by D. Tolmach
That night Karlatte was lying on her bed reading an actual physical paper book. As big a pain in the ass the Muggers could be, she was glad they cataloged so much of Human history. In a past life, she imagined herself slaving over a piece of parchment, dipping a feather in ink by candlelight, or spending hours bent over a typewriter in a bombed-out building, covering one of Earth’s many romantic wars back when guns shot bullets and soldiers drowned in mud or were blown apart in an unimaginable barrage of artillery fire in places with exotic names like Passchendaele and Verdun.
As she read, half of her brain was already working on what she was going to write next. All of her favorite authors had gone to war, but until she had returned from self-imposed exile and been wrongly imprisoned for murder, Karlatte felt she hadn’t had anything real to write about.
Great literature could be born only of tragedy, and the last few days would make a great prologue to her biography, which she hadn’t given up on despite the fact that anyone who could tell her anything about the elusive Andromeda Mayday was dead. There was one person who was dead who she could still talk to—Mayday herself—but her brain had been downloaded into the computer of a ship that was now somewhere outside the Milky Way, traveling to her eponymic galaxy. Tombstone, despite the conditions of their interview, had given her some valuable information, but she was still missing several important pieces to the puzzle.
Her thoughts became less and less coherent as her eyelids grew heavy, and she found herself drifting off, not noticing the meter-long black spider descending from the ceiling above her.
* * *
“Shit, she’s already asleep.” Kanard, Shakespeare, Armida, and Pritchard were watching the feed from a video camera they had installed in Karlatte’s room. Mugger spiders were frightening but harmless, nothing more than a nuisance, but they hoped it would scare her enough to alert her viral twin.
There was a terrified shriek from down the hall as Chirp discovered the spider they had let into his room, jolting Karlatte awake, who let out an almost identical shriek upon seeing the enormous eight legs about to close in on her.
“They should show themselves any second . . .” Pritchard was on the edge of his seat.
With a thud, several books flew off the bookshelf as Karlatte’s naked double jumped from the wall and started ripping the spider limb from limb.
“Go!” Shakespeare barked into his radio, and Mugger security agents broke into the room, plasma rifles set to incapacitate. In the span of a few seconds, they had bagged both interlopers and Karlatte and Chirp sat on their respective beds, shivering in shock.
Assassination
The Mugger Dungeon was a veritable museum of Human torture devices from throughout Earth’s history, none of which unfortunately were applicable for use on a walking virus that could squeeze its way out of any stocks or iron maiden. Therefore, Shakespeare had two glass boxes built to hold his newest prisoners. They were brightly lit, and a large video camera pointed toward them. The heavy wooden entrance opened slowly, and the copies of Chirp and Karlatte threw themselves against their transparent walls, hissing and hurling threats and obscenities at Kanard as he entered. Without a word, he pulled out a plasma pistol and shot the faux Chirp, the plasma beam bursting through the glass and killing him instantly. This startled Karlatte’s double, who quieted instantly and glared at the priest with an unsettling smile.
“I’m giving you a choice: you can either do as I ask and you will be rewarded with nothing less than the feast of a lifetime, or you can die.” He pointed his gun at her. She looked at him defiantly for a moment before she broke.
“I’m listening, Human. What is your offer?”
* * *
“The first step of our plan has been set into motion. All that worries me at the moment is Gerrard. We need to get him out of our way before he ruins everything.” Kanard had again assembled the Secret League of Assassins, as Chirp called them—himself, Armida, and Liona—to his office.
“I’ll kill him.”
“Now, Liona, I was thinking of something a little less drastic.” He pulled out an old-fashioned nightgown from Ancient Earth and called Karlatte on his wrist communicator.
* * *
“You want me to seduce a priest?” She was wearing the nightgown Kanard gave her, which turned out to be practically see-through.
