Lars Breaxface- Werewolf in Space

by Brandon Getz

  “Well, give the slugs a ring then. We killed Quillian, the Hand is offworld—deal’s a deal, right? They said safe passage.”

  “You don’t know the Cairnish,” Jay replied.

  The radio buzzed over the metal music, and a slimy Siskelian voice droned, “Cruiser 62815, proceed to Embassy docking.”

  Lars craned toward the princess. “What the fuck?”

  “Cruiser 62815, proceed to docking,” the Siskelian voice repeated. “For exchange of package. The Ambassador has changed her mind. She wants the Hand herself.”

  Jay spat another string of profanity at the radio—a sequence of growls and hisses that would make an alligator blush. In the long moment before the Cairnish replied, music hummed and needled at the weight of the silence. Lars could feel Jay breathing, smell the animal scents of her breath and sweat. There was fear in her glands.

  Static. Then: “Your transport is in range of three of our satellites. Proceed to docking or be terminated.”

  “That ain’t the deal, you blue-blooded fuck,” Lars barked into the radio. “Deal is we leave, end of story.”

  “The deal was for safe passage off the planet upon removal of the intruder. There was no agreement regarding your ship’s departure from orbit. That is yet to be negotiated.”

  Cursing like a sailor, the wolfman turned the cruiser’s wheel and set course for the Embassy, wondering where exactly the dryslugs’ chins were located—and whether he’d have to punch each and every gnashing tumor too. He was sick of double-crosses. Sick of the slugs and this whole damn region of the universe. He looked out the window at the looming hive and slammed on the brakes. “Jay, I’ve got an idea. It’s maybe the most brilliant idea I’ve ever had in my life.”

  “Good,” she said, “because I’m seconds away from jumping into space and cutting my way through the hive’s hull just to eat the Ambassador’s heart out.”

  “Easy, tiger. We could just dock if you want to run an assassination.”

  Jay flashed a shark smile. “What’s the fun in that?”

  “Save the space jumps for another time, princess,” Lars said, turning the death metal up to eleven. Music crunched through the mounted speakers. “We’re blowing this popsicle stand.”

  Sheila’s boosters charged, and Lars jerked the wheel toward the giant, luminescent star whales. Warnings flashed red across the control panel. The Cairnish space-guns were locking on, charging their laser torpedoes. The FTL-drive dampeners were still in effect—no subspace access—but shit, Sheila still had her nitro. Lars cranked the turbo boost and felt the G-force shove him deep into his seat as the cruiser took off for the pod of whales. Sheila shook with speed and the all-too-close explosions of plasma torpedoes. Thirty seconds. That’s all they needed. Thirty seconds and they’d be among the whales, and home-fucking-free. The gaseous giants loomed ahead, rising in the window like planets. Explosions burst on either side. Sheila jerked, hula girl spasming and Jay falling hard against a control panel. Metal crashed in the cargo hold. Green sparks splashed across the cruiser’s flame-painted nose. Warnings scrolled across the holographic HUD too fast to read. And then they were surrounded—phantom whale skin all around them, soaking in the energy of the Cairnish ordinance, absorbing it, the plasma of the torpedoes feeding the cosmic beasts.

  Lars laughed and hallelujahed and flipped the bird to the hive behind him. Fuck the slugs. Fuck Cairn. Fuck the Ambassador. They’d float with the whales until they were beyond the reach of the futtle befuddlers. Then it’d be back to hypertravel, the wormhole highway, to wherever Jay wanted. Library, another universe, whatever. As long as there was hooch and cooch, he’d be all right. In fact, he’d be just fine.

  PART II

  RagNarok N Roll

  Chapter XXXV

  Whatever robo-drones, fighter wings, or battle grubs the slugs managed to scramble were too slow out of the docks. As soon as Sheila coasted out of jammer range, she’d slipped into the stroboscopic colon of subspace like an overlubed space dildo, leaving the pod of space whales bobbing in the black. Lars didn’t take his hand off the controls till they were zooming through a faraway patch of wormhole geography, light-years from the Cairnish, Fed Prime, and any other evil empire, bounty hunter, or hooker with a paternity test who got a bug up their ass to chase his cruiser. Then he switched the ship to autopilot and ducked into the hallway to the cargo hold.

