Lars Breaxface- Werewolf in Space

by Brandon Getz

  “That’s just overstock from the emporium,” Fish said. “They’re foot vibrators. For the podophiles. You click the heels together and get a sensuous little tickle.”

  Lars tapped his heels like he was wearing ruby slippers, and the boots hummed with vibration. It wasn’t unpleasant, but he couldn’t see getting off on foot-jiggling. “Fuck it,” he said, “they fit.”

  When they’d filled the bags, the only things left hanging in the Rubber Room were mech armor and water lances. Nobody had any idea how to swing a spear made of hexed H2O, and anyway, both the armor and the spears were too big for the bags. As they headed for the front door, Jay said, “Bring the amphibian, too. He can show us how this stuff works on the way.”

  Fish’s frog eyes stretched so wide Lars thought they might pop out and roll into the sex toy wreckage in the middle of the floor, to be lost forever among butt plugs. “Me, what, me? That’s kidnapping, that’s confinement and forced ambulatory locomotion without my express consent on the matter, which I do not give, I have a shop to reassemble. Some of this might still be salvageable. I have my customers to think about. Shipments to be made. Lube fruits to jelly.”

  “Frank,” Jay said, “bring him. If he gives you trouble, put those fuzzy cuffs on him.”

  The tremuloid, laden with four full bags of stolen weaponry, slid a raw limb over Fish’s shoulders. The amphibian drooped, resigned, and gave no reason to bother with the fuzzy cuffs. “I’m taking inventory,” he said. “Every broken cock ring, every pilfered laser. I’m sending the invoice to you, Miss Thief. Itemized and alphabetized.”

  As Frank marched him toward the door, Fish began to list all the broken things in his once-pristine Fucktoy Emporium. The shop was an exercise in chaos now, impressive in its complete and total annihilation. Hell, Lars thought, a fucking hurricane would’ve left more standing. Passing Quillian, he marveled at the clean wound the canon had made, as if the gangster had been carved by a giant melon-baller. The silver man’s body was solid and sterling all the way through, shiny as the bumper on a brand-new cruiser. Lars suddenly had a deep, resonant urge to be back in Sheila’s pilot seat, skiffing the black, stars passing at random in the far-off, just him and the ship and some cranked-to-eleven metal tunes.

  When Fish locked up—Jay allowed him that courtesy—they left the KO’ed gangster inside.

  Chapter XI

  Night creatures in the canals burped bubbles of gas into the spaces between buildings, the bubbles glowing from some spontaneous luminescence and lighting up the whole city. The soft light reflected on the oil-slick water, and it was almost beautiful enough to forget the stink. Young women passed, bubbles caught under clear umbrellas, their own personal spotlights. Nocturnal birds moved like shadows through the light, snatching mosquitoes and moths the size of Fish’s eyeballs from the heavy night air. The boulder-crabs were sluggish, half hidden in gutters, but the citizens of Canal City were out in force, clogging the scaffolded walkways with their drunken selves, every species shouldering, shimmying, or slithering toward their watering hole of choice.

  Fish kept up his litany, but he didn’t fight or run. He must’ve realized that if he stayed, Quillian would’ve put two diamond bullets in his amphibious skull and tossed him into one of the canals for his erroneous canon shot. Lars had seen the gangster do worse, to scarier people, for smaller offenses. Fish had shot him. He was fucked in Canal City, and he knew it.

  There were more rivercycles on the canals at this hour, fewer cabs and barges. The cycles’ hover-engines added a chugging bassline to the city’s cacophony, their paddlewheels kicking up the stagnant water, popping bubbles of light-gas that wafted from the night fauna. Lars kept his eyes on the crowds for animated debris, the lurching of trash-puppets on the hunt. Jay was hauling ass, humping the full bag of weaponry on her back like it was just another limb, a part of her. Frank was trying, but the surprising speed Lars had seen in the tremuloid back on the spinner wasn’t there. The tree-man was lumbering. His sallow eyes pleaded for a drink.

  When they came to an arched iron footbridge festooned with old padlocks, Lars saw the first golem, another shoddy amalgamation of Fish’s battle-damaged sexual appurtenance, this one with a formtex disembodied butt for a head. Lars tried not to laugh. It was on the other side of the canal, behind them, pushing through a gaggle of laughing bridesmaids, their neck gills coiffed and bedazzled for a night out. They shouted epithets at the moving sex toys, too drunk to notice its gaping butt-face or floppy strap-on fists.

