by Brandon Getz
As he’d walked back from the boot shop, he passed the cosmic chapel, looking for a moment at the dark altar where the hologram of the god of his youth had projected, the smiling otherworldly woman-god with her third all-seeing eye. It still had the smell of bullshit. But Lars dug a coin from his pocket and tossed it into the donation bowl anyway. With Jay and Fish ripping holes in the universe, he wasn’t taking any chances.
When the beer was stacked and strapped in place, Lars shoved the cart back into the slip’s antechamber and engaged the airlock. Jay hadn’t moved. She seemed to stare beyond the hull, into the stygian void.
“Princess,” he said, “I got a fuckton of questions for you.” When she started to speak, he stopped her: “Not now. I haven’t slept in Jeezus knows how long. I’ve been shot, strangled, and hung out an airlock. I haven’t been fucked in weeks, and the only thing I’ve eaten since my last job is canned meat in synthetic gravy.”
He turned, headed for the corridor toward the bow. “I’m going up to the controls and getting my baby into open space. Then I’m setting auto-course for someplace with a cheap whorehouse and decent food, locking her up with a passcode, and going to sleep.”
“We have to stick to the mission,” Jay said.
“Yeah? We’ll vote on it tomorrow. Goodnight, princess.”
Chapter XVIII
They were wet and gorgeous and writhing. Three of them, bodies in the dark, drudged up from memory in the stroboscopic reality of his dreams. Tourists on a planet of beautiful ruins, black sandscapes, beanstalk trees with sparse violet canopies. He’d met her/them on a long vacation, splurging on R&R after a shit merc job in the cold crags of some disputed corporate asteroid. She/they were 3Flesh, a race in triplicate, three identical bodies connected by twisted, pulsing umbilici: each cord snaking from the skull of the central Flesh to its stereo-bodies. Their skin was translucent and bioluminesced a faint blue, and Hot Cosmic Jeezus Christ they looked like angels, if angels were triplets connected at the head by fleshy rope. Best sex of his life, and he hadn’t even had to pay for it. She/they had wanted him. And he’d wanted them/her, the ephemerality of their connection as intoxicating as any alien hooch he’d ever tried.
Lars woke up with a shudder and warm cum on his sheets. Finally, he thought. His fur-covered balls had been begging for relief since the Pickled Quasar. He rustled the spider-silk armor from the floor, rolled on a pair of mismatched socks, and shimmied each foot into a formtex boot. Dressed in yesterday’s clothes, he shrugged on a shoulder holster and dropped a thick-muzzled automatic under his left arm. Didn’t usually carry onboard, but he had to have a balls-out heart-to-heart with Jay the Ninja Princess. The weight of the gun made him feel better.
In the hold, Jay was slouched against some cargo netting, eyes closed. Most of the blood had been cleaned off of her, a smattering of stains on her clothes. A white bandage wrapped the ankle Lars’ wolf-claws had mauled to save her. Frank was in sentry mode, his numerous eyes watching Lars and Jay at the same time.
“Don’t worry, Frank,” Lars said. “She’s safe. Unless she tries to drink my neck too. Then I’ll unload a clip into her face. But I don’t want to. It’d take forever to clean up.”
He made his way to the stack of kegs. He unlatched one, tapped it, and poured three mugs, each mostly foam. Fucking spinner bartenders, man. Chiselers, all of them. Lars passed one of the mugs to the tremuloid and sat on a crate. After a long minute of dead silence, he started to laugh.
“Saw this cartoon once when I was a kid. The library, they had all this weird shit. Like some musty old museum, except the shit’s just on shelves instead of glass cases. A couple of us, we dug up this real old file, this cartoon cat and dog, gross as hell—gross even by our standards, which in a flood town, where the sewage runoff backs up every other day, are pretty low. One day, the cat squeaks out an epic ass-blast, this airborne toxic event of a fart, so radioactive it’s sapient. It starts talking. The cat, he thinks the fart cloud is his son. Names it—names it Stinky.” Lars almost spilled his beer he was laughing so hard. That stupid cartoon, hell, he hadn’t thought of it in decades. It was nothing, just an afternoon with friends whose names he’d forgotten, wasting time on a day the rains were bad and they couldn’t kick mud or swim for the underwater city off the coast. “Stinky runs away. And I was thinking—I was thinking about that bartender. Reminded me of little Stinky. Poor bastard. Him and his whole fart race.”
