comb. The slightest explosion and the things tended to topple. And humans always overreact; maybe because their hives take so much effort to rebuild. Back home if we lose a hive we just moved on and the workers build anew. Maybe human hives are hard on the outside to compensate for their lack of exoskeletons? Exoskeletal envy, it’s typical.
If at all possible I wanted to get in there, get him, and get out without being detected. And if I wanted my reward I needed at least fifty-one percent of the corpse. That’s why I preferred hit jobs; no one cared about the corpse as long as it wasn’t moving.
The humans seemed to be going in and out of the hive from the ground entrance, so I decided to enter from above. The hive’s hide wasn’t so hard, my claws penetrated it easily, but the climb was taking longer than I had anticipated. At last I got a bleep from the locator.
I entered the hive through a small opening about halfway up. The jump location turned out to be a white tiled room with tall, porcelain water dispensers on the walls. I grabbed a drink while I waited. Someone had left a large mint sitting at the bottom of the dispenser so I shoved it in a pocket for later; a mint might come in handy if the jump home made me puke. I checked myself out in a reflective surface mounted above some kind of basin: two legs, four arms, two antenna, two large, complex eyes, coarse black hair jutted out from my joints, my mandibles snapped open and closed. I turned and checked the simple eye in the back; I was in one piece and just as handsome as ever.
Then the door started pushing open. I dashed inside a small cube and closed the door just as a squat human with some kind of hairy life form glued to his head entered—and beings say I’m cruel. I stood my three-clawed feet up on top of a water trough and squatted down, hoping he hadn’t spotted me.
“Hey buddy, what are you in a movie or something?” He made some kind of gargling stutter I took to be a laugh.
“Yeah, whatever,” I grumbled and tucked down my antenna. The inviso-souls must have been damaged in the jump after all; I should have caught that in my reflection. It’s like that dream you always have, you’re out in public and your abdominal exo-plate is showing. I’d made an amateur move and I couldn’t afford mistakes like that against this jumper, not if I planned to keep on living. So far everyone who’d chased him wound up in a zillion pieces. I had to be on my best game.
The human was still laughing. Humans have many weaknesses, one of which is they have brains, and brains have this need to be entertained, even if it’s by pointless conversation. “What’s the movie, attack of the giant bug men from planet nine?”
I wasn’t entertained. “Strunk off mammal.”
I heard him enter the cube next to me and lift the trough cover with a clang of hard plastic against porcelain. “Hey, I was only say’n. What you wear is your business, doesn’t bother me. Hey, did you see that game last night? Now that was something.”
And humans never stop talking…almost never. I straightened up to my full height. He was sitting on his trough, still running his mouth. He was involved in some bizarre mating ritual with it; his pants were around his ankles.
He looked up at me. “Man, that’s a wild costume. Hey, are you a team mascot?”
I reached an arm over the wall and snapped his twiggy neck.
I went back to the basin and washed all four claws. Then I rewashed them, just to be safe. Man, I hated touching humans. I would have blasted the squishy creep to vapor, but I couldn’t make any noise—yet.
The whole place smelled like human, gross. I rechecked my weapons. The toad sticker was operational but I couldn’t trust the sights and didn’t have time to recalibrate. It didn’t matter. If I fired it at this range I wouldn’t even be able to bring back fifty-one percent of the building. The Oric 3000 Whispersonic Bowling Ball Cannon powered up, but it looked like only seventy percent of it had survived the jump complete. I couldn’t risk having a round ghost through this guy. Jumpers are already jittery; I wouldn’t get a second shot. It looked like the antique was the one for the job.
“Seven, six, five, four…” I counted down till jump time. My antennas tingled and the room started to hum—right on time. There was a flash, crackle, and pop as space-time split. Here comes my guy. I stabbed the Drilling’s business end at the opening and drew back the first barrel’s hammer. If I could smile I would have. This was going to be easy money.
But something else was coming through first. I trained all my retinas on the spatial gap, but the energy glare was burning too brightly. That’s when I heard the patented burp. “Frass!” I spun and hurled myself back through the hive opening as a Micronuclear Tupperware Imploder passed through the time rift.
