Lars Breaxface- Werewolf in Space

by Brandon Getz

  Lars tried to smell the gangster, that clean gunpowder smell of him, the factory-new stench of his silk suit. All he could scent was the sour meat of the dead mercenaries and the smoke of burning bone. Not far away, surrounded by a ring of dead and living puppets, Jay continued her sword dance. She was bleeding now, from more than just her palm. Fresh black cuts crisscrossed her name scars. Lars picked up the shotgun and aimed for the nearest skull-fucker, one with an armored fox’s fleshless face. The puppet juked his first shot, and Lars blasted again. The fox was quick. Its wire joints moved with magic locomotion, the puppet almost flattening itself as it readied itself to leap.

  “That’s enough,” came Quillian’s voice from the dark.

  The windmills froze, blades outstretched toward their targets.

  From the haze smoke and dust came a familiar creaking of old wood, and Frank lumbered out, foliage dropped in surrender, a dozen skull puppets in his branches with something dark in their hands. As if choreographed, each puppet jerked its hexed hands, and torches bloomed with flame. Quillian stepped out from behind the tremuloid hostage, flames reflecting red on his silver face. He wasn’t in his gangster glad rags anymore—the puppeteer had opted for full spider-weave body armor and a stupid-looking beret in place of his trademark fedora. Lars saw Jay twitch with her sword, but she knew just as well as he did that any wrong move and Frank would be firewood.

  “Congratulations, you Destro-knockoff piss weasel,” Lars said. “You managed to slime your tin-can ass out of Canal City before they trenched you. Want a cookie?”

  “No cookies, Breaxface. I want you—one piece at a time,” said Quillian. “You and this hot little number with the knife. And the tree. And, of course, Mr. Fishman. I’m looking forward to a reunion with the former emporium proprietor. In fact, this whole affair has been elevated to extremely fucking personal. If it were business, Breaxface, I’d let you bribe your way out—maybe just take the woman, as a good-faith gift. But that little amphibious shit shot me, and you let him tag along into the black like he was your kid brother. You should’ve left him where he was. Now we have a debt to square.”

  “You’re too late. Fish fucked off transdimensionally,” Lars called. “Sloughed this whole plane of existence.”

  “That’s too bad.” Quillian looked up as if pondering the stars and the universe and existence and shit. Maybe he was, or maybe he just wanted Lars to sweat a little. The wolfman’s trigger finger was starting to itch. Quillian would’ve looked a whole lot better with a burning hole in his face. But Lars knew he wasn’t the fastest gun in the west. Sure as shit not faster than the puppeteer’s thoughtwaves. Even if he did drop dead, Frank would be toast too. “That is really too bad. But it doesn’t matter. You owe me, Breaxface. You and your whole crew. And I’m going to collect.”

  Lars snorted and spat, the loogie landing a centimeter from the gangster’s gold-plated loafers. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “Shit, Quillian, if that’s all you want, a little reimbursement, I can write you an IOU. Good as cash, anywhere in the universe.”

  “Just listen, you cave-beast. Let me tell you how this is going to go,” Quillian continued. “Since this primordial shrub tossed a rock at my ride and caused it to run aground, I’m going to take your ship. Now, I can see your engines are running so I know I don’t need any keys. You can put down your weapons right now and tell me about whatever killswitches and boobytraps you’ve got set up in there, and I’ll let you live. The slugs can figure out what to do with you. Or you can put up a fight—in which case, your tree friend becomes your funeral pyre and I take the ship anyway.”

  Lars growled, mitts tensing around the darklight shotgun. “You think I’m gonna let you fucking ship-jack my Sheila? Already had one ship-napper this week—that motherfucker went out an airlock.”

  “Easy, Breaxface,” Quillian sang. To make his point, the skull-golems in Frank’s branches waved their torches. Bark and sap sizzled under the proximity of the flames. Another inch and the old tree would burn.

  Surrounded by puppet debris, Jay sheathed her sword and shoved her dagger in her belt. “Wait,” she said. “The Cairnish made us a deal. We kill you, we go free. If we don’t signal them that you’re dead, they’ll blast that ship right out of orbit.”

  “They missed me once.”

  “They won’t miss again.”

