Pew! Pew! - Bad versus Worse

by M. D. Cooper

  There was a yelp from one of the frags bringing up the rear, as they kicked at a fallen branch, and stubbed their toe.

  “You didn’t happen to notice anything unusual about these trees, then?” Krantor asked idly as he continue to stomp along in full armour.

  Bouffard glanced at the nearest tree trunk in confusion. “Not really, they look pretty much identical to the holos I’ve seen. What do you mean?”

  Gods, he was slow. Krantor stooped to pick up a twig without breaking stride.

  “Watch this,” he said, and snapped it in half.

  “Are they not supposed to do that, then?” asked Bouffard. The party came to a halt, and all eyes were on Krantor.

  “Well, yes, they are,” he said in a faintly exasperated tone, “but most twigs don’t do this.” He bashed the two halves of the twig together, and the frags all jumped back as the impact struck fat sparks.

  “Solid flint,” he said, gesturing to the trees all around him. “Every tree in this forest is made entirely of stone.”

  Bouffard’s mouth dropped open, his mind clearly blown. Meanwhile, Froll raised that uncertain hand again. “What, petrified? Fossilised?”

  Krantor pointed at the man’s feet, where a single green shoot had thrust from the earth. “I doubt it. It’s alive, it’s growing. Stone forest. Silicon-based life. A whole new paradigm. Now, that, Prince Bouffard, is something worth boggling at.”

  Another frag picked up a stiff leaf from the forest floor. “But that would mean…” he tested the edge against his finger, and whipped it away with a yelp. “Ouch! These things are sharper than razors!”

  “And that, gentlemen, is why we don’t leave our helmets behind when exploring exotic new worlds. Hmm?”

  The assembled frags looked a bit guilty. They mumbled, and shuffled their feet, but there were a few mutinous glowers. “S’not our fault,” one muttered, thinking himself safe at the back of the pack. “No one told us…”

  Krantor reached out, a flicker of energy wreathing his gauntlet, and punched the nearest tree trunk. With a ssssssssssschtippp!, a single leaf plummeted down to the ground like a guillotine, landing edge-on at Froll’s feet, and burying itself in the soil up to half its height. It quivered in the sudden silence like a shuriken that had just been embedded in an enemy’s forehead.

  The troops stared at the razor leaf, and then up at Krantor’s impassive mask. He cleared his throat. “As I was saying. ‘Hmm?’”

  “Sorry, boss. Helmets, yeah,” the frags chorused. One of them turned round and headed back the way they’d come.

  “Excuse me, where the fidgeting fuck do you think you’re going, lad?” Krantor called.

  “Fetch helmets,” the frag grunted. He was one of the barely sentient ones, operating purely on instinct.

  “Too late. We can’t just go back and fetch stuff. We’re on a mission!” Krantor hated how petulant he sounded, and hoped that wasn’t conveyed by the amplifiers either.

  “We’re on a hike,” Bouffard pointed out gently.

  “Oh, fuck off and gawp at a tree.”

  Krantor stomped onwards, and gradually the frags fell in behind him. Every so often he’d punch a tree, just for the savage delight he felt at listening to the troops squeal and dive for cover. Then a stray leaf knocked a knuckle from his gauntlet and he suddenly realised these trees weren’t dicking about.

  The terrain was still falling away from the cliffs, so the going was fairly easy, even in full battle armour. From time to time, they’d pass clearings full of delicate flowers, which also turned out to be made entirely of stone.

  Bouffard raised an eyebrow when Krantor halted abruptly next to a particularly delicate stone orchid, and gently plucked its translucent flowers.

  “Is there a girl you’re trying to impress?”

  “Hah! Who knows? Maybe something like that,” Krantor said as his enormous gauntlets manoeuvred the fragile blooms into a belt pouch with astonishing dexterity and gentleness.

  “So, how much further?” Bouffard seemed relieved that Krantor’s sulk had finally abated.

  “That rather depends on what tries to stop us.”

  “Stop us? We’re in a petrified forest next to an acid sea. We’ve seen no signs of animal life since we got here!”