He kept laughing, choking on his beer, then chugging the second, his beard wet with foam. Frank just stared. As Lars went for refills, Jay started to move, her joints cracking as she stretched. Lars offered her a mug. She took it, but she didn’t drink.
“Sorry,” he said, “fresh out of blood kegs.”
Her eyes hardened, and she took a sip, wiping the foam off her nose.
Lars took his spot on the crate. “So. The fuck are you, a vampire? Should we add that to the list? Magic ninja vampire space princess. I saw Wolfman Meets Dracula. Drac makes Wolfman his man-slave, makes him eat bugs and shit. It’s degrading.”
“My race requires fresh blood,” she said. “Regular feedings. On my world, there’s a slave class to feed on. Out here, traveling, it’s more difficult.”
“So, you murder people.” Lars took a gulp, noted the dark malts. It wasn’t a bad beer, under all the foam. “Which is cool. Fine. It’s a dog-eat-dog universe. But you should’ve given me a heads up, let me know some regular blood-feeding would be part of the equation. You really fucked it up on that spinner. Low profile that wasn’t.”
Jay shrugged. “Doesn’t fucking matter. That little toad got away with my key. And even if he didn’t, I don’t know if it would do anything. I don’t even know what button to press.”
“Me neither. I was always shit at the Rubik’s cube.”
“The what?”
“Nothing. Homeworld kitsch.” Less foam this time, the keg was evening out. He poured a refill for Frank too, who stood mute as a telephone pole on his coiled roots. “Okay, you’re an alien vampire ninja space princess. Why did you dive headlong for that space-hole? And what is the box? Fishman grumbled about it being a harbinger of end times, ripping up pieces of the universe. Felt so strongly about it he jumped out a fucking airlock. Seems like there’s maybe an ounce of truth in that tale.”
A half-smile played on Jay’s lips. If not for her fangs, it would’ve looked soft, even flirty. “It’s a key,” she said. “To a pocket universe. Separate-but-connected existence beyond this dimension.
I’ve been looking for one all my life. Or something like it—some way home.”
“Home?”
“Home is a galaxy in a pocket-verse. When I went into exile, I didn’t just leave the kingdom, the planet—I was taken to another plane of existence, another bubble of space-time, your universe. There are dozens of keys, maybe hundreds, across the cosmos. I’ve found some, but most are too old, too arcane, too specialized to alien epistemology to operate. Some are planet-sized, some aren’t even in this dimension. Then I heard about this key, the one traded to that dildo peddler. I knew if I enlisted you first, I’d be more likely to come out of that store with the box. That business with the golemancer—”
“I don’t want to say I told you so,” Lars interrupted. “But I fucking told you so.”
The vampire princess leaned forward, her scarred breasts pressed together in the V of her neckline. She drank her beer empty and handed him the mug. “Anything else you want to know?”
He thought of the 3Flesh, her/their long luminescent tongues, what those identical wet bodies had been able to do. He smiled. That coital sorcery was the high score to beat.
Chapter XIX
Lars flexed and went to the keg for refills. His leg still burned a little where Fish had shot him, the wolf blood, low on lunar power, slow to stitch him back together. He’d plugged into a lunar battery while he slept, but it hadn’t been enough. The turn back at the spinner, so far from any moon, had drained too
much. He handed Jay and Frank their mugs, slurped foam off his.
“Yeah,” he said, “one or two more things. What’s on Cairn?”
“Someone we need,” Jay said. “A hexsmith.”
“A witch.”
Jay grinned, all those sharp teeth glistening with the wetness of the brew. “She’d hate that word.”
First Jay’s blood magic, then Fish’s enchanted puzzle box. Now a bona fide space witch. What was next, a star-killing unicorn? It was all too much hocus-pocus. Shit didn’t mesh with his skeptic worldview. He looked down and caught a glimpse of the hex tattoos on his arms and sighed. Maybe hocus pocus was part of the fabric of the universe. And maybe he had the proof right there on his skin. Didn’t mean he had to like it.
“Okay,” he said, “a hexsmith. Question C: why me?”
A flash in those purple eyes. “You know why.”
