by Nick Webb
I felt my face getting hot. “I made the deal with Avalon, a human. You’re both Marines, and you will honor your word. Right?”
I realized too late that I was yelling at them. Not just yelling, but pacing up and down, waving my arms, delivering an all-in-their-personal-space dressing down worthy of Gunny. Hercules had a clenched jaw and Mambo dropped her sunglasses over her eyes.
“Right?” I repeated, still breathing hard and sweating even harder.
They both nodded. “Sure, Noog.” Mambo said.
“And my name is Tom,” I yelled back.
* * *
“Tom.” The voice was very faint, like someone was calling me from across a wide open field.
“Tom.” I startled awake, my head thrashing back and forth as I tried to remember where I was.
The familiar bulk of the Zeron console centered me. Back on the Fury, at my workstation. A puddle of drool had dried on the flat part of the console, and it felt like I had a keyboard imprinted on the side of my face.
“Tom, Madeline wants to see you,” Avalon said. I focused on her face. Her blue eyes still had that searching quality to them, but she was smiling.
“Gunny’s awake?”
“And asking for you. I’ve already taken the other two in to see her.” Her gaze lingered on the Zeron screen and I stood up to distract her. I’d spent most of the day preparing a data package we could send off to UEF Command about Avalon’s... condition. She looked at the screen and started laughing. “Looks like you’ve been sleepwriting.”
I followed her gaze. I had indeed fallen asleep on the keyboard. The screen was full of gibberish. Inwardly, I breathed a sigh of relief. “I’ll fix it later. Let’s go see Gunny.”
The sun was low and red on the horizon; I’d slept for hours. I had a sudden pang of indecision. Maybe I should have sent off the message to UEF, but this was the kind of thing that Gunny needed to know, especially since we’d agreed to let the alien—K-Tor—live. Maybe they’d want him as a specimen. And the baby, too. The political dimensions of this whole situation hurt my head. I needed Gunny to take it off my hands.
Mambo and Hercules were nowhere to be seen as Avalon led me through the compound to the medlab. Gunny was sitting up in bed. Her gray bob was a mess of finger-combed tangles, but she had color in her cheeks and she was alive. I smiled. “Gunny.”
“Corporal,” she said, a chill in her tone. My smile died and I instinctively came to attention. “I understand you made an agreement with this woman regarding my medical care.”
Avalon started for the door. “Maybe I’ll leave you two alone—”
“Stay, ma’am. I want to thank you for saving my life.”
“K-Tor is the real doctor,” Avalon said. “I’m more of a scientist, really. Geneticist by training.”
“Gunny,” I said, trying to put some urgency in my tone without alarming Avalon, “I need to speak with you.”
“Here’s the real doctor now,” Avalon said. K-Tor made some whirring sound behind me—probably a greeting—and I heard the slap of his bare feet on the tile.
Gunny’s eyes shifted over my shoulder. Her hand disappeared under the covers and reappeared holding a slim pistol. Mambo called it her “lady gun,” a five round old-school projectile weapon. Gunny fired right past me, so close I could feel the heat from the muzzle against my forearm. Again and again she fired until the weapon was empty. The shattering sound of the discharges deadened my hearing to a low hum.
I spun around. K-Tor was sprawled on the tile, leaking black blood everywhere, his bare torso stitched with five angry wounds. Avalon was on her knees, her mouth open in a scream, but all I could hear was the humming sound. A hand grabbed my collar, dragging me down until I was nose to nose with Gunny. Her sour breath washed over me and her growl barely penetrated my damaged hearing.
“Mission complete.”
* * *
In hindsight, I suppose Mambo and Hercules didn’t break their word to me. They didn’t pull the trigger that killed the alien.
K-Tor. His name was K-Tor, I reminded myself again.
Sure, Mambo gave Gunny the weapon, and Gunny never actually promised anything, so technically everyone had a clean conscience.
But I don’t live in a world of technicalities. I live in a world of actualities.
I could have rationalized what happened by saying that even if Gunny had died, the UEF would have sent another Eraser Unit to hunt the alien down. That’s probably true also.
It was dark when we left the planet’s surface. Mambo pushed the Gs harder than normal as we climbed like she couldn’t wait to get rid of the place. I wondered if she felt guilty about what had happened. I know I did.
However I turned it over in my head, I came back to the same place: I promised to keep K-Tor alive, and K-Tor was dead. That’s on me.
We paused in high orbit so Mambo could do her flight plan calcs to take us to the rendezvous point. Hercules was already asleep. Gunny was watching me.
“Had to be done, Tom,” she said.
I didn’t react to the fact that she’d used my actual name. Instead, the only thing I could think about was Avalon’s soundless scream.
“Course laid in, Gunny,” Mambo called out. “Our uplink is hot if you want to transmit now.”
“Tom,” Gunny said again.
Avalon’s scream was just on the edge of my hearing now, overpowering the hiss of the electronics around me and Hercules’ gentle snoring. At least she was still alive, I told myself. That was something.
