“What kind of idiot do you take me for?” demanded the professor.
Cal hesitated. “I don’t know. Just, like, a regular idiot?” He glanced at Mech. “I didn’t know there were types. Did you know there were types?”
He pointed up to the professor. “Also… just so I’m clear, is he a robot?”
“No. He’s a guy in a robot suit,” Mech said.
“Oh. So… kind of like you?”
“I ain’t in a suit,” Mech said.
“You’re kind of in a suit.”
“No. I’m a cyborg. Part organic, part robot.”
Cal looked from Mech to the professor and back again.
“And he’s…?”
“He’s a guy in a robot suit,” said Mech.
“Right. Right,” said Cal, nodding. “And that’s different?”
“Yes! It’s fonking different.”
Cal looked around at the semi-circle of metal figures behind them. “And those are robots?”
“Yes,” Mech sighed. “Those are robots.”
“Hey, don’t look now,” Cal whispered, nudging Mech with his elbow and leaning in close. “But I think the hot one on the end is giving you the eye.”
“Silence!” screeched Nushtuk yet again. “I may not know who you are, but I know why you are here. You have come to collect the bounty on my head. You, like all before you, have failed. You have no trap. You have no clever tricks up your sleeves.”
“This one doesn’t even have sleeves,” Cal said, jabbing a thumb in Mech’s direction.
“Shut the fonk up,” Mech grunted.
“You are hopeless. You are defeated. You are—”
A knife embedded itself in his forehead, cutting off the rest of the sentence.
Cal’s hand flew to his mouth. Mech’s, for a variety of reasons, didn’t.
They both watched as Professor Nushtuk slumped forward, toppled out of the robot suit, and fell to the floor. The butt of the knife struck the ground first, the impact ramming the blade the rest of the way through his head. It protruded through the back of his skull, a lump of brain impaled on the end.
For a moment, there was only silence, then there was only the sound of Cal swallowing. Slowly, he removed his hand from his mouth.
“Hello?” he said.
“The fonk are you doing, man? He’s dead,” Mech said.
Cal watched the chunk of brain slide down the knife blade until it came to rest in a nest of wiry hair that was now more pink than white.
“Jesus Christ,” he groaned “Where did that knife come from?”
“Ha!” hollered a voice. It echoed around the inside of the warehouse from up high on one of the stacks. “Bested!”
And then, the semi-circle of robots around them raised their weapons. The sound of several hundred blaster bolts screamed around the warehouse.
Fifteen
Cal ducked for cover behind Mech as half a dozen of the robots exploded into bits of scrap metal.
Loren strode along the corridor, a repeater cannon tucked under her arm, spraying an apparently endless stream of energy bolts across the warehouse. Splurt perched on her shoulder, the orange glow of the rapid-fire bolts reflecting off his glossy green surface.
“The cavalry’s here!” Cal cheered, peeking over the top of Mech’s head. “We’re saved!”
Loren’s feet slid out from under her. They heard her eject an, “Ooh, fonk!” as she briefly went horizontal in the air, then she hit the floor. The repeater cannon continued to fire throughout, peppering the stacks of crates and ceiling with hundreds of holes.
“No, wait, I spoke too soon,” Cal sighed. “She fell over.”
The robots turned their guns on Loren and opened fire. Splurt expanded around her, becoming a domed shield that deflected the robots’ fire and sent it screaming off in all directions.
The bots all realized at the same time that they were wasting their ammunition, and stopped firing. The moment they did, Miz came bounding from between a stack of crates, running on all fours, the fur on the back of her neck standing on end.
Initially, her expression was exactly what Cal was hoping for. She was angry. She was determined. She was here to fonk some shizz up!
And then her rage turned to confusion as the frictionless surface claimed her, too, and she slid straight from the mouth of one alleyway into the one directly across from it.
“Like, what the fonk is up with this floor?” she demanded, her voice fading as she went sliding off into the wings.
“Jesus, if you want something done…” Cal muttered. “Mech, keep these guys busy.”