  The silver gangster’s face pinched into an invisible smile. “Looks like we’re all stuck here then, eh? Might as well make a fire and get cozy.” The puppets began to lower their torches again.

  “We’ll take you,” Jay said. Over the smoke of the torches, Lars could smell her sweat, her fear. The puppets stopped, reflections of flames dancing on their corroded turbines.

  “You know,” said Quillian, cocking his fingers into the shape of a gun, “I miss my old pistol. Big sucker, diamond studded. A bit showy, it’s true, but I’ve always skewed toward the ostentatious. In situations like this, I’d pull out that gleaming gun and I’d point it at your pretty face and with all those diamonds gleaming in the light of these torches, I’d ask you exactly what the fuck do you mean, take me with you?”

  “What the hell are you doing, Jay?” Lars hissed.

  Jay ignored him. She stepped toward Quillian, and the skull puppets around her bristled their blades. “You stowaway on the cruiser. We hail the Embassy that we left you dead here in the desert. Once we’re past the hive’s defenses, we’ll figure out the next move. Maybe we just get off at the next inhabited planet and you go on your way.”

  The puppets parted as Quillian walked toward the vampire princess. “What’s the double-cross?”

  “No double-cross. We want to get off this rock same as you.”

  Cosmic Christ. Lars had to hand it to her—she was rough around the edges, a trait he found more than a little arousing, but she could play the royal diplomat when she needed to. The only problem: She was bargaining his baby to a sadist. Quillian was close enough to her that the princess’s reflection rippled on his mirror face. The wolfman could’ve reached out, put a darklight slug through that silver skull, and Christ, he wanted to, wanted it more than a free fuck or a cold beer. But it’d be signing Frank’s death warrant. And after all the booze he’d shared with the grizzled tremuloid, Lars just didn’t have it in him to let the old shrub die.

  “Okay,” said the gangster. “Deal.”

  Chapter XXXIII

  Jay led the way, Frank and Lars behind her, Quillian at the rear with what was left of his windmill army marching lockstep, a grinning swarm. On the way back, among the debris of shattered skull puppets, Lars saw the bodies of the slaughtered mercs, each one barely more than a pile of body parts. He almost felt sorry for the blue bastards. Just doing their job, same as he was. To be hacked to death by an old lady’s wind turbines was a hell of a way to go.

  As Lars stepped into Sheila’s cargo hold, he was already forming a plan. Mostly it consisted of wolfing out and clawing through Quillian’s solid metal face. It wasn’t his best plan, but he wasn’t about to let the gangster make off with his ship, no matter what deal Jay had made. He felt a hand on his arm and suddenly he was pushed hard to the side, almost sprawling in one of the piles of trash, and then the revving of a gun powering up—Boris’s arm. Quillian stood halfway through the hatch, one boot still on the dry desert ground, when the robot fired. The blast hit the gangster square in his armored chest, and Quillian sailed back half a dozen feet into the dust, knocking into his line of puppets like a bowling ball, his stupid beret flinging into the darkness.

  Before Lars could slap the hatch closed, Jay was through it, both blades out and gleaming. The dagger came in low, but Quillian was fast—he grabbed the blade with his gloved hand and held it. As it bit into his mineral flesh and Lars fumbled for his shotgun, Jay brought the sword down from above. The gangster raised his forearm to block, and on his wrist the metal band of Fish’s power enhancer flashed with hex-amplifying circuitry. Lightning sizzled down Jay’s blade, and even Quilli
an’s blank face managed to show surprise. Blade cut through arm like it was chrome-plated Jell-O. As the half arm fell to the dirt, everything else seemed to slow. Skull puppets, advancing, wavered. Quillian was as petrified as a statue, a monument to his own stupidity. Jay crouched as if in prayer, head down and tendrils hanging. Lars found a gun, not the shotgun but some other mystery piece of ordinance he’d tucked away, and for a hundred years the snub-nosed barrel inched upward.

  Then, with his good hand, Quillian reached for his amputated limb. In one smooth motion, Jay brought the broadsword up through his shoulder, lopping off the whole second arm, and embedded the slug dagger in his back. Without a mouth, in his ethereal broadcast, his sense-language soundsphere, Quillian screamed.

