by Brandon Getz
Lars growled but the look in Jay’s eyes said no arguments—the mission, for now, was Canal City, and if he wanted to see payday, he’d have to suck it up. He slumped against the hull, nylon cargo nets dangling from the ceiling above him, grabbing one of the nets for the hell of it, resting his arm there. The music thumped. He sipped his beer. Despite a dull, constipated feeling in his gut that said he was headed for a barge-load of trouble, Lars felt better already. Hair of the fucking dog. Tasted like Valhallan glory.
“That blood thing,” he said finally. “Back at the spinner. What was that? You a witch?”
Jay took a long gulp from her can then ran a fingertip over the braille of scars on her forearm. “It’s something I learned a long time ago.”
“Cruise control’s got Sheila blazing the wormhole highway all the way to Canal City. Unless I was passed out all damn day, I’m guessing we’ve got an hour or two before we bump out of subspace and start docking.”
“Three hours thirty-six minutes. Galactic standard.”
“That’s three hours to swap stories, get to know who we’re working with.” He drank. The beer was cold and bitter, the way he liked it. Frank’s eyes, all of them, were fogging over, foliage sagging before them; Jay’s flashed like violet galaxies. A guitar solo howled on the stereo, a good one, notes blitzing up and down the neck. He said, “So. Are you a witch?”
Chapter VI
She’d learned bloodhex as a kid, hardly big enough to fill out her black spider-print training bra. It was part of her schooling, she said. Blood magic and martial arts, right after ancient literature and music class. She could still play a mean fire-tremolo, her long fingers dancing across its pistons, though she only remembered a few songs. As for hex training, it’d been cut short, along with everything else, when her teacher had dragged her kicking and screaming away from the burning castle as her family, and her family’s attendants—the guards, the scribes, the advisors, the priests—were murdered while she watched, the little bit of hex she knew helpless to save them.
“So, no,” Jay said, finishing another beer. “I’m not a witch.”
“Shit,” Lars said, “that doesn’t disprove witch. They burn witches. You could be a whole witch family.”
Even before he finished the last syllable, Jay’s long knife was at his throat, straining against an artery.
“Say it again, wolf. Call my family witch.” Her eyes burned purple.
“All right, you’re not a witch,” he said, hands up in surrender, feeling the point of the knife nick his skin as he swallowed. “Nobody’s a fucking witch.”
Jay whipped the blade back in a blur of silver, and it disappeared into the length of her boot. She settled back with another beer, cracking open the can and watching it foam at the mouth. Lars sipped his. He still felt like six tons of oiled brick, and the dream made the hair on his arms feel like insects. At least it hadn’t been Dys-7. The smiling skull he could handle. Dys-7 was deep-fried Hell. Near the fridge, Frank slouched against the hull surrounded by empties, his yellow eyes all blank and ringed with sap, smelling sick and saccharine and surrounded by flies.
“What about the scars?” Lars said finally.
“What about them?”
“They aren’t battle scars. Precise. Tribal.” He thrust his chin toward his own tattooed arms. His skin was covered wrist to neck in ink, much of it faded and hidden under thatches of dark hair. “These, they all have a story. Some military, some salvage-crew. Most of them, though, are hex. Witchy shit.” Her eyes seemed to scan his arms. She was leaning forward on the crate. He thought he saw a smile grow at the corner of her lips, but if so, it was brief. “Found a witch on some godforsaken forest moon, guy I heard knew something about binding ink. Worth the cash. Hurt like the devil pissing razorblades, but it was worth that, too. Helps to control the turn. Before that—”
“Your massacre.”
Lars scratched at one of the runic tattoos on his elbow, then scratched his beard because what else was there to do. “Yeah. That mess.”
“Military,” Jay said. “You don’t walk like a soldier.”
“I walk like a goddamn werewolf badass.”
“You walk like a pirate.”
“I swashbuckle a little.” Lars shrugged. “Part of my public persona.” Jay raised a scarred eyebrow and said nothing, so he went on: “I was born and raised on the Nevada coast. Back on Terra. My hometown, when you grew up, you joined the flood crews and crank-
ed out your own assembly line of starving brats with some local piece of ass, or you enlisted. No way I was getting stuck in that rotting stilt-town. I wanted offworld. Got stationed on an asteroid, our garrison officially on orders to guard a mine but everybody knew we were there to put down a rebellion if any of the miners had ideas about their pay or work hours, both of which were shit. One day the workers strike, so I get orders to shoot a few in the face and hang them above the shaft elevator. And me, I’m a good grunt. I know how to follow orders. So, I take each of these guys who just want a fair shake, and I put a bullet through each of their eyes and I tie them up by their feet, like cattle. I get a promotion.
