She seized on the excuse. Villains tended to love this kind of thing. The trick was to create an opening while seeming like you knew all along. Mission accomplished. “I killed my mother so that I could take her place”, she began, smiling at the recollection. “But for years-YEARS, Space-I’ve been manipulating the rebels, making them ready, giving them things, feeding them information. Tonight my revolution will be complete, the underclass will rise to wipe out all the royals who would oppose me and, just as I wipe out the higher ranks of the family, the underclass will steal across the land. The remaining royals will fear me, the rebels will follow me and I will remake this world. We will enter, Space, we will spread under MY rule. And you should pity any who stand to oppose us.”
“So why are you telling me all this?”
“Because, Space, you are a COAR Core corps captain! A man used to the dangers of space. You have the experience. I am making a place for you in the new order. A place of honour and respect, a place fitting a man of your talents.”
“I do have a lot of talents”, I admitted.
“You do. I can see them. You could rule by my side. This universe has brought the two of us together in my hour of need, when my plan is about to come together entirely. Do you not tire of this endless roving around the galaxy, solving the problems of others?”
“It can be… tiring righting all the verse’s wrongs….”
“You can have your command here, be deferred to. You would have battalions to command-“
“Battle lions?”
“Them too! The possibilities are endless! And you would have me with you. We could do this together.” She lowered her eyes at me and spoke in an undertone. “I know that you want me, Captain. I saw it the first time our eyes met. I know it from how you look at me now, I guessed it from the many letters and rude stick man cartoons that someone’s been posting under my door.”
“Well…” It was true. Not just about my pictographic art but about it all. She was making a lot of sense. Especially the part about the amount of talents I had.
“What say you, Captain? Will you join me?”
I let out a breath. Time to make a choice.
I let out a breath. He was still alive, barely, taking ragged gulps of air like a man just saved from drowning. I took a knee next to him, squashing a muffin that had fallen from his desperate hand.
“So... you bested... me....” he wheezed.
“I got lucky, Baker.”
His laugh turned into a grimace of pain. There was blood around his mouth, although I admit that may well have been more jam. It was really difficult to tell. “Gracious in victory, Mr. Funkworthy... a commendable... trait.”
“Listen, I need to know who hired you. Innocent people will burst and I can’t let that happen.”
“I am duty bound to tell you. As the man who beat me in single combat, you are entitled to that... also my recipe book. It contains the recipe for the Coq Au Pain that killed the Ellisiar President and the Rifle Trifle that I used to eliminate the chancellor of the Trade Federation. Keep my secrets safe.”
“I will tell no one. But please, a name-the name of the Benefactor.”
“Lean closer.”
I obliged, putting my ear next to his mouth.
He whispered a name and my blood ran cold.
“Space!” I exclaimed.
“Yes, I believe that your dear Captain may be in... hot soup.”
“No!”
“No?!” she cried, as she fired the pistol over my head. I had taken the brave decision to make a manly leap and hide behind a nearby chair. Hiding is the better part of valour, as they say.
The Queen was not taking this turn in our relationship well.
She reloaded the pistol and let out another volley of shots into the chair. They thumped through the structure and rattled through my back. I looked around, this cover would not hold.
“You fool! How DARE you?!” she thundered between shots.
I counted them. She was about to reload. She leapt at me, clacking her empty gun as I dashed across the room and slid under the four-poster bed, brushing aside a startled-looking stuffed bear as I took refuge. I had spied where my belt and gun lay, but they were too far away from me. Damn that woman’s sexy subterfuge!
“Cool your jets, baby!” I called, trying to soothe her as best I could. “It’s nothing personal. Under normal circumstances I’d be jumping at the chance for any coupling with a lady such as you. Hell, you even nearly swayed me back there. You just made one mistake.”
“Oh yes? And what was that?” I saw the indentations in the mattress above me. She was standing on the bed.
