My Pal the Bug #3: Bait

by Greg M. Hall

Bait

  My Pal The Bug #3

  By: Greg M. Hall

  Copyright 2010 by Greg M. Hall

  This is a work of fiction. All characters, places, and events portrayed in this novel are products of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to persons living or dead, locales, or events is entirely coincidental.

  Traffic Control (Action)

  Closure (Fantasy)

  Rick’s Hostage (Horror)

  The Gig (Horror)

  My Pal The Bug #1: For They Know Not… (Sci-Fi)

  My Pal The Bug #2: The Haunted Drug Lab (Sci-Fi)

  The Water Peddlers (Sci-Fi)

  The air in front of Turlock’s face wobble-jumped like a truck flashing by at hypersonic speed and the ground shook with a thunderous impact. He dive-rolled into the nearest alley, shoved himself off the dirt, and launched into a run. A chunk of the adjacent apartment building blew out in a shower of cobbles and splinters.

  He took a handful of sprinter's strides, then skidded to a stop.

  A second later, modublock exploded and glass shattered ahead, where he'd have been if he kept running.

  Turlock jumped, grabbing an electrical cabinet attached to the side of the building. Hauled himself up. Swung a leg and hooked it over a nearby satellite dish. Reached to grab a window ledge. Rubble-dust and ozone shoved the stench of garbage out of his nose. Dust ground into the burn the near-miss projectile had smeared across his face.

  He climbed, his body resisting the whole way. Gravity on Andajar sucked, but he’d been here long enough for his body to compensate as well as the poorly-designed human form could adapt.

  When a fresh blast shuddered through the wall below him, it nearly shook him free, but he managed to hold on. A couple more shots like that, and the whole freakin’ building might come down.

  A trilling wail pealed off the alley walls, and Turlock breathed a sigh of relief that Tramin was indeed large enough to have some sort of police force. An airburst rumpling through the alley obliterated that grain of hope, and the siren weakened before cutting off with the clash of something heavy impacting the ground.

  Whoever it is, they’re serious.

  He resumed climbing and wondered if the unseen hunter underestimated humans as much as the rest of this planet's inhabitants.

  The corner of the building behind him answered that thought by detonating in fresh rubble and shards, three meters above the hole left by the first hit.

  Aw, crap.

  Then came a sound more welcome than the cop-siren: the barrt of a three-round burst from an automatic rifle.

  Distinctively throaty. The old-world craftsmanship of a Benfield.

  Turlock smiled. In this little burg, few would have even seen a Benfield, and he'd gotten to know the owner of the only one he knew about quite well.

  Two seconds later, a second burst ripped through the air.

  He still climbed, but after ten seconds had passed with no further wounds to the building, he relaxed and for the first time looked down.

  Somehow he’d shimmied up to the third story of a rickety modublock tenement that had had most of its base taken out from under it, on a planet with over one and a half times the gravity of Earth’s. In a body that couldn't even stand up to a tumble in its own native gravity.

  Without the unique motivation that comes from a twenty-millimeter kinetic slug passing within a handspan of his face, he was no longer able to scamper up the building like a crazed monkey. A jab of fear poked in his gut as he swung a leg out and kicked at a window. The cheap, breakable glass—a rare blessing of being in out-of-the-way, working class Tramin and not some Andajaran city with building codes—tinkled in a spray of shards as his boot blasted a Turlock-sized hole in two kicks.

  He hand-over-handed the seemingly endless meter toward the opening before he reached inside the window and, finding nothing to grab onto, slapped a palm flat against the interior wall. He pulled, and just as he was able to rear his torso up toward the window, that palm slipped.

  Gravity hungrily reached up and yanked him.

  The leg on the ledge slid off and soon he dangled, sharp pain in his hand reminding him glass was involved, and for a second he knew he was going over. Then rationality shoved panic aside—sure helps having your life at risk so much lately, his brain inexplicably told him—and he dug his toes as well as he could against the rough bricks below the window.