“And then I resign. Dishonorable discharge, since my contract isn’t up, so the only work I can get is salvage—all those fuckers are one step away from criminal anyway. I wasn’t going back to the surface, not to the flood crews and the corn blight and the radioactive wind blowing in over the ocean. Worked salvage for a while. Then I got the wolf in my veins. Military groundcrew found our wreck, me wolfed-out and berserk, covered in gore, bits of my crewmates still in my teeth. Took twenty of them to take me in, six dead. Banished me from the planet after that. They were too scared to kill me—they didn’t know what would happen if they tried.”
The music had stopped, and the only sounds in the ship were the heavy thrum of the engine and the creaking of wood from a drunk and passed-out Frank.
“The scars are my name,” Jay said. She looked down at her chest, the brand mostly visible between her cleavage and collarbone. As old as the scar was, it still looked wet, painful. Its design was intricate and hard to follow, an optical puzzle he couldn’t parse. “Family crest. Branded when I was born. The rest of it they cut on my nameday: date of birth, zodiac, my rank within the family.”
“That’s a lot of fucking syllables for a name.”
“Yeah.”
“You’re high society, then, huh? Some kind of space princess? I’ve always wanted to fuck a space princess.”
Jay ran a finger across the hilt of her knife, still in her heavy boot—for now. “I’m just an orphan, Breaxface. I’ve been waiting a long time to avenge my family. Now you’re going to help me do it. You, Frank, a few others. Even a witch.”
Lars chugged his beer and tossed the can into Frank’s pile of empties. They rattled and the cloud of flies scattered, briefly, but the tremuloid didn’t budge.
“Well, shit,” he said. “I didn’t realize we were on a mission of righteous vengeance.”
“We are.”
The air was cloying with Frank’s sap stink. Lars banged on a ventilation duct, and something dislodged, recycled air pumping in from the processor. They sat for a while, saying nothing, having said a hell of a lot already, whole biographies, so they listened to the small sounds of the ship. The vents, the flies, the machinery of propulsion, Frank. Lars’ nuts were still aching from being cock-blocked back on the spinner, and he had to piss from all the beer. He stood up, steadying himself with the straps hanging from the ceiling.
“Put some tunes on,” he told her. “When I get back, we’ll play cards.”
“Cards?”
“This is outer space, baby. Nothing to do but beat off, rock out, and sit pickling in your own farts.” He dug a deck of cards from one of the pockets in his jeans and tossed it toward Jay. “At least this round I don’t have to play solitaire.”
As he drained the snake in the ship’s chemical toilet, he heard thrashing heavy metal begin to blast from the cargo hold stereo. He imagi
ned Jay banging her head to the beat, purple tendrils whipping like a squid with palsy, and felt his cock turn rigid in his hand.
A mission of righteous vengeance. For a magic ninja space princess.
There were worse ways to earn a paycheck.
Chapter VII
Sheila sloughed the wormhole like an old, stiff tube sock, and right in front of her, in a swirl of white clouds, was the ocean planet. From orbit, all Lars could see was the wild blue of the planet’s turbulent surface sea, but he knew that down somewhere near the southern tropic was the world’s only landmass, a small island continent crisscrossed with filthy, stagnant canals, the algae-slick intergalactic trade port of Canal City, a crime-ridden gangster town just out of Federation reach. It reminded him of Freewheel, without all the fun. Beyond the blue world, a couple of moons swung like a pair of celestial testicles. Lars could feel them trying to pull the wolf out of him. He grit his teeth and pushed Sheila toward the atmosphere, radioing the city’s maglev aerodock for permission to land.
As for the card game, Jay had won every hand.
When they landed, it took a couple of slugs from an engine wrench to rouse Frank. The tremuloid shook his foliage, blinked the sap out of his eyes, and lumbered toward the hatch. He stood just outside the cruiser, drinking in the fading sunlight through his leaves. Jay climbed out behind him, then Lars, who took note of the shape of her ass in the fatigues and of the blaster hanging from an ammo belt that sat loose on her hips.
