by Brandon Getz
“They’re sentimental,” Jay said.
“They’re assholes.” Docking arms poked from the hive-station’s middle like errant hairs. Lars eased Sheila into a slip, waited for the airlock to fuse. “What do we say when they ask us our business? That we’re looking for a witch to help us on our murder-revenge mission to a vampire-planet pocket universe?”
“We tell them the truth. We’re here to see the sights.”
“One of those sights being a formidable hexsmith.”
“Exactly.”
Lars popped the key from the console and stuffed it rabbit’s-foot-first into his pocket, heard it clink against the six loose revolver bullets. A message from the hive fed into his stereo system, announcing they were to be boarded by Cairnish officials. When the door began to open, Lars had joined Jay and Frank in the cargo hold, all of them politely bereft of weaponry. He was still wearing the shoulder holster and felt stupid with the empty slot under his arm—he hoped the dryslug wouldn’t notice.
The door opened, and the Cairnish official slithered in. It was flanked by two Siskelian lackeys, each outfitted in the black uniform of StatSec and holding chunky laser-sighted rifles. The dryslug wriggled between them, its thin legs helping to skid its thick, segmented body along the floor. It was dressed in a rainbow of elaborately wrapped scarves, each loosely wound around its time-tumors: blind growths of howling teeth. Its face was cracked and speckled, and its wide mouth was set in a vicious frown.
What’s your business on Cairn? said the hive official, its translated voice echoing as the facsimile sense-language of the tumors muddled the interpreter sensors.
“Sightseeing,” Lars said. “Beautiful landscape, I’ve heard—”
The slug’s tumors hissed. Princess.
“Yes,” Jay said. “I’m back. I’m here to see the Hand.”
The tumors spasmed, and an echoed cry reverberated through the cargo hold. Lars turned to Jay and mouthed What the fuck?
The Hand is not a friend of the Cairnish, the official said. The Siskelians’ fists tightened on their rifles. They were smaller than the smuggling crew Lars had scuffled with on Victor’s Halo, without the fat middles and dull eyes. These blue fuckers had military training. He didn’t want to have to rip them to pieces. They’d be trouble.
“I know,” said Jay, “That’s why I’m here. I want to take the Hand off your planet.”
The dryslug’s sallow eyes squinted, focused hard on the princess. Tumors bucked on its back and chest, teeth grinding. You would remove this thorn from the skin of the Hive?
“I would.” The princess sat back on her preferred crate. “But I need something in return.”
Another hiss, tumors wild like an orgy of tube worms. The Ambassador, said the official.
“I’ll talk to her,” Jay said.
The official began to turn back to the door, picking at its scarves with a claw. Very well, it said, come with me.
Chapter XXII
Hardslime tunnels curved and crisscrossed throughout the Hive, a labyrinth of petrified ooze that still looked wet and dripping till you got up close. Advanced tech studded the walls, and hidden lights illuminated the walkways, shining off the slime. Siskelian mercs were stationed everywhere—a platoon of them for every scarf-festooned dryslug on the moon-sized station. The slugs might have been in charge, but it was the blue hired guns who were keeping the place running.
Lars followed Jay, Frank, and the slug official through an impossible-to-remember path up the Hive’s interior. He wasn’t happy about leaving Sheila at the dock, but Jay seemed sure his precious cruiser would be unmolested, and the official itself had given its word. The wolfman had locked up, told his baby he’d be right back, and slipped the rabbit-footed keys into the pocket of his armor-laced fatigues. Then the maze of the Hive, the four of them, plus their Siskelian escort, stopping only when they reached a large, locked door with a pair of blue mercenaries in full battle armor at attention on side. As if choreographed, both mercs turned to train their big blaster rifles on the non-slug newcomers as they approached.
The Ambassador, the official said. We will see her.
“She hasn’t given the order,” mumbled one of the guards.
The slug’s tumors gnashed at the mercenary, but the armored Siskelian didn’t react. Must be used to the things, Lars figured. Even the worst things in the galaxy are easy to get used to, you’re around them long enough.
The big door sighed, some hidden hydraulic lock releasing, and slid open. The guards stepped back into position, shouldering the rifles, and the official slithered inside, Lars and crew shuffling in behind.