  With so much effort he thought he’d pop his eyeballs out of his face, Turlock hauled himself up. His hand screamed in pain, and blood lubricated the weak hold he’d gotten. With one final effort he shot his other arm up and grabbed a piece of windowsill mercifully free of jagged shards. He hauled up with both arms, now able to see a poorly made bed and dingy plastic dresser against drab walls. With one final, teeth-grinding effort—

  A blocky humanoid rolled out from under the bed and pushed upright. Just as Turlock began heaving himself through the window, it saw him and screamed. Spastic hands shot out and pushed him on the shoulders as his mouth formed for a no...

  Gravity swam up and this time swallowed him whole.

  His arms pinwheeled. He didn’t scream, just barked out a mwhoop as the second floor raced by.

  Land on feet, crumple-roll—

  He was no gymnast. Pain and a thwop in the head.

  Game over.

  #

  …I’m seeing alpha waves, doctor.

  Well, I’ll be. Maybe it’s not human after all?

  All the machines say it is.

  I suppose we’ll ask it in a minute.

  Back when he lived with other humans, Turlock had heard accounts from people who'd had serious accidents. They talked about how they didn’t remember anything during or after what nearly killed them. Supposedly, it was the brain trying to spare itself the trauma of remembering…well, trauma.

  He’d never had that particular gift. That’s how he knew he'd just taken the equivalent of a five-story fall on Earth. How he could remember the vertiginous lurch in his torso, how his limbs flailed against nothing. He supposed that's how he'd ended up on this bed with who-knew-what-but-he-didn't-want-to-guess looming over him.

  A blessing for most people is a curse in combat, where the inability to recall receiving a serious wound meant an opportunity lost to learn, adapt, improve. His own recollection of how he’d come to have a leg bitten off while patrolling an innocuous open field probably saved thousands of his comrades the same horror in their war with the Tano-Makluu.

  So his brain placed itself into in 'mission debrief' mode, running the sequence from the threat to splitting up with Marve to the desperate climb away from certain death. He'd nearly made it, til the panicky resident—fair enough, its home had been blown to Swiss cheese—shoved him out the window. Once his head impacted the hard dirt of the alley, it cold-cocked him. Recording equipment busted.

  That’s probably what had saved his ass: the alley hadn’t been paved.

  Oh, and the nanotabs he’d taken about five minutes before. He imagined how pissed off the horde of little bots must have been, at first zipping around his bloodstream finding no jagged escape-points to fix and then, suddenly, the brain-mushing impact with the ground.

  “Sir?”

  A male voice, though Turlock could be certain in this back corner of Andajar it wouldn’t be a human male. He opened his eyes. The lighting wasn’t too bright, but it still jabbed at his eyeballs, making it an effort to keep them open.

  “Can you understand me?”

  “Sure.” The word came out like something foreign embedded in him made it. He wondered if the nanos were still active and hard at work, or if they’d burned out on the massive damage that confronted them
.

  “I’m a doctor. Lucky for you I’d done a firmware update for my machines last month. They'd never seen your kind before. Of course, neither have I.”

  “Glad to provide you with something unusual to work on.”

  He was speaking to a creature with a rounded head, no neck, and a tapered body. Kind of avian, though instead of a beak he had a short snout like a pug or Boston Terrier. The snout didn’t move as he spoke. “Actually, all I’d read about humans after your arrival suggests you’re fragile bags of water and brittle bone. How did you manage to survive?”

  “Popped a couple Nanotabs beforehand,” he grunted. “I’d been expecting trouble.”

  “And trouble you got. So you suspected such...violence would break out?”

  “It’s a long story.” He couldn’t trust the doctor enough to tell him about the YOU WILL BE KILLED IN IN FIVE MINUTES text. Even if he did, what rational being would believe it?

  “It’s a story the Sheriff is very interested in, I’m afraid. One of his deputies died responding to the disturbance. A good man.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that.”

  “You probably should have gone to the Sheriff the second you suspected there was to be trouble.”

  “It’s complicated.” He clamped down on the urge to tell the nosy doctor to stick to healing people. “Who brought me in?”

