Tritium Gambit

by Erik Hyrkas

  Chapter 13. Max

  “He looks crispy. Is he still alive?” Tyler asked.

  I felt pressure on my wrist. “Master, he is alive,” said a robotic male voice.

  “It was fortunate for him we turned off the power in time,” Tyler said.

  My eyes felt dry, and it hurt to open them. I could see Tyler standing over me with two robot guards at his side and a third bending over me, the machine checking my pulse. I grabbed the robot that had been holding my wrist, jumped to my feet, and spun the machine into Tyler and the other robots. Both of the robots guarding Tyler shot me, but they must have had orders for the shots to be non-lethal and I shrugged the shots off and swung a haymaker into Tyler’s face with everything I had. When he staggered back, I jumped forward to bash my fist into his throat but a robot clothes-lined me before I could land another blow. I crashed backward onto the floor.

  I spun and swept my foot around, knocking over the nearest robot, then leapt toward Tyler. Before I could get to him, a second robot hammered me in the jaw and my vision went blurry. I spit out a tooth as I stumbled back a step. Then a flurry of metal blows struck my head and body. Darkness threatened to take me, but I fought off unconsciousness.

  I rolled past the nearest robot, sprang to my feet, and landed face to face with Tyler. Before I could be taken down, I threw a punch, but a robotic hand intercepted my fist and clamped down with bone-crushing force. I ignored the popping of bones, the pain, and the robot itself. I swung my knee up toward Tyler’s groin. I might die, I thought, but I’d have the satisfaction of seeing him cry first. Unfortunately, the robot gripping my broken hand yanked me around before my knee could connect and backhanded me in the face, breaking my nose and my cheekbone.

  I managed to rip out the exposed wires in the machine’s neck with my free hand and the robot’s dozen eyes went dark. I felt the pain of the two remaining robots shooting me again. I spun the disabled robot around to use as a shield against flying proton pulses. If that robot had any functioning parts left before, it didn’t after it was blasted about twenty times. When there wasn’t much left of it to use as a shield, I let it fall and launched myself at Tyler, who had been standing there nonchalantly watching his robots beat the crap out of me.

  He seemed a little surprised when I connected with a left hook to his jaw, then an uppercut into his stomach. He fell to the ground as a flurry of proton blasts struck me in the back and legs. I couldn’t control my body and fell back to the hard metal floor of the ship.

  Tyler regained his feet and stood over me. “You didn’t think you could win, did you?”

  “Questions are for pussies,” I whispered just before I lost consciousness.

  When I woke up, I was tied to a giant stump on a rugged, boulder-strewn hill. Tyler sat on a blue-gray rock a dozen feet away with his fancy-schmancy antimatter pistol on his lap and four robots at his back. There were two suns in the sky, a large orange sun on the horizon emitting no warmth and only weak light and a small blue sun directly overhead that was brighter and warmer.

  A line of alien foliage stretched from the limits of my vision on all sides, not trees like on Earth but giant tangled vines with woody shoots popping out at densely packed irregular intervals along the main trunk. The thickest vines were ten feet in diameter and had shoots at least two feet thick where they met their trunk, each topped with giant green leaves twenty feet long and fifteen feet across. Smaller more Earth-like vines draped every surface and carpeted the ground. Nothing grew on the hill we were on, though. There was no soil, only jagged and irregular blue and gray rocks jutting up on all sides.

  The ground trembled. Tyler looked up, and I could see his grip on his pistol tighten. He stood and faced the green. The massive tangle of foliage to my left began to wave and stir. Something gigantic was making its way toward us.

  I struggled against the ropes that held me to the giant stump, but they were really tight and there wasn’t any play in them. I couldn’t feel my legs, and I wondered if they were getting any blood circulated to them at all. My hands were uselessly at my sides under the rope.

  There were many shapes moving in our direction, a procession of terror marching toward us. I only made out shadow and fur, the Wendigo I assumed, each of these creatures larger than a two-story house. Tyler seemed to be having second thoughts. He glanced over his shoulder, but he wasn’t looking at me. I assumed the ship must be somewhere behind me. I tried to crane my neck around, but it was no use. I couldn’t see past the thick stump I was tied to.

  I looked back toward the creatures steadily crashing through the foliage. I could see them clearly now. The lead creature was massive, four stories tall with tufts of blue-gray hair on its head, knuckles, and torso. Its skin was bone white and smooth as marble, and each of its hands had four fingers, the first and fourth shaped like thumbs and the two fingers in the middle thick and powerful. The creature had a flattened nose with two obsidian-black eyes on each side of it. The creature had two bushy blue-gray eyebrows, one above each pair of eyes. If I squinted, excluding the extra set of small eyes, this beast might pass for a really big hairy naked human with a Goth look. The creature’s stomach was distended, but its limbs and chest were thin and drawn, and it occurred to me that it might well be starving. Its mouthful of terrifying jagged teeth notwithstanding, this beast could be a poster-child for the Feed the Aliens cause.

  A swarm of more than a hundred large four-legged beasts burst through the underbrush. They were covered in green chitinous locking plates similar to lobster shells, but their bodies resembled that of a grizzly bear. They had four wild eyes, and each limb had four razor sharp claws. Tyler raised his pistol as the herd of wild beasts thundered around us, but these creatures weren’t attacking. They were fleeing the larger creatures, the Wendigo.

  More Wendigo followed the first, all of them smaller than the leader. In fact, they seemed to be following the big guy in order of size, from largest to smallest. As the leader stepped out into the rocky clearing near us, I had to strain my neck to look up at its face. The stench of decay on its breath was nearly overwhelming.

  “Get that guy some Tic Tacs,” I complained.

  “You’ll get used to it in a hundred years,” Tyler said.

  Somehow, I doubted that. I was about to become the unending meal for this big guy, and it was going to hurt and stink.

  I managed to reach into my pocket in spite of my tied hands, felt about for my bottle of metabolism boost pills, and popped the cap. I let them spill out into the bottom of my pocket and then scooped all of them into my hand. It felt like I had about ninety small pills, and I held them tightly in my hand.

  “Greetings, Your Majesty,” Tyler said in Intergalactic Common Tongue.

  The Wendigo’s voice was guttural as it replied in Intergalactic Common Tongue. “Slime. Is this tiny creature all you have brought me?” The king gestured to me with his clawed hand.

  “At least this guy knows who he’s dealing with,” I whispered in Tyler’s direction.

  “Yes, Your Majesty. He will make you the most powerful Wendigo ever,” Tyler replied coolly.

  The king moved with blinding speed and snatched me off the ground, the stump to which I was tied too, and held me up to his beady black eyes. “It will be tough not eating him all at once.”

  I was counting on that. I really wasn’t into being tortured for a hundred years. “Bite me,” I said.

  The Wendigo chuckled. “Such willing food.”

  He ripped away the ropes that held me. I managed to lift my hand that held the pills just as he bit my arm clean off. The pain was nearly overwhelming, and I gritted my teeth to keep from screaming, but I couldn’t stop a groan from escaping my lips.