Lars couldn’t stop himself from letting out a loud and disbelieving “Jeezus fucking Christ” at the sight of the Cairnish Ambassador. He froze, gawking, till Jay elbowed him to keep walking. The consular slug was huge, a fat mass of peeling leather skin and man-sized tumors, five times the size of the Cairnish he’d seen throughout the Hive, like a truckload of leather couches had been beamed with Gamma rays and fused together into a tumor-riddled monstrosity. Her mouth, and the mouths of the blind tumors, frothed with slime, and around her, amid unintelligible trid displays with holograms overlaying holograms like someone had forgotten to wear their red-and-blue glasses at a 3-D movie, were the rotting husks of other slugs, their tumors slumped over their bellies like dicks after sex. The whole nest stank of sweat and death, and Lars, senses heightened with his wolf blood, choked on the smell. The official who’d met them at the dock bowed to its leader and hissed something that the translators didn’t catch. The Ambassador reared her head, and her tumors writhed.
Princess, she said. The alien voice boomed in the confines of the room.
“Ambassador,” Jay said. “It’s been a long time.”
Not long enough. The Ambassador bristled. Our pestilence halved when you left. I thought I asked you not to return.
“You did. But I haven’t returned to stay. I’m here to take the Hand home.”
The big slug shuddered as it laughed. Its tumors shrieked, biting the air. Home? You have no home, exile. That’s why we took you in, allowed you to defile our land.
“Like you said, Ambassador . . .” Jay smiled—the demure smile of someone skilled in diplomacy. Lars had to give her credit. Even if she’d only been a royal for the first few years of her life, she’d learned a thing or two about leverage. “It has been a long time.”
Tumors screeched. The Ambassador lowed her head, coming face to face with the ninja princess. A disturbance is sensed. A fissure in time. Explain this, Princess. Do you plan to cross the Cairnish? If you do . . . The slug’s wide mouth pulled into a hideous grin, and a claw swept from beneath layers of gilded scarves to gesture toward her nest of corpses. I will feed you to my children as they hatch.
“The fissure is the doorway to our universe,” said Jay. “That’s all your antennae are sensing. Our way home.”
For a moment, neither Jay nor the Ambassador moved. Lars felt a fart blossoming in the pit of his bowels, but he decided to hold it in, lest the squeak send the tumors into a frenzy. Finally, the Ambassador lifted her head, settling back into her perch among the dead.
As you wish, Princess. You will descend to the surface and take the Hand home. Cut the cancer from our planet. Tumors wailed at the mention of Hand’s name. Is there anything else you wish to ask of the Cairnish?
Chapter XXIII
Drag burned harmlessly along Sheila’s armored nose as the cruiser slanted into Cairn’s atmosphere. Lars eased the throttle, slowed the descent to an easy speed.
“A knife?” he said again. “We traipse all through that wretched hive of scum and villainy to hold court with the Queen Slug, and your one request for helping them get this witch off world was a fucking knife?”
Jay was stationed in her annoying new perch right behind the pilot seat, gripping the pleather as the ship bucked with turbulence. In the distance, sprite lightning crackled in the sky, and clouds obscured most of the
brown and beige landscape.
“It’s not just a knife.” The knife was in her boot sheath, ornate pommel level with her knee. She pulled it out, admired it as if checking her reflection in the blade. “It’s a Cairnish ceremonial dirk. A holy relic. Forged through arcane metallurgy the slugs lost in the exodus.”
Lars glanced over his shoulder. “It looks just like your other knife.”
“It is just like my other knife,” she said. “It’s exactly like my other knife. Lost the other one when that toad jumped the airlock with my key.”
Land was rising in front of them now, wide wastelands sliced through with blood-red rivers and boils of old mountains. Patches of black hair on the skin of the planet turned out to be trees, gnarled blackroots with slim yellow leaves. Lars tried to focus on the landing. Jay had given him exact coordinates, as sure of the numbers as if she’d been rattling off her birthday. He cut Sheila up over a knob of mountain peaks, bringing her low over a river valley, scattering a herd of hard-shelled beasts.