  Krantor sealed the pouch, and stood up with a sigh. “I told you, the forest isn’t petrified, it’s silicon-based. So you need to ask yourself two questions. First, what happened to the birdsong we heard before we reached the trees? And second, exactly what kind of birds would live in a forest like this?”

  As Bouffard began to ponder, Froll scrambled down from the fallen tree trunk from which he’d been trying to judge how much further the forest stretched ahead. The frag pointed into the canopy, maybe fifty feet above their heads. “Uh, I saw something move up there.”

  “Of course you did,” Krantor said. “I was just explaining…”

  “Yeah, birds. Sure. But what if they dislodge a bunch of leaves? This is a brand new primed skull. I’m not supposed to get razor-leaves embedded in it.”

  At that, the frags began to scramble about in panic. Except one of them, who picked up a leaf the size of his face from the forest floor and tied it to the top of his head like a bonnet. Krantor scowled at him from behind his mask. He’d wanted a bit of initiative, but that was a little too smart.

  He raised his hands for calm. “Please, please! You’ve nothing to fear from razor-sharp leaves…”

  Even Bouffard boggled at that. “We don’t?”

  “Not compared to the birds, no.”

  Vrrrrruuuummm! Bouffard was knocked from his feet by a blurred airborne shape that flashed away into the undergrowth.

  The frags rushed to help their fallen leader. “I’m fine,” he said, waving them off as he scrambled to his feet. “What the hell was that?”

  “A bird,” said Krantor, unslinging Lady Chatterley. The trees began shaking in the direction in which the creature had flown. A fusillade of deadly leaves began to hurl themselves at the ground in the distance, and everyone except the bonnet guy was wincing and glancing fearfully up at the sky.

  “What kind of bird would live in a forest of living stone?” Bouffard asked, drawing his sword.

  Krantor’s suit picked up on his mood and injected him with a massive adrenaline spike. He tore off his mask, and hurled it into the undergrowth. He gave the Frag Prince a wild grin, his eyes blazing with excitement. “Stonepeckers!”

  Vrrrrrruuuummm! A dazzling shape burst from the undergrowth and struck the bonnet frag full in the chest, sending him flying across the clearing.

  He landed against a tree with a squelch, as a jagged branch punched through his chest. Pinned to the trunk as blood ran freely to the ground, he could only stare in wordless horror as a jewel-encrusted bird flapped up to perch on the end of his nose.

  It cocked its head to the left, blinked, to the right, blinked twice, and then walked up his face and braced itself on the bridge of his nose.

  Rattatattatatta!

  In a few short seconds its thundering beak had bored a gaping gory hole in the frag’s forehead, and the bird quickly vanished inside. Seconds later, it erupted from his throat, putting an abrupt end to his agonised twitching. The stonepecker cocked its head, taking in the small squad of frags, and the larger man in the black armour. Then it spread its delicately glittering filigree wings, beat them once, and vanished back into the trees in a blur.

  The assembled frags looked as one to Krantor. Froll took a step forward. “Look. We are really sorry we forgot our helmets. Could you… sort this out?”

  “Watch and learn, children.” Krantor cocked Lady Chatterley with a concussive crack, and painted the undergrowth with wide blasts of plasma fire. The undergrowth took the barrage rather well, which under the circumstances was more than a little disconcerting.

  With an unearthly screeching, the stonepeckers leapt into the air in an irridescent blizzard. Krantor twisted a dial on Lady Chatterley. “I want it on the record that
I wanted you guys primed as sharp shooters. Just blast as many as you can.”

  The frags fired wildly into the cloud of stonepeckers, even as Krantor picked his shots with a little more care.

  Their wild fire seemed to be effective enough to keep the swarm at bay, but Krantor was starting to get worried. Without his AR, he couldn’t be sure, but he swore blind that he blasted one bird, only to see it rise back up into the air after nothing more than a brief dip towards the ground.

  “Ah, Bouffard,” he muttered, “I feel a bit bad about the whole helmet thing. Turns out we might be a bit buggered, just as soon as they realise they’re more or less impervious to our weapons.”

  The Frag Prince’s moustache twitched in what was probably a friendly smile. “Joth Krantor. Are you asking for help?”

  Krantor scowled. “Shut up. Sword out. Win. Now.”

