Dwarves in Space

by S E Zbasnik

  Orn barreled into two, his axe slicing through guts and knees as his arm crashed from the weight of a 30 stone body clinging to his weapon. As he bit through an orc's backside he shouted, "And that's for showing us hospitality!"

  The end of his slide appeared very rapidly, where two of the guards were building a quick barricade of their own. "CAPTAIN!" he shouted, just as one of her bullets spattered through the left guard, felling her from her post. Shifting his ass as hard as he could, he cranked left and blew past the other guard trying to straighten up and attack.

  Orn continued to fly, his pants literally catching fire from the friction as he skittered across the polished stone floors and began to ascend up the other incline. Before gravity could have a full hold and shoot him back up to where they were trying to flee from, he dropped the handle of the battleaxe to the floor and tumbled ass over end, rolling until he spun up on his feet. They may not look like it, but dwarves are spry and always landed on their feet.

  "What now, Cap?"

  Variel pushed past her other two crew, and took aim at the right guard chasing after her pilot. She nicked the guard's shoulder but she kept chasing after Orn, the minimal pain not registering. "Orn!" Variel shouted over the rising din of more emerging guards from gods knew where. "Remember the Gilded Pear? When we didn't have exact change?"

  He laughed heartily and stamped his feet in rage, "Oh do I. Waiter," he shouted to the guard slowing in her collapsing steps as the dwarf faced off with her, "there's a fly in my soup!"

  "I didn't mean it literally," Variel grumbled, as the dwarf tossed the battleaxe, which in their first attempt was a steak knife, above his head.

  The guard stopped, watching it, giving Variel enough time to whack her on the back of the neck with her gun. Down went the guard. Orn caught the battleaxe with his good hand and brought the blade across the guard's shoulder.

  "I don't remember it going like that at the restaurant," Variel chided, as she cocked her gun, cursing her lack of batteries, and aimed a few shots at the guards emerging through the side heart valve.

  "It's called improvising," Orn said, "besides, that was just a few fussy elves. Globbing soup in their hair wouldn't work on orcs."

  Variel waved at Monde and Segundo, "Get to the door, you idiots." While Segundo gasped at the piles of surprisingly still squirming orcs, the doc grabbed hard onto his charge and drug him through the vena cava and back into daylight. "Orn, you're next."

  "Yes, boss," he whooped, swinging the axe around as if posing for an action card, and dashed for the door. Variel followed close behind, taking a few shots at the guards, trying to stagger them, before gritting her teeth and running for the door. She jumped just as the portal closed behind her, and with her last bullet shot out the scanner's eye. The entire system went into lockdown mode. No one was getting in or out of the heart for hours.

  As Monde helped her to her feet, she looked into those orange eyes she'd trusted so often with her life and ordered, "Run."

  Darting through the indentations, hovering close to the doorsteps and in the shadows of the T's, the group moved through the wakening streets with Orn out front. His new best toy sliced through another scanner poised above the cross section of a street and he waved the others on.

  Being so short, he was the only of them who could easily infiltrate before the scanner could register something worth rousing from a nap for, but this much damage in such a specific route was certain to draw attention soon. "We can't run all the way back out to the farm," Variel said, flattening herself next to their doc who'd been far more quiet and obedient than usual, "We're lucky to have made it this far."

  Rattling his battle axe as if facing down a siege, Orn grunted, "Let them come!"

  Variel landed her hand on the dwarf's shoulder to steady him, and glanced up and down the block. Not a bad part of town, nor the good side; a few orcs chased after children wandering the summer streets in short overalls, a ball passing between sticky hands. "Orn, wander down the block destroying every camera you can to create a false trail. Once you're done, get back here quick."

  "You planning on sprouting wings and flying us out of here?" he asked, already eyeing down a red eye thirty feet from their position.

  "Not exactly," she said turning to Segundo who crossed his eyes trying to figure out what she was looking at.

  "This is so humiliating," Segundo's voice carried across the PALM link up Variel held between them all in the dark.

