by Hercules
While the Crew watched, a Quokka that looked like Nigel dived forward and his vest lassoed another Quokka, knocking the gun out of its hands and throwing it off its tiny feet.
Metho, Skip and TS were so engrossed in the battle that Tits' blood curdling screech almost made them soil their undergarments. With the single–minded ferocity of a crime fighter in a nest of baddies, Tits leapt through the door and threw two huge handfuls of rotten meat right into the centre of the Quokka pack. Three of the four marsupials gagged for a moment and then vanished, leaving behind their laser guns. The fourth—the Quokka who had been lassoed—spewed forth a stream of green goo with orange chunks but managed to stay conscious. After a moment during which Quokka and human stood frozen, staring at one another in shocked surprise, the little Quokka took to its heels and sped through a door.
'That's where they have the people in cages,' Tits yelled, and raced after the little fellow. He burst into the purple corridor but when he pushed through the second set of doors, a bright flash of light temporarily blinded him. When his vision returned, he found he was standing in a huge, empty room. 'Jesus,' he blasphemed.
The others joined him a moment later.
'Where is he?' TS asked.
'This was the room where they had the people, but no way was it this big last time I was here.'
Metho walked out into the vast, empty cavern. It was so big that it made the mushroom cavern feel like a cramped bedsit in comparison, and it was better lit so its bigness was easier to see. He could see the walls, but only just, and he assumed there must have been a ceiling lurking somewhere in the darkness above because it sure wasn't the sky up there. 'Wow,' he said, but felt it lacked punch. 'Fucken big place,' he added for clarity.
'Well, that's it then,' Skip said, 'time to go home. There are no cages here an' no Small Spaz. He's probably gone on a Pomegranate Margarita bender an' will be back in a couple of days.'
'Let's go find a furry little shit and ask it some questions,' TS said, waving her gun menacingly.
Tits looked around the huge room and suddenly felt very small. 'Not even a Quokka could hide in here,' he said, looking out over acres of flat and featureless terrain. 'I say we go back to the mushroom room and look around there.'
'I'm hungry,' Skip said.
'Shut up,' said the other three in unison.
To Skip's disappointment, there were no mushrooms in the mushroom room but there was general devastation caused by the tiny laser guns. Metho picked one up and took a good look. 'Even their guns are cute,' he said, after a moment. A beam of light shot out from his hand and incinerated a nearby mushroom planter that had escaped the devastation of the battle of the Quokkas. 'Nice,' he said.
A distant humming drew their eyes to the opposite end of the room where two Quokkas were riding towards them on what looked like a floating golf cart. Tits pulled out his last handful of meat, while TS and Metho readied their guns. Skip, having seem what Metho's laser gun had done to the planter, picked up a Quokka gun and positioned himself strategically at the rear of the group.
The Quokkas approached at a rate of knots until they were almost within earshot, which also put them within range of the rotten meat Tits had scattered about. They were close enough for the Crew to see their faces contort in disgust just before they vanished. The tiny golf cart continued on at speed and collided with the door.
Metho sighed and rubbed his forehead. Skip's headache was going viral. 'Come on,' he said and started out across the floor in the direction the Quokkas had come from. The others followed, Skip at the rear
A few minutes later, the Quokkas appeared on another golf cart.
'What the hell do you think you're doing,' an angry Nigel said when they were close enough. 'You let that psycho get away.'
TS strode forward and pointed her gun at Nigel. 'Where are they?'
'Who? The pilot? He's long gone. We had him and then you burst in and fucked it all up. We've lost everything, you know that? Everything. And he locked most of the staff in the panic room. It's going to be a pain to get them out, let me tell you.'
TS lifted her gun a little and fired a warning shot over the Quokkas' heads. Beside Nigel, the little Quokka fainted and vanished.
'What have you done to Basset?' TS demanded.
'Me? I didn't do anything to the poor boy. You're the one who fired that awful canon and frightened the life out of him,' Nigel said.
TS lowered the gun so that it pointed directly at the Quokkas' head. 'Where is my brother?'
'Stop being silly, this is serious. Basset's a Quokka! He can't be your brother,' Nigel said.