  “Quillian’s awake,” Lars said. “We got a dildo-puppet on our ass.”

  Jay glanced over her shoulder at the butthead golem and glowered. “We should’ve turned that vulture into powder.”

  “Maybe,” Lars said, moving, “but you don’t get to be hot shit in a port town like this without connections, on-world and off. Could be every gangster, senator, and freight tycoon he owes favors would be gunning for us to pay his debts. Better to have one sadist hunting us than a hundred.”

  “Space is a big place.”

  “Not big enough.”

  The crowds were too thick. The golem wasn’t making up ground. It tussled with a gang of squid-faced punks in identical plastic jackets, brass rings piercing their tentacled beards. Their brawl knocked a crate of alien saltfish from the branches of a tremuloid stevedore, and the big, chain-laden tree-man joined the melee. Lars smirked. The butthead would have its phallic hands full with that bunch.

  He turned a corner and was suddenly in the middle of a street market, stalls selling tchotchkes and swill and all manner of grilled critters and sea-flora. Lars realized he was ravenous. Jay and the rest were already ahead, Frank prodding the forlorn Fish along through the crowd. Behind them, a fishmonger began shouting, and Lars saw the tentpoles of her stall fold into themselves, twisting into man-shape, a gutted shark for a head. The shark-golem loomed over the shoppers and revelers, dead slabs of fish entwining with the tentpoles to form a scaly mimicry of musculature. It was pushing through the crowd, tossing shoppers into toppling stalls. Screams. A siren somewhere. Butthead edging in from an alley, punks and tremuloid apparently dispatched. The mood of the crowd began to shift, panic diffusing like a drop of dye in water. It spread subtly, bloomed.

  Jay veered toward a canal-access stairway, and the others followed. The wolf writhed inside Lars as he smelled blood and meat and the far-off moons. His blood wanted to let go, to let the animal burst out again and sate itself. It was always like that—the more he turned, the more the animal in him wanted another turning.

  “Frank,” Jay said, “hail a taxi.”

  The shark-golem’s head appeared over the railing above them, looking down on the small dock with its dead black eyes. Rivercycles splashed by, and the smell was overpowering. Piss and brimstone. Frank shot one of his branches over the water, and a barnacled taxi swerved toward them, exhaust pipes spewing black smoke. The taxi was an open design, barely more than a raft, but the engine looked heavy and powerful, made for speed. The driver, a slug-rat with a thick green beard, yelled for them to board. The golems were climbing over railings now. Falling purposefully into the water. Jay pulled her knife from her boot.

  “Sorry,” she said. “We need to borrow your ride.”

  The driver shrugged and dragged a long, chipped cutlass from his dash. “Bitch, you think you’re the first jacker I’ve run through in this rathole city? Dropped a dozen in these waters, gutted, left to bloat.”

  As he pushed forward with his sword, Frank’s tentacle-branch slipped down around his slimy rat arm and threw him, shouting, into the canal. Jay busied herself at the controls, looking for a way to disengage the rat’s killswitch. More splashes echoed from the flood walls. Lars looked up, and an army of debris-men stared back. The fuck? Quillian could only manipulate two at a time—the gangster had said as much when he’d handed Lars his contract. The limits of golemancy, at least for Quillian’s race. How in the cosmic hell was he puppeting an army?

  “It was me,” Fish
said, following his gaze.

  “What was you? Are you calling up your own crew of trash-creatures?”

  “He wanted more power, you know? More juice.” Fish rubbed his wrist nervously, more of the trash creatures splashing into the canal around them. “I’m a businessman. An innovator and entrepreneur. Money is money—in this town, you can’t be picky. Just a little rewiring to a pair of anti-grav cuffs and voila. If you’re familiar with the hex frequencies, it’s nothing.”

  “So?”

  “So, uh, well . . . Quillian can puppet a hundred of these things,” Fish gulped, “with the power enhancers I sold him. Works with any psychokinetic ability. Ups the voltage fifty-fold.”

  “Hot Cosmic Christ, Fishman,” Lars howled, “you gave that bastard an army.”