“Corporal!” Gunny’s voice cut through the images in my head.
“Sorry, Gunny. What was that?”
“Do you have our Kill Report ready to transmit?”
“Just finishing it now, Gunny.” The Kill Report was a simple form. How many aliens killed, what planet, time and date. There was a space for amplifying details but no one ever used it. All anyone cared about was the body count. I loaded it into the transmit queue.
My message about Avalon and cross-species genetics was there already, complete with Zeron data files.
I deleted it.
“Kill Report ready to transmit, Gunny.”
Q&A with David Bruns
Where did this story come from?
Honestly, it was my wife’s idea. Christine has eye rolled over my sci-fi obsession through more than a quarter-century of marriage, but she still reads every story I write—regardless of genre—and I love her for it. But at the oddest times, she’ll blurt out an idea and say, “You should write a story about that.” (I believe “The Epsilon Directive” idea came out of an episode of Vice.) When those moments strike, I just write the ideas down and let them cook for a while.
As for the writing part, I love taking tried and true sci-fi tropes and giving them a little twist to add some fun to the story. And really, isn’t everything better with a surprise ending?
How does this story fit with other things you’ve written?
I write sci-fi under my own name and modern-day thrillers with a career naval intelligence officer and friend, JR Olson. He does the plotting and I do the writing for novels with names like Weapons of Mass Deception, about nuclear terrorism, and Jihadi Apprentice, about homegrown radicalism.
When I’m not trying to save our current world from itself, I like to make up worlds to save. I’ve written a sci-fi/fantasy series called The Dream Guild Chronicles about a series of first contact experiences from the perspective of the aliens as well as number of sci-fi short stories. See http://davidbruns.com/books-stories/ for a complete list.
What are you working on now?
At the moment, I’m taking a break from thrillers to write a military sci-fi novel set in Nick Webb’s Legacy Fleet world. The new book is called Invincible, and is scheduled for release in Kindle Worlds on September 15, 2016. Here’s the tagline:
The Swarm took away her ship. Commander Addison Halsey plans to take it back.
If this sounds like you
r kind of book, get on my mailing list for an advance review copy.
Just an Old-Fashioned Lust Story
by Christopher J. Valin
THERE I WAS, surrounded by five of the deadliest scumbags in the galaxy. Five guys who had murdered some of the baddest of the bad. They were taking aim at me, and all I could think about was making sure she was safe.
But I wouldn’t exactly call it a love story.
A lust story, maybe. Is that a thing? All I know is, I would have done anything for her. Anything at all. And she wasn’t even human.
Don’t go getting any crazy ideas. It’s not like she was a lizard or a Tovarian Devil Slug or anything like that. She was humanoid. Ish.
She had mostly the right parts, except for the third mammary appendage and an extra orifice that I won’t discuss in polite company. But other than that, she could have walked around any city on Earth without getting too many second glances. Well, not for the fact that she wasn’t human, anyway. She certainly got a lot of looks on account of how beautiful she was.
A few too many, if you’re the jealous type. Not that I’d know anything about that...
Maybe I should start from the start now that I’ve laid down all that interesting foundational info.
You know how you’ve seen a million holo-vids where some rich yahoo hires a scumbag to track down his girl because she got tired of him, or left with a bunch of his credits, or fell in love with another yahoo, or some combo of the above? Well, there’s a reason there’s a million of them. It’s because it’s something that happens when a woman thinks all she needs is a rich guy to take care of her and she’ll be happy, and then it turns out that being rich isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, especially when you’re not attracted to a guy who feels like he has a right to slobber all over you any time he gets the urge.
Buuuuuut it also turns out it’s hard to give up the credits once you’ve been mainlining them for a stretch. So, you try to get the best of both worlds. The easiest way is the divorce route, but most of these yahoos are smart enough to get a prenup, so that’s usually out. The nastiest way is to make sure he has a big insurance policy, or added you to his will, and then off him the first chance you get and hope you don’t get caught. And then there’s the dangerous way, which is finding some scumbag to help you get a hold of a good portion of his credits, and then escape into a life where you can spend the credits without the hassle of all that slobbering.
I’m sure you noticed I mentioned both sides making use of a scumbag. And that’s because, in this particular case, I happened to be said scumbag for both sides.
You see, Xiomara—that was her name, or rather the Earth standard approximation of it—had decided to try to extricate some credits for herself without any assistance, knowing full well that anyone she chose to assist her would probably insist on some slobbering of his own. And, because she’s good at pretty much everything she does, she darn near got away with it. In fact, if her husband hadn’t hired the best of the best to track her down, she would have.
Now, I don’t usually toot my own horn unless there’s a serious need to toot it, but I should probably clarify here that I happen to be the aforementioned best of the best. It’s a formerly disputed fact that is no longer in dispute. Because if those who disputed it had been correct, then they would currently be considered the best rather than what they are considered.
Which is deceased.
