“Jassi! I’ll save you!” He raced to her, but another burst of silk wrapped his arms and bound his tires. He wobbled and crashed to the floor. “Actually, never mind.”
They both thrashed and struggled against the sticky strands. Dilly’s eyes turned to Swooch. “Anything to add, Lieutenant?”
Swooch shrugged. “Nah, I’m chill.”
“Good work, soldier,” a voice growled. “I guess you can follow orders after all.”
The spider scuttled aside, revealing Burlock towering in the doorway, with all of his cybernetic implants restored. Dilly bowed submissively. “Yes, sir. It apologizes for insubordination. Will not happen again.”
“See that it doesn’t.” Burlock marched onto the bridge. “Comfit, open a channel to…” He glanced at the empty stations. “Where are my MonCom and EngTech?”
“Oh, they’re long gone,” Swooch said. “As soon as the shix hit, Comfit split. Quartermaster even faster.” She snorted a chuckle. “Dang, listen to me. I’m like a rapper.”
Kellybean wriggled in Dilly’s hand. “Let us go!”
“Burlock!” Leo cried. “Somebody sabotaged the cruise! I have evidence! My tabloyd—”
“Silence them!” Burlock snapped.
Dilly whirled Leo and Kellybean in its arms, neatly binding each of them in webbing from their ankles to their noses. They shouted muffled curses as Dilly set them down on their feet like a pair of exhumed pharaohs. It pointed to the comm view on the window. “Connection is in progress, Captain.”
Burlock raised his voice to the glass. “This is Captain Rexel Burlock of the WTF Americano Grande calling the WTF Opulera. Do you copy?” Nothing happened for a long moment. “Damn it, Opulera! Do you copy?”
“Yes, Burlock, I copy.”
The comm rectangle flickered and resolved into an orange face. Admiral Skardon was in his formal robes, standing in front of what looked like an enormous window overlooking the Blue Hole. As the picture came into sharper focus, a lifeboat flew through the window, sparking red as it passed through the glass. Leo realized it wasn’t a window at all, but the gaping door of a shuttle bay with an atmospheric containment field.
“Admiral Skardon,” Burlock said, snapping to attention. “I’ve never been so happy to see you, sir.”
“I wish I could say the same,” Skardon replied. “We came as soon as we got your distress call.”
Leo thrashed his head and worked his jaw, coaxing the webbing down over his chin. “We didn’t send a distress call!”
“Of course you did,” the admiral said. “We received it while en route to Nyja and immediately set an intercept course at maximum speed. Luckily we were in time to start collecting your lifeboats before it was too late.” He gestured over his shoulder at the busy shuttle bay behind him. “Quite a fortuitous turn of events, eh? Me, being here with this regal Ba’lux ship to rescue the survivors of Varlowe Waylade’s catastrophic American-style cruise.” He rubbed his hands in delight. “She will never live down this humiliation.”
Burlock nodded. “Yes, sir. It’s been a shix show over here, to be honest. But I don’t understand how you’re responding to a distress call.”
“What’s to not understand?” Skardon said. “You called for help and we answered.”
“But we really didn’t call for help,” Burlock replied. “We’ve been in the Blue Hole’s dead zone for hours. It’s not possible you could have received a deep-space comm from—”
“Gah! He didn’t get a distress call!” Leo shouted. “He knew someone was going to wreck the engines! He sent the saboteur!”
“Shut your blasphemous mouth!” Burlock roared. “Or I’ll have Dilly bite your gahdamn head off!”
Skardon tutted. “I’m disappointed, Burlock. It seems the monkey figured it out before you did.”
The color flushed from Burlock’s face. “Wait. MacGavin is right? You put a saboteur on your own ship?”
“Not on my ship.” Skardon chuckled. “On Varlowe’s ship.”
“But why?” Burlock asked.
“To protect my interests, of course. It was a foregone conclusion that the American couldn’t captain that monstrosity all the way to Ensenada Vega, but the stakes were too high to leave it to chance. So I sent in my own little agent of chaos.”
“Yeah, I know,” Leo said. “I found all your secret files.”
Skardon snuffed. “You did not.”
“I did! Look!” Leo wrestled both arms from between the strands of his binding and swiped his tabloyd. A holographic heart sprang from his wrist.