  Silhouettes of junk soldiers marched beneath the water’s surface. They were coming, dozens of them, crawling, splashing, sinking. It wasn’t about unpaid debts or Guild bounties, Lars knew. It was vengeance. Shoot a piece of a man’s arm off and lock him in a sex shop, and suddenly he’s not such a cold, calculating bastard. He wanted their heads.

  Lars dropped to one knee and threw his bags of guns on the deck. Unzipping one, he called to Jay, “Let’s get the hell out of here.”

  “I’m trying,” she rasped back.

  Bubbles of gas ballooned beneath the surface, membrane-lanterns growing from the breath-glands of animals, and Lars could see the dark shapes nearing. Close enough now to reach with rubbish hands. A yellow bubble broke the surface, and a fat claw made of mashed-together fish parts reached up. As it did, Jay grabbed the taxi’s controls and punched the accelerator.

  Chapter XII

  The engine groaned and the taxi began to skid on the water. Frank looped his branches around the starboard railing, grabbing Fish as the amphibian nearly toppled over. Lars wound one arm through the straps of his gun bags, the weight of them enough to keep him from sliding. “Fish,” he yelled over the engines, “which one of these should I bust out for those garbage goons?”

  “You thieves,” Fish blubbered, “you ruined my shop, you took my stuff, you’re kidnapping me—”

  “We’re gonna save your life,” Lars said. “Now tell me what heat to use on these assholes.”

  Fish frowned and said, “That chrome one. The one with the sight on it. Precision blaster. Try not to shoot any innocent people.”

  “Just guilty trash,” said the wolfman, hefting the blaster. “Got it."

  Lars flicked the safety and aimed at the canal behind them. The taxi furrowed the water in its oily wake, and the engine exhaust billowed with long chains of smoke. Rivercycles sloshed in the waves, plowed out of the way by Jay. Their riders shouted from the water until they noticed the army walking beneath them—then they scrambled for docks. Quillian Nine’s golems kept dropping into the canal, kept marching for Lars and his crew. Bad fucking luck, this whole stop. They could’ve gone anywhere in the galaxy for hardware. But Jay had to have Fishman’s goods, right in Quillian’s back yard.

  “Hold on!” Jay called back, and then they weren’t in the water anymore, not soaring between canal walls, they were bouncing, crashing, across hard ground. The taxi splintered, and the heavy engine broke from the stern and whipped wildly over Lars’ head, taking half the pilot house roof with it as it careened into the outer wall of the shuttle terminal. Lars found himself flat on his chest against the deck, Frank huddled nearby over a rattled but still intact Fish.

  Jay came up from some cubicle in the pilot house, a dark scuff of soot across half her face.

  “You okay?” Lars said.

  Wiping the ash off with the back of her hand, she said, “Grab the shit. We make it to a shuttle, then we’re nonstop to the cruiser and off this planet.”

  Lars shouldered his bag, blaster in hand. From the creaking sound of wood behind him, he knew Frank was following. Then some grating alien voice shouted for them to stop. All around them, flooding out from the terminal, were uniformed officers, Canal City PD and Port Security, all with skinny laser pistols and semi-automatic harpoons. The guns were trained on Lars and crew. Sights speckled them with red dots.

  “You want to explain the joy ride?” said one of the nearer cops. “Does that stretch of water look like a fucking highway?”

  “Sorry, Officer,” Lars said, “I just like to feel the wind in my hair.”

  Before the officer—or any others—could harpoon his wisecracking wolf ass, someone screamed, and a body in CCPD blue splattered the pavement between them. Golems had trudged up from the canal bottom. Slime-covered and draped in algae, they came. Fists of junk pounded through the ragged line of cops, some species faring better than others. Slug-rats and hominids burst like sacks of meat. Crustaceans and leather-skinned things took punches and unloaded

  their pistols. Lasers cut empty holes through the animated rubbish. Harpoons bounced or stuck harmlessly.

  Jay took off in a dead sprint for the shuttle platforms. “Run!”