  He was rewarded with the most sarcastic salute in military history. “Bless you, you’re on.”

  “Craig on fire! Have at you, wee cyborg hummingbird bastards!”

  With that, the young man charged the avian swarm, wielding his ceremonial sabre over his head, and screaming.

  “Craig on fire?” Krantor asked Froll.

  The frag scratched his chin, where stubble was blossoming hand in hand with acne on his three day old skin. “I think it’s supposed to be an Old Earth Scottish battle cry, that you yell when you get scammed by an internet classified listing.”

  As he spoke, Bouffard reached the swarm, and began to lay about him with the sword. The stonepeckers reacted to the new threat by raining down on him, but the Frag Prince’s sword flashed in a web of death over his plumage-protected head.

  Whenever Bouffard’s trusty blade connected with the steel-plated birds, a shower of sparks leapt into the air, until all concerned were thoroughly grateful that the stone forest seemed to be thoroughly flame-retardant.

  Krantor and the frags continued to blast away, though now aiming significantly higher. Excitingly, they found they could stun the stonepeckers so they fell just far enough that they connected with Bouffard’s sword and were sliced in two.

  Still, one man against a crowd of metallic deathbirds was never going to be an entirely fair fight. Two of the stonepeckers dived down at the Frag Prince from opposite trees, and he was forced to duck, and stumbled to the ground.

  “No!” shouted Froll, but instead of finishing him off, the flock seemed more interested in silencing the relentless pew pew of the frags’ blasters.

  A glittering cloud of stonepeckers gathered over Bouffard’s prone form, then darted forward towards the clearing.

  “Run away!” the formation of frags broke, and they began to sprint for the undergrowth. Krantor shook his head, and raised both gauntlets.

  “Come at me, you bastard tweeters,” he snarled. He clenched his fists, which instantly burst into sparkling blue flames.

  As the stonepeckers closed the short distance between him and the recovering Bouffard, Krantor struck. He jabbed one hand forward towards the speeding birds, while reaching to the sky with the other gauntlet.

  With a blinding flash, blue fire radiated out from Krantor’s splayed fingers, jabbing deep into the cloud of speeding metal-feathered death.

  The birds were flying densely enough that Krantor’s lightning conducted through the flock, flickering across the sparse gaps between wingtips and knocking the birds from the air.

  He should have realised they’d be vulnerable to conductive attack. All the liquid quartz that ran through their veins, and through the trunks of the stone trees, must have been oscillating fit to make their little diamond beaks drop off.

  Sure enough, as he maintained his lightning attack, the stonepeckers began to explode in puffs of feathers. The feathers were steel darts, and the expanding balls of shrapnel were a problem in themselves, but Krantor dialled up his armour’s shielding until he was fairly sure it would withstand even a direct hit. Anyone else would have to fend for themselves and remember to bring a decent damn helmet next time.

  In a few seconds, the attack was over, the few surviving stonepeckers turning more like swifts as they sped away deep into the forest.

  “You can come back now,” Krantor called. “I just saved you from the sort of things I thought I was paying you to shoot at.”

  Bouffard raised his head. “I think I might have shtabbed one or two,” he slurred thickly.

  Krantor strode over to the fallen prince and offered his hand to help him up. “You did all right,” he admitted grudgingly. “In that one case, a ridiculous sword was more use even than the Lady.”

  “You do know it’s edged with warp filament, right? Why do you call your gun Lady Chatterley, anyway?”

  “Because she bangs like a barn door in a storm, and leads to a lot of lengthy legal cases. Now get your shit together, we’ve got some galactic elders to intimidate.”

  The frags had regrouped around the pair, a little sheepishly. Froll stepped forward. “We feel we’re not covering ourselves with glory on this trip, Prince.”

  Bouffard waved him away, as Krantor made mocking gestures from behind him. “You’re not soldiers, Froll. None of you are. For the first time in history, frags are not soldiers.

  “And for me, that’s a victory in itself.”

  Chapter 5: Born to End

  They found the cave towards the far side of the forest. On their walk, they’d caught the occasional glimpse of a stonepecker hurtling through the foliage, jinking around trees, and even alighting on a branch to bore the trunk for liquid quartz sap, but the birds seemed to have lost their appetite for frag tissue.