Metho stepped forward and put a restraining hand on TS's arm. 'Tell me, Nigel,' he said, in his most reasonable voice, 'what's the name of that little fuzzball that just vanished?'
'Basset, of course. Are you lot the stupidest humans ever, or are all of your race like this?'
'It's just that one of our friends is called Basset and we think you fuckers kidnapped him.'
Before Nigel could answer, there was a bright flash of light and the mushroom planter beside Skip disintegrated. Basset the Quokka had returned on a floating golf cart of his own and was pointing a huge—for a Quokka—gun at the Crew. 'If you lot weren't a protected species, you'd already be dead,' he said. 'Now drop your weapons and point your hands toward the ceiling.'
The words were brave but the delivery left a bit to be desired from a threat perspective. The little Quokka was vibrating with excitement and his hair was standing on end, like he'd just gnawed through an electrical wire and was still trying to decide if he'd enjoyed the experience or not.
'I gather you're after one of the breeding colony humans,' Nigel said, and turned to Basset. 'Put it down lad. They're far too valuable to disintegrate.'
Basset lowered his gun slightly.
'If he's been taken by Terry, then I'm afraid it will be a while before we can bring him back. The crazy pilot that you helped to escaped took your brother as well as our ship and we don't know where he's gone. We got his cousin, but I don't know how useful he'll be. He may not even know where Terry's gone.'
'Um, actually, sir, I got worried when he started getting weird and got my brother-in-law to leave a spare ship on the satellite of this planet. And I put a tracking device on the ship,' Basset the Quokka said. 'He was just too much into the shrooms to be dependable and I didn't want to get stuck on this hell hole.'
'What the fuck are you little fuckers going on about?' Metho said. 'What do you mean, we're protected, and how come we're too valuable to disintegrate?'
'Humans are a delicacy on many planets,' Nigel said. 'A very expensive delicacy, especially the testicles of the male of the species. Disintegrating a whole human would be like setting fire to a big pile of cash. Complete madness. Not even Terry would do it.'
'Is that why you kidnapped Basset, you fuckers?' TS said, and lifted her gun again. 'You're gunna sell him to someone who's gunna turn him into steak?'
'Oh, no, definitely not,' Nigel said. 'Terry's taken him for breeding purposes. It all started when we acquired a plane full of humans by accident and didn't know what to do with them...'
According to Nigel, it had been early in the piece—just after the Quokkas had harvested their first big lot of mushrooms—when the seeds of this disaster had been sown. The Quokka ship was located under the Indian Ocean to minimise the chances of bumping into human air traffic, but on their very first run they'd almost collided with a human passenger jet. Terry was flying the Quokka ship and was off his face on shrooms as usual. When he saw the passenger jet just cruising along in the middle of nowhere, he had an idea that only a drug addled brain could have. Why not start a human colony in deep space and make a heap of risk-free cash? Mushrooms were lucrative and all, but the good ones could only be grown on Earth for a variety of reasons, and the galactic cops were everywhere on Earth. Humans, who were nearly as valuable as mushrooms, could be grown anywhere. You could set them up on a nice planet on the edge of the galaxy an
d they would all but take care of themselves.
Humans were so valuable, in fact, that they were lucky that scientists had discovered just how special the Earth was. The unusual potency of Earth mushrooms, and the inability to replicate this on any other planet in the entire galaxy, meant that the Earth was put under strict quarantine by the galactic government. Nigel explained that the powers that be had decided that mushrooms of such outstanding quality should be reserved for those who were deserving. The remaining 99% of the galactic population—Nigel called them the Inconsequentials—could all just sod off and make do with the lesser highs of ordinary mushrooms.
Closing off the planet meant that humans became even harder to get hold of, which meant that their value rose considerably. Even human shit skyrocketed in price because freelance mushroom growers throughout the galaxy would pay a fortune for it. They swear by it as a fertiliser, and claim that it grows mushrooms almost as good as those grown on Earth.
The galactic embargo put an end to the large scale human testicle harvesting operations that had popped up all over the planet—the ruins of which were still standing. The galactic authorities had spread the rumour on Earth that they were just burial chambers for important humans.