“Call Mommy!”
“Gah!” He stuffed his hands behind his back. “Well… they’re on there! Trust me!”
“They are not. Your device is useless. I should know. I’m the one who ordered it.” Skardon grinned mischievously. “The real captain’s tabloyd has unlimited access to all areas of the ship, as well as every system. I gave it to my agent, who used it to wreak havoc without ever being detected.”
Burlock’s jaw trembled. “Sir, I don’t understand. You can’t honestly have sabotaged—”
“Praz Kerplunkt!” Kellybean shouted. She spat a wad of gnawed-up spider web on the floor and hissed. “Oh my gosh! You made that idiot the chief engineer so he’d have access to the engines and magnetosphere dynamo!”
“Praz?” Skardon giggled. “Are you kidding me? Praz is a nincompoop. I wouldn’t count on him to tie his shoes, let alone sabotage a ship.” He shook his head. “No, my saboteur was not on the senior staff.”
“Whoa,” Swooch said. “Was it Comfit?”
“No.”
“Quartermaster?”
“No.”
“Was it me?”
“No!”
Swooch scratched her head. “Does anybody else work here?”
Skardon pinched his eyes. “Let me make it easy for you.”
The picture became all hand as the admiral reached out and adjusted the camera angle. When he pulled his fingers away, the view resolved to a few parked lifeboats and one very smug looking Nomit slurping a tall-boy of blue beer.
“S’up, dickweeds?” Stobber said.
“Ha!” Jassi crowed. “I knew it!”
Kellybean gasped. “You knew Stobber was the saboteur?”
“No! I knew he was a lyin’ wuss! He said he hacked the ticketing system to get us on the excursion, but he just used an all-access tabloyd like a little bish.” She turned toward Stobber and snorted a laugh. “You can’t hack software for shix, you traitorous fartknocker!”
Stobber scowled and bunched his shoulders. “Yeah? Well at least I can hack hardware without hucking it up!”
“No you can’t,” Jassi barked.
“He can, actually,” Skardon said. “If it’s simple enough. I made sure of that before I booked Murderblossom for this cruise.”
“That was you?” Kellybean said.
“It was,” Skardon mused. “When I recruited Mister Stobber, I surreptitiously added his band to the entertainment roster. Being a musician was the perfect cover for him to slip this past security.”
He flicked the tabloyd on his wrist and another window appeared on the glass wall, showing a tech schematic of a device in the shape of a waist-high cylinder.
“Hey!” Hax cried. “That’s my bass drum! The one Stobber bought me then lost!”
“That’s no drum,” Leo said. “It’s the thing I destroyed in the machine room!”
Burlock just stared, his eye lens twitching. “It’s a parasitic capacitor. Ba’lux Imperial Navy tech. Back in the war we used those to disable enemy ships.”
“Ah, so there is something left in your hollowed out brain,” Skardon said smugly. “I liberated a para-capacitor when I left the service. Kept it hidden away for a rainy day.” He glared at Stobber and sighed. “It was such an elegant plan. The Nomit was supposed to smuggle it on board as part of a drum kit, then use the captain’s credentials to sneak into the machine room and clamp it
to a power junction.”
“Which I did!” Stobber said defensively.
Leo’s mind flashed back to when he first met Praz in engineering.
“Look at the lockpad logs!” He had whined. “Captain! Captain! Captain! He’s been in here more times than I have!”
“Wait,” Leo said, blinking back to the present. “So that gizmo was draining power from the engines the whole time?”
Stobber sipped his beer petulantly. “It wasn’t supposed to. It was supposed to kick on and blow them out when we got to the Blue Hole. But something hucked it up.”
Leo remembered finding the device, and the error message flashed in his mind’s eye.
Surge detected. Core corrupted. 15% efficiency.
“Praz must have accidentally activated it when he was wrecking consoles in engineering,” he guessed. “But the surge damaged it too much to kill the engines. It only weakened them!”
Burlock sucked a sharp breath. “That explains why the nav thrusters went out when we left Jaynkee.” He turned to Stobber in a rage. “We barely missed a rogue iceberg! You almost killed us all!”
“And way too soon,” Stobber grunted with annoyance. “I hadn’t even gotten Skardon and the other bigwigs off the ship yet.”