  Lars was behind her, beside her, wolf blood swelling. He choked back the urge to hulk out. No time to go wolf. Above them, beyond the skylights, the aerodocks—massive cylindrical magnet-islands—hovered high over the coastal ocean, partly blurred by smog and darkness. Dark shapes landed and took off in the commerce of travel, oblivious, and Lars couldn’t wait to get his ass in Sheila’s pilot seat and shoot off this godforsaken waterpit. Sounds of battle faded behind them, the cops overrun by Quillian’s puppet army. Golems entered the terminal. New arrivals from off-world fled for the exits. Armed security fired on the stone men from behind luggage racks and shipping containers. They paid no attention to Lars or the others—the golems were tearing up the terminal, the main hub of Canal City’s interplanetary trade.

  A shuttle was docked at one of the platforms, doors open. Its passengers still huddled inside, away from gunfire. Lars dove in and held the door for Jay, Fish, and Frank. Everyone inside, he let it go, but the sliding door stayed open.

  “What the fuck?” Lars said to no one in particular. “Take off, you oversized butt plug!”

  “It-it’s automated,” one of the passengers said from the floor. “It’s on a timer.”

  Marching steadily through the battle of the terminal, algae stuck in its crevices and leather bits burned black by laser fire, was the butthead golem, the gaping anus in its face staring down at them like a cyclopean eye.

  “That was one of my best pieces,” Fish lamented of the butt. “Based the design on one of the biggest pop stars in the city. He modeled for me personally. A perennial top seller.”

  Amid the chaos of the terminal, the butthead wrenched its own space-dildo fist from its arm, reached back, and hurled the chrome claw straight for Fish’s grief-stricken face. The doors began to close, dildo fist soaring—and then a thunk, and a large phallic dent in the door only inches from the amphibian’s wide eyeballs.

  “Holy Frog Mother . . .” Fish muttered.

  Lars laughed. “I think assface is sweet on you.”

  The noise of battle raged outside as the shuttle lifted, ascending its prescribed route. Something thudded on the roof. Beating. Punching.

  “Hot Cosmic Jeezus,” Lars spat, “for real?”

  If he saw another sex toy any time in the next century, it would sure as shit be too soon. He’d had it with murderous coital accessories, and with animated junk in general. There was no game in killing something that wasn’t alive. Even most robots had an A.I. Quillian’s trash soldiers were just marionettes. Across the shuttle, Jay was crouched near Frank, her knife raised and gleaming. The rest of the passengers were frozen in terror. The warm smell of fresh piss spread across the shuttle. Lars couldn’t blame them. He didn’t say a word.

  As the shuttle neared the aerodock, the floppy strap-on hand punched through the roof, its rubbery material shredding as it pried back metal. Wind gusted as the pressure leaked from the shuttle. Lars dropped to his back and took aim. He could see the golem’s anal visage through the hole it’d ripped. The shredde
d strap-ons reached in again, pulling back more of the roof. The shuttle was settling onto its platform now. PortSec on the dock were already firing. Thin laserbeams sliced through its steel and leather torso. Lars steadied the blaster’s sight between the head’s butt cheeks—and pulled the trigger. Blaster plasma funneled straight up its rubber poop chute. The assface reared back, bursting in a spray of latex confetti, the rest of the body crumpling.

  Doors opened. The security team didn’t lower their guns, and Lars didn’t like what might happen next: another shootout with port guards, more dead cops in their wake. It wasn’t that he had any special affinity for cops. But dead cops, especially in a city this big, meant more attention from the Bounty Guild, and a higher price than station security or dead smugglers would garner. A backspace spinner like Victor’s Halo was one thing; this was Canal City. Space was a big place, but it wasn’t that big. They didn’t need this kind of heat trailing them the whole mission.

  “Nice shot,” called one of the Port Security grunts, holstering her laser. “Blasted his whole face off. What’s going on down there? Looks like a war zone.”

  “It’s that little bitch Quillian, isn’t it?” said another cop. “Is he fucking rolling on something? Killing cops, fucking up port traffic . . .”

  The first cop nodded. “Even he doesn’t have the funds to bribe his way out of this shit. The Consortium’ll drop him in an ocean trench. Let the Old Ones sort ‘im out.”

  “Nah,” said a third. “Exile. Offworld. Knows too many shipper cartels. Can’t trench a man with connections.”

  “Where you going, sharpshooter?” the first PortSec said to Lars.

  “A-97,” Jay called out. “Cruiser dock.”

  “Just routine business, man,” Lars added. “Shit to haul across the black.”