'Only a human would believe that someone would go to the trouble of building a half mile high pyramid just to stick a couple of dead humans in it,' Nigel said, and wiggled his whiskers in amusement. 'Anyway, I tried to talk Terry out of it but, really, it sounded like such a good idea. So I let the mad bastard nab the jet with its human cargo and take it to his cousin's place to store while he got things organised. And now he's taken our harvest, along with another batch of humans he'd been collecting, and done a runner.'
'We should never have hired him,' Basset the Quokka said. He'd dropped his gun and was sitting on the side of Nigel's floating buggy. 'Hiring a shroom-head to be the pilot in your shroom growing operation is so mad, it's almost human.'
'We had no choice, lad, you know that. Unemployed pilots are hard to find, and he was the best of a bad bunch.'
'But sir, I can pilot a ship.'
'Listen, we've been through this a million times. I told your father that you could work for me but you had to learn the ropes first, and that means working the boxes until you knew mushrooms inside out,' Nigel said, sternly.
'Um, excuse me,' TS said, 'but my brother is in outer space with a mad, drug addicted Quokka. Can you two hold off on your Quokka Resources meeting until after we've brought him back.'
'They're even cuter when they're angry,' Nigel said. 'Of course we'll get human Basset back. But first, we have to free the staff to get the operation going again. We lost a crop, but that doesn't mean we have to lose another.'
'Cute?' Tits said, 'you think humans are cute?'
Basset rolled his eyes in a very human way. 'Why wouldn't we? People like you really piss me off. Just because I'm a Quokka, doesn't mean I'm a hard-arsed criminal who's going to steal your shuttle or sell mushrooms to your kids,' he said and ran his paws over his ears and twitched his whiskers in a most annoyed way. 'We're just like every other species in the universe, just trying to make a living day to day. It's all because of people like you that Quokkas are incarcerated at a higher rate than any other race. I mean, we're not all mushroom pirates.'
'He even sounds like Small Spaz,' Skip said.
'But you are a mushroom pirate,' Tits said, 'and you're kidnapping humans for profit.'
'Oh come on, mushroom dealing is a victimless crime,' Basset snapped, conveniently ignoring the kidnapping element of the Quokka's operation. 'And ours are the bloody best mushrooms you can get. Earth grown and pure, not like the rubbish most others sell.'
'Don't get Basset started on speciesism and bias in galactic society,' Nigel said, and clapped the little Quokka on the back. 'and humans are definitely cute. I mean, you got those big round heads on top of your bodies, and the way you walk. You shuffle along one foot at a time with your long arms swinging to and fro so you don't fall over. Nothing like it in all the galaxy.'
'Listen, I don't give a shit what the galaxy thinks of Quokkas or if humans are cute or not,' Metho said, 'but I got a headache, right, an' I just wanna go home to bed an' stay there for a week. Problem is, a Quokka has kidnapped my boss' son an' I have to get him back before I can relax. So how about you fuckers stop gabbling about bullshit and tell us how we go about catching this Terry fucker so we can bring Small Spaz home.'
'I'll go get the spare ship down here,' Basset said, after the Quokkas had exchanged embarrassed glances.
'And I can give our guests a tour of the facilities,' Nigel said, 'after I've freed the idiots in the panic room, of course.'
(ii)
Nigel, on his floating golf cart, led the Crew through another glassed door on the far side of the mushroom room.
'Big operation you got here,' Metho said, as one professional to another. 'How long did it take you to build all this?'
Nigel smiled a Quokka smile. 'You humans are so quaint,' he said, and preened his left ear in an amused way. 'We have robots for that sort of thing. The whole complex, including the tunnel to the space dock, took three Earth months to make. Bit of a dodgy job, really, but we were working on the cheap. One more crop and we can bring in some decent tech. It's like the prairie-ages down here.'
Metho turned to look at the Crew who all did shrugs and confused faces. None of them had paid enough attention at school to remember when the prairie-ages were, nor what sort of tech was around at the time.