  "Keep it up, and maybe stick your ass out or something. Orcs like asses, right?" she asked the other fellow crouching atop a few bags stuffed with molding, half eaten takeout and shredded invoices for fresh meat.

  "Yes, sort of," Monde said. "The flatter the more preferable, but also on display."

  "Right, stick your flat ass out and maybe pout something," she ordered as the dumpster lid flung open and a curious dwarf's head peeked in.

  "A good seven cameras are piles of rubble. What'd I miss?" his hand reached out and Variel caught it, hauling him into their hiding spot.

  "We're hitching," Variel said, trying to not breathe through her nose. The only thing worse than the smell of orcs wandering the streets at midsummer was using their pungent garbage for furniture.

  "From inside a trash bin," Orn glanced around the cramped accommodations, lit only by the captain's glowing palm. "You Crests sure do things interestingly."

  "I got Segundo out strutting whatever the gods gave him," she didn't hide a growing grin as she said. "After all, you said he was like catnip."

  Orn snorted, shaking his head at the poor human who'd blossomed under the attention from a few lusty orcs who he believed only cared about what existed between his ears. Now that he was using his manly wiles for bait, the reality of the universe was sinking in. "Hey kid, maybe try showing a little leg."

  "I must insist, this is strictly agains..."

  Variel bumped the mute button, letting Segundo whine into the ether even as he paraded up and down the street, occasionally sticking out a thumb, or channeling a lone lamb that lost its mistress.

  "So," Orn started, glancing over to their little fugitive, "killing babies part of orc medical school or was it just something you did on the side for rent money?"

  Monde clasped his fingers and focused on them, "I didn't kill a child, I refused to complete the bonding process."

  The dwarf's abundant brows furrowed as he tried to flip through his ever increasing list of euphemisms. He'd heard quite a few over his life, "shaking the fur" from the were-sloths being one of his favorite, but infanticide was a new and confusing one. "You were a concubine or something?"

  Monde broke from his hand vigil to the lost dwarf and sighed, "The bonding process, orcs require a...I was young, and close to completing my first pass of medical school. And I may have let my judgement get the better of me a night or two."

  "Oh, now this I have to hear." Then Orn thought better of it, "Actually, no I don't."

  "Sometimes I think you can breathe and talk at the same time," Variel said, watching her pilot as if he were a particularly interesting but nasty stink bug.

  "She was supposed to be a momentary distraction," Monde continued, wanting to get this tale out. It'd gnawed away at his soul until he felt as hollow as those eggs they traded away. "But a week later she approached me with news that she was full of egg and wished it to be fertilized."

  The aliens glanced at each other, both only passingly aware of their own reproductive anatomy. Monde sighed and launched into an ancient lecture from an instructor brought in to warn the boys away from engaging in slutty hand holding. "Intercourse will at times cause an egg to drop from the female's tract. This is a random occurrence that relies upon the correct balance of both hormones and nutrition, as well as some underlying causes we'll figure out later. At this point she can decide whether to continue the process of growing the child or let the egg recede."

  "And that has what to do with you?" the dwarf asked. "I thought you women all wandered off to huts and
took care of that stuff yourself." Variel whacked Orn in the back of the head with a broken pipe for that.

  Monde sighed but continued his lecture, "At which point the male shall bond with her, sharing not just genetic material but also nutrients from his own body. The process requires constant contact for three weeks."

  "So you refused to bond with her? I don't blame you, child support's a scam."

  The orc twisted his hands, "Not exactly. Refusal of bonding is acceptable under the law..."

  "Which means if you're rich enough, or well known enough, people look the other way, but anyone poorer or lower class than the one pushing gets tossed to the egg," Variel said, seeing this played out in much the same across the galaxy just with a few chromosomes reversed.

  "Yes, and my family would have been very disappointed in me, possibly even cut me off, and I'd certainly be expelled for letting myself get into such a compromising position. It would have shattered the morality clause."

  "Maybe it's the pipe to the head that scrambled my brains," Orn muttered, still rubbing the sore spot, "but if refusal is so bad, why not suffer the three weeks or whatever, then she has the kid, and it's not your problem anymore."

