape that blotted out their view of Salubrious IV. Sharon struggled to make out any details for a moment, and then she saw some undulating barbed tentacles, and she knew.
“No,” said Sharon. “They released the planet-eater.”
“Is that Liberty House’s last line of defense?” asked Jara, fascinated by the shape on their external viewer.
“No,” Kango said. “They made it for a party years ago. It basically just eats planets, much as its name implies. And we’re between it and The Vastness. Hold tight!”
Six Months, Three Days, Five Others Page 36