  “You fuckers. You pieces of meat-bag shit. You have no idea what you’ve done. Who you’ve fucking fucked with.” The gangster was on his knees, armless, hunched with the knife between his shoulders. A silent shockwave radiated from the armless Quillian, and any puppet still standing toppled and broke, skull faces no longer menacing, now only so much desert debris.

  “Can’t hear you, Quillian,” Lars said. “Try sign language.”

  The gangster roared. Lars stepped up and aimed the snub pistol. Execution wasn’t his style—he was a brawler at heart—but Quillian had been a special pain in his ass for entirely too long. The wolfman wasn’t taking any more chances.

  “Don’t shoot.” It was Jay. She was unclasping the enhancers from Quillian’s dead arms, her broadsword sheathed behind her back. “Leave him. The scorpions will take care of him.”

  “What about all that ‘carve him into jewelry’ bullshit?” Lars said. “You said it yourself. Left him alive in Canal City and look what happened.”

  Pocketing the power cuffs, she stepped behind the deflated gangster and, pressing her boot to his back for leverage, wrenched her dagger from his flesh. “Executing a cripple. Doesn’t seem right.”

  Quillian fell to the dirt, heaving with the rhythm of a being that breathes. “You let me live,” he seethed, “and I’ll haunt you for the rest of your days.”

  The vampire princess turned toward the ship. “No,” she said simply, “you won’t.”

  Lars shrugged and holstered his pistol. What a disappointment. He was really hoping to see what the little thing could do.

  They left the gangster on the ground shouting insults in every language in the galaxy.

  

  Back in the hold, Lars relaxed. The hatch hissed closed, its airlock clamping shut. The beer was safe, and so was Sheila, minus a few scratches. Nothing he couldn’t buff out.

  “How’d you know that bucket of bolts would know to blast Chrome Dome?” Lars said, wading through the trash piles toward the kegs.

  “Autotargeting, threat assessment,” replied the princess. “Boris wouldn’t let him anywhere near Auntie. I just had to get him within range.”

  “Cheers to that.”

  As Lars grabbed a plastic cup to pour a brew, something brushed against his leg. He kicked it away, and it bounced against the wall—an empty beer bottle, singing hollow on impact. Then a crusty meat can, wound with spare wire and old condom wrappers, knocked his boot heel. A chunk of fox skull wedged into it, and more loose wire stretched from the can’s bottom, wriggling like fingers.

  “Aw hell,” he moaned, “Jay, fucker’s turning the trash villainous!”

  All over the hold, detritus was knitting together in the vague shapes of appendages—garbage hands, trash legs, refuse ribcages. Lars stomped the can-and-wire hand to bits then got to work kicking whatever moving debris he could. Jay hacked at it with her sword, Frank twisted it apart in his branches, Boris squashed it with his clamp-hand. Nothing larger than a leg and a torso made it together, one last sad and desperate move from a sad and desperate Quillian Nine, turning the werewolf’s own trash against him. A man’s trash is sacred. You don’t fuck with trash.

  Lars punched the hatch toggle, and out in the desert night Quillian was standing, barely. Armless and angry, the gangster lowed and made a run for the open door. The wolfman raised his mystery pistol.

  “Nine,” he said, “your number’s up.”

  He pressed the trigger, and a nothing fired, no spiral of negasonic whizbang or hail of old-fashioned lead—nothing but a singing sound, a rising chorus like a hundred angels queeving at the same time. Quillian kept coming. Lars squeezed the trigger a couple more times, slapped the casing and shook it to see if any parts were loose. Nothing but the vulgar angel music. Then he saw the change in the gangster’s face: Quillian’s pyrite brow was arched with surprise. His carved chin quivered. Drops of mercury liquid slithered from the corners of his smooth silver eyes. The whole face rippled, the funhouse-mirror reflection of Lars—of the hold, of the crew, the whole scene—roiled as Quillian Nine’s face began to melt. The gangster’s momentum was too much, and Lars couldn’t shut the door fast enough. As Quillian convulsed and dissolved on melting legs, he fell into the wolfman, bursting in splash of silver all over Lars and the whole damn cargo hold.

