The Court of Crusty Killings: A Captain Space Hardcore Adventure

by Michael Ronson

  Mustering reserves of strength, I drew my arms from under his flabby knees, buried my tasers into his armpits and depressed both buttons. I felt him buck as the voltage shook his frame, and in seconds his weight lifted off me and the cloying cream that had threatened to drown me was knocked away. I rolled under a table and heaved, panting for fresh and unpasteurized air. I looked round and the Baker was wheeling, in agony, patting madly at his underarms. Still panting, I took to my feet. We regarded each other from other ends of the room.

  “More fight in you than I’d thought, judging by the size of you.”

  “You should know more than anyone that when the heat’s on, even the smallest of us can rise to the occasion.”

  He chuckled. “Ah, little soufflé, I wish we had met under different circumstances.”

  “Who is your Benefactor?” I demanded.

  “Someone with plans for this world. Grand plans. You’ve been amongst the poor here; you’ve seen the toil that these people have to endure to prop up these ridiculous towers and the chattering blue bloods within. You’ve seen the suffering!”

  “I have”, I admitted.

  His already ruddy face ruddified further as genuine anger entered his voice. “And still you fight for them? Against a revolution? You and that swaggering ego are nothing but tools for the status quo. If you thought for just one second, you would help me pull down the upper classes, help bring true equality to Aplubia.”

  “I thought you were a Baker, not a Commie Chef.”

  He brushed that joke aside. “You jest, but you know I’m right. You toil for the benefit of an over-privileged egotist; you suffer so that he can cover himself in glory. You know this is the right path.”

  “It’s a path paved with the discarded corpses of burst royalty, Baker”, I said with finality.

  “I can see you’ve made up your mind.”

  “And I, you.”

  “Is there anything I can do for you, as a last request?” he reached out and grasped a weighty rolling pin in one hand, then reached for his industrial whisk with the other.

  “Actually there is”, I took out my tasers, giving them an experimental zap. I looked up at him. “I’d like you to make me some pie.”

  He arched his brow. “What kind?”

  “Humble pie”, I said. “I’ll be feeding it to you in about thirty seconds.”

  He laughed.

  I charged.

  I charged.

  And the door to the Princess’s chambers gave way. There was no time for doorknobs, and I muttered that I would pay for the damage to the doorframe in the morning. I laid special emphasis on the words ‘in the morning’ and waggled my eyebrows at her. The subtle up and down motion of my eyebrows was an unconscious cue that her libido would pick up on, as it bypassed her conscious brain. My, but I was good at this.

  I set her down on her feet and, calming myself, nonchalantly wandered around her chambers. It wouldn’t seem right to be so agitated, especially not in the presence of royalty.

  She sat herself down on a small stool facing her dressing table and made herself ready, unclasping her hair and letting it fall over her slender shoulders like a waterfall made out of hair.

  “I am glad that we have the opportunity to talk in private”, she said into her mirror, but addressing me (I hoped). “I know we might have seemed alone in the banquet hall, but there are eyes and ears everywhere in the palace. I know there is nobody listening in here, believe me.”

  I tried not to sag at the mention of the word ‘talk’. I had thought we had that part out of the way.

  “Of course, Melia’ta. Why, I could talk to you all night. I could talk till the break of dawn. I could talk to you till my tongue was tired.”

  She looked over at me and laughed.

  “Good, Space. We have a lot to talk about. Clear those away, won’t you?” She waved her hand at a stack of papers sat on the bed. They were blueprints and maps, with various points circled and notes scribbled next to them. I recognized the layout of the banquet hall in one of them. She must be planning renovations, I thought, to honour her mother. What a sweet girl. But now was not the time for lessons on decor. I swept the papers to one side and lay on the bed in my most scandalously crotch-centric of poses.

  She somehow ignored it and kept talking. “I meant what I said earlier about travelling to the stars, you know. I do want that, and I will do it. But I’m the Queen now, and as my mother was so fond of saying, Aplubia is within me. Where I go, my people go. It’s something I’ve been thinking about for quite a long time, actually.”