“You took me for some mercenary or brigand. I’m Captain Space Hardcore. I’m a man of honour and valour!” I cried from under the bed, moving aside a bedpan that was in my way. “No matter how topsy-turvy this universe gets, I still have to follow a few rules, and unfortunately for you, one of the main ones is arresting people plotting mass murder instead of seducing them. Regicidal maniacs? I bang them up, I don’t bang th-”
“ENOUGH!” she cried, emptying her guns into the mattress. I rolled to the side as the bullets bored into the hardwood floor millimetres away from my face. I rolled out from under the bed and charged through an open door, slamming it behind me. The Queen thundered on. “You dare think you can high road me with your simplistic monochrome code, Captain? I made a grave mistake in trying to take pity on you tonight. It was a moment of weakness I shan’t be repeating!”
“No need! I have justice on my side, m’Lady. Frankly, I think you should just give up now”, I said, looking around. It seemed that I had found my way into the Queen’s cupboard, surrounded as I was by the frilliest of frilly dresses and some rather fetching bonnets. “If you give up now, I’ll go easy on you”, I offered generously.
“Do you see where you are?” she asked.
“Still on the side of the angels, Melia’ta”, I cried.
As she pulled back the hammer on her old pistol, I flung open the door of my fashionable oak prison and threw an enormous bodice at her. “Fah!” I cried as I flung the lacy thing expertly at her face. She reeled back, clutching at it and firing her pistol into the ceiling. I had seconds before she unclothed her eyes. I bounded over to the clotheshorse and retrieved my belt and holster. I turned with it clutched in my hand and saw her extracting herself from her underthings and levelling the pistol at me anew. No time to extract Pew-pew. No time for much of anything. I charged for the door behind her- the door leading outside to the ramparts. In the rush, I felt a warmth erupt at the side of my head as she discharged her pistol dangerously close to my temple. I ducked under the hot blast still lashing my belt around myself, tumbled through the door and out onto the cobbled street.
I wrestled the gun from my belt and took cover behind a low wall, waiting for her next move.
The sound of gunfire punctuated the Baker’s laughter. Flat low booms were issuing forth from somewhere below us. I rushed to a window and squinted. A firefight was in progress, and though I could scarcely make out the combatants, I would bet my life that Space was in the middle of it. I had to get to him fast.
“Gunfire... and bakery smells... This is the way I leave the verse... Fitting....”
I shook his shoulders, trying to revive the fading killer.
“I need to get down there! Now!”
He looked up at me, light leaving his eyes. “My hat... take... my hat... bleaugh....”
I shook him again, but realized that I was just manhandling a cadaver.
Boom! Kablooey! Bang! Went the firefight below me.
I grabbed the puffy white chef’s hat from the Baker’s head and looked inside. A tab was there to be pulled. No time to test it; lives hung in the balance. I gripped the thing and scooted back, lining myself up with the window. For the second time today I’d be chucking myself out of one of the highest turrets in Aplubia. No pie burning my face this time, though. A small comfort. I took off in
a run, dived over the corpse of the fallen assassin and fell toward the sound of gunfire.
“Hold on, Space, I’m coming!” I yelled into the roaring air.
As the night sky blurred past me I saw the first twinkling lights in the sky. The Hailstrom shower.
I yanked on the tab in the Master Baker’s hat.
* * *
Chapter Fifteen!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
A Killer Revealed
In which Space learns of the AI’s purpose, Ebenezer starts carving a time tunnel hidden behind a big poster and the Albino Prince unleashes the robo-kraken.
Hard as it is to believe, I’ve known rejection.
The universe is a crazy mistress, and within her she holds mysteries that even the keenest of minds like my own cannot unravel. So yes, I have been attacked for my romantic advances. I have been verbally rejected, slapped, shot at, chased by a pack of wolves across an ice planet, held in contempt of court by a very sexy judge (who, in my defence, had clearly been giving me the eye during my prosecution) and even turned into a pig on the planet Circe Eleven by a sorceress I had made a pass at. This last one was a powerful lesson that, I assume, was meant to teach me how it felt to be as undesirable as some of the heftier girls of the coven that I had neglected to approach.