'Ah, here we are,' Nigel said and brought his golf cart to a halt. He took what the Crew assumed to be a tiny tool box from under the seat of the golf cart and waddled over to the wall, which he inspected at great length. He put the box down, traced a section of wall with his finger and a stream of tiny robots flew out of his vest and attacked the wall with tiny drills, saws, and laser beams.
Nigel nodded in satisfaction at a job well done, took a bundle of leaves from the box he'd taken from his cart, and sat down for a spot of lunch.
'I'm starved,' he said when he noticed the Crew's incredulous glances. 'You primitive races have amazing stamina because you have to walk everywhere and do everything for yourselves. Soft bastards from the centre of the galaxy like me don't do nearly enough physical activity.' He took another big bite of greenery. 'Robots do everything, and aren't we happy about that,' he added with his mouth full.
Metho watched the tiny robots work and a thought crossed his mind. 'Are you still gunna give us flabby?'
'If you want it,' Nigel said. 'I thought you'd be dead against the stuff after what's happened.'
'We were selling tons of it. One taste is all it takes to turn a stranger into a customer.'
'It's amazing stuff,' Nigel said. 'The Lizards from the Grus supercluster developed it to keep their livestock young and healthy. The only negative side effect is that it increases cognitive ability.'
'Why is that a negative?' TS asked.
'Their cows started to recite depressing poetry on the way to the slaughterhouse.'
'How horrible.'
'You're not wrong. They cold blooded bastards record it all and publish an annual volume called Poems from the Slaughterhouse. They make an absolute fortune out of it,' Nigel said. 'I'm not into that sort of thing myself, but the younger folk seem to like it.'
The robots had done their work while their masters had chatted, which resulted in an almighty crash when the wall fell open. On the other side, a dozen or so Quokkas huddled in the back of a small room.
'Aeeeiiiii, the humans have found us,' one of them screamed and a handful of Quokkas fainted.
'Shut up you idiots,' Nigel said, throwing down his lunch in anger and spraying bits of masticated greenery about the place. 'You're lucky I didn't leave you in there to rot like you all deserve. Letting that shroom fucked pilot lock you in here was human level stupidity. Now it's time to take your paws out of those nasty places where you keep 'em and get back to work.'
'Where's Terry?'
asked the Quokka who had screamed at the humans. Her name was Sherry and she was the one of those employees that appears in every workplace, regardless of where in the galaxy it is—she was angry, belligerent, and not nearly as smart as she thought she was.
'He's stolen the crop and done a runner. Me and Basset would of got him but some humans got in the way and he gave us the slip,' Nigel said. 'Oh, and these humans are here to help, so there's no need to be scared of them.'
'What, all of the crop?' Sherry said. 'So no new teleporters? Or proper pleasure circuits? We have to keep slaving away in those fucking suits? Not a chance, fatboy, not a chance.'
Nigel walked over to TS and motioned for her to follow him forward.
'See this human?' he said when they were both up against the hole in the wall, and then pointed at TS's gun, 'and see that thing she's holding? That's a canon, that is. A human weapon, an' it's too strong for your bots to stop. Now, if we get this crop up and out the door, I might get you bots that can stop it. But until then, she's an angry human with a grudge against Quokkas because Terry kidnapped her brother.' Nigel looked up and wiggled his whiskers at TS, who looked down at him, mystified. 'A demonstration of your ferocity would be nice,' he whispered. 'Just imagine that little shit over there is Terry.'
TS banged her gun on the wall and roared a ferocious roar. All the conscious Quokkas—including Nigel—fainted, but because Nigel wasn't in the panic room, he disappeared.
Metho sighed and rubbed at his forehead. 'This is a fucking nightmare, isn't it? Any minute now, I'm gunna wake up and none of this will have happened.'
'I hope not,' Tits said, and flexed his biceps. 'I like being Multicultural Man.'
A moment later, Nigel returned, huffing and puffing from the exertion of traveling without mechanical aid. 'Sorry about that, but you are soooo scary looking.' He darted into the panic room and touched a small stick to each of the comatose Quokkas, which brought them back to consciousness.