“Not seduce, no. I’m rather positive he won’t touch you. The man is a true believer and a virgin. He wouldn’t know what to do with a woman if she threw herself on him. Trust me, I’ve known him since he entered the seminary. What we are asking you to do is to pay him a visit and confess, in great detail, any sexual indiscretions you have had and beg for forgiveness. Use your imagination. Tell him how you pleasure yourself and that you have been a very bad girl. If you’ve had any lesbian experiences, you can throw those in. When you get a chance, and you may have to ask to use the bathroom because it is unlikely he will let you out of his sight otherwise, hide this somewhere he won’t find it.” Kanard held up a canteen-sized metal flask. “You press this button—it time-releases Mugger gas—and leave immediately. By this point Armida will have disabled his ventilation system. According to my calculations, after you leave, he will spend approximately one minute masturbating, after which he will spend the rest of the evening praying for forgiveness as the gas puts him into a coma.”
Karlatte took this all in. “Wouldn’t it be easier to just have him arrested?”
“Unfortunately, according to the Mugger Constitution, one must commit a crime if one is to be arrested. They’re terrible sticklers about that. In the meantime, Gerrard has locked himself in his room and refuses to listen to reason.”
“I guess I’ll do it.” She was still confused as to what this was all about, but she had promised to do anything to repay him.
“Wonderful. Here, put this on.” Kanard removed a necklace with a Truther medallion from his neck and put it around hers, where it hung perfectly in between her breasts and just above the low neckline of the dress. “Don’t forget to hang a do not disturb sign when you leave, and, um, don’t wear any shoes. He has a thing for feet.”
* * *
“I must cleanse my soul to you, Father, in front of Goldath. I have a very sinful nature, and sometimes I get these urges that I can’t control.” Karlatte straightened up in front of the mirror and fixed her hair. She had taken her role as a femme fatale agent provocateur seriously and found she liked it, going so far as to get a pedicure. The most important thing, she told herself after doing another line of coke, is be believable. Don’t overact. But really, fuck it. Men are idiots. Once that Holy Roller gets a glimpse of these tits . . .
* * *
“Who is it?” The voice was jarring and his words slurred.
“Father Gerrard, it’s me, Karlatte. Please let me in.”
The door opened and Gerrard stood in the entrance in his underwear, smoking a cigarette. He stank of vodka, and she felt his red eyes scan her entire body as he looked her from head to toe and back.
“What do you want?”
Great, fucking Tombstone all over again. “I, um, would like to confess my sins.”
The priest smirked cynically. “You want absolution? From me?”
“Yeah, I, uh, have a sinful—”
“Go tell it to your friend Kanard.” He started to close the door, but she held it back.
“I don’t . . . I want you. I mean, to hear my confession.”
“Well, then come the fuck on in.”
The room was dark and rank, and all the hairs on Karlatte’s body rose in unison as her lizard brain sensed danger. This was not the Gerrard Kanard had prepared her for. As she turned around, she realized she was standing in front of the only lamp in the room and her nightgown was completely translucent. He was closer than she expected, looking her up and down again.
“What is it you want to tell me?”
“I have, um, done some very bad things, and I need forgiveness from Goldath.”
“Ba
d things?” He moved in even closer, his hot breath showering her face, mixing with her sweat. “You mean worse than jerking off that accordionist?”
“Well, no, I mean, yeah . . .” She found herself backing up toward the lamp. She could feel its heat against her skin, and she started feeling faint.
“Why don’t people like me, Karlatte?”
“What do you mean? Of course people like you. Everybody likes you. They like you a lot. Nobody doesn’t like you.”
“You like me?”
“Sure.”
“Better than Kanard?” With this he grabbed her waist and pulled her in to kiss her, but with a sudden rush of adrenaline, she threw his hands off and stepped back, knocking the lamp onto the floor and shattering it. She deftly stepped to the side, and as he rushed to block her from leaving the room, she ran the other way into the bathroom and locked the door behind her before collapsing onto the floor. For a moment the only sensation was the blood pulsing in her ears before he started pulling on the doorknob and pounding on the door.