“Expecting trouble?” he said.
Without looking back, she answered, “Hoping not.”
Lars glanced at the water-city rising below them. He could see the whole city stretching across the island from up there, on the port’s floating mag-lev docks. “Keep the safety off. This whole town’s trouble, battered and deep-fried.”
A shuttle spat them out on the platform of a busy terminal, its vaulted ceilings alive with holograms and screeching birds, crawling greenery, and the echoes of loudspeakers calling out departures and arrivals. Frank and Lars followed Jay through the crowds of travelers and panhandlers, toward the wide-open archway that led into the city.
Canal City was teeming. The port metropolis stretched into the shallows of the continent, its waterways clogged with glass gondolas and amphibious taxis with heavy electric engines, bipeds of a hundred alien races weaving between traffic on levitating riverbikes. Sunset reflected on the upper stories of skyscrapers—towers of thick, barbed coral which rose from the green water like the bones of leviathans. A film of algae and slime clung to their brindled foundations. Birds that looked like twists of rubber tubing arced in the light, diving the polluted canals for twitching red fish, while cicadas screeched a constant white noise under the shouts and rhythms of the city. Canal City was old and alive, beautiful in its labyrinthine architecture, and stank of sewage and brine. The salt in the air made Lars’ beard itch.
Jay walked the canalside planks with purpose, and Lars kept pace, scanning the crowds for any sign of the re-animated trash puppets of Quillian Nine. He knew the gangster puppeteer still held a grudge for the job he’d skipped out on, Lars absconding offworld in the dead of night with the up-front half of his fee with him for his trouble. Though the wolfman had figured them squared. The job hadn’t been as advertised. Lars Breaxface beat people up for money, broke some faces, even killed a few assholes now and again if they needed it, but it was just a paycheck. He didn’t get his rocks off to violence and pain, and didn’t trust anybody who did.
As they turned a corner, a brace of the tube-birds flocked to Frank’s foliage, twisting to roost in his beleaguered branches. The tremuloid swatted at them irritably. Before Lars could quip that the tree looked too damn sober, a small boulder spattered with moss and lichen scuttled into an alley, hissing and barking its head off. The sounds sent the birds fleeing from Frank’s upper regions as the boulder—a crab thing, with thick legs and rough asymmetrical claws— kept up its racket. A brood of boulder-crabs bubbled from rain gutters and sewer runoffs, all the size of spaniels and all raucous. In one fluid motion, as if busting a dance move, Jay booted one over the walkway’s edge, its shriek and splash a warning to the rest. As Lars caught up behind her, the barking creatures slunk back to their gutters, claws clapping angrily.
Lars smirked. “What’d it do, catcall you in crabspeak?”
“This city is a cesspool.”
“Yeah,” the wolfman shrugged, “but the sunsets are all right.”
The princess glanced up at the sun beginning its slide behind the coral towers. “Come on. Before it’s dark.”
They resumed their trek across the boardwalks, Jay again taking the lead, a chorus of hungry claws clicking behind them.
The sun had fallen behind the skyline, its light slanting between calcified towers in long, bright beams. Jay led them through another business district, down a side terrace of shops all carved into the lower floors of a coral block, and finally stopped in front of a nondescript storefront in the middle of the row. “This is it.”
A bell dinged as Frank ducked through the door behind the ninja princess, and Lars followed them in, the two slivers of moon
making his blood race. If there was a sign above the shop’s door, he couldn’t read it.
The fish-man was standing beside a display case polishing his knob. The knob was glass, or some kind of crystal, and the green-scaled alien rubbed it thoughtfully with a soft cloth before setting it back into the case with knobs of varying sizes, shapes, and colors. Some were ribbed or rippled. Some looked like anemones. The fish-man blinked wide frog eyes, made all the more bulbous by the copper-rimmed steampunk goggles he was wearing, and his thick rubbery lips stretched into a salesman’s smile.