“How the fonk am I supposed to do that?” Mech demanded, waddling around in a semi-circle to look at Cal.
“I don’t know. Do a little dance,” Cal replied. “It’ll be adorable.”
He half ran, half slid over to the robot suit and scrambled up its front. He dived in headfirst just as a volley of blaster fire struck the spot where he’d been. He felt the heat of it, and then he was inside the robot suit’s cockpit, albeit upside-down.
“Fonk, it’s cramped in here,” he complained, performing a series of complex rolls and twists in an attempt to turn himself the right way up.
A foot struck a lever and the suit clanked forward, forcing Mech to waddle out of its path on his emergency feet. Two of the robots weren’t so quick to react, and crunched loudly as they were crushed into scrap beneath the suit’s immense weight.
With a final tuck and tumble, Cal successfully righted himself. Nushtuk’s chair was predictably tiny, and Cal felt like he was operating a child’s toy as he ran his fingers over all the buttons and levers.
“OK, you metal fonks—not you, Mech, the other guys,” Cal said, shouting to make himself heard over the screaming of blaster fire. It hammered against the back of the suit, and the glass canopy closed protectively over the cockpit on some sort of auto-response program.
Cal grabbed a joystick and jiggled it. The top half of the robot shimmied from side to side.
“Aha!”
Jamming the joystick to the right, Cal turned the battle suit around until it faced the growing army of smaller robots. “Let’s see how you shizznods like this!”
He squeezed the joystick’s trigger.
A moment later, the suit’s arms fell off and clanked to the floor.
“Fonk. Wait, no. That was wrong.”
“Oh, you think so?” Mech barked, toddling around in circles, chased by two of Nushtuk’s robot minions.
“Why is that even a button?” Cal yelped, as another volley of blaster fire slammed into the front of the suit. He picked another likely looking button. “Let’s try this one.”
The suit’s legs folded backward, slamming the body onto the floor, and giving Cal an uninterrupted view of the ceiling. “No. No, that’s not it.”
Before he could try anything else, three of the robots clambered up onto the cockpit and began slamming their metal feet against the glass.
“Fonk off! Leave me alone!” Cal told them. He gave the joystick a jerk to try to throw the robots off, but rather than the top half turning, the suit’s legs spun instead.
Krick.
A line appeared in the glass. Cal watched it grow diagonally up the window, each splintering kerack sound filling him with an increasing sense of dread.
He looked up into the electronic gaze of the robot that had caused the damage. Its face was identical to all the others, but Cal could’ve sworn it managed to look just a little smugger.
All three of them raised a foot again. “Hey, guys, let’s talk about this!” Cal cried.
And then a series of blaster bolts hammered into them, sending them sprawling onto the floor.
“Cal! You OK?”
“Loren! Yes! I’m OK!” he replied, laughing with relief.
A green shape passed between Cal and the ceiling, there one moment, gone the next.
The sound of blaster fire intensified, but was quickly joined by another sound, too.
&n
bsp; Cal had never heard a robot scream before. He hadn’t even known it was possible. And yet, he had little doubt that the high-pitched electronic whines he was hearing now were exactly that. They were not unlike the feedback screech from a speaker placed too close to a microphone, but with a more ragged, desperate sort of edge that suggested pain, terror, and other things that robots technically shouldn’t be capable of.
Trying the same button he’d pressed last time, Cal unfolded the battle suit’s legs, springing it upright again. Through the cracked glass, he saw a whirling dervish of green, and a number of robots all flying in different directions.
“That’s my little guy!” Cal cheered, but then a movement from farther back in the warehouse cut his relief short. More of the robots were closing in. Hundreds of the fonkers, surely too many for even Splurt to fight.
“Shizz, shizz, shizz.”
Cal studied the buttons, almost pressed a few of the more promising-looking ones, then thought better of it.
“Glove box, glove box, there must be a glove box,” he muttered, running his hands across the smooth plastic panel in front of his knees.
Nothing.