“Get the fuck out here, slut!”
From her purse she pulled the canister of Mugger’s gas and set it on the floor before reaching in for her cigarettes. Her hands shaking, she put one in her mouth while searching blindly in the bag for a lighter with no luck. Fuckin’ A, you’re a moron, Karlatte. Then she realized that next to the shower there was a water heater with a pilot light, so she stuck the end in the tiny hole and took a drag, finally managing to mentally block out Gerrard’s commotion and focus on how she was going to get herself out of this. When she was finished, she realized that the noise had ceased, but from the other side of the door she could hear him sobbing softly.
“Gerrard, I need you to get away from the door and let me leave, or I’m going to call Kanard.” She could hear him finally get up and step away. After pressing the button on the canister and putting it under the sink, she cracked open the door and peered out. The room was completely dark, but she could see his silhouette near the bed.
“I’m sorry, Karlatte. I won’t touch you again. I didn’t mean to scare you. Open.” The front door opened, letting the soft light from the hall in. Gerrard was even more disheveled, and his eyes were glazed and looking off into a corner. Karlette had no idea what to say to him, so she just hurried out as quickly as possible.
It was when she reached the elevator that she realized she had forgotten to hang a do not disturb sign, so she ran back and nicked one from a neighboring door.
* * *
“How’d it go?”
“Just as planned.”
“Wonderful! He should be asleep any minute now. Thank you very much, Karlatte. You’ve helped us immensely.”
She smiled with a hint of sadness. Her lower back still pulsed with pain from where she was burned by Gerrard’s lamp. “Liona, can I talk to you?”
“Sure.” They stepped out of Kanard’s office.
“You knew Andromeda, didn’t you?”
“I met her once, after she died. I was at her funeral.”
“Do you mind if I ask you some questions about her?”
“No, of course not.”
* * *
Osco Silvos caressed his daughter’s face, cupping the light particles that made up her hologram with his hands, not feeling her skin, yet somehow feeling her skin.
“Daddy, I’m coming home.”
It was this part he rewound and played over and over again. Fourteen years. Had it been that long? Retina scans, voice analysis, and fingerprints of the recording all pointed to the truth he had felt in his soul all this time. Karlatte was alive.
* * *
She was finishing up her feature on the sad fate of the Tombstone Wolfram Sextet when there was a knock on the door.
“Open.”
“I hear you’re leaving us.” It was Pritchard.
“Yup. Liona gave me her ship, and I’m heading off to Andromeda in search of a woman named Andromeda. She’s got a decent head start and I don’t know if I’ll ever find her, but I have nothing to lose.”
“Need some company?”
“Don’t be silly. It’s a one-way trip. Most of the time you’ll have to be in stasis, and you’ll never see anyone you know ever again. You’ll be stuck with me.”
“Or, to put it another way, a once-in-a-lifetime adventure into the unknown with the brightest and most beautiful woman in the Milky Way.”
“You don’t even know me, Pritchard P. Perkins, Interdimensional Man of Mystery.”
“Parsons.”
“Sorry, Pritchard P. Parsons, Interdimensional Man of Mystery.”
“No, but I have a good feeling about you, Karlatte Silvos, Fearless Interdimensional Truth Seeker.”
“Centaurus.”
“Sorry, Karlatte Centaurus, Fearless Interdimensional Truth Seeker.”
“You don’t sign letters with emoticons and x’s and o’s, do you?”
“Of course not. I’m a grown-ass Human adult.”
“Pack your things.”
* * *
As her ship flew farther and farther away and G-44-01 became just another speck in the asteroid field, Karlatte realized she would miss those weirdos. She could only hope that whatever adventures awaited her out there in the darkness of space would provide just as much fodder for her next book. Finally, she pressed Send on her tablet, mailing her article to her editors, and joined Pritchard in his stasis pod.