“Whole bags of swords and sorcery back there that we stole from Fishman,” Lars said. “You couldn’t pick out a good blade from that heap? What about that broadsword you were sweet on?”
He could almost hear her shrug. “I’m particular,” she said, “about some things. Maybe I’m just sentimental too.”
“Gift from a boyfriend,” Lars muttered. “I get it.”
“Not really,” she said. She thrust her face forward over his shoulder, edging him sideways in his seat. Ahead, the stretch of wasteland narrowed into the fork of a red river, and at its apex sat a small silver dome glinting in the sunlight. “Set it down. We’re here.”
Rocks, brush, and random junk littered the wasteland around the dome, forcing Lars to park Sheila several shiplengths away. As the landing gear thudded against the desiccated earth, the whole cruiser shuddered, and a cloud of dust spread around it like a dense fart. Watching the dust settle made the wolfman’s stomach rumble—that gas from back at the Ambassador’s nest had gone shy, giving his guts a wicked ache. He needed to blast off some butt thunder pronto. And after that, he needed a long deuce and a hot breakfast, some moist little alien beauty in his bunk with her hindquarters poised at the ready. Instead, he was following a shifty murder princess into the desert den of a mysterious space witch. So much for luck.
Keys safely jangling in his pocket, Lars bee-lined through the cargo hold to his lunar battery stash. He could feel it, his blood—tapped of lunar energy like an engine running on fumes. It’d been reckless to change on that spinner, no moons in range to siphon, to recharge. He powered up two of the batteries and strapped them to his back. The packs’ white lights pulsed as he felt the surge of lunar juice diffuse into his wolf blood. It would be a little while before he could turn again, but with this moonless rock, he didn’t have much of a choice—it was battery power or zip. He rooted through one of the weapons bags from Fish’s emporium and grabbed a bunch of shit he liked—combat knives he strapped to his arms and legs, a couple of plasma-cell revolvers. Locked and loaded, he rested the barrel of a laser cannon on his shoulder and grinned at Jay and Frank, who were watching irritably from the door.
“Ready?” he said.
Jay glowered. “We’ve been ready for ten minutes.”
“Fuckin’ A, then. Let’s rock ‘n’ roll.”
Outside was hot and desolate and bone-dry. The air smelled of rust and sulfur, with an extremely faint undercurrent of patchouli oil that made Lars’ stomach turn. As they headed for the dome—a silver thumbnail on the bleak horizon—the wolfman noticed that most of what he’d thought was junk was in fact a wind farm: a whole haphazard field of makeshift windmills cobbled together from blackwood, animal bones, scraps of steel, old hardened dryslug slime. Sun-bleached skulls from alien animals smiled from their rotor hubs, a kind of grim welcome, as the blades moved slowly around them, squeaking in the breeze.
“Love the arts and crafts,” Lars said, tightening his grip on the cannon.
“You should see her macramé.”
A grin spread across Lars’s face—Jay was always so damn serious, it was a relief to know she could speak smartass when the occasion called—then faded just as quickly. Something changed in the scent of the wind. An animal smell. Bitter, acerbic. Venom and chitin. From nowhere, some unseen dimension, a crustacean claw as long as Jay’s leg slipped into reality and clipped a whole branch from Frank’s topiary crown. The tremuloid reeled, spraying hot sap.
Lars wheeled and started blasting the shimmering air with laserfire. “Fucking Christ. Jay—what was that?”
Jay was in full ninja crouch, eyes glittering. The Cairnish dagger in her fist caught sunlight: bright and menacing. “Chronoscorp,” she called back. “Four-D predator. Why do you think the Cairnish evolved those tumors?”
“Figured they were chainsmokers.”
Another claw burst into the third dimension, barely missing Jay as she leapt acrobatically from crouch to kick. Her boot landed on some random bit of the beast’s obscured anatomy, shell cracking under impact, and the time-scorpion screeched.
Lars blasted again, hitting nothing but air. “I can’t even see the fucker!”
Jay landed on dusty earth and rolled, dodging long, dripping stingers that breached time, stuck in rock, disappeared. With her ridged blade, she lashed out at nothing, and a stinger thudded wetly on the ground, severed from a chitin tentacle. It bled green into the dust. The monster screamed again.