  “My ship’s pretty roomy, but that may be a little bit of a stretch”, I commented, looking at a photograph on her bedside table. It was of a moustachioed man in a big white hat, holding what appeared to be a large oak rolling pin. Curious. A relative, maybe? A former lover? I felt a stab of jealousy.

  She turned and spied it in my hand. “You can put that away too, Space, that picture is no longer important. Or at least it won’t be very soon. Oh I am looking forward to the meteor shower.”

  Gratified to hear her say that, I shrugged and threw it aside.

  The picture of the man with the rolling pin sailed through the air and hit the floor.

  The rolling pin sailed through the air over my head. I hit the floor to dodge it, and then moved in to the opening, but it was a feint-the steel balloon mesh of the whisk met me as I moved to strike. It thrashed at my nose in an expert arc. As I backed off, it followed me, beating my face into stiff peaks. I ducked out of instinct just as the tree trunk mass of the rolling pin swung back around with a decapitating blow that I just missed.

  My taser batons swung out and beat a zapping staccato rhythm on his pinioning arms, but despite the assault, the Baker did not slow. He was frenzied, high on slaughter and fired on by electric jolts. He meant to finish me within the minute.

  Damn it all. My weapons weren’t making enough of a dent. I thumbed a button and set them to a full charge, weaving away from a fresh round of rolling pin strikes which fanned tides of cool air millimetres away from my face. I needed to take out one of those arms. I decided on the rolling pin, and as he pulled back his arm for a fresh blow I braved the whisk and closed in for my move. The whisk met my face again and a flurry of metal spokes thrashed at my features as if they were reluctant liquid dairy produce. I pushed through the pain and swung both of my tasers down in a whistling arc until they met with the heavy, knead-hardened forearm which bore the rolling pin.

  A crackling singeing smell filled the air and the Baker let out a roar. The taser batons jolted from my hands, their charge expended. He stumbled back, cradling the debilitated arm. The whisk and rolling pin clattered to the floor.

  “Give it up, Baker! Can’t you see your plans have gone a-rye?!”

  Still hunched over with his back to me he sneered, “Enough with the bun puns, little man! It’ll take more than that to make me crumble.”

  “Fine. Let’s roll.”

  I took a razor-sharp pastry crimper from a wall rack behind me and took off in a dead run at the dastardly assassin. Kicking myself off the sturdy wooden table with one leg, I took to the air, heaving myself into a jump and raising the crimper aloft in both hands to land the terminal blow. Still with his back to me, he was doubled over in pain holding his electrified arm. As I reached the apex of my jump, I thought that I’d have to be careful not to knock him out of the window he was stood next t-

  The window!

  The world seemed to move in slow motion. My triumphant blow now turned into an inexorable fall.

  With widening eyes I looked to the window, more specifically the window ledge, which was now empty.

  I still remember the evil grin of triumph on his face as he turned. His unimpaired arm thrust out toward me, letting fly the hot pie he had left to cool when I entered.

  It flew into my slack, shocked face.

  And my world became an explosion of molten apple and raspberry filling.

  I tumbled, felt my
feet blunder into his ducking frame as my inner ear sent lurching warning signals at me. I had jumped blindly out of the window. What a fool.

  I was tumbling from one of the highest towers, with crust in my eyes and no way out. My arms shot out.

  I fell.

  I was falling, I felt it. She was breathtakingly beautiful, that I knew, but on top of that the woman had boundless intelligence and ambition to spare. Not to mention all the blueprints. She really did have a disproportionate amount of blueprints. As I lay back on her bed, attempting to casually flex my muscles every time she looked at me, she was devising a plan for her people.

  “We expand, Space. We take to the stars. Under my reign, we can join all the other races that have pierced the clouds and embraced the black of the verse! My mother and the rest of the line never understood. Aplubia maintains? Pah! Aplubia stagnates. Aplubia ROTS! But now she’s gone.”