  "I do not understand."

  "You know, single mothers raising their adorable apple cheeked spawn against the unfair world and finding love with a widowed father in antique stores. Don't any of you watch the network vids?" Orn asked at the stares he got.

  "Women do not raise children, at least never alone. That's..." Monde giggled at the idea of it. She'd probably put the baby in the food combuster and the roast in a bassinet.

  "Okay, fine, Mr. Everyone's Gone Fucking Nuts, if you didn't refuse the bond, but you didn't bond, then why are you facing an execution squad?"

  "Before the latching on period-" Both Orn and Variel shuddered at that, trying to not put their imaginations to how that works for three damn weeks. "I injected myself with a serum of hormones that would make it fail. After it did not take, she more or less kicked me out on my ass and I assumed I was free.

  "It was another two years, I'd graduated the first session and was working to the second, when the accusations appeared. She had proof that I'd knowingly sabotaged the bond, most likely from a bitter competitive colleague."

  Monde twisted his fingers. He'd had years to reflect upon who it was, but revenge seemed a futile dream as he could never enact it, so the identity remained a black space in his tale. "In a panic, I ran, first to any space port that would get me off planet. I hopped from one colony to another, hiding amongst cargo and refugees, extending my punishment sentence, but too terrified to face up to it."

  "And you ran into me," Variel said, remembering the day when she'd taken a moment of pity upon the jittery orc begging for relief. If she'd known he was in such dire straights...she'd probably have refused him, her own life not needing the magnifying glass of a warrant upon her head.

  "Yes, captain," he mumbled, lowering his head to his colorful chest.

  "And they were just gonna kill you for not making babies?" Orn's darkest fears raised up for a moment at his own endless insistence to keep his genetic material on lockdown.

  "Orcs do not kill on sight unless the punishment has reached beyond your logical lifespan."

  "Prudent," Variel said earning the hairy eyeball of both her pilot and the man facing down the end of the firing squad. "I didn't say it was right," she waved her hands, shining a perturbed Segundo against the dumpster wall, his face redder than a hydroponic tomato, "only that it makes a bit of sense. Why drag back someone convicted of a hundred or a thousand life sentences when you can just end it there?"

  Orn folded his arms, "Sounds like there's a story in that bit of wisdom."

  The dwarf was right, damn him, but it wasn't one she was in the mood to get into. Luckily, her eye landed on a very flustered and frantically waving technician and she raised the volume button, "...car, egg, vehicle, is slowing. What do I do?"

  "Flash him your danglies," Orn cooed, getting an even brighter burn across their bait's cheeks.

  Their vantage point flew down to the black ground as the egg rolled to a stop. Segundo was on his own.

  Turning back and forth, trying to not feel like an idiot while accidentally looking like one, Segundo skipped back from the edge just as the barrier burst up. Either one of those eggs was about to stop before him, or...actually he'd prefer anything other than that. He lifted his hand up to his face, and whispered into it, "It seems we have a target. Advice? Over."

  It was what all the space agents did in the few epics he'd read in the contraband at the commune, though most brothers turned a blind eye to it glad the kids weren't beating up someone who could be the future prophet and use that harrowing experience to turn into some kind of super villain. Though there was very little in the adventure tales of the agents strutting their stuff on the side of a road, and certainly not opening up the jacket of their uniform only to have the captain shake her head, mutter something and motion for him to zip it back up. Agents were masters of disguise and manipulators of all. Segundo felt like a terrified kid on his first day of school, assuming the truancy officer was well armed.

  "Hello!" he shouted back into the palm connection. "Is anybody there? Oh god, or gods, or ancestral spirits with voyeur tendencies (the commune had some interesting cursing to cover any and all future eventualities), I'm all alone. They've done left me to be a distraction while they battled some mighty orc warriors all alone and were killed in the process and I'm gonna die on this orc world completely forgotten aside from a small note on a shipping manifesto!

  A blur slowed to visible range and began to inch towards his particular street corner. His voice rose a few octaves as he screeched into his palm, "Help me please! A car, egg, vehicle, is slowing. What do I do?"