  The cave entrance sat at the bottom of a steep bank, and was almost completely hidden by a drift of the forest’s razor-sharp leaves. Krantor adjusted a few settings on Lady Chatterley, and managed to melt them away.

  He waved the frags into the narrow opening, one by one. “In you go lads, and keep your eyes open, but your fingers off the triggers. The Elders of Klirrip are even worse in a fight than you shower, they’re not going to kick off.”

  Bouffard paused on the threshold. “Froll told me that old farmer barely had time to whisper his name. How did you know where to come?”

  Krantor spread his hands in a gesture of injured innocence. “Now, now, Bouffard, this suspicious and mistrust is most unbecoming of you. I told you I was doing twisted immoral science experiments in the cargo decks of the Space Bastard. Once we found the planet, it was just a case of doing a few simple scans to pinpoint the location.

  Bouffard wasn’t entirely mollified. “If that’s true, then why the pointless long dangerous trek through the stone forest? Could we not have landed closer?”

  “Not really. It’s a dense stone forest of razor-sharp leaves. We landed on one small obelisk and it damn near fucked the shuttle. Anyway,” Krantor patted the pouch where he’d stowed the stone orchid, “who says it was pointless? Now come on. Your frags are just hours away from claiming their place among the stars.”

  It took less than a minute for Bouffard to realise Krantor had found the right place. The cold dank cave, with rough limestone walls and spectacular rock formations, all gave way to smooth white-walled corridors in mere metres, on a precise downward slope that carried them quickly under Brothokk’s surface.

  The corridor was featureless and dead straight, and the party began to lose track of time as they walked. So all they knew was that some time later they emerged in a huge chamber empty apart from a central plinth which was topped with a sculpture in writhing liquid metal that floated in mid-air.

  “Ancient super-race? I’m underwhelmed,” said Bouffard.

  Krantor rolled his eyes. “You can talk, Frag Prince. I had to take an ice slide into a slug clusterfuck just to enter your so-called kingdom. I’ll take a gentle slope and an empty room any day.”

  “If we’re getting personal, I prefer cyborg attack birds to your creepy psycho janitor manservant. But what now?”

  “Who disturbs the endless vigil of the Elders of K
lirrip?”

  The disembodied voice rolled around the chamber, and everyone spent some time looking around for its source until they spotted the liquid metal had writhed into a rippling approximation of a benevolent and vaguely humanoid face.

  Bouffard scoffed. “What? You call yourselves the Elders of Klirrip? Isn’t that a bit pretentious?”

  “Your Mum’s a bit pretentious,” the face retorted, as Krantor sniggered into his armoured sleeve.

  The Frag Prince’s face flushed, and he drew his sword with a nasty scraping noise. “You think so?”

  “We know so. Every time we fuck her she gives us a canapé.”

  “Craig on fire!” Bouffard lunged forward, only for Krantor to grasp his shoulder.

  “They’re just fucking with you.”

  “You think?” Bouffard screamed. “I’m going to splash liquid metal all over this room.”

  “That’s what we said,” the voice continued cheerily. Krantor grasped Bouffard’s other shoulder.

  “I think that’s enough,” he commanded, and his voice bounced from every corner of the huge room.

  The liquid metal face took on a distinctly sulky pout, then brightened after a moment. “Joth Krantor. How we have longed to make innuendo about your mother.”

  The warrior sighed. “We’ve come a long way to seek an audience with the Elders of Klirrip, only to find them skulking under Brothokk’s Rosetteish Stone tourist trap and dealing out mom jokes. You’ll appreciate this is more than a little disappointing.”

  “Ah, we walked the secret pathways of the Universe when it was less than half its present size. Leave us our one modest pleasure. As opposed to our one immodest pleasure which is, of course, your mum.”

  Bouffard guffawed at this, and Krantor cuffed his head lightly with his gauntlet. “Well, now you’ve got that out of your system. We have travelled to this world through hyperspace.”

  “We know.”

  “Good. So, ah, legend tells us you mastered another form of travel. We beg knowledge of this secret.”

  The face frowned. “We were able to traverse the universe in the blink of an eye. Safely and at will.”