  “Sounds great, baby. Say, if you’re cold, you might be more comfortable over here.” I patted the bed.

  But she was swept away by her vision. “We have a workforce of millions, riches beyond the ken of most planets! We don’t need to be shackled to this one rock. Here, I have the plans for our rockets.”

  She pulled at an arm of a candelabrum, which squealed and gave way. Before my eyes, a section of the wall swung open to reveal a small antechamber: a hidden room. Probably full of dresses and other womanly things, I thought. She ducked in and brought out a fresh roll of papers and laid them before me. I had to admit, this was not going quite as sensually as I had hoped. Maybe if I dazzled her with my knowledge, I could win her bedwards.

  “Here, what do you make of these designs, Space?” She fanned a few out before me, and I put on my studious face.

  “Well...” I said carefully, “this one here, the one labelled... ’dreadnought destroyer’, it seems to be rather overloaded with... weaponry. That might impede its speed and manoeuvrability in space, especially if you hit a meteor shower. Speaking of which, isn’t that later tonight? Maybe we should get a blanket and some wine and sit outside to watch it?”

  She didn’t respond, but simply looked anxiously at more of the blueprints, eager for my input.

  “And these fighters? Well, I’d make more room in the design for some... Phlogiston equalizers. Yes, those. Those are things. And any experienced space captain would want some aboard his craft.”

  She looked impressed. Good, I thought, finally.

  “And these frigates, if I may say so, need more... T... G... 65... thrusters. Apart from that, these Gump Class carrier frigates are as lithe and well put together as the queen who commands them.” An excellent line that, but I so seldom get to use it.

  She clapped delightedly, swept the plans away and held my face in her hands. Now this was getting us back on track.

  “I knew I could count on you, Space. You were sent as a blessing to me. Useful in so many ways. You have the expertise to help us into the universe. You’ve been around. You and I, Space, we can take the Aplubian race into a new era!”

  “You and me side-by-side, eh? Maybe we should practice that. And side-by-side isn’t the only working position we could consider, there’s also the ‘Rexlian Mule Avalanche’, the ‘Leaping-’”

  A bleeping noise cut me off. She took out a small communicator from her drawer and flipped it open, and then murmured into it briefly. I overheard her talking about something ‘falling’ and this being ‘excellent news’. Maybe she was playing the intergalactic stock market.

  She looked back at me, pensive, snapping the communicator shut as she walked over and put her hand on my belt buckle before undoing it with a small movement. Well now, I thought, this had been some off-colour pillow talk, but things were getting back on track. She unbuckled the belt and my attached holster and threw it into one corner, onto a clotheshorse. She walked over to her chest of drawers and rested against it.

  “It’s all coming together, Space. Tell me, what do you think of the rest of my family, the royals, and my mother?”

  I looked over at my belt and at Pew-Pew. I thought we had been getting somewhere. I wasn’t used to this amount of discussion about mothers in the bedroom, except maybe on Oedipa Prime.

  “The royal line has been remarkably resistant to my questioning. They’ve stood in the way of my investigation and each one has protested their innocence more than the last. It has been most trying”, I said, grudgingly, unwilling to discuss the stalled investigation at that point.

  “So you’d agree that they should be gotten rid of. Since they’re in the way.”

  “Well, of course I do... Wait, hang about-what was that last part?”

  “I’m talking about a new order, Space. I’m talking about when they fall and when I rise. I’m talking about tonight!” She took her hand out from behind her back from where it had been fishing about in the drawers. She levelled the pistol at me, aiming for my heart. “Don’t play dumb.”

  Dumb luck.

  Dumb luck and reinforced plexi-hedron steel.

  I thanked them both as I wiped the really delicious scalding projectile from my face.

  I hung from the small handle of the pastry crimper that, in my flailing fall, had sunk into the cement between two stones and held fast. Had the Baker used less reliable instruments or had my arms flailed a few degrees differently than they had, I would be the latest victim of the Master Baker spattered somewhere in the valley below.

