by Brandon Getz
Jay whirled the broadsword around in some fancy one-handed ninja move, its blade sizzling with lightning while her other hand unsheathed the slug dagger and kept it low and close. The gray static was gone from her eyes—they burned purple, deep and endless.
“Yeah,” Lars said, kicking up a big gun from another one of Fish’s sacks. “Figured it’d be the hard way. What about old Auntie? Can’t she bloodwall these fuckers and give Sheila a bubble to shield us from the sats? Maybe we can still make a run for it.”
Jay looked down at the old witch, her face softening. “She thinks she’s invincible. Being the most powerful hexsmith in the world—in your whole universe—you start to think you can do anything.” The princess knelt and tucked the Hand’s rattling robes over her exposed hands. The witch didn’t stir. “Even a super witch only has so much blood to hex. Her cells need to regenerate. She barely has enough to keep her heart pumping.”
Standing over a weapons sack, arms loaded with blaster-guns, the wolfman grunted. “So, what’s the plan? Gunfight, then run like hell anyway?”
The vampire princess stood, blue lightning shimmering down the wide blade of her new techno-glaive. “Swordfight,” she said. “Then run like hell.”
Chapter XXX
The door was still closed, locked. Lars stood in front of it with every scary-looking gun he could find holstered, strapped, or zip-tied to his arms, legs, and torso. In his hands, he had Fish’s big plasma cannon, its wide barrel aimed straight at the hatch. On his right, Frank creaked and groaned like an old sailing ship, and on his left, Jay stood ready with the broadsword crackling electric. Boris had its gun-arm up, red LED eyes sharp and scanning. Auntie Hand just kept snoring.
Lars tapped the cannon’s trigger guard and sniffed. The Cairnish double-cross made his nerves raw, the same feeling he got any time a client tried to back out of a deal. He was hot and sober and undersexed and tired and in need of some quality time with good old-fashioned moonbeams. Instead, he had his half-empty lunar batteries, a bullshit holdup with a bunch of shifty slugs, and a few dozen mercs right outside his ship with a whole lot of firepower trained on his baby, which—between the yeasty stink of empty bottles and cans in the cargo hold, the sap leaking from Frank, and the essential-oil marinade Auntie Hand had been pickled in—smelled increasingly like a hippie’s unwashed grundle. Not to mention an as-yet-unidentified mystery man rattling around in that crashed jet. Yet more hitches in Jay’s mission. The whole damn job was too many snags, too little beer and pussy. And it stank.
“Lars,” Jay was saying, “can you hear me?”
She was still holding her tricked-out sword, its pommel sizzling with puzzling gizmos. Lars wondered what exactly those upgrades could do—open up a shotgun inside the blade? Zap an opponent with electric blue fireworks? Play your favorite rock-n-roll tunes frontwards and back? Whatever it was, he hoped it’d take out a dozen or two Siskelians in one go.
“Yeah, I heard you,” he said.
“We can’t just stand here all night.”
“Just one more beer. To steady the nerves”
Jay hissed, showing her fangs. “Frank,” she ordered, “open the door.”
“Don’t do it, Frank. I’m captain of this cruiser. One more before shit hits the fan.”
A branch slapped the airlock, and the door began to move, half a hundred mercenary soldiers somewhere beyond it in the desert night. Ah, fuck. Lars readied the plasma cannon.
“All right, you Siskelian screwheads, listen up. This is my—” Boom. A blast of neon green plasma tore through the open hatch, and from the dust and the dark came screams. A body ablaze in green fire stumbled out of the darkness, flesh already melting off its bones. As it lumbered closer to the hatch, Lars froze. It was like he’d opened the Lost Ark. The burning Siskelian fell to his knees as muscle and bone sloughed from its legs. In seconds, the merc was nothing but a puddle of charred armor and wet fat slightly sizzling in the dust.
“Target eliminated,” announced Boris’s robo-voice.
“No shit, bolts,” Lars muttered. “Target supernova’ed.”
Jay hissed, “Listen,” both hands clenching the broadsword’s long hilt.
Lars listened. Even with the engines rumbling, he should’ve heard it before the vampire. The shuffling of things in the desert, the occasional odd squeak of an unoiled wheel.
The broadsword drooped an inch as Jay turned, still listening. “Why aren’t they shooting at us?”