But as a cannonball whizzed over my head, giving me an unbecoming central parting, I looked at the rapidly changing turret of the Queen and thought about how much it must hurt to be rejected by me. Hydrangea hadn’t taken my rebuttal of her advances as well as I’d taken my own modest amount of ‘no’s from the few crazy women around the universe who I hadn’t even been that keen on in the first place.
As I peered around my cover, I saw that several large cannons poked out of each of the windows of her chamber. That was new. On top of that, the roof of the whole thing came off with a groaning creak as an enormous canvas balloon grew out of the top of the turret. The woodwork roof fell away like a façade and the cloth below inflated like a more violent bouncy castle. The walls shook and, in a few seconds, hidden mechanisms detached the top of the tower from the rest of the palace city. Masonry crumbled from the sides of it as it unsteadily rose from its moorings. The tower turned into an airship. I really had not searched her bedroom turret that well, I admitted.
It floated off into the night, transforming into what can only adequately be described as a bedroom zeppelin.
No, I concluded, I had never reacted to a romantic rebuttal quite as violently as this. I mean, she was firing around eleven heavy cannons at me while gunning her engines in the opposite direction. Her bedroom was currently flying away. I’d call that overkill.
Speaking of which, the orange fire blooming from the cannons caused me to prudently dive to my right behind a low stone wall so that I would not become overkilled myself. The heavy copper ball bore onto the paved floor around me with a flat whallop, sending a tinkling rain of stone shrapnel around my shoulders. It left a furrowed mound where the heft of the ball had dug itself into the solid street surface. Balls, I thought, deadly balls. If one of those hit me, I was finished. A barrage ploughed into a building above me, carving into the ancient walls as though they were mud and showering my face with still more rubble.
I peeked over my little wall and saw her ship angle its way to a high tower and start a slow ascent. It was shedding all vestiges of its former status as a living quarters, its walls falling away, the posters fluttering in the wind to reveal the dreadnought beneath. I was starting to think that my previous search of the domicile could have been more thorough, but there was no time for self-persecution. As I sat and thought, a fresh peculiarity was falling from the heavens on to me-literally. As I tracked the chill ascent of the deadly bedroom through the clouds, the tower it was headed to birthed a tiny diver. This dot-falling towards my position at a velocity that suggested that the jumper had somehow offended Gravity herself-seemed to be fooling with some headgear. I squinted at the curious suicide. Halfway through the descent, what could only be described as a really massive chef’s hat ballooned out of the top of the figure, slowing his trajectory and carrying him on a smooth arc towards my position. As he hovered above my head, he suddenly let go of the headgear, which was having the unfortunate effect of making his head look rather small, and landed next to me in a ready squat.
“Funkworthy?!” I could barely contain myself.
“Space!” he returned, delighted.
We took a moment and gave each other a warm and manly handshake, as befitted the immense emotion of the moment. I had to say, he looked like an utter mess. Bruises, cuts and welts adorned his face. His garb was torn to ribbons and those ribbons were caked in mud. A whiff of Indian food hung about him. Of course, if I were to point this out, he’d be mortally offended.
“I have to say, you look like an utter mess. Bruises, cuts and welts adorn your face, Ebenezer. Your garb is torn to ribbons and those ribbons have been caked in mud. A whiff of Indian food hangs about you, too”, I said to him.
He looked mortally offended for a moment, but he quickly composed himself. I had never seen his brow so furrowed nor his chin jutted so purposefully.