“You did not get executives off ship,” Dilly noted. “Board was medically evacuated by doctor.”
Burlock pointed to Leo. “After the chimp poisoned them with his disgusting American cuisine.”
“Pfft, whatever,” Stobber said. “I poisoned them. Or at least I set it up. It was easy. And cheesy.”
“The huck is that supposed to mean?” Jassi asked.
Skardon snuffed at her. “As everyone knows, Ba’lux physiology is very sensitive to certain types of dairy.”
“Everyone knows that?” Leo asked incredulously.
“I did,” Kellybean confirmed. “And I personally checked over the menu for the Captain’s Welcome Dinner. The only dairy was the cheese on the nachos. Gouda is on the safe list!”
“It is,” Stobber agreed. “Which is why I stole all of it.”
Leo’s mind reeled back to his encounter with the chef, and the Geiko’s reaction to his criticism of the “American nachos.”
“If you’re going to be a pedant about it, yes, we were out of gouda cheese so I used muenster.”
He raised a brow. “They were poisoned by muenster cheese?”
Skardon nodded. “Highly toxic and strictly banned in the kitchens of Ba’lux ships. But on an American ship…”
“So I didn’t poison them at all!” Leo cried. “You set me up!”
“And you nearly ruined it by changing up the menu,” Skardon snapped. “And then you went and destroyed the para-capacitor.” He shook his head. “You’re a bigger thorn in my side than I ever expected, MacGavin.”
“Back at ya,” Leo grumbled.
“Wait, I don’t get it.” Jassi nodded at Leo. “If the hairbag wrecked the sabotage drum…” She nodded at Stobber. “How did shix for brains still blow out the engines?”
Stobber snorted. “They were supposed to burn out during the concert. When they didn’t, I knew something was hucked up. So I had to go demolish ’em by hand.” He shrugged. “Wasn’t even hard. All the systems are wide open once you get past the secure doors.”
“And how did you manage that?” Jassi asked. “Because I know your dumb arze can’t fake credentials, and you lost your sugar daddy’s tabloid back in the gas pit.”
“I stole a new one from a senior staff member,” Stobber said. “And you helped.”
“Jassi!” Hax squealed. “How could you?”
“I didn’t help!”
“Stobber!” Hax squealed. “You fibber!”
The Nomit raised a broad hand. “All I’m sayin’ is, I never could have drugged the Gellicle without you.”
Kellybean gasped at Stobber. “You drugged me and stole my tabloyd?”
“That makes no sense,” Jassi said. “Why did you get her all horny so you could mug her?”
“Horny?” Stobber asked.
“Yes, horny! The second Kellybean swallowed your stupid sex drugs she was all over me!”
Kellybean’s ears blossomed red. “Can we not talk about this?”
Stobber burst out laughing. “They weren’t sex drugs! They were just standard, run-of-the-mill tranquilizers.” He grinned at Jassi. “You of all people should know!”
“How?” Jassi growled. “How should I know?”
“Because I put ’em in your drink too, idiot. The plan was for you to lure her away from the crowd for a little kitty coitus, then you’d both black out and I could steal her tabloyd with no witnesses.” He shrugged. “And I could get a show out of it.”
Kellybean’s whiskers thrashed. “You watched us?!”
Stobber grinned. “I even recorded it. Check it out.” He pulled a minicam from his back pocket and flicked its controls.
“No!” Kellybean screeched. “Don’t show it!”
A video window popped up on the glass, showing a jerky handheld shot tracking down a hallway of stateroom doors. Kellybean and Jassi were shoulder to shoulder, arms slung over each other, feet shuffling and bouncing over the carpet as if they were on the twelfth stop of a pub crawl.
“Okay, Beans,” Jassi slurred. “Almost home. Keep it moving.”
“Oh, I’ll keep it moving,” Kellybean moaned. “Moving into your pants!”
She lurched against Jassi, slamming her into the wall. Jassi groaned as Kellybean pressed against her body, licking her neck with long, clumsy strokes of her little cat tongue.
“Stop,” Jassi said drowsily. “Stop it. I’ve gotta get you into bed.”
“Yeah ya do,” Kellybean purred.
“Inta your bed. Alone. You gotta sleep this off. You’ve been drugged.” Jassi gestured limply at the camera. “That shixhead gave you drugs.”