More shuffling. More dust clouds and darkness. A burst of gunfire, brief, in the distance. Lars loosened his grip on the cannon and sniffed again. He couldn’t smell anything over the stink of the ship. Patchouli and trash. Priority number one after they hit open space: Dump the garbage. How the hell was a wolf supposed to operate without his super-sniff?
“Time scorpion?” Lars ventured. He didn’t relish the idea of another one of those interdimensional bastards crawling about, but enemy of my enemy and all that. Let the 4-D arachnid thin the platoon, werewolf and crew could mop up the rest. Then another thought unnerved him: “Those fuckers ever rove in packs?”
“Solitary,” Jay whispered. “I don’t think it’s a chronoscorp. Too quiet.”
Frank creaked in his corner. His eyes looked worried. Lars couldn’t blame him. The old tree had already lost one limb to a scorpion—and this time the witch wasn’t waiting in the wings to piece him back together.
Around the ship, silence congealed, broken only by Frank’s creaking and the hum of the air recycler, the farty fwah of O2 pumping back into the hold. Then a squawk from Boris’s voice box broke the quiet: “Multiple targets incoming.”
As the robot’s blaster revved, Lars squinted into the darkness. “Can’t see anything out there, Johnny 5. Just a burnt merc and a whole lotta dust.”
The robot fired, and something splintered in the dark. Lars waited for a scream, or the shriek of a scorpion, anything, but no sound came except the scattering of debris.
“They are Mother’s,” the bot said.
Jay stepped back, uneasy, and glanced at the sleeping witch. “What does that mean?”
“They are Mother’s,” Boris repeated. “They are her creations.”
The plasma cannon nestled against Lars’ shoulder. He sighted on the empty dust cloud and figured, hell, he got lucky the first time. “Whatever they are, they’re fucked.”
As he touched the trigger, a voice sounded in the ether, reverberating from nowhere in particular. Sense-language. Booming and familiar. “Lars Breaxface . . . and his motley crew of nobodies. This is going to be fun.”
Quillian Nine. That was who’d been in the chrome jet—the silver gangster, on the run from whatever price Canal City’s Consortium had put on his shiny head. Chased them across the black all the way to fucking Cairn, and managed not to get his ass blasted out of the sky when he broke atmosphere. However he’d tracked them, Lars was going to make damn sure he couldn’t do it again. Quillian’s sense-language had diffused through the hull, unhindered by shield and steel—which meant he was close. Somewhere just out of sight. Captain at the head of his troops. He wondered how the gangster’s chin would break—whether it would crack like marble or burst into silver dust.
“Lars,” whispered Jay, “look.”
Out of the dust clouds, thin shapes began to emerge. White skulls smiled the grins of the dead as halos of blades turned lazily around their heads. The rest of their makeshift bodies were scraps of wood and metal and hardslime. They lurched forward on legs of junk. The witch’s windmills. A hundred of them, like the brooms in that Mickey Mouse cartoon, marching and marching from the dust toward the cruiser’s open door.
Chapter XXXI
Fox skulls. Chronoscorp mandibles. The skinny bone faces of stranger creatures, glowing faintly in the moonless night. Lars remembered what Fish had told him back at the fart-alien’s saloon: As long as Quillian wore the enhancer cuffs, he wasn’t limited to two aces—he could play the whole deck, and all they had was a couple of jokers.
The windmill army advanced slowly, skeletal smiles eerie in the gloom. As they marched, they pulled blades from their necks with fingers of hexed bone. Black and blue blood was spattered across most of them, and some were missing teeth and limbs. Lars held back a shudder. One sextoy golem had nearly choked the life out of him back at Fish’s emporium—now Quillian had a whole new army, one that could snuff a platoon of well-trained mercenaries almost without a shot fired. As long as the gangster had his puppet frequency on broadband and the slugs had their lock on from space, there was no way to fight and no way to run. Lars and crew were ten ways to fucked.
The wolfman brought the cannon back to his shoulder and took aim at the oncoming skull golems. “Hasta la vista, skull-fuckers.” His thick finger pressed the trigger. And the cannon beeped impotently. No hot neon plasma burst, no boom. He wiggled the trigger, slapped the barrel a couple of times. It beeped again, angrily, a red light pulsing on the stock, its whole wad blown on his big Siskelian surprise.
Beside him, Boris’s gun-arm powered up, and Jay’s sword sizzled.
“We should have killed him in Canal City,” Jay spat. “You should’ve let me carve him into jewelry.”
Lars chucked the dead cannon into the trash pile and pulled two blasters from his belt. “You’re right, princess. Any amount of heat from the Consortium would be better than this bullshit. Let’s not make that mistake a second time.”
Boris popped a pulse-burst through the open door, and one of the skull puppets crumbled. But behind it, there were dozens more—Jeezus, had there really been so many in the field? Skulls, dust, menacing blades. All of it coming closer to Sheila. Lars holstered his blasters.
“Aw, hell naw. Frank, close it up. We’re jetting—I’d rather take my chances with space guns.”
The tremuloid hesitated—till Jay gave a nod, and a creaking branch poked the toggle, the door to the hold closing with a hiss.
Jay’s sword tip scraped the dirty floor, knocking an empty can across the room. “What are you doing?”
Heading for the corridor, Lars called over his shoulder: “Getting off this rock.”
Keys jangling from the steering column. A stale brew in the cup holder. Six-legged hula girl shimmying on the dash. Lars revved Sheila’s tachyon drive and flipped the burners on the wings for takeoff. Through the windows, he saw nothing but howling dirt. Even on the infrared, all that showed were the flames of the crashed dropship and the cooling bodies of the Siskelian mercs. Quillian and his army were invisible. He tapped the holo-display to funnel more power to the cruiser’s defenses. If Quillian’s puppets got through, game over. At least in Canal City, Lars had been channeling the ocean planet’s double moons. Here, he had only his half-charged batteries. Sheila was a coffin, and if they didn’t jet, they were all dead already.
He smelled Jay behind him before he felt her, the princess huffing and puffing with her broadsword in hand.
“The fuck, Jay? I’m trying to drive.”
The ninja princess was flushed, little roses of lavender on her pale cheekbones. “You frivolous mutant. The slugs were caught with their defenses down once—they won’t make that mistake again. They’re watching us. They’ll blow us out of the fucking sky.”
“They could try,” Lars said. “Sheila’s a Class-V speedcruiser—nothing faster than my baby. We get clear of ozone, I’m futtling subspace for the nearest frontier brothel. You and the rest of the Funky Bunch can sit on the witch’s wooden hand.”
“Hail the Cairnish. Maybe they’ll help us.”
“Are you kidding? The slugs hate you and your witch. Why would they help us?”
“Revenge. Quillian just slaughtered the rest of their ground forces.”
Lars leaned back in the pilot seat and handed Jay the radio. “Well, give the slugs a ring then. We’ve got the witch, right? Deal’s sealed. They zap Quillian, we jet, and everyone’s happy.”
“Yeah,” said Jay. “Everyone’s happy.” She tapped a couple of keys on the holo-dash, just below the hula girl, and held the radio mic to her lips. “Hailing Cairnish Embassy, this is Cruiser 62815.”
From the radio, the slug voice hissed: “Princess . . . We are losing patience. Our hirelings . . .”
“The other intruder—he killed your mercenaries. He’s making a mockery of your sanctuary, flooding it with blood.”
“Do not try to fool us, Princess.”
“We had a deal. The Ambassador gave us her word—we remove the Hand and the Embassy allows us safe passage offworld. We can still honor that deal, if the Cairnish will target the intruder—”
The slug broke in, “We do not fire on our home. That is why we sent the hirelings.” The radio crackled as the dryslug paused. “Destroy the intruder yourselves. If you do, the Cairnish will honor your agreement—you will be allowed to leave the planet.”
“But he’s got a fucking bone army,” Lars blurted.
Jay bared her fangs. “Shut up,” she whispered. To the radio, she said, “We’ll kill him.”
A sound from the speakers sounded almost like a laugh, and then the transmission cut.
Lars tapped the hula girl, and she swayed robotically, reminding him of someone he used to know. “Quillian’ll send everything he has at us. Guaranteed he lost his whole operation in Canal City, all that ruckus at the port. Blames you, me, and the erstwhile amphibian. And he’s a sick son of a bitch. I say we throw bolts out there and let him thin the herd. He’s just a bot—who gives a shit if the puppets smack him with their blades?”
“Yeah,” Jay said, “Maybe.” Then her eyes widened, and she took off into the corridor, muttering obscenities in her vampire tongue.
Lars called her name, but she didn’t turn, and in a second, she was in the hold, heading for the hatch. “Jay, don’t,” he shouted. “Keep it closed—we need the chokepoint. Send the android out, we can sit tight and have a beer with Frank while he does the hard work!”
But she was already gone, the hatch left open like a wound. Next to his face, a red and yellow blob streaked across the infrared screen, and then he knew why she was running. The blob was tree-shaped, and whipping wildly. Frank was taking on Quillian’s skull army all on his own. Muttering his own four-letter litany Lars popped the blasters from their holster and followed Jay’s path. Deal or no deal with the space slugs, they were going to battle Quillian and his windmills, and save Frank from getting chopped to bits.
Chapter XXXII
There are gladiator pits in Freewheel, big radiant stadiums swimming with corporate holograms and overpriced booze and grilled critters sold out of handcarts, where oily, rippled warriors face off against the beasts of the cosmos. There’s the gladiator flexing in the middle of the ring, and on either side there’s a big ass door. Door Number One is electrified bars—you can see right in to the monster snarling, stalking, or spidering, taking in the warrior-meat and the bloodthirsty crowds. But Door Number Two—Door Two is an opaque black slab. You can’t see shit behind Door Number Two. While the doors are closed, you place your bets on which monster will eat the gladiator first. Lars had won a few bucks on those fights, and lost a small fortune, and that’s exactly what this felt like—betting on the glad pits, deciding which was the bigger threat: the swarm of skull-and-steel puppets or Quillian himself. Lars didn’t have enough lunar juice to last long in his werewolf skin. In Sheila’s dingy hold, staring down teeth of a hundred haunted windmills, Lars calculated the odds. Wolf out now, try to take the skull-fuckers before they killed Frank and Jay, or swallow it, stick to the old-fashioned shoot-em-up, save the beast for the silver bastard.
He looked over his shoulder. Boris hadn’t moved. “Bolts, you coming?”
“I must protect Mother.”
“Protect her by demolishing these pricks. We perish them, we’re home free.”
The ‘droid was rooted in place. Only the LED scanners in its eye-slits moved. “I must stay at Mother’s side.”
Lars kicked some trash and watched
it scuttle across the floor. “You’re useless, you know that?”
“I have many uses,” the robot said.
“Why don’t you rattle them off to my asshole,” Lars muttered. “I’ve got a tree to save.”
The wolfman charged out of the hatch with blasters blazing. The skull golems were everywhere. Even with Sheila’s meager spotlights, it was all darkness and chaos. In the dust, Jay whirled like a god of chaos, her techno-glaive flashing with electricity as she executed her own broadsword ballet. Skull golems clamored and fell, sliced to splinters, only to reform again and swing their rusty blades. When they got too close, a bloodshield would bloom, and the skull-fucker’s blade would stick harmlessly in blood. But they were relentless. Sooner or later, the princess would slip. As he surveyed the area, Lars kept blasting, bolts of black energy chipping away at wood and bone. No sign of Frank or Quillian. No Siskelian stragglers either. Behind him, over the pow and clatter of swordplay and blasters, the wolfman heard scratching. He wheeled on his bootheel, and there they were: a gaggle of skull puppets hacking away at Sheila’s hull, definitely scuffing the paint.
“You boney sons of bitches!” he shouted as the pair of blasters clicked empty. Lars dropped the blasters, swung a darklight shotgun from his back, and fired two bursts, each one shattering a puppet’s skull to splinters. Their rubbish bodies rattled down the hull. Another two bursts, two more skulls in pieces. The last two turned to Lars with their vacant, hellion smiles and leapt, flecks of Sheila’s paintjob on their turbine-blades. The wolfman swung the shotgun and blasted one out of the air, missed the other by an inch. Before he could ready his fist for a good chin punch, it was on him, slicing at his flesh like a trash-puppet sushi chef. He dropped the shotgun, both hands wrenching at its wood-and-wire frame. Its patinaed skull—the long-dead remains of a slug tumor, judging from its lack of eyes and horrible teeth—gnashed at his beard, clipping a bit from the right side. If the scratches in his ship’s paint hadn’t pissed him off enough, now they’d gone and unbalanced his facial hair. Fending off the golem’s mouth with a forearm on its neck, Lars scrounged his weapon-laden body for a knife, found one, and unsheathed it, bringing its pommel down hard on the skull’s solid forehead. The skull split, and the windmill’s frame fell limp. Lars touched the bitten side of his beard. Un-fucking-balanced. Quillian was going to pay for that.