  The dwarf's particularly useless banter chirped over, but Segundo dropped his hand missing it; the egg car was hatching. A narrow gap appeared and an orc head popped out. Greyer than the others and with slightly smaller neck horns, topped in a hat somewhat reminiscent of his own back on the ship, she smiled wide and didn't hide the once over sizing up gaze across Segundo's form.

  He shuddered and subconsciously covered his chest with his folded arms, giving the others a view of his rapidly staining armpit. Luckily, this worked in his favor as the orc smiled even wider at his obvious discomfort, "What's a nice boy like you doing all alone?"

  Segundo lapsed into the small script Variel drilled into his head while Monde searched for a suitable hiding place, dragging the dumpster nearer. "I AM VISITING FROM ANOTHER PLANET, BUT MY SHEEP GOT LOST. I REQUIRE A TRIP TO ANOTHER PLACE TO DETERMINE LATER!"

  The orc blinked at the human's outburst but the smile didn't dim. She'd probably never seen one of their kind before and assumed all males shouted inane babble at the top of their lungs. She may even see it as a mating thing.

  A quiet voice buzzed out of his armpit, "-ucks sake, I shoulda put the dwarf out there."

  "I got better legs."

  "Get her to the dumpster, the dumpster. I'll handle the rest."

  His possible ride motioned him closer, and he slid a few steps nearer. "I imagine an alien like you would be grateful for the help."

  "Oh yes, very grateful," he nodded, trying to find a chance to insert about the dumpster.

  "Well then, jump on in," the smile took on a dragon turn, deep creases connecting the mouth to the red eyes.

  "I have some things!" Segundo shouted, not moving an inch towards the opening gap in the egg car.

  The orc gazed about at the empty space beside him and turned her head as if that'd make his invisible things appear. Armpit voice cut in, "Ask for her help, orc's love showing off their strength. Make's 'em feel womanly." Orn made a vomiting sound at that, the dry retching echoing in Segundo's pit.

  "I don't have them here, they're too large for me to carry by myself. Could you help?"

  "All right." The orc glanced around the empty street, making certain there was no waiting
ambush; but finding only the scrawny human with the whispering appendage, she descended from her vehicle.

  Segundo stepped back, trying to keep out of arm's reach, as he led the orc towards the dumpster, "It's just back here, this way." She followed behind, uncertain about the game but enjoying it nonetheless. Pointing towards the dumpster, Segundo smiled and tried to flirt with a face that looked more like a cat fresh out of the rain, "Would you pull it out of there."

  "You put your luggage in a dumpster?" the orc staggered back, in no mood to go routing through garbage.

  One of those rare bolts of brilliance hit Segundo, "To keep people from stealing it off me behind my back."

  "Very wise," the orc rolled up her sleeves and lifted the heavy latch on the lid. "Who told you that?"

  "A woman!" Apparently bolts of brilliance can strike a person twice if they forget to lower their umbrella.

  The orc smiled. Keeping her head up, she reached down into the dumpster not wanting to get a nose full of whatever nested in garbage. A gloved hand grabbed her arm, holding it down, as the captain popped out, wrapping her own hand around the orc's mouth and jamming a needle deep into the reactive and unprotected area between the third and fourth neck horn. The orc struggled against the pair and whatever lashed through her veins, but she quickly slipped and crashed to the ground.

  Variel threw up the lid, gasping for air away from the stench, and climbed out. Monde followed, gathering up his bag overloaded with the part they'd been through this entire hell to get. Segundo offered his hand to the dwarf, who tossed it aside. "Watch this, pretty boy." Swinging the battle axe wide, he cut himself a dwarf hole out of the thick metal dumpster. "Not as impressive as a knight sword, but it'll do," he chuckled, climbing out of the hole he made and earning a glare from Variel.

  "Great, where did you think we were going to stick the body?"

  "Uh..." Orn scratched his head.

  Variel shook her head, knowing she'd have to get that thing away from him, probably at night when he was sleeping. Assuming he didn't go to bed with it. "Behind the dumpster. Help me, Segundo."