by Greg M. Hall
thwangs pealed through the air as the tentacles lifted the body they were rooted to from the soil, which trembled under his feet.
“It showed itself to me,” grunted Marve with a pain-wracked hiss, “it’s got an eye, and there are two orbs on either side that it uses to—”
A brain-textured body the size of a Xonthian mining truck emerged from the ground and the Lotian’s words transformed into a screech of pain so high-pitched that Turlock once again felt relief at his puny human capacity for hearing. His partner fell back to the ground, and from outside the compound wall came a population’s worth of screams from the Pendshelemites unfortunate enough to live nearby, screams too intense to be generated by fear alone.
Whatever the thing was, it was gargantuan. Its body rose into the sky, gouts of earth sloughing off its sides and cascading in brown waterfalls, forcing the human to look straight upward.
There’s the eye.
It was a black, moist ellipsoid, tiny in relation to its body but at least a human’s armspan across, recessed into a depression in the hardened carapace of the creature’s underside. Turlock raised his rifle, sighted…
A hundred meter shot, at least.
He adjusted for windage but hesitated when he saw something else.
On either side of the eye was an appendage, dangling like a putrid melon in a ropy bag. As Marve’s tortured screams continued at his feet, he shifted his aim.
His Merton C-100 Assault Rifle (with long range package) bucked into his use-hardened shoulder. A spray of carapace flecks kicked up just to the right of the appendage as the creature’s movement swayed it out of harm’s way, but Turlock, icily calm as he found himself in any battle, kept firing until the fourth one hit.
He didn’t see the damage, but the creature swayed on its tentacles and drew its body higher in the air.
Turlock didn’t see, but sensed the black eyeball scanning the ground, looking for the source of its pain…
His trigger hand flicked up to the Merton’s selector switch, he adjusted his aim, and he let it go full-auto.
Just as the clip neared the end of its feed, the other appendage distorted in a spray of flesh and the sky was torn by a deep-throated howl sufficient to split mountains.
From the ground, Marve moaned in a mixture of relief and ecstasy.
“Oh, crap… We gotta run!”
It wasn’t dying. It was pissed. The thick-corded twanging rang through the air and one of those tree-trunk tentacles raised off the ground. The human hauled his Lotian partner to his feet and they sprinted for the gate of the compound.
Turlock raised a glass. “To hard luck.”
Marve watched the very human gesture, tilted his head to the side, and eventually said: “Ah… yes.” He lifted a brushed-aluminum cylinder of his own in the direction of his partner before jamming a protuberance at its top into a slit below his ear-hole.
Turlock tossed back the drink as a mechanical hissing came from the Lotian. He winced as the liquid burned down his throat. It bit like the whiskey he’d ordered, but the resemblance stopped there.
“Urf. Shoulda known it was too much to ask. Finding a bar that stocked both Lotian aspirators and decent booze, that is.”
Marve didn’t answer for a few seconds, then let out his breath and leaned forward to rest the elbows of his upper arms on the bar. “I’ve fared better, good sir. Shall I order one for you?”
“I think it’d kill me. Isn’t cyanide the active ingredient?”
The Lotian held the aspirator in front of him, rotated it in his…
K’tiklit, right? That’s what he called ‘em.
“At least the fireworks were impressive to watch… once we got to a safe distance, of course.”
“Yeah,” said Turlock, glad to be talking instead of trying to swallow more of the battery acid they’d put in his glass, “where did those fighter-bombers come from? I thought Pendshelem had no military.”
“Vondrak, to the south. They have mining interests in the Lusian Asteroid Belt to defend. Those were Xonthian, weren’t they?”
“Xonthian ZZ-25 Holy Maulers.” The memory of the large but nimble craft circling the air above the abomination distracted him, and he had another slug of his drink before he remembered how horrible it was. “Murgf. Could you believe how many missiles it took to bring that freakin’ thing down?”
Marve bobbed back and forth as he waved the barkeep over. “I’d like another one. And my friend here…” He swept an arm toward Turlock.
“Oh.” Friend. Sounded a little strange coming from the bug-man, but, yeah, hell, after what they’d been through, he accepted the label. “Uh… you guys got Vodka? And maybe something to dump it in, like a Coke?”
“Shame about Guild headquarters,” said Marve as the mixologist busied himself with their orders.
Turlock thought back to the moment when the kilometer-high monstrosity ate one Vondrak missile too many and fell, with a planet-rending death rattle, onto Pendshelem’s Central Business District. “Yeah… what were the odds? You don’t think that old monk had anything to do with that?”
“In what way?”
“Uh… doesn’t his race have some sort of scary power?”
“The Keminar?” A derisive wheeze escaped Marve’s thorax-vents. “The only thing special about that race are their unreadable eyes and flat expressions. It makes them dangerous at the gaming table, I hear.”
Turlock laughed in spite of himself. “Well, shame about our payment, anyway. And the prospect of future work.”
“Yes,” agreed his friend. There. Friend didn’t sound too bad at all. “But all the destruction will lead to chaos in the streets. A pair of mercenaries looking for a job defending those with coin and intact homes could stay busy. Perhaps even draw decent wages.”
The barkeep set a fresh brushed-aluminum cylinder in front of Marve, and a glass with… mostly clear liquid in front of Turlock. “No Coke,” said the sullen Pendshelemite as he set a can of Barq’s Root Beer in front of him.
“You’d… willingly work with a human? Aren’t we deficient in every way?”
The bug-man held his cylinder up to his partner in an approximation of a toast and said: “Your deficiencies saved my life today. And probably a half-million others.”
Turlock returned the salute with his maybe-vodka and said: “To humans, then. We’re barely sentient, psionically defective, and have crappy attitudes. But we always seem to show up at the right place and time.”
>+<
About the Author
Greg M. Hall has many stories published online and in print, and his debut novel, Traffic Control, is available online and in select bookstores. For more of his stories, visit his website at www.gregmhall.com, his podcast at www.killbox.mevio.com, or his blog at sf.gregmhall.com. He lives in eastern Nebraska with his wife, a bunch of kids, and pet tortoise.
Traffic Control (Action)
Rick’s Hostage (Horror)
Closure (Fantasy)
The Gig (Horror)
My Pal The Bug #2: The Haunted Drug Lab (Sci-Fi)