  The hold was a wreck. Trash had been rattled from crevices, unstuck from old growths of this or that fungus. One of his crates of canned meat had broken open, and everywhere there were loose weapons and stray shotgun shells and iridescent globs of what used to be Quillian Nine.

  Jay and Frank sat in the far corner beneath the cargo nets. Both nursed a beer and a wound—Jay a bruised shoulder, Frank a dozen splintered cuts. Boris stood at attention as if waiting for the dead puppeteer to gloop himself back to life. Lars didn’t blame the bot—anything could happen in space, even silver alien gangster zombies.

  “You were right, Breaxface,” Jay said. “That was the best idea you’ve ever had in your life.”

  Lars grabbed a cup, wiped some of Quillian off the rim, and poured himself a brew—then downed it and poured another. “Fucking star whales, man. Beautiful creatures.”

  “What’re we going to do about the mess?”

  Frank’s eyes glanced nervously at the old mop. His limbs huddled inward.

  Lars shrugged. “Seal it off, open the hatch. Shit’ll all rush out to fill the Big Empty. Easiest cleanup in the ‘verse.”

  They drank. They looked at the mess. They drank some more.

  Looking at her empty cup, Jay coughed. “Seriously, Breaxface,” she said. “Thanks. You saved our asses. Mine, Frank’s . . . Auntie’s. Might be room for somebody like you, you know. When I retake the throne.”

  “Don’t get too attached,” he said, scratching at a scar on his arm. “My first family I discarded like an old boot. Second family I tore to shreds in orbit when I first went beast mode. I ain’t looking for another one. Universe’s ultimate lone wolf, right? Safer for everyone that way.”

  “My family was murdered by a horde of rioters,” Jay said. “I don’t need another one. I just want my revenge.”

  Lars tossed his empty onto the trash pile and fumbled with some junk in the cargo hold. This talk was giving him a weird feeling, something close to the sensation he had when he first met Budge, the minotaur monk, Lars barely more than an animal then—raw, flayed, exposed. The wolfman coughed. “Yeah, well, then we’re square. No strings. Just a ragtag crew of badasses on a mission.”

  The princess chewed her lip, fangs drawing a bead of blood. She used her wrist to wipe it away. “You’re right, Breaxface. That’s it,” she said finally, standing up. “Just the mission.” She nodded toward the corridor that led to the bunk, head, and pilot house. “I need to pee.”

  As the vampire princess headed for the corridor, Lars noticed the witch wasn’t in her bed of cargo nets. “Hey, where is Auntie, by the way? Old lady missed the whole party. Didn’t fall out the back door, did she?”

  Jay paused, gave Boris a look. The robot betrayed nothing.

  “What’s with the secret agent act?” the wolfman said, his eyes scanning the hold’s bulkheads. “She turn into a bat and go roost in the rafters?”

  “She’s in your bunk,” Jay said, leaning against the corridor doorway. A dark look fell across her face as she continued. “Back when we first fled across the breach from my home world, when we were looking for somewhere safe to hide, Auntie could do anything. She could’ve split the Embassy in half with a glance. Ripped the blood out of every merc in the hive. She picked Cairn because it was empty and protected, and everything the Cairnish had thrown at us to keep us off planet, she’d waved back—time after time till they gave up, let us stay, begrudgingly, a weed taking root on their holy world.” The princess’s eyes swarmed with starlight and amethyst, and Lars didn’t mind so much that she was going on and on about the old lady. “It’s this universe. It
’s, I don’t know, the frequency of matter and energy, the vibrations. Things are almost the same, but not quite. Auntie’s dying.” A hard purple gaze. “And so am I. The longer we’re here, away from our world, the more we—come apart, break down. It’s slow, takes years, like a river eating through a mountain. But I knew she was running out of time. Older, her body more attuned to home. That’s why it has to be now. We have to avenge my family now. We have to cross the breach. She won’t last much longer here.”

  Lars whistled. “Shit. That’s heavy.”

  Boris’s gears whirred. “Mother is ill.” It was almost a question.

  “Yeah, bolts, sounds like.” No wonder the witch hadn’t deigned to help battle back Quillian’s forces. She was a black-magic hospice patient. He hoped she didn’t die on his sheets. He only had the one set.