With a planet shaking lurch of reality, the implosion sucked the hive into an hourglass shape and pulled me back in through the window along with a dozen shards of razor-sharp glass. What’a ya know, this guy was every bit as good as I’d heard. The imploders’ powerful vacuum was as deafening as an unregulated spaceport. Airborne dirt and debris all but blinded me. I managed to tuck into a roll, but I was careening toward the collapsing rift. If I was inside when it snapped shut I’d be guillotined in half, and no molt would fix that.
The entire contents of the room were ripping apart and flying toward the implosion tear. I managed to grab onto one of the water troughs as I passed, the metal walls that had surrounded it and bits of tiles flew toward the shrinking opening. Steal rent, glass shattered, and doves cried. I watched the metal walls crush though the much smaller gap like a tissue sucked in a vacuum cleaner hose. I tightened my grip on the porcelain bowl. Too tight. A hunk of the trough cracked off in my claw and I barley managed to grab a hold of the pipe it had been attached to with two other claws.
Flying shards of glass tore my trench coat to slivers, but couldn’t penetrate my natural armor, or so I thought. “Arghhh!” I screamed as searing pain shoot though my lower left shoulder. I clenched my mandibles closed and bared the pain. I hung onto the iron pipe as hard as I could, my feet were pulled out vertically, my toe claws were stretched out of their sockets and hung centimeters from the powerful opening, I felt like I was being pulled apart from my joints. “Oof!” The contents of the room, including the floor and ceiling, flew by, occasionally slamming into me before being dragged splitting and screaming out of time and space.
At last the rift slammed closed. I dropped and crashed through what was left of the floor. I landed on top of some kind of desk cut from a living tree; these humans were even crueler than I’d heard. A woman with chemically-treated blond hair wouldn’t stop screaming, her wide eyes were focused on my mug. The forced molecular change of her hair must have put her in terrible agony. Her horrible scream was an obvious plea for help, so I help her into unconsciousness with a tap of a claw. At least I thought she was unconscious, human skulls are egg-shell weak.
I dragged myself off the remains of the desk as the rest of the room’s inhabitants ran out screaming. I wondered what was going on to cause such a reaction, but I had my own problems. I opened the rear eye and spotted the shard of glass that had managed to catch me square in the shoulder joint. I ripped the jagged shard out and took inventory. I’d lost partial range in the lower left arm, my favorite trench coat hung in rags about me, I’d lost my inviso-soles and one toe claw. Just once I’d like to molt a complete husk.
A huge crack had formed in the wall behind me. The whole hive shook; it looked like it was going to collapse. Panicked humans were streaming out of it like blood from a wound. Visible or not, I was going to have to beat feet and write the job off as a total loss.
Mega frass.
I was down to five good climbing limbs, but, wanting to avoid as much fifthly human contact as I could, I scaled the outer hive planning to return jump from the roof.
On top of the shaking structure, I was about to hit the activator key when my antenna picked up the charge of an incoming jump. I ducked behind a low wall. Another flash, another crackle, and my guy was standing there looking around anxiously.
He was hum
an all right, and smart, maybe too smart. That was a good trick with the Tupperware Imploder, but it looked like it had been a feint. Somehow he’d managed to cloak this jump past my locator, or maybe it had been damaged in the implosion. Either way I’d just gotten lucky, which meant my mark had just gotten really unlucky. I drew my triple-barreled Drilling and aimed three paces to his left; a guy this good would be wearing an image distorter. I pulled the right trigger, and, “Kablam!” with a thunder-like crack, the shotgun kicked and spat lead.
Wide-eyed and still on his feet the jerk spun around and started looking for me.
Miss, damn it.
I aimed three paces to his other side. When his eyes met mine I saw he was holding a Coleco Edsel Sling. Frass it all to hell. No more time for antiques. With a squeaky stretch of rubber he drew the band back, then, thwangg, I heard the snap of the sling. My right upper pulled the toad sticker and fired just as the grenade went off and a two-ton, V-eight behemoth with whitewall tires, air-conditioning, and a cloth interior appeared midair, sailing towards me at great velocity.
With a screech and an ear-shattering crash, the Edsel impacted the roof two meters in front of me. Steel, glass, and burning tar rained down as tires bounced off the roof
PeeDee3, Intergalactic, Insectiod, Assassin in: Another Time Perhaps (Season 1, Episode 3) Page 2