“It’s not in our dimension,” Jay said, shaking scorp blood from her knife. “Not all of it.”
More stingers in and out of ripples in time. Still a fountain of sap-blood, Frank hefted his own severed limb and swung, cracking one of the scorpion’s lethal claws. Lars’ cannon clicked empty, and he chucked it, double-fisting the plasma revolvers. Jay whirled and jived through the onslaught of barbed tentacles. Ducking behind one of the skull-topped windmills, the princess ensorcelled Frank’s spraying sap, twisting it into ropes she wound around the monster’s flashing limbs. The green blood oozing from the severed stinger she formed into a shield, and charged forward, the sap-ropes a web, the chronoscorp writhing with anger. Slowed, it was an easier target, and the revolvers tore through its carapace, brain already burned through with plasma holes as Frank brought his branch-arm down for the final blow, shattering the tentacled time-scorpion’s nightmare face.
They were all heaving, out of breath, covered in green blood.
“What is this, planet of the time monsters?” Lars gasped. He felt his guts jag, and the deadly Embassy fart finally squeaked between his cheeks. At least that was a relief.
Frank threw down his lost limb and sat on a rock, depleted. Sap oozed down his trunk, over some of his eyes even, and he looked like he needed to get good and drunk. Lars couldn’t blame him—he felt like emptying a keg himself. From the direction of the dome, he heard the clunking of metal and then he saw them, just barely, making their way through the field of windmills: a tall robot and a small old woman wrapped in robes. Even with the distance, he could tell she was the same vampire species as Jay, the purple tendril-hair and pale skin dead giveaways. As they neared, the woman shouted something that sounded like a snake gargling the words Jade-Caesura-R’lyeh. He tapped the language sensor on his collar.
“Sensors must’ve gotten fucked up in the fight,” he said. “She’s talking gibberish.”
“It isn’t gibberish,” Jay said, watching the witch approach. “That’s my name.”
Chapter XXIV
The witch was quick for an old broad. She walked with a hunch, occasionally leaning on her android, but in no time at all they were standing next to the dead chronoscorp, a hard frown carved into the woman’s mummified face. She nudged the scorp’s cracked claw with a bare foot.
“Goddamn bugs,” she said. “Desert’s lousy with them.”
She turned her gaze to Jay, squinting through thick red-quartz lenses. The witch was smaller than the princess
, shriveled and bent by age. Her purple hair-tendrils were faded almost lavender, her skin yellowed and thin like the pages of an old book—arms and face marked with the same ritualistic scars. Her dusty robes hung low enough to make out a faded brand under her gaunt clavicle: a smaller, simpler knot than the one burned into Jay’s chest. She pulled the glasses from her face and blinked sand from her eyes, darker and redder than Jay’s amethyst, and Lars noticed that her left hand, holding the wire frames, was a prosthesis—a mechanical claw of bone-dry wood and copper wire, fastened with leather to the stump, which whirred with clockwork as it moved. The woman replaced her glasses and sniffed in disgust. Beneath her arched, scarred nose,
yellow lips puckered over a mouthful of fangs, her whole face sharp and carved like a well-used ax.
“I’m home, Auntie,” Jay said.
“This isn’t your home. Remember that,” the witch snapped. She eyed the princess’s sheathed dagger. “Still playing nice with that grub bitch, I see.” Then she seemed to notice Frank, the tremuloid nursing his scorpion wounds. “You’ve been watering your houseplant. What’d you do, run him through a wood chipper?”
Jay started to speak, but the witch held up her wooden hand.
“No excuses. If you’d stayed, you would know this arcana.” She motioned for her robot, a seven-foot Frankenstein of bolts and steel. Each of the android’s parts was mismatched and cobbled together, a motley of metal right down to the screws. Its left arm was painted in red camouflage and blossomed into a hefty concussion cannon at the elbow; the right was candy-striped black and yellow, the six-fingered gripper of a loader bot, Federation insignia still on the shoulder. The thick, rusted trunk of it had been hollowed out, and black liquid sloshed inside behind a pane of warped glass. On its bucket face, above two red slits of eye, was its callsign in faded block letters: BOR15.