  Tossing her empty cup, Jay reached into her hair as she’d done in the lounge with the translucent cats—a moment that now seemed like a million years ago but which had only been a handful of days. She pulled out the vial of negativium, Lars’ big fat payment for a job well done, and opened it. Looking right at him, she drew a small shiv from her boot, shaved a sliver of the black shape onto the blade’s tip, rolled out her dark tongue, and set the sliver in the center. Then she closed her lips and swallowed millions of credits worth of one of the rarest substances in the universe.

  “Well, that was fucking dramatic.”

  “Holds the sickness off,” said Jay. “For a little while.”

  The wolfman looked at the vial in her long fingers. He wasn’t pissed. The space princess had just ripped him off for millions of due wages, and he didn’t even give a shit. He wanted her to take it. He swirled his beer, watching the last pale traces of foam circle the cup. He wondered again what he actual fuck he was up to, sidekicking Jay’s mission of vengeance for a tube of space fuel. He was supposed to be on leave, getting fucked ten ways to Pluto and drinking too much to remember any of it. And afterward, he was supposed to board Sheila alone, skip alone across the black, and take whatever muscle or shoot-em-up gig he came across, never making friends, never bullshitting about anything more than the job or the weather. Drink alone in his cruiser, or with whatever lonely barflies were buzzing the saloons. Pay to fuck a nameless body, not even human—and hell, he was never more alone than in those moments, those brittle seconds when connection was supposed to exist, when the physical bits conjoined and there was nothing but business staring back in those eyes/light receptors/optical orifices. For all the near-death and nonsense of Jay’s mission, it was something to do. And for the first time since his exile, he wasn’t alone doing it.

  Lars stopped swirling the beer and chugged it. He stood, crushing the cup and tossing it into the trash pile. “Let’s blow this mess into space and get on with the mission. Tie down all the shit we need—starting with the beer.”

  Chapter XXXVI

  Garbage jettisoned, Sheila’s cargo hold looked cleaner than it’d been in years—minus a few stray streaks and skids of silver puppeteer. Nothing a little Windex wouldn’t fix. The hold’s iconic piles of rubbish—the rattling empties, the crusty meat cans, sticky nudie mags and greasy takeout buckets, even the film of dust and grime—were all gone, the floor suddenly visible and stark. They’d need some mats or something, Lars thought, maybe a shag rug or some alien beast’s skin with the head still attached. The floor was blinding.

  Lars had popped the cruiser out of subspace just long enough to open the hatch—everybody crammed single-file in the hallway while the suction of space did its work—then jumped back into the wormhole matrix with autopilot steering his baby straight toward the Library. In the hold, he poured a brew for Frank and himself, then called up some victorious fucking death metal on the hi-fi. Muffled shouts made their way through the tunes—Jay and Boris in the bunk trying to rouse the sleeping Hand. The wolfman sipped his beer and considered his crew: Jay the blood-magic alien vampire ninja princess from another dimension; Frank the drunk, mute, and half-blind ambling oak tree; Boris the bastard android pieced together from robot trash and powered by magic; Auntie the cosmically ill space witch; and of course himself, Lars motherfucking Breaxface, the werewolf in space, the lonest wolf in the universe. It was a strange gang, but strange had lost all meaning back when he’d inhaled a skinchanger virus from a hundred-year-old space capsule. Even time and matter didn’t play straight anymore, and a sentient fart or a laser ghost could be ahead of you in line for a bucket of fried cats at the next food court. He sat on the too-clean floor, back against a crate. The beer was dark and cold and damn good. Alien strains of hops and malts—you never knew what you’d get. A saison that tasted like bleached fish, a black lager swimming with fermented egg sacs. This one was deep, like drinking the darkness from a cave. He savored it and closed his eyes, listening to Jay’s shouts and Frank’s flies buzzing close and that low, hellish guitar, that thudding animal bass drum, that music, Cosmic Christ that music, beating away at the infinite silence beyond the hull.

  Frank’s limbs creaked, and Lars was aware again of the tremuloid nearby. The old tree slouched against the wall, foliage hanging ragged over half his trunk-face. One branch dipped lazily into his beer cup.

  “Hey, Frank,” Lars said, tapping the stereo volume to a hum, “how’d you lose those eyes?”

  Frank reached up and, with a thin limb, traced one of the gray, empty sockets. The remaining eyes flashed with a remembered anger. The tree tensed. Flies scattered in a tizzy.