He reached under the seat and fumbled around. His fingers touched something wet and he yanked his hand clear. A stringy yellow noodle dangled from his fingertips. Shuddering, he flicked it off. It splatted near the top of the canopy glass, drawing Cal’s eye to the sun visor.
He folded it down, revealing a photograph of a scantily clad alien woman with more breasts than anyone would reasonably know what to do with. Beside it, tucked into a little pocket, was a hand-drawn diagram of the battle suit’s controls.
“Bingo!” Cal said, grabbing for the paper. “Splurt, hold on, buddy. Be right with you!”
Splurt had cleared out almost all of the initial wave of robots, but the approaching army opened fire, peppering his blobby surface with a torrent of blaster fire.
Thrashing, Splurt whipped out with several elastic tentacles, but the sheer volume of blaster fire drove him back. They punctured his surface and passed cleanly through, each blast reducing his size a fraction.
Cal’s eyes darted across the instruction sheet, then down at the controls. His stomach flipped when he realized that the information on the paper bore no relationship whatsoever to the layout of the buttons and switches inside the cockpit.
“Damn it!”
“Cal, do something!” Loren yelled.
“I don’t know how!” Cal hollered back. “I don’t know how it works. It’s not like there’s a button that just deactivates all the…”
His eyes fell on a bright red button in the center of the console. A label had been affixed to the plastic beneath it, clearly stating its purpose.
“Wait, no. There is,” Cal said. “It literally says ‘Deactivate robots.’”
He pressed the button. Immediately, the robots stopped closing in and all lowered their weapons to their sides.
Cal held his breath, waiting to see if anything else was about to happen. When it looked like nothing was, he searched for the button that would open the canopy, before eventually deciding it was safer to manually push the broken glass out of the frame.
That done, he leaned forward and regarded the floor before him. Splurt was gradually pulling himself back together. Loren swept her weapon across the inert robot army, looking for an excuse to start shooting.
Mech waddled, penguin-like, between the metal carcasses Splurt had left strewn across the floor. He and Cal both turned as, with a, “Whoaaaa!” Mizette came sliding out from between two stacks of crates on all-fours. She spun to a stop amid all the carnage, finally coming to rest with her face just a few inches from Mech’s.
She looked him up and down, her confusion palpable.
“Like—”
“Don’t even ask,” Mech told her.
“Look at his little emergency feet!” Cal said. “Aren’t they adorable?”
Satisfied that the robots weren’t about to spring back into life, Loren lowered her repeater cannon. “You didn’t call for help,” she said. She did not sound happy about this. “Why didn’t you call for help?”
“We didn’t really get a chance,” Cal told her. He swung his legs over the edge of the battle suit’s cockpit, moved as if to launch himself off, then lost his nerve and slid clumsily down the front with a panicky expression on his face.
Straightening up, he flashed Loren one of his most winning smiles. “Things were going great one minute, and then the next minute…” He shrugged. “Robots. So many robots. Also, the only comm-unit we had was in Mech’s arm, and fonk knows where that went.”
Cal gestured over to Mech. “I mean, look at him. They literally tore him limb from limb,” he said. “And, I suspect, molested him. Sexually.”
“They didn’t molest me,” Mech growled.
“Sure they didn’t, short stuff,” Cal said. “You keep telling yourself that.”
He clapped his hands and rubbed them together. “Now. Reckon we can claim this bounty?” he asked, shuffling and sliding around until he found Professor Nushtuk in all the carnage.
This turned out not to be too difficult, as Nushtuk was much larger than he had been. Or rather, he covered a much wider area. The outline of a large three-toed foot could just be made out in the mush of his remains, most of which were now almost two-dimensional.
His head was still the correct size and shape, but it had become detached from the jelly of his neck and rolled a few feet across the floor. His face was pointed in Cal’s direction, the eyes rolled back in their sockets, the end of Tyrra’s knife hilt protruding from a hole in his forehead.
“They wanted him alive,” Loren said.
Cal considered this.
“Maybe if we dressed him up…”
“What the fonk are you talking about, ‘dress him up’?” Mech demