He steered the shuttle toward a clear spot on the concrete streets of the city below, one of the few places in this area of the city uncovered by debris and death. He engaged the landing gear and set the ship gently down upon the ground. He turned to Agent 29333 and nodded. He thought for a moment about saying something more to her, just in case anything dire should occur when they disembarked the ship. Instead, he bit the inside of his cheek and reached down to unfasten his crash harness. Agent 29333 did the same, and then the pair stood. Agent 27142 smacked Art on the back of the head, and he stood. Well, he attempted to stand, but he was still held in place by his crash harness. He struggled and flopped against it for a few moments before Agent 29333 leaned over and unclasped it. Art jumped up onto his feet and frowned, his face red with frustration as he stared down at the plaster encasing his hands.
Agent 27142 led his companions down the ladder that connected the bridge to the hold. Surprising no one, Art fell during his descent and yelped a loud curse. Agent 29333 smacked him across the back of the head, and Art scrambled to his feet. The trio turned to face the marines, who were strapped into their crash harnesses that lined the hold. As they turned, Agent 27142 and Agent 29333’s eagles swooped down from the perch near the ceiling of the bridge to land on their shoulders.
Agent 27142 signaled, and the twelve platoons of B.I.T. marines removed their crash harnesses and lined up at the back of the ship. Though most of the fighting on Earth 616,000 had wrapped following the disintegration of the cosmic bears, there still remained random members of the pink and blue invasion forces that had been too injured or unlucky to escape in the mass teleportation event that the bears had invoked when the B.I.T. wiped them from existence. The B.I.T. Navy had been on clean-up duty for days now. Having started at the epicenter of the battle, they methodically patrolled in ever-widening circles, disintegring any straggler from the invasion forces they encountered. They would continue this process for however long it took to certify that the entire earth was free of invading survivors. There had been many casualties even in this effort of mopping up stragglers, and these twelve platoons that accompanied Agent 27142 on this trip to the planet’s surface would scatter to fill in holes in the effort as soon as they were relieved of their bodyguard duties to him.
Agent 27142 pressed a button on a nearby console on the wall and the ramp at the back of the ship dropped. The first squadron of twenty marines descended the ramp and twisted to look for signs of the enemy. This squadron’s commanding officer raised a scanner to his eyes and glanced around. Satisfied, he pressed a button on his watch and said, “All clear. No immediate danger.”
And with that, the remaining marine squadrons marched down the ramp. One particular grunt, a private from an earth where the people resembled miniature humanoid giraffes, hit his head on the ceiling as he exited. He fell backward and knocked down a few other grunts. The squadron’s commander, a surly human with thirteen arms, grabbed the fallen marines by the collars and jerked them up onto their feet. He berated them as they continued their descent, promising demerits as they sped off to form a perimeter around the landing site. Agent 27142 noted the commanding officer’s B.I.T. agent number, mentally beginning the process of demoting him for his inability to prevent his men from doing something stupid.
Agent 27142’s thoughts were interrupted by the buffoonish guffawing of his prisoner. “Did you see that guy? It’s like: Hey giraffe, learn to gir-walk. Am I right?” bantered Prisoner-Art, a coping mechanism in which this halfwit engaged often during times of tension or imminent danger.
Unfortunately for Prisoner-Art, his interruption had so invaded Agent 27142’s thoughts that the squadron commander’s agent number slipped from Agent 27142’s mind, and thus with it the opportunity to gain the pleasure of punishing the poor soul with a petty demotion and reassignment to some terrible unit on some terrible reality where he would suffer quite terribly. Agent 27142 sighed, the excitement of all the terribleness he had looked forward to inflicting dissipating like so much fog in the afternoon sun. He grunted and removed from his belt a cylindrical black rod the size of his palm. He pressed a jagged blue button on its side, and a blade of blue lightning leapt to life from its end.
He stabbed the pointy end into Prisoner-Art’s neck. The prisoner screamed. Agent 27142 glanced over at Agent 29333. She seemed pleased as she watched the slovenly Art fall to the floor and squirm in pain. He smirked and jabbed the lightning-blade deeper into Prisoner-Art’s neck. The prisoner flopped around like a fish that had been strapped to a B.S.S.C.-class engine battery. Before Agent 27142 caused any permanent physical damage, he removed the weapon from his prisoner’s neck and powered it off.
Prisoner-Art curled into a ball on the cold metal floor, smoke steaming off his body and portions of his bright green prisoner uniform burnt black. He said nothing, which Agent 27142 rightly interpreted as submission.
“Stand the prisoner up on his feet,” ordered Agent 27142. His heart fluttered gently as he watched Agent 29333 walk forward. He watched her buttocks as she bent down to grab the prisoner by the armpits and yank him onto his feet.
Agent 29333 glanced over her shoulder at her commanding officer. He nodded. One day she shall lie below me not only in rank, but with her body as well, thought Agent 27142, never even realizing how ridiculous and stilted his internal dialogue might sound to an outside observer. I shall continue to impress her with the powers of my rank, and soon she shall press herself upon me.
Agent 27142 may have continued these horribly sophomoric erotic “witticisms” unto infinity if Agent 29333 had not cleared her throat. Instead of wondering how long he had been lost in thought, he barked, “Well? Walk the bastard down the ramp and prepare the specimens for me.”
Agent 29333 shrugged, grabbed Prisoner-Art by the elbow, and pulled him down the ramp to the exit below. Meanwhile, Agent 27142 unharnessed a crate from the back of the hold and pressed a button on its top. Air hissed from its bottom and it raised a few inches to hover in the air. Agent 27142 pushed the crate over to the cargo elevator on the opposite end of the hold and descended in the cargo elevator to the ground outside the shuttle.
He pushed the crate to the top of a nearby pile of rubble—the remains of an office building demolished during the battle with the invading armies—and waited for Agent 29333. He glanced about at his surroundings. The sun shone hot overhead, flanked by a few tiny clouds that provided no shade at all. Where skyscrapers and gigantic brick office buildings had risen from the city like needles on a cactus before the battle, there now existed piles of rubble and lakes of blood and gore. One particular gnarled piece of brick shrapnel caught his attention, for a piece of bloody scalp lay stuck to it where it must have swiped some hapless bastard in the head during the carnage. As Agent 27142 studied his surroundings, he saw no evidence of a body to whom the scalp may have belonged, so he shrugged. In the distance, he heard the crackling sounds of Scatter Guns firing and the terrified screams of Arts and Ginnys ceasing to exist. These screams mixed with the sweet calls of songbirds flittering amongst the few random trees that remained erect in their scattered pots that lined this street, creating an aural cocktail that saturated his ears with a satisfied buzz. The horrified squawking of a gigantic beard then drowned out the sweet songs of all the other birds. Agent 27142 frowned. This gigantic bird launched into view from a few blocks over, rising into the air so its silhouette momentarily blocked the sun. Agent 27142 stood in the shade for a brief second before the bird disappeared in an explosion of energy from one of the marines’ Scatter Gun bolts. It had obviously been an Art or a Ginny, and Agent 27142 nodded a satisfied nod at its elimination.
Agent 29333 cleared her throat, and Agent 27142 turned to face her. She stood in front of a rectangular plexiglass object hovering a few inches off the ground. The glass was covered in green runes that crackled periodically with lightning. Within the confines of the glass lay one of the black bubbles that the cosmic pink bear had launched as it had been hit with a Scatter
Gun bolt. Meanwhile, Prisoner-Art used the stumped ends of his restraints to push a second plexiglass object forward to rest next to this one. Prisoner-Art’s container looked identical to Agent 29333’s, except inside it sat a white bubble rather than a black one.
“As ordered, here are the teleportation specimen collected by the marines,” said Agent 29333.
Agent 27142 nearly thanked her for her effort, but he stopped himself short. He remembered the advice about women he had received from his old commanding officer back when he was merely a grunt in the marines: If you want a woman for but a short period of time, romance will do. But if you want her to be truly yours, then you need to constantly remind her that she needs to fear and respect you—for true love can only grow strong enough to conquer all with frequent displays of violence and power4.
Thus, Agent 27142 merely nodded without distributing any thanks and got to work. He pressed a button atop the crate that he had brought with him from the ship. It opened, and within lay a pair of forearm-sized glass tubes. Within the tubes, hundreds of tiny metallic scarab beetles crawled all over each other, launching little tiny beams of olive-colored lightning that filled every nook of empty space within so that it looked like the beetles were floating in some form of liquidized, dull green lightning.
Agent 27142 picked up one of the tubes. Prisoner-Art stared at it. He started to open his mouth, likely to ask what it was, but quickly thought better of it and snapped his mouth shut. The gesture did not go unnoticed by Agent 27142, and he beamed with internal pride at his ability to torture even the most unruly and mouthy of alternate-dimension-selves into submission.
“These are cybernetic tracking beetles,” he explained to Prisoner-Art without being asked. “You see, every jump, no matter how cosmic, leaves some sort of transdimensional residue behind. We’re going to feed those black and white bubbles to these little creatures, and then they shall pick up the scent of where the cursed pink and blue cosmic entities sent the remains of their horrid armies, and then when we find them, we shall wipe their remaining forces from the Multiverse once and for all. And then this stupid little cosmic war you started will be over, and Agent 29333 and I will finally be able to put you on trial and send you to a penal dimension, where you shall be tortured beyond belief for all the trouble that you have caused.”
Prisoner-Art’s face blanched, and as ever, he reached up a hand to grab the piece of onyx that dangled from his neck beneath his bright green prisoner jumpsuit. He apparently forgot for a moment that his hands were enclosed in hard plaster, so he merely succeeded in knocking the thing against his chest. He sighed.
Agent 27142 ignored the gesture and instead connected one end of the glass tube to a rounded receptacle in the base of the cube that contained the black bubble. He pressed a button on the side of the containment unit, and the tiny metallic scarab beetles swarmed into the unit and quickly gorged themselves on the cosmic bubble until nothing remained of it. Agent 29333 retrieved a thin tablet from her holster and typed something into it. The beetles then began shooting each other with miniature bolts of olive green lightning, and soon where a horde of metal scarab beetles and a fluffy black bubble had lain, there existed only empty space.
Agent 27142 repeated the process with the white bubble, and when it was done, stood at attention with his hands behind his back. He glanced over at Agent 29333. He considered once more expressing his feelings to her, but he forced his emotions into a ball and swallowed them. He would not do so now for all the world to see, and especially not in front of this horrid version of himself. So, he continued practicing the courtship to which he had grown accustomed by barking orders at her. “Agent 29333, you are to return to B.I.T. headquarters on Earth 55,777 and monitor the beetles. Alert me at once when they locate the survivors of either of the cosmic invaders’ armies.”
Agent 27142 pointed at Prisoner-Art and continued addressing Agent 29333, “You are also to take this cretin with you. Now that this earth has experienced an incursion on this vast of a scale, I must remain here to induct it into its place in the Multiverse and to ensure that its citizens understand their duties to the B.I.T. and our laws. And I do not want the prisoner mucking up the process.”
Agent 29333 nodded. She patted her eagle on the head. Its antennae stood up on end, and then it launched a pair of lightning bolts that enveloped her and Prisoner-Art. When the lightning cleared, they were gone. Agent 27142 frowned, clicked his heels together, and went to work.
*
Agent 27142 shook the tan hand of the man in the suit. After weeks of meetings with the world leaders of Earth 616,000, a transition committee was finally put in place. A diplomatic representative from each governing body on this planet had been appointed to the committee, and the man in the suit had been elected their leader. He was a bold, brash man with a large comb-over from the United States, and Agent 27142 neither liked nor trusted him. But these misgivings mattered not, for he had liked few transition committee heads over the years and that had yet to stop them from getting the job done.