“Very likely, Space”, he said, eschewing my title, “but I can catch you up later… if we live to see later, that is. I’ve tumbled to the whole affair, Captain. In brief, the Queen was knocked off by her own daughter, the Princess Hydrangea, who has been funding the rebels in the underclass for years under the assumed mantle of the Benefactor. She’s been behind the campaign of terror and flapjacks and seems to be mounting some kind of coup. She brought in the Master Baker and this night she plans to snuff out the lion’s share of the royal line with the last little piece of the puzzle left to her by the Baker. Look!” He pointed to the top of the turret he had jumped from just as the airship perched atop it. As we watched, the roof groaned and buckled under the pressure from the ship and broke apart in segments, revealing an attic of stacked grain and flour. A small docking door had opened on the bottom of the craft and enormous nozzles came out like big udders and began hoovering the ingredients up.
“The Baker’s last task”, Funkworthy explained. “A shipment of Aplubian self rising poison. In the hold of an airship piloted by a deranged monarch on its way to a place where a bunch of royals will be looking up with their mouths open: the meteor shower viewing party in the southern province of the city.”
“It’ll be a massacre.”
“A lot of people will burst”, he said with a grimace, no doubt picturing the spectacle of the royal line inflating and exploding in a big garden like a bunch of rare flowers suddenly blooming in the night in a mass of gore and blown-off limbs. It was a terrible mental image to conjure, a tableau in no way leavened by the sound effects I was imagining.
“Hang about”, I blurted, breaking my own reverie. “What about the Baker? Where’s he in all this?”
“I took care of him”, Funkworthy said, still squinting at the airship, which was midway through its hoovering process.
“Took care of him? You paid him off?”
“No, Space. I took him out.”
“Where? Out on the town? Out for a meal? Out to brunch?” He wasn’t making any sense.
Funkworthy sighed. “I killed him, Space.”
I was flummoxed for a second. “You eliminated the most feared cookery-based assassin in the verse?” I asked incredulously.
“It was him or me”, he replied.
I went to clap him on the back in congratulation, but stopped myself. It seemed patronizing and so I stilled my hand. I was not looking at Funkworthy-no, I was looking at an officer who had cracked the case of the coup and eliminated one of the most feared bakers in the universe. He was ragged and beaten, but still standing and ready to fight. I wondered what had happened to him with the rebels under the city to make him into this new man. I felt, absurdly, like saluting him.
“So… what’s our next move, Ebenezer?” I asked hesitantly.
He looked around at me suddenly.
“Now? We duck!”
We collapsed on the floor just as the booming sound of the cannons reached our ears. As we fell flat to the cold stone floor, the tightly grouped spread of cannonballs hissed through the air above us, cutting a swathe like a horizontal blade in the space immediately above us and demolishing a strut of the building we were crouched behind. Funkworthy spun on his knee and grabbed roughly at my collar as he took to his feet and made a dash for cover. As I followed, blind from the detritus and smoke in my eyes, my back was raked with falling glass. The sound of an avalanche of falling masonry alerted me that the building behind us had fallen in on itself under the barrage from the collapsing building. We dove and tumbled in the air, down a shallow flight of steps. I pressed myself against the wall, trying to clear my eyes and ears from the cement and stone that could so easily have been a part of my tomb.
“Good reflexes”, I muttered to Funkworthy as I dusted a drift of dirt from my shoulder.
“I have a feeling I’ll tax them more before the morn”, he replied.
We peered around our cover as the edifice of a building near us imploded under an assault of cannonballs. I could hear the roar of the engines now, though. The bedroom ship-having taken in all of its deadly cargo-was drawing closer, sniffing out our position and laying waste to everything around us with her seemingly inexhaustible supply of balls. A crackle sounded in the air, an electronic sound of distortion-it was a loudspeaker. I heard her voice.
“You should have taken up my offer, Captain!” Hydrangea called to me. “We could have changed Aplubia forever together.”
I made to reply, but Funkworthy clamped his hand over my mouth and hissed in my ear, “She’s trying to draw you out, get a fix on your position.”
He was right. As she taunted, the shadow of the ship traced along the line of buildings, scanning for prey. Its thrusters toasted the air above us. I looked up to see it coast over us. She was still too high to grab. Clever girl.
The Court of Crusty Killings: A Captain Space Hardcore Adventure Page 17