  “I feel you.” Lars extended his forearm, face up. It was hard to see beneath the hair and tattoos, but the flash was laced with scars. Hell, everybody in his crew was scarred up—Frank, the two transdimensional vampires, even the metal body of the android. “This long one here, that’s from salvage. Big piece of scrap with a jagged edge. Over here, that round one—engine leech. Greasy bastard was sucking energy from Sheila’s core, had to beat the hell out of it with a wrench. Had a mouth like a tube of needles.”

  Branches snaked down from Frank’s canopy and pointed to long gashes in his trunk, cuts like axe marks and pocks from insect ravaging. The tree-man turned and showed a grisly chunk taken from behind his leftmost eye. Auntie Hand’s magic had healed over his chronoscorp wounds, but Frank still wore the scars he’d been carrying a long time. Lars wondered how many of them the tree had taken protecting Jay. More than a few, he figured. Frank was more loyal than a kicked dog.

  “Probably a few more on us both by the time this shit’s over.” Lars finished his beer and tossed the cup at the wall. It bounced hollowly and rolled across the floor—the start of a whole new mountain of trash. The mess made him feel better, more at home.

  The bunk door hissed open, and Boris carried the old witch into the hold. Jay skulked behind, a nervous look on her face. The robot set the Hand on one of the crates, steadying her with its clamp hand when she seemed to wobble.

  “I’m fine, Boris,” the witch spat. “I’m the arch-hexsmith of the royal court—not a fucking china doll.” Auntie Hand’s crimson eyes surveyed the room. “Hope you didn’t tidy up for me.”

  “Nah,” said Lars, “it was trash day.”

  “The slugs,” Hand said. “I’d embarrassed them. They’re a prideful race. Of course they wouldn’t just let us leave.”

  “We did leave, Auntie,” Jay said.

  “You ran,” said the witch. “That’s all we do. That’s all we’ve done is run. I’m tired of it.” The witch snorted and spat on a silver streak on the floor. “I should’ve ripped their blood through their pores and broken that hive into splinters. Watched that bloated Ambassador choke in the vacuum.”

  Jay leaned against the skid of kegs. “They were protecting us. Involuntarily, but still.”

  “I’ve done everything wrong, little bug. I should have protected you myself. We should have raised an army years ago, when I was stronger.”

  “We didn’t know.”

  “I knew.” The witch closed her eyes. “I felt it. The leeching. I knew.”
/>   Beeping wailed over the speakers, cutting off the Hand and the whisper of death metal.

  “We’re here,” Lars said. Space and time uncoiled and then congealed around them as Sheila surfaced from the wormhole into the here-and-now universe. It felt a little like a helium high, a little like getting gut-punched.

  Everyone’s eyes turned to the porthole. The witch smiled, her stained fangs turning her grin wicked. “The Library.”

  ChapteR XXXVII

  The Library was a planet-sized cube, built around a singularity that powered the entire world from its core. Its stacks were cities, its catalogs a map, and even its quietest corners thrummed with the energy of living knowledge. Wizards, scholars, and bored teenagers from a thousand solar systems trekked space-time to viddy the Library’s book stash. Most of the Library’s catalog had been transferred to digital in the last thousand years, able to be read or heard or traveled holographically, but the Library was centuries ancient and many of the texts impossible to digitize. There were bone books and skin scrolls, books inked along the veins of moth wings and giant stone tomes of glyph-spells. Pickled mind-encyclopedias in cloudy jars. Books with pages conjured and hexed from light and smell and sound. Living books asleep with the braille of their knowledge on their tongues. Lars couldn’t have cared less. He hadn’t read a book since his tour in the asteroid mines, and even then it was just porno forums and poker how-to’s.

  Sheila eased toward the square planet, with Lars at her controls. Death metal was still pumping through the speakers in a whisper, as if abiding the Laws of Silence he imagined the Librarians enforced like bespectacled fascists. Jay had told him to head straight for the Librarian capital, an eruption of haphazard tower-stacks, all dark angular wood and slithering marble, among the unbroken city of books. Beacons guided the cruiser to a landing port, and the wolfman was surprised to see the vulgar flashing of aerial adverts flying on either side of the descent path, beckoning him to check out the latest war novels, alien sex manuals, and salacious intergalactic memoirs. Even in a place as ancient and holy as the Library, the neon seeds of marketing had taken root and bloomed. For a moment, he almost wished he was back on Cairn, in the middle of that scorpion-infested wasteland. At least the scorp didn’t try to sell him bullshit in thirty-two flavors.