Stobber’s grunt of laughter was too loud, too close to the minicam’s microphone. Kellybean nuzzled her furry head against Jassi’s wet neck.
“You’re my drug,” she whispered.
Jassi’s knees wobbled. “Well, I am a quarter catnip on my mother’s side.”
On the bridge, Jassi thrashed against the spider webs gluing her to the wall. “What the huck? You said they weren’t sex drugs!”
“They weren’t!” Stobber said. “That’s all her! After one drink!” He snorted a chuckle. “That kitty cannot hold her liquor.”
Kellybean looked at the floor and muttered under her breath. “This is why I don’t drink on duty.”
The video glitched and flickered, then resumed inside Kellybean’s stateroom.
“Okay, we’re here,” Jassi mumbled. “We’re at your place.”
“Finally!” Kellybean cooed.
Her claws came out and Jassi yelped as Kellybean grabbed her and threw her onto the bed.
“Don’t,” Jassi yawned. “Stop it. Staaa…”
Her eyes drifted shut and her head tipped back with a snore. Kellybean pawed at her for an uncomfortably long time before she collapsed and fell off the bed.
Behind the camera, Stobber chuckled. “And scene. C’mon, Jass. We got work to do.”
A massive hand reached into the shot and grabbed Jassi’s limp body. A smaller hand plucked the tabloyd off Kellybean’s wrist. The video glitched again, changing the scene. Now the minicam was lying on its side in an engineering conduit. Jassi was big in the foreground, sprawled on the floor and snoring like a sawmill. In the background, Stobber ripped hunks of circuits and bundles of wire out of the walls and ceilings like he was trying to dig his way out. Music echoed faintly down the corridor, laced with a smooth, crooning vocal. The video stuttered and turned off.
Leo blinked as the quiet voice resolved in his head. “That’s Swaggy Humbershant, Jr.! This was filmed during the concert!” His eyes went wide. “You were the one who took down the magnetosphere dynamo!”
“Guilty,” Stobbe
r said, slipping his minicam back in his pocket. “That was an accident though. I was only trying to huck up the engine. I didn’t mean to ruin the concert.”
Jassi sneered. “Yeah, it’s a real party foul to spoil the entertainment when you’re just trying to murder everyone on board.”
“Oh no, not everyone.” Skardon shook his head. “That simply wouldn’t do. The ridiculous American ship had to go, but the passengers had to live.” He smiled proudly. “Imagine the news feeds. Hundreds of survivors of Varlowe Waylade’s deadly folly, plucked from the jaws of death by the steady hand of Admiral Rip Skardon amidst the regal grandeur of the WTF Opulera.”
Leo crossed his arms across his bound chest. “So that’s it? You doomed this ship to make people like you?”
“Of course not! I’m not a homely pre-teen!” Skardon snapped. “I did it to realign the brand. To destroy Varlowe’s inane legacy and bring back traditional Ba’lux values under my reign as president!”
Burlock’s jaw clenched “Respectfully, sir, this is madness. I don’t like this American ship any more than you do, but there are still thousands of souls aboard. And we’re out of lifeboats!”
“By design, Burlock. All by design.” Skardon flashed a sinister grin. “I had the dock workers remove half your escape craft before you left Jaynkee.”
Dilly’s mandibles flexed angrily. “You intend to kill us to keep your secret?”
“Oh no, certainly not,” Skardon said. “I intend to kill you because you’re the worst crew in the galaxy.”
Swooch chortled. “Sick burn, bro.”
“We may be a little rough around the edges,” Leo admitted. “But worst in the whole galaxy? I don’t think so.”
“You are, MacGavin. Trust me,” Skardon said. “Each member handpicked by me. I saddled you with the worst of the worst of the entire WTF fleet. Dead weight to cut. Garbage to incinerate. All of you.”
“Dude,” Swooch chuckled. “That is a next-level sick burn.”
Kellybean scowled at her. “I’m sorry, do you not understand what’s happening here? He just said he put you on this ship to die.”
Swooch shrugged. “Nobody lives forever, right?” She rubbed her belly. “Anybody else hungry?”
“Nobody else is hungry!” Jassi snapped. “The huck is the matter with you?”
Galaxy Cruise: The Maiden Voyage Page 20