“Dys-7. You want an atom bomb in wolfskin. But that doesn’t compute—we’re still a handful of jackasses going up against, if your story checks out, an army of rebels and pretenders to the throne. Why not hire someone like Quillian to conjure you a swarm of trash-soldiers? Or any number of dangerous sons-of-bitches that aren’t yours truly?”
Jay settled back against a crate, drank a long gulp with a wry grin wedged in the corners of her lips. “You really want out? We can turn back to Canal City . . .”
“I don’t want out,” Lars said. “I just want to know why you need a werewolf.”
“Spoilers,” she said, setting the empty mug on the floor. Frank shuffled toward the stereo and jabbed a couple of buttons with a branch, and suddenly there was raging death metal playing at a polite volume, triple-bass drums a muffled, seizing heartbeat. Jay’s smile was still there, and Lars wasn’t sure he liked it. He hated surprises.
“I hate surprises,” he said.
“You’ll just have to trust me. Come with me, let the wolf loose on the people who killed my family, get paid. It’s easy.”
“Easy,” Lars repeated.
Mugs were all empty, and this time Frank poured, managing an expert ratio of foam. Lars looked at the small porthole in the door, stars whizzing by, as if he could tell where they were by a glimpse of constellation.
“I set the nav system for Freewheel when we ditched the spinner. My guess, we’re about three hours out. It’s a casino planet past the fringe of Federation space. A thousand and one places to get fed, fucked, and drunk, which pretty much covers the sum total of what I need right now. Cairn and the hexsmith can wait.”
Jay smiled and moved closer to him, grazing his forearm with an armored breast. “Who says we need Freewheel for all that?”
There was no fighting it. His mouth dried up like the asshole of an old cat, his chest ramped up to match the pounding of the triple bass, and his erection reached omega levels, explosive. He felt Jay’s
hot breath on his beard hairs, her fingers along his waistline. It was, he had to admit, what he’d been jonesing for since he’d first seen her back at that cat-infested neon saloon. His gaze sank into the shadow between her scarred, pale breasts. Hard to say whether her nethers were humanoid, but he’d blown his juice in stranger. Everybody had some sort of orifice or ovipositor—it was just a matter of creative positioning, sexual imagination. He started to reach for the zipper on her body armor, then heard the click of his thick-barreled revolver even as he felt its nose jab his favorite rib.
“What the hell?” he said. “I thought we were having a moment.”
“We don’t have a moment,” said Jay, pushing the revolver further into his side. “Set course for Cairn, and jump into FTL. I’ve waited a fucking lifetime for this. I’m not taking a holiday in some neon backwater while you get your rocks off and choke on steak. We go to Cairn and we get on with the mission.”
Lars sighed. His erection withered. Goddamn.
“Okay,” he said, “get the gun out of my rib meat. I’ll set for Cairn, futtle and fuck-all. No reason for the hot-and-bother ruse. I’m a professional.”
The princess flipped the revolver, shook its six slugs onto his lap, and held it for him to take. He dropped it back into the shoulder holster and scooped the bullets with one hand, shoving them into the pocket of his black dungarees as he stood. The smile was all but gone from Jay’s mouth. Bloodsucking vampire mouth, he reminded himself. If she didn’t shoot him with his own gun, she might just drain him till he was a cold blue corpse. It disturbed him a bit when his dick twitched at the thought. But only a bit.
Chapter XX
It was the moons. An early job. He was still fresh to exile and taking any contract with a promise of paycheck. The Federation had been in an expansionist phase, taking planets into the confederate fold—whether they wanted it or not, if they had resources the Fed-Prime thought it needed. Peasant-collective planetoid in the Dys-X system, seventh in orbit of a pair of twin red stars. The population of Dys-7, what there was of it, huddled mostly in a handful of urban clusters, the rest of the surface given to farming and mining collectives, all of it on a rock riddled with rare metals. Fed wanted plausible deniability. Let a couple of free agents wreak some havoc, strongarm the Dys council into annexation. That was the mission.