  Lars stood gawking as bits of Quillian pooled around his boots. He felt a poke on his right shoulder, and Frank, still sporting burn marks from the puppets’ torches, was holding out a ratty mop.

  “Shit, Frank,” Lars said, “Do I look like Susie Housekeeper?” He kicked a pile of de-puppeted trash to make his point and threw the mop back into its corner, then made his way to the beer. It’d been a long night, and they still weren’t offworld yet. The witch was snoring. Jay was inspecting the puppeteer’s power enhancers. Frank slumped in his corner, nursing his burns. Boris hadn’t moved an inch.

  “Hey, bolts,” Lars offered, shaking off melted bits of Quillian. “Nice shot, blasting that fucker out the hatch.”

  “I was protecting Mother.”

  “You sound like the bastard child of HAL 9000 and Norman Bates.”

  “I am not a child, I am a Mark-III security android.” Boris cocked its head at its clamp-arm. “Mostly.”

  Lars just sighed. It was brew o’clock, and some double-fisting was in order. Then sayonara Cairn, so long slugs, and a jaunt across the black to the almighty Library, and the fancy-shmancy spellbook that waited in its stacks.

  Chapter XXXIV

  In the pilot seat, Lars took a long swig from the flat beer in the cup holder. The brew tasted ancient, a film of dust floating on top, but whatever, it was booze—the two back in the hold hadn’t been enough. For a long minute, he’d sat on a crate with a beer in one hand the little angel-music pistol in the other, aimed at the puddle of Quillian. He’d worried the gangster might T-1000 himself back into humanoid shape and start another trash-golem battle royale, but the silver puppeteer stayed liquid, like somebody’d broken a giant thermometer and dumped it all over the floor.

  Outside, the dust storm was starting to subside. Finishing the dusty beer, Lars looked up at the night sky, barely making out the distant shape of the hive-station, and whispered silent, profane prayers to the totem of the dashboard hula girl. It was over. All he had to do was tell the Embassy they’d done the deed. He tapped the comm controls on the trid display and hailed the hive. “Intruder terminated. Dude’s a stain on my rug. We clear for takeoff?”

  For a moment, no reply came. Then the radio crackled. “You may leave the planet.”

  “Yippee ki-yay.” Lars jerked the cruiser skyward. Over the howl of the wind, Lars heard the intakes wheeze, and the boosters spat blue fire into the dust storm. Clogged exhaust. Not something you have to worry about in open space—which is exactly where he wanted to be, hopping whorehouse to whorehouse across the backspace frontier. A couple of jerks on the fan toggle, and the wheezing stopped, the boosters sneezing out the last of the dust storm’s grime.

  Sheila lifted and shuddered. Lars punched a big red button, and speed metal began to blare from speakers mounted overhead. Squealing guitar raced like an electric flood through the cockpit, drowning out every damn thing. As he pulled the controls, the cruiser’s nose tilted,
and the wolfman jacked the throttle, zooming jaggedly through the opaque sky.

  

  As the cruiser rocketed from the planet’s surface, dust clouds dissolved and atmosphere faded, giving way to the fuzzy black of space and a wide, nasty view of the Embassy. Beyond it, bobbing like interstellar balloons, he saw something else: the huge ghost-shapes of the star whales floating toward Cairn’s white-hot star. Lars took that as a good omen. He popped the cover off the FTL ignition and winked at the Cairnish hive.

  “So long, slug turds.”

  He jammed the ignition, pushed the throttle, and waited for the psychedelics of faster-than-light to assault his senses.

  Nothing happened.

  “Hot Cosmic Jeezus Christ on sixteen crutches and a golden goose.” Lars poked the FTL button a couple more times, but the same result: Sheila floated in orbit, staring down the moon-sized hive of hardslime. Turning the rock tunes down to a whisper, he called back into the corridor for Jay. “Something’s wrong. Futtle drive isn’t powering up.”

  In seconds, the princess was behind him, muttering obscenities faster than the decoders could translate. “The Embassy’s got subspace dampeners,” she said. Lars fought the urge to call them futtle befuddlers—Jay wouldn’t have found it funny. “We’re trapped in slow-motion till they say it’s okay.”