by Barry Lyga
The Golden Berth did not have a faster-than-light engine… anymore. Its warp core had burned out decades ago. Using the ship’s sublight engines to approach lightspeed would be dangerous but necessary if they were to get to the gate in anything like reasonable time.
Cha shook his head. “Most of the Kalami Gates aren’t functional any longer. Besides, His Lordship would never allow it.”
“I don’t care what His Lordship wants. I’m talking about getting us to a place where we can free the people on this ship.”
“Even if the gate works, who knows where in the infinite universe we’ll end up?”
Thanos snorted. “First, it would have to be better than here. By definition. Second, the universe is not infinite. The universe is expanding, Cha. That’s not a belief—it’s a demonstrable fact. Therefore, it cannot be infinite, because it has boundaries.”
Cha shrugged. “If the universe is expanding, what is it expanding into? What is beyond those boundaries?”
“We don’t have time for me to tutor you in astrophysics and celestial mechanics,” Thanos insisted. “We have more important things to discuss.”
“A lot of the more well-cared-for crew are loyal to His Lordship. And you can’t kill him because of the sympathy circuit. We have no choice. We have to keep His Lordship alive as long as possible and hopefully find a place to evacuate to before the ship falls apart—or he does.”
“Even odds as to which will happen first,” Thanos told him. “But you need to trust me: I can kill His Lordship and keep the ship going. And I have a way to deal with Robbo as well. Are you with me? You’re the only one I trust on this ship. I need someone at my side. And you are instrumental to my plan, if you can handle a little bloodshed.”
Cha didn’t even take a moment to consider, staring down at his broken hand swathed in the sweaty, half-chilled healie that had lost most of its gel. “He’s been lying to us all along. Yes, of course I’ll help.” When he looked up at Thanos, his eyes shone with renewed hope and vigor. “This is why you were sent here, Thanos. I can’t abide killing, but if it means liberating all of the souls on this ship… I believe that would be for the greater good.”
“How convenient,” Thanos rumbled. “I’m glad everything works out for you.”
“Your hardness will be your undoing, Thanos.”
“I’m fine with that.” Thanos said brusquely. “All the well-wishing and inarticulate hope in the universe could not have found an easier way. But I’m glad to have you on my side. I have a plan. And we will need Demla’s help.”
Cha gabbled in shock before finding his voice. “Demla? Thanos, Demla is a fine, upstanding person, and a kindhearted soul, but he is as the universe found him: dumber than a petrified turd. What can he possibly offer us?”
Thanos grinned for the first time since his exile. It felt good. “You’d be surprised.”
He scrounged material from the engine room and some circuitry from the medical bay, scavenged from the implements Cha had conveniently broken.
His new quarters were no more spacious or well-appointed than his old, but they were his alone. Still, he couldn’t risk working there. He was bunked near Robbo and His Lordship, and they had an annoying tendency to drop in and see him when he wasn’t in the engine room. His Lordship constantly asked about power consumption and occasionally gave new coordinates to aim for, though the coordinates never seemed to follow any sort of pattern. As best Thanos could tell, if His Lordship was looking for something in the possession of the Asgardians, he was doing it by pawing blindly through mountains of dinosaur waste, hoping to find an undigested fern leaf.
Robbo stopped by erratically, unpredictably. Thanos realized early on that His Lordship’s majordomo and primary weapon did not entirely trust him. Perhaps some of Thanos’s enmity had leaked psychically to Robbo. Or perhaps he regretted telling Thanos His Lordship’s secret. Whatever the reason, Thanos sensed that time was running out. He had to act quickly.
So he spent as much time as he could in his old quarters with Cha, building the first element of his plan.
“It’s a hat,” Cha said warily, watching as Thanos used medical adhesive to graft two pieces of dented, curved metal. Cha’s hand had healed from its break, but he still tended to flex it randomly, as now, expecting pain every time. “How does a hat get us to mutiny?”
“It’s not a hat,” Thanos told him. “It’s a helmet.”