“Look at you, big guy,” he said to Lars. “You’re a heck of a specimen. All that sculpted muscle, yes. You got one of them, whaddayacallit, one of those mushroom tentacle things in your trousers? How big is it? Could I take some measurements, some molds maybe?” He started fumbling in his shirt pockets before his gaze darted back up, taking in the whole bulk of Frank. “What is that, you guys horticulturalists? I don’t think I have anything vegetal. Maybe some kind of root vibrator or something,” adding in a yell that was aimed for Frank’s uppermost branches, “Just how kinky are you, sir?”
Lars nudged Jay. “Fuck is he talking about, ‘mushroom tentacle’?”
“Sorry, you guys just window shoppers? Welcome anyway, come in, come in.” The fish-man bowed theatrically. “Arcturus Fishman, proprietor of Arcturus Fishman’s Fucktoy Emporium. Coital pleasure enhancements for thirty-six different species and the number one supplier of erotic appurtenance for twelve planetary systems. We do custom jobs, too, for trickier bits. What are you guys packing? You two here together? Either of you got one of those egg sacs that squirts, or is that those half-naked apes from Xaxx-Planton? I get you primates confused. All that hair. So, what’ll it be? A sex swing? Artisanal lube? Flavored with local fruits. I make it myself in the back. Makes a great sauce for ice cream, too.”
It was then, as the piscine salesman grinned expectantly in the white light of the display case, that Lars began to understand what he was looking at: The whole shop was stocked with sex paraphernalia, from holographic gimp masks to cybernetic genitals. Half of the stuff he could only guess at its purpose. In his travels across the cosmos, he’d tried to stick to sexing with more or less humanoid plumbing. Pussy was pussy, even if the chick was electric blue.
“Mr. Fishman,” Jay said.
Arcturus Fishman, proprietor of Arcturus Fishman’s Fucktoy Emporium, waved a webbed hand. “Call me Fish. Everybody around here does. Of course, everybody around here has a clit-sized brain and no imagination. But you don’t get to pick your own nickname, right? I wanted to be called Razor. Never stuck.”
Jay leaned forward, resting her arm on a display case. Her other hand was on the grip of the blaster. “I want to see the Rubber R
oom.”
“Rubber Room?” Fish picked at a fan of dried scales on his neck. His frog eyes avoided Jay’s. “Where’d you hear about that? There’s no rubber room. Heck, there’s no room rubber or otherwise. Who told you about that? What you see is what you get, rubberwise. You see that dildo there? Rubber. That’s about it, rubberly speaking.”
Lars picked up the rubber dildo, and it flopped forward, the grotesque head of it smacking against his wrist. He set it back on the shelf and picked up a sleek metal number that he could see his face in, shrunken and skinny.
“Jay, what the fuck?” he said. “This guy just sells dildos. The fuck good is he for the mission?”
“That’s not just a dildo,” Fish called to him over Jay’s shoulder. “That’s a space dildo. Specially engineered for maximum zero-grav and subspace satisfaction, for the long haul through the black. On sale this week, twenty percent off.” Fish glanced at Jay, then at the gun on her hip. “Two for one. Fifty percent off. Whatever you want.”
Jay slipped the blaster from the ammo belt, and instantly it was trained on Fish. The bright red triangle of its laser sight glowed between his eyes.
“I want,” Jay said, “to see the Rubber Room.”
“Fuck, whoa, Frog Mother and all the fucking blue gods of the sea, oh fuck,” Fish stammered, both webbed hands way up, “This is a private establishment. You can’t just, with a gun, fuck. There’s no Rubber Room. Oh fuck. There’s no any kind of room. Even if there was, I couldn’t—”
A bell jingled as the front door opened. Jay swung the blaster toward the door; Lars brandished the space dildo. Flanking the door stood two figures: the first, a knotted assembly of jagged coral and thick, gray driftwood, the other barely more than a pile of rock, algae-festooned and spattered white with bird shit. Debris-men, held together by some arcane force, in the vague shape of human giants and standing taller, even, than the towering Frank. The rock golem’s head was rough-hewn and eyeless, the other’s a jagged crown of conch shell, their faces blank and dull in a way that couldn’t be mistaken for something alive. Between them stepped a man with skin like silver nacre, a mirror man, reflecting the sex shop like a funhouse attraction. Lars clenched the dildo so hard it crumpled. So much for the long haul in the black, he thought. And so much for a fucking low profile. Quillian had found him. And the mirror-faced gangster didn’t look pleased.