The world leaders had agreed to the B.I.T. bylaws, including the conscription of 2,000 citizens each year to fill the ranks of the Bureau as soldiers and medical workers and bureaucrats, of which 150 were required to be metahuman, since this reality housed a plethora of such beings. Agent 27142 approved humanitarian aid and the rerouting of a construction fleet to this reality to clean up and rebuild the swath of destruction that the war between the blue and pink bears had left in its wake. Further, a Research & Development committee would also be rerouted here to work with the world leaders to discover which native object was best suited for hyper-evolution into a jump totem, which would allow this earth to access interdimensional travel for tourism and employment purposes—so long as the citizens followed protocol and obtained proper permitting before jumping. The leader of the transition committee would be given an office in the B.I.T. headquarters and assigned his own Jump Eagle for immediate use in his diplomatic duties.
Agent 27142 found these transitional duties nearly as tedious as that of notifying next of kin. Thus, when they were finally done, he beamed with delight and immediately took his leave of the planet. He returned to the B.S.S.C. Mimessiah and sat in the captain’s chair. He frowned as he stared at Agent 29333’s station, currently occupied by a stranger for whom he felt nothing, romantic or otherwise. He shrugged and ordered someone in the room to connect his video feed to the High Commander.
The view screen shifted and an olive-skinned man filled the screen. The man wore a dull blue toga, had a horribly crooked nose, and sported a beard that dangled down past his waist. His hair was bound in a ponytail that hung down over his shoulders to rest near his hips. The shoulder of his right arm bulged with muscle while his left seemed skinny and undersized. His legs were crooked and jagged, which Agent 27142 had learned was the result of severe breaks in the High Commander’s childhood that had never properly healed. The pupils in the High Commander’s eyes shone with burning red flames, and as he hobbled closer to the screen, he grimaced with each limp.
“Chairete, High Commander,” barked Agent 27142, using the formal greeting required when speaking with the High Commander.
“Is all proceeding in an orderly fashion, Agent 27142?” asked the wizened old man.
Agent 27142 nodded. “Yes, High Commander. Earth 616,000 has agreed to the requirements to enter B.I.T. providence, and the transition is going smoothly. I’ve rerouted forces from the minor frontier quadrants 44,001 and 690,000 to aid in the reconstruction and transition.”
The High Commander nodded. “Prepare the fleets in sector 909,771 to fill in gaps if needs arise in quadrants 44,001 and 690,000.”
Agent 27142 nodded back. “As you command,” he replied.
“And how goes the war?”
Agent 27142 smiled. “It is nearly complete. The tracking beetles have not yet located the remains of the blue and pink incursion forces, but as you know, the weapons you designed have utterly destroyed the cosmic leade
rs of this conflict.”
Agent 90909 spun her chair around to face Agent 27142. “Sir,” the being said, “you requested notification when we heard from Agent 29333, and there is an incoming transmission from her.”
Agent 27142 scowled at his subordinate officer. “You know better than to interrupt me when I am speaking with the High Commander. Report to the Torture Deck as soon as your shift is over.”
Agent 90909 looked down at the floor and did not speak, knowing quite well that a long night of punishment awaited.
Agent 27142 looked back up at the High Commander, whose brow was furrowed. “There is no need to torture that agent for following thy orders,” he said. Agent 27142 frowned a deep frown, and Agent 90909 need not look up to know that the High Commander’s request for clemency meant the ambigender agent could expect a worse torture than ever.
The High Commander continued, “If there are no further updates, then I shall take my leave of thee and return to my work.”
Agent 27142 nodded. “Chairete, High Commander,” he said, and then he pressed the button to end the communication. Once the High Commander disappeared from view, Agent 27142 ordered, “Now connect me to the incoming transmission from Agent 29333.”
The Endless War That Never Ends Page 9