Fashioned of medical-grade steel and pieces of finer alloys scavenged from the ramshackle engines, the helmet contained meticulously soldered circuitry within its dome. It had taken Thanos two weeks to gather the materials and another week to assemble them. Each day—each hour—that passed, he feared discovery and the psychic spike that had exploded Googa’s eyes. He also feared the ship splitting in two. And His Lordship casually, indiscriminately, deciding to kill off his new engine chief for no sane reason.
He had a great many fears, and not many options.
“A helmet, then,” Cha said doubtfully. “How does a helmet move along your mysterious plan?”
Thanos sat back and admired his handiwork. He had used tools ancient or broken, and in some cases both, but still managed to cobble together the first piece of the puzzle that would oust His Lordship for good.
“I’ve noticed that Robbo has to be close to use his power. Within arm’s reach.”
“Yes. So?”
“That means it’s transmitted on a short-distance wavelength. I’ve calculated how many could be generated by organic brain matter.” He held the helmet aloft. It was blue with a gold stripe bisecting it. Above the eyes, it flared into two golden horns. “And this helmet blocks all of them.”
“And the purpose of the horns?” Cha asked.
Thanos grunted. “They are there to intimidate those who might stand in my way.”
“I’m sure that will work,” Cha said approvingly. “As though the mere sight of you were not intimidating enough.”
Thanos feigned a chuckle.
“So, Robbo cannot hurt you,” Cha went on. “But you still can’t hurt His Lordship. I’ve thought it through—even if you try to sedate him so that his heart keeps beating, his health is so poor that he probably wouldn’t survive the process.”
“He’ll sleep,” Thanos promised. “Permanently. That’s where Demla comes in.”
“I still don’t understand how….”
Thanos told him. Cha’s jaw dropped. And stayed that way for a very long time.
Demla had the night shift in the engine room, so he was waiting there when Thanos arrived in the morning. What passed for morning, at least. It had been only three hours since the ship’s lights had gone out, and now the lighting savored more of crepuscule than of dawn, but it was close enough.
When Thanos entered, Demla immediately launched into a litany of everything that had gone wrong overnight, what he had done to fix it, and what could not be fixed. Thanos pretended to care, and then, when Demla was finished, took him by the elbow and guided him to a spot near the fusion reactor’s intake system. The noise there made being overheard unlikely.
“I need something from you,” Thanos began.
“Anythin’, boss!” Demla said with great verve. “Whatever ya need!”
“Boss! Need!” Bluko called out. “You betchum!”
If necessary, Thanos was prepared to threaten Demla. Unbeknownst to Cha of course, Thanos was even prepared to kill Demla, though he hoped such a path would not need to be embarked upon. His goal was to save as many of the poor souls trapped on the Golden Berth as possible, not slaughter them in the process of rescuing them.
He said nothing to Demla, merely looked significantly at his shoulder. Demla stared ahead blankly, not getting it.
Eventually, though, he realized. His face fell, and he pouted. “Aw, c’mon, boss! For real?”
“Boss real!” Bluko chattered. “Boss real!”
“I’m afraid so,” Thanos said as gently as he could manage. “And it’ll have to be right now.”
De
mla’s shoulders slumped. “Yeah, yeah, all right.”
“Yeah, all—” Bluko started, and then stopped when Thanos’s hands closed over him.
CHAPTER XX
WEARING HIS HELMET, THANOS STRODE THE CORRIDORS OF the Golden Berth. Behind him was Cha Rhaigor, who carried a bulky chillwrap and dragged a jerry-rigged floating stretcher. No one stopped them or questioned them along the way; no one would question the ship’s medical officer carrying medical equipment, and no one would dare raise a finger or an eyebrow or a voice to one of His Lordship’s inner circle.
At the door to His Lordship’s quarters, Thanos paused. He did not so much as look back at Cha or remind him, even with a word, of what he was to do next. Instead, Thanos simply went inside as though this were any other day and he were about to have the evening meal with His Lordship.
His Lordship was already at the table. Robbo and Kebbi flanked him, as usual. For a moment, Thanos wondered if Kebbi had some sort of power as well. That, he realized, was the one potential glitch in his plan, the one thing he’d not prepared for.
But he was ready. Cha was ready. Most important of all, Bluko was ready. He had to move now.
“Thanos!” His Lordship drew out the word: Thaaanos! “Thanos! What a pleasant surprise. And what an interesting choice of headgear. I never imagined you to be a helmet sort of guy. Anyway, I thought you were retuning the warp core. If we could get that back up and running… we’d be out of this Raven’s Sweep in no time flat!”
“I regret to inform you that the warp core will have to wait,” Thanos said. “I need something from you.”
His Lordship shrugged and tucked into his meal. Robbo turned slightly toward Thanos, his brow wrinkling. Did he have powers beyond the psychic spike? Was he picking up on Thanos’s intentions?
Thanos licked his lips. Kebbi’s eyes widened just a tiny bit. She knew.
“What can I do for you?” asked His Lordship, oblivious, eating.
Thanos spoke the words he’d prepared and practiced: “I’m going to give you one opportunity to do what is right. I need you to step down from your position and hand authority over this ship and all aboard to me.”
No one spoke. The air filled with a loud slurping sound as His Lordship sucked up something that appeared to be an obese variety of spaghetti covered in an oily brown gravy. The viscous goop spattered in all directions as the noodle vanished between His Lordship’s lips; sauce dotted his chin, his wattles, the tablecloth, even the arm of Kebbi’s tunic.
“A dead man says what?” His Lordship asked calmly, and Robbo came around the table, eyes alight with malice. When Robbo came within range, Thanos staggered, bumped against the table, slapped both hands to his head, and bent over, keening.
“Spike him good!” His Lordship shouted, food spraying.
And then, when Robbo was within arm’s reach, Thanos stopped pretending; he lashed out with one hand, grabbing the majordomo around the throat.
“What the ever-loving hell!” His Lordship cried out, his eyes alternating between red and a sickly chartreuse.
Robbo grabbed Thanos’s wrist and tried to pry the Titan’s hand away even while grimacing and focusing his eyes on Thanos’s head. Clearly, Robbo was using every last bit of his psychic power and couldn’t believe it wasn’t working. Even with the shielding and nullifying circuitry in his helmet, Thanos felt the beginning of a headache in the back of his skull. He would have to end this quickly.
He applied his other hand to Robbo’s throat. The majordomo made a sound like Urrrr-uck! and then his eyes rolled back in his head.
Thanos kept squeezing. He’d never killed anyone with his bare hands before, and he wanted to be absolutely certain. Under the pressure of both his hands, Robbo’s throat collapsed. His spine crumbled. His head lolled on his shoulders, defenseless and uncontrolled like a baby’s.
Releasing his grip, Thanos let Robbo’s body drop to the floor. It made an undistinguished and generic thud. Very anticlimactic.
Clearing his throat, Thanos returned his attention to the other end of the table. His Lordship had scrambled behind Kebbi and cowered there now, pointing and screaming, “Kill him! Kill him! Do it now!”
Kebbi stood very still. Then, with a slow movement, she pulled down her kerchief, revealing again that distorted, distended reptilian maw. As Thanos watched, she opened it wider than would have been possible on any other humanoid. That forked tongue flicked out, and behind it he beheld something else—a longish, fleshy tube with a moist opening.
“Use your poison spray!” His Lordship howled. “Do it now!”
Kebbi spoke. “You need him alive, don’t you?”
“Are you kidding me?” His Lordship swore. “I want him dead now!”
But she hadn’t been speaking to His Lordship.
“I need him alive,” Thanos concurred.
With a curt nod, Kebbi closed her mouth and pulled her kerchief back into place. Then, without so much as a look at her master, she stepped away from His Lordship and the table and strode past Thanos and out into the corridor.
It was just the two of them now. His Lordship scuttled behind his chair, as though that would provide protection from Thanos’s wrath. With three long strides, Thanos closed the distance between them.
“I’ll give you anything you want!” His Lordship screamed. “Anything! What do you want? I’ll give it to you!”