All those goddamn moons spinning in the red sky. Flooding his blood. When the carrier landed, he let the beast loose—and it swallowed him. He hadn’t yet marked his skin with hexed ink or meditated in the black mountains of Nowhere, repeating the mantras that his monk-tattooist Budge had told him. He hadn’t learned control. The moons were too much, and he lost himself inside the wolf. He woke stiff in hard-caked gore, blood an inch thick. No one in the city was left alive, not even the other mercenaries. Dogs, miners,
councilwomen, children. Their bodies were shredded, bits of vein and tendon still under his fingernails and stuck between his teeth. The rest of the cities were willing to surrender, but Prime didn’t want to acknowledge the bloodshed. Brushed the whole fucking thing under the rug, even stiffed him on the paycheck. He hadn’t done a government job since—and had spent a long year hiding in the mountains, under Budge’s needle. Deep-fried Hell, he thought, a goddamn nightmare.
For the first time since the Pickled Quasar, Lars wondered why exactly he was on this wild sheep chase. Jay’s vial of negativium was a big score—a retirement score. And sure, he’d admit it, he was an adventure junkie, and Jay’s vengeance had the sweet tang of epic whup-ass all over it. The vampire princess wanted a massacre. But if she wanted Dys-7, a whole city of usurpers gutted and chewed on, the answer was hell nah. No fucking way would he go full-on wolf berserker like that again. Lars looked down at the spirals and runes inked along his arms, hoping he couldn’t get lost in the wolf again even if he wanted to.
Streaking past the cockpit’s windows was the kaleidoscopic striation of faster-than-light. It was close enough to an acid trip, without the flashbacks and neurological burn, and Lars loved every minute of it, every sizzling color. He sat back in the cushion of the cockpit, pilot seat warm and still molded to his own ass, and watched the underside of space-time fly by, wishing he could hear the tunes playing on the stereo, some righteous metal to drown out his memories, to forget everything but the lights.
Chapter XXI
Somewhere in the relative orbit of the planet Cairn, Sheila warped out of the technicolor jetstream of futtle-drive and slowed to cruising speed. Ahead, moon-sized balloons of phosphorescent gas floated, at least a dozen, and beyond them, eclipsing the corona of a white star, was a brown moonless world. The gas bubbles turned toward the sun’s light, and as the ship neared them, Lars could see that they weren’t gas, they were something living—heaving, semi-corporeal ghost-like things, luminescent glow-organs pulsing inside their twilight skins.
“Star whales,” Jay said. She stood behind the pilot’s seat, Sheila’s array of controls reflecting in her amethyst eyes. “They feed on energy waves. Schools flock to novas, dwarves—big light sources.”
“They breathe out there?”
“Who says they
breathe?”
For all the alien things he’d seen since leaving Terra in his tachyonic wake, he was awestruck by the sight of the whale. He eased the throttle and let Sheila coast toward Cairn, past the glowing leviathan, the heavy ghosts drinking in the blinding light of the star.
Jay stayed behind him as they approached the planet. Clouds swirled above its desert surface, white and thin mottled with dark raging patches of gray-black storm. Lars had known, even as they’d come up from subspace, that Cairn was without a moon—he’d felt the lack of lunar energy—but that didn’t mean there was nothing in its orbit. A massive hive-station hung in the space beyond Cairn’s atmosphere, a shining and light-speckled structure shaped like a giant yam and built of hardened, crystalline slime.
“Dock at the station,” Jay said. “The Cairnish have a network of blaster satellites orbiting the entire planet. Any vessel without clearance is vaporized.”
“Fuck do they care? Planet’s half dead—Cairnish haven’t lived on it in what, a millennium?”
The Cairnish were well known in the galaxy, mostly as deep-space pilots, and Cairn a perennial legend in the dark corners of interstellar watering holes. Alien plague had decimated the population, triggering an exodus among the survivors, and what was left of the dryslug race lived in diaspora across the cosmos, a memetic bitterness against all other sapient life ingrained in their collective memory. They were notorious racists and generally unpleasant, but the heavy six-legged slugs, with their gnashing sentient tumors—four-dimensional feelers, time-antennae—could see things in the subspace strata most races couldn’t even begin to perceive. The Embassy orbiting Cairn was more a function of nostalgia than anything else—Cairn was home, even if it would kill any Cairnish survivor to breathe its air. Pub gossip also had it that there were treasures galore beneath the planet’s surface, left behind in the slugs’ haste to evacuate. Lars decided he wouldn’t mind checking it out firsthand, nosing through subterranean slug city ruins for priceless kitsch to pawn back at Freewheel or elsewhere.