  “A Lotian,” trilled a voice from over the Doctor’s shoulder. His eyes recoiled at the sight of its owner. Looked just like the creature that had shoved him out the window. Squat body, green-gray, leathery skin, bony knobs at every joint. “I always thought they were ‘don’t get involved’ types. But this one seemed to have genuine concern about your well-being.”

  “Is he near?”

  The doctor held up a portable device. “He asked us to notify him when you woke up. Shall we?”

  “Certainly.”

  The doctor nodded, but then said: “Unfortunately, we got the same request from the Sheriff, and I have to prioritize that one.”

  #

  Turlock tried to get up before the Sheriff came in, but nothing happened when he tried to move. Either he’d gotten a batch of lazy nanotabs or they had some sort of nerve block on him. Maybe the doctor’s firmware updates weren’t such a blessing, after all.

  He tried not to groan when he discovered the Sheriff was another one of these walking Glyptodonts. Apparently Tramin wasn’t as much of a melting pot as the bigger Andajari cities. He’d have to ask Marve about this race. Provided the Sheriff didn’t decide to take advantage of the nerve block and smother him with a pillow. He looked angry enough to. Or maybe that was just the permanent expression on his race’s beaklike, hemispherical snouts.

  “So,” he grunted, in as much of a grunt as his high-pitched voice could manage. “The bastard could hit a high-speed hover-car at a thousand meters, but somehow missed you.”

  “He had to target me through a building. Another couple of shots and he’d have had me, too.”

  “So why didn’t he take those couple of shots?” The Sheriff squinted his pale eyes, yellowish like that one kind of gemstone. What was it…topaz? Those eyes could bore holes through—

  “I said: why didn’t he keep shooting?”

  “Oh, sorry. I did take a pretty hard whack on the head back there. I, uh, don’t even know if it was a he, sir. I just assumed there were more cops out there, and one of them took the sniper out.”

  “Nobody was that close,” he said, in a tone that conveyed a complete lack of belief in Turlock’s ignorance. “The shooter was gone when backup arrived, even leaving the rifle.”

  “A nasty one, I’ll bet. Hi-kinetic railgun if I had to guess. The first shot missed my face by this much”—he tried to hold up his hands to demonstrate, got frustrated by the nerve block, and let out an exasperated huff—“well, it was close. Close enough to burn me. Nothing slower than a quarter of c is going to cook meat at that distance.”

  “It was a Kasparov K-7J. Throws twenty-millimeter Deaconite slugs at, says the manufacturer”—the sheriff referred to his infopad—“point three-seven c. You sure must be a big deal, to get such top-shelf hardware pointed at you, huh?” He holstered the pad in a wide pocket stitched to the center of his shirt and crossed his spiny tree-trunk arms. “So, let’s summarize: A trained sniper comes to my little out-of-the-way town, where us cops deal with nothing worse than brawls and the occasional street duel, sets up on a rooftop with a gun that costs more than I make in a year and throws slugs with quadruple the density of Depleted Uranium…which I’m certain cost almost as much as I make in a week…each. Then he wrecks a city block trying to kill the only human that's ever set foot in my town, on a whim and chosen at random, blows up the car driven by one of my best damn deputies, and then gets bored, dumps the gun like a candy wrapper, and walks away—having not killed you?”

  “I wasn't in a very good position to see much, sir. Kinda had a building between me and whoever it was.” Pointing this out seemed to have the opposite effect from what Turlock was going for. “Maybe they figured they did enough damage to kill me. We humans do kinda have a fragile reputation. I never got a good look. Hell, even a crappy look. Then I tried to climb inside this building when some dumbass pushed me out the window.” Aware the thing that shoved him could be a cousin of this guy, he added: “I suppose I would have reacted the same, given the circumstances.”

  The Sheriff’s knobby shoulders slumped and he wiped a paw across his face. “Fine. I can see I’m getting nowhere here. What about the Lotian that took you in?”

  “Oh, I’m pretty sure he didn’t do it, because—”

  “You know what I mean, wiseass. What will he be able to tell me?”