  I slowly made my ascent back up the coarse rock turret to the window, with the crimper as my only anchor. Yanking the instrument out and stabbing above myself into the weak concrete was a stomach churning move, but I quickly got a rhythm going and, after a few minutes of strenuous climbing, found myself just below the window once more, with all of my weight hanging from the grip of my left hand and the dulled blade of an assassin’s pastry tool.

  I was bloodied, scalded and bruised, with no real weapon and a murderous intergalactic Baker above me. Panting, I counted my advantages:

  1) Surprise.

  Having finished reviewing my inventory of advantages, I planned my move. I could hear him above me, whistling, rattling more pans about. He set a new pie above me on the ledge and I ducked closer to the wall. I looked up at it. I smiled. Payback is a bitch, Baker; payback is a lemon meringue bitch.

  I leapt up onto the window frame and then into the room, grasping the piping pie by the base.

  “Surprise!” I yelled, announcing and compounding my advantage in one move.

  He wheeled around, aghast. “You?!”

  “You’d butter believe it!”

  He scarcely had time to take in my pun before I released his own pie at him.

  As it sailed through the air, I ran at him, raking my arm across the nearby baking surface, sending scones and samosas into my other hand.

  His eyes widened and the meringue exploded all over his face, molten eggs and hot lemon battering his senses. I knew the feeling.

  Without breaking stride, I emptied my hands of the purloined pastry projectiles.

  Samosas cut deadly arcs in the air and heavy scones battered into the Baker’s ribs. He writhed and clawed at the pie tin on his face as his own tools of slaughter were turned against him. I kept striding as I emptied my hands of nibbles.

  Finally he freed himself of the hot tin. His face was an enormous, sugary blister. He looked at me in amazement. I threw the last samosa at him and it jammed into his gut as a scream I hadn’t known I was letting out died in my throat.

  The Baker finally slumped down the wall, a puddle of strawberry jam pooling around him.

  I fell to my knees, panting, exhausted and hungry for crumpets.

  “Dumb? What do you mean, ‘playing dumb’? What does that mean? How would you even spell that?” I said, looking at the muzzle of the gun.

  “Pah! You’re still doing it!” The Queen returned as she circled me, her gunsight never leaving my chest for a second.

  “So… you’re the culprit we’ve been s
earching for all along.”

  She laughed lightly. “Don’t accuse me of such paltry crimes as regicide. I’ve gone so far beyond all that. And try to keep the accusation out of your voice, Space. If I wanted you dead, then you would be. I brought you here for a proposition.”

  I tutted. “A treaty down the barrel of a gun? I’ve known more auspicious starts to partnerships. For example, in a bed?” There’s never any point in giving up, I thought. She ignored my suggestion.

  “I want to put this silly thing down, but I need you to hear me out first. I know you’ll see sense, once I’ve explained myself, but do you really expect me to admit my culpability in my mother’s murder to the man I entreated to investigate that very crime and not take precautions against my capture?!”

  I shrugged and put my hands up. As the seconds ticked by, I had to make peace with the painful possibility that sex was almost definitely off the table tonight.

  “Don’t look so sad”, she implored earnestly. “I may have employed you as an investigator but now I’m trying to tell you that I want to recruit you as something much more! I brought you here for a reason, Space. I wasn’t lying-your expertise in the black yonder would be an asset to me-to my people as we expand under my rule. You would have a place here: right by my side.”

  “I see it all, now. Oh, yes, it’s all become clear to me”, I said to her, shaking my head.

  “I thought you would! Marvellous isn’t it?” she said with a mad gleam in her eyes.

  “In fact, I had it all figured out a while back….”

  “Did you?”

  “Definitely. Bit elementary, really.”

  “I thought you said that your investigation was stalled.”

  “… Nope.”

  “No?” She looked sceptical.

  I shook my head. “Nah, doesn’t sound like me. Anyway, you were in the middle of unfolding your dastardly plan…?” I said, extending an inviting hand.