* * *
“Ladies and gentlemen, patriotic citizens of this great Galactic Union of Autonomous Planets, it is my sad duty to inform you that, at 62:83 this morning, our leader, our guiding light, our moral compass President St. Osco Silvos was assassinated.” Vildana Dianae was dressed in black, and her eyes were red from crying. “A small band of terrorists made up of aliens and xenophiles, led by a disgraced priest, infiltrated the presidential palace using a clone of Karlatte Silvos, the president’s deceased daughter, as bait. They genetically created this monstrosity with the help of a mysterious race of aliens called Muggers. As he embraced it, thinking it was his long-lost daughter returning home, it killed him and . . .”—she put a tissue to her eyes as the tears started afresh—“started to eat him before the secret services destroyed it. Just hours ago the Galactic Navy conducted a raid on G-44-01 to arrest those responsible for planning the attack, but the aliens launched missiles at the armada. In the ensuing battle, our brave soldiers neutralized the enemy.” Video of the carnage was shown on every holoviewer in the Union. “The only bright spot in this terrible story is that a Human priest taken hostage and tortured by the cabal was rescued from the alien lair.” Footage played of Father Gerrard being carried out on a stretcher under gunfire with Bertha jumping over him and darting out into the snow, followed by mugshots of Liona, Chirp, Armida, and Kanard. “The killers, along with fifty-three senators from the Young Reformer Caucus of the Galactic Assembly and the governors of three star systems who assisted in the plot, have been sentenced to death and are scheduled to be hanged in St. Osco Silvos Square right after these commercial messages. Please stay tuned.”
Silvos
“Osco!”
Vildana Dianae was a field mouse of a girl with crooked teeth and thick glasses running through the streets of Port City, weaving through the breadlines and striking workers and dodging the heavily armed Department of Public Order troops and bored secret policemen, scanning every angry, dreary face for the boy she secretly loved.
“Osco!”
She finally spotted him in a group of about thirty fellow Young Reactionaries demonstrating across from a large mass of burly men picketing the Dynastic Button Factory. He was shouting hysterically at them and carrying a sign that read GET BACK TO WORK YA BUMS. It was obvious that if it hadn’t been for the cops from the DPO, the workers would have severely thrashed the small group of counterdemonstrators. As it was, a harmless projectile would be lobbed over the flimsy fence separating the factions, or a gob of spit, and the police would pretend not to notice. Nobody wanted the pol
ice to get involved, especially not the police.
Things were not going well for the Galactic Dynasty.
“Osco!”
A couple of months earlier and the DPO would have gladly gone in and beaten and arrested all the workers at the slightest provocation. They would have really enjoyed it, too. Beating protesters was one of the main perks of being a police officer. If they were lucky, their chiefs would order them to disappear a union leader or two into the bowels of the secret-police headquarters, where they could take turns stuffing various foreign objects into various orifices. But now the mood in the city was changing. The food shortages were starting to affect everyone, and devaluation meant that bribes didn’t have the same purchasing power that they used to. More and more cops had sons or brothers coming home from the Great War in body bags. The collective subconscious of the workers seemed to have sensed this, and they stopped openly antagonizing and targeting the police in terrorist acts, instead trying to win them over. You can still be a violent cunt, just be one of our violent cunts.
“Osco!”
There had been all manner of rebellions, revolts, and uprisings before, even an assassination or two, but for the people of the Dynasty this seemed fundamentally different. The war was depleting pensions, the value of a Dynastic Credit bill had tanked, and wages were being paid later and later, often in shoddy boots and cheap vodka. Something had to give.
“Osco!”
She waved frantically, but he still didn’t hear her. It was a brisk –42oC sunny spring day, and the galactic spiral arched majestically in the sky. A roar of boos and curses erupted as the government troops formed a corridor through the strikers, escorting a column of drunken, frightened scabs into the factory. Workers pelted them with rotten vegetables and threats, and again the police pretended not to notice. The Young Reactionaries cheered.