  Turlock tried not to think too long about what he should and shouldn’t share. He supposed someone could have seen the two of them together earlier. Not the sort of thing that doesn't generate the occasional double-take, a human and bug-man hanging out together. “I don’t know. We were kinda doing our own separate things that morning. I’m surprised he found me, actually.”

  “And yet, you knew enough to take nanotabs a few minutes before you were shot at.”

  That damn Doctor’s sure not living up to his Hippocratic Oath, he thought. Or was that only lawyers and priests that had to keep secrets?

  “Uh, yeah. I kinda pissed off a few people at the bar last night. And my race sometimes has these…well, we call them premonitions. Where we see something happening before it happens. Or at least get this weird feeling something’s about to go down.”

  The cop extracted his infotab and began pecking at it with the conical bump at the end of a paw. After a few seconds, he grunted: “Precognition with only half a normal brain’s bits and pieces? Your race is weird, if you’ll excuse my bluntness. How you ever managed interstellar travel is beyond me. So: let’s talk about who got pissed off at the bar, shall we?”

  #

  The Sheriff finally left, and though he was a nerve-disabling snitch, at least the Doctor had contacted Marve.

  His partner opened the door, sticking his triangular head in, mandibles half-open and massive, compound eyes dominating most of the rest of it. The body that followed that head through the door was long and bent like that of a mantis, though wingless. No wings could possibly be large enough to lift a two-plus meter tall creature into the air on the Lotian's homeworld. Instead of bent-in-front mantis forelegs, Marve had a fully-maneuverable pair of arms with two elbows, tipped in the fine yet sturdy k’tiklit that he used like Turlock used his fingers…if he could cut a beer can in half with his pinky, then carve a poem into a grain of rice with the tip, that is.

  “Sorry to keep you waiting. I’d have gotten up but I think the doctor shut my spine off.”

  “You forget that the concept of ‘waiting’ is exclusive to your kind. Besides”—he craned his insectile head this way and that—“I don't mind waiting a bit longer until we find a place more
suitable for a nice conversation.”

  Of course a Doctor who’d spill his guts to law enforcement wouldn’t be above bugging a room. Turlock almost said this out loud.

  “Well, this is going to sound a bit awkward: I’m fine, I’m sure the nanotabs did well enough, considering the circumstances, but if they’re not going to remove whatever lock they’ve got on me, I may have to ask you to carry me out of here.”

  Marve’s mandibles spread as wide as they could. “I don’t think they sell enough soap in this town to cleanse me after a chore like that.”

  “You’re lucky they bricked my nervous system, roach.”

  Clacking his mandibles in amusement, Marve said: “Yes, that’s how you humans must convince each other to work together: through exchange of insults. No matter. I alone would understand how little patience humans have. I’ll have this situation rectified shortly.” He stepped out of the room.

  #

  They walked out of the clinic—Tramin didn’t have the population to warrant an actual hospital—half an hour later. Turlock concentrated on his shuffling legs to keep from tripping. One thing a human picked up quickly on a pan-species planet like Andajar: they were about the only sentient beings that tripped. He’d tipped over into the gutter one night after six too many drinks and about gave a clear-skinned, bobble-eyed passerby a heart attack.

  “So,” he asked as soon as he trusted his feet to do their thing, “why did the Sheriff only find the gun on that rooftop?”

  “It wouldn’t fit into any of my body cavities,” said his partner. “But the good news was I did manage to carry off three of his Deaconite slugs.”

  “Which I’m sure you won’t want to try selling in this town. But that’s not why I asked.”

  “Apologies. I was trying my best to have this conversation in a human manner.”

  Turlock smiled and waved at a passing local who immediately stopped gawking. “So what happened? I heard you shoot.”

  “It was a Tullian. At least, it was meant to look like a Tullian.”

  “How do you know it wasn’t?” A Tullian sniper made sense to him: in addition to being renowned assassins, their home planet’s gravity was even worse than Andajar’s.

  “It wasn’t a Tullian because you’re not dead.”