“I want this,” Thanos said, and closed his hands around His Lordship’s throat.
Eyes gone flat white and now bugging out, His Lordship choked out words. “Can’t… we… talk about… this?”
“Conversation is all well and good,” Thanos said, remembering, grinning, “but sometimes only brute force will suffice.”
“You’re… killing… everyone… on… board…”
“You just let me worry about that,” Thanos said, and squeezed harder.
He was careful not to kill, only to render unconscious. Just as His Lordship swooned into a dead faint in his arms, Thanos heard the door slide open. Cha and Demla rushed in with the chillwrap and floating stretcher.
“Get away from him!” Cha shouted. “I don’t have much time!”
Thanos did as he was told, stepping aside so Demla and Cha could wrestle His Lordship’s body onto the stretcher. Then they hustled him out of the dining room and vanished into the corridor.
Thanos considered following them. But, no. Either they would succeed or they would not. If they did not, his presence wouldn’t matter; the Golden Berth would explode into a billion fragments, as it so obviously wished to do, and Thanos would be flung out into the cruel vacuum of space. But if they succeeded…
Ah, if they succeeded!
He took His Lordship’s seat at the table. The food, still repellent, was at least marginally more palatable than the swill eaten by the rest of those aboard the ship. Thanos dug in, trying not to taste it.
A little while later, the door slid open and Kebbi entered. She sat at the opposite end of the table.
“So, are we to call you His Lordship now?”
“Thanos will do. Assuming we’re all still alive.”
“You have a plan,” she said neutrally.
“I do. There is no guarantee it will work, but I do have one.”
“And if it does work?” she asked, leaning her elbows on the table. “If you become master of this ship? You’re still stuck with balky engines, a nigh-useless, unmotivated crew, and a hull that will fall apart if someone belches in the wrong direction.”
“I’ll try to keep everyone’s intestinal distress under control,” he said wryly. “Tell me: Why did you step aside?”
“Death was in the room no matter what. If you killed His Lordship, I would die, but then again, I’ll die someday anyway.” She took Thanos’s goblet and drained it, managing to lift her kerchief in such a way that her mouth was still concealed.
“My parents were descendants of some of His Lordship’s first conscripts. Never been off the ship in their lives,” she told h
im. “They were emotionally compatible, but not anatomically. They made me in a test tube using some old, stale genetech.”
“You are unique in the universe,” he said, and thought he detected a smile—large, cavernous—beneath the kerchief.
“As are you.” She saluted him with the goblet. “I suspect that—”
Just then, the door slid open again. Demla and Cha entered. Cha wore medical scrubs spattered in still-wet blood and a surgical mask that covered the bottom half of his face, but nothing could conceal the glee in his eyes.
“It worked!” he exclaimed.
Thanos’s heart surprised him by skipping a beat. Some part of him had thought that this plan would not work, no matter how well thought through. But then Demla approached him and, with something like reverence, handed him… a thing.
A pulsating, gelatinous bulb roughly the size of both of Thanos’s fists, the color of a bruise, with the consistency of worn rubber. It gently throbbed in his hands, reliably lub-dubbing along.
“Poor ol’ Bluko,” Demla sniffed.
By rote, everyone waited, anticipating the usual echo from Bluko. But Bluko wouldn’t be responding anytime soon.
In Thanos’s hands, he held His Lordship’s heart, expertly removed from his chest by Cha’s able hands. And then—before it could miss a beat—slipped into Bluko, the shift-blot who had been coaxed to take the form of a sac that would envelop the heart and keep it beating.
As far as the Golden Berth’s sympathy circuit was concerned, His Lordship’s heart was just fine. It was beating. And it would continue beating until Thanos no longer needed the ship.
He grinned and held the heart aloft. “Step one,” he said, and Cha, Demla, and Kebbi nodded along with him.
He was still young, not yet in his physical prime, and he was master of all he surveyed.
CHAPTER XXI
WHAT HE SURVEYED WAS, IN TRUTH, NOT MUCH TO BEHOLD. Kebbi’s assessment of the ship and the crew were spot-on.