So this guy—let’s call him Big Hank (since that was, after all, his name)—hired me to track down his wife and his credits, and return the one he still actually cared about (hint: it didn’t have three breasts) and get rid of the other.
Now, I’m not going to pretend that she fell for me as soon as we laid eyes upon one another, or even that I fell for her. Especially the former, since I’m not much to look at myself. But she knew she was dead if she didn’t get me over to her side somehow, and she happened to have certain attributes that I found very appealing. So we quickly came to an... understanding.
* * *
Interlude: There’s an ancient Earth song that still streams the metanet occasionally with the metaphor of driving in the passing lane of a land highway, by a band named after an extinct bird of great import to the old Earth United States of America. You may know it—I’m not going to quote it because I don’t want to owe half a year’s pay just to mention it, but you can still find it without too much effort. In the song, there’s a couple of ne’er-do-wells who run around drinking and snorting intoxicants and generally having one big party all the time.
Well, our life became a lot like that song, except instead of driving around what’s now become the great salt flats on Earth in a vehicle running on combustible fossil fuels, we were blasting around the galaxy in my ship, the Red Raptor, spending Big Hank’s credits like they were about to expire. We also may or may not have stopped by some of the galaxy’s most affluent neighborhoods and financial institutions on occasion to refill our coffers. I’m not one to incriminate myself, so I’ll leave all that to your imagination.
In addition, we often made an appearance at the best pasta joints we could find. Xiomara loved her some pasta, and couldn’t get enough of it. We’d always get extra to have later on board ship. I even got pretty good at whipping some up in my small galley when she got desperate. Turned out she enjoyed my pasta as much as the stuff at the fanciest places. At least, that’s what she told me.
* * *
Hank...
Well, Hank was not happy.
There were a lot of reasons why Hank felt that way. Not the least of which was that he’d hired me, and there’s obviously no way the second-best scumbag would be able to take me down, even in the awful state I was in a good deal of the time. Or even the second and third best scumbags together, for that matter. But the second through sixth best? That would be a problem. And, thanks to Hank, it did become my problem.
I took to calling them the Cinque, just because I thought it sounded cooler if I was being chased by a posse by that name instead of just five regular scumbags. I’d been working with and against these guys for years, depending on the circumstances, with the exception of the guy who was Number Five with a bullet. Never met him because he was new to the business of doing what we do, but he was what you might call a “rising star.”
Plus, I didn’t actually know any of their names. I hadn’t bothered to learn them before, even when I was working with them, and I wasn’t about to start then. So I just referred to them as “Two” through “Six.”
* * *
Before I get into too much detail about these new scumbags, let me first tell you a little bit more about myself. I could tell you I had a horrible childhood, but that would be putting much too rosy of a spin on things. I was orphaned on a barren rock of a planetoid called Finnegan’s Centaur, way out in the middle of the Reach, which had been abandoned by the mining company because it hadn’t been turning much of a profit.
You’d think they’d let the miners and merchants who were there know, and maybe even provide some transport out of there. But that would be giving them too much credit. They decided it was cheaper just to leave everyone and everything there, figuring it would sort itself out one way or another.
And, boy, did it.
At first, everyone just thought the supply ships were running late. Maybe a schedule mix up or some such. But then it started to be a while, and supplies were running low, so the supervisors attempted to call out to headquarters to find out what was what.
But the comm stations were one of the few items that were actually worth anything on this miserable rock, and the last ships out had quietly taken them, along with anything else they thought was worth saving. From what I can gather, one of the crew thought my mom fit that category, because I never saw her after that last ship left. I’d like to think she was forced into leaving and pleaded for them to take me along too, but I wasn’t so young that I don’t remember what she was like, and I find that version of the story
to be highly unlikely. The truth is, she was probably passed around the crew until they were tired of her, and then tossed out an airlock.
My dad was the closest thing to law enforcement that existed in our small community. He wasn’t a pleasant man, which actually helped him in his job, and he was highly proficient with a blaster. But when the truth about the company had been discovered and the rioting started, he was one of the first to be killed.
Which left me in quite a predicament. Because I was barely seven sols old.
Being the only kid on that godsforsaken rock actually had its advantages, including the fact that nobody ever thought to childproof anything. I don’t mean putting guard rails up and plugging empty sockets. I mean there were lots of ways someone my size could get in and around pretty much everyplace in that small settlement because nobody thought to make it otherwise.
I swiftly learned that I could go practically anywhere without being seen, and that meant I could take whatever I needed from whoever had it. And if what I needed to take was a person’s life, then I took that. Within a few months I was so good at sneaking up and slitting someone’s throat that they never even knew I was there.
Sneak.
Slit.
Steal.
Repeat.
That was my life for years—I lost track of how many—until there was no longer anything to steal, or anybody to steal from. Eventually, I was on my way to starving, and there was nothing that was going to prevent it. Truth to tell, I had become somewhat feral.
Then a ship showed up. From what I gathered, they needed to do some repairs that required them to land, and this was the closest place. While they were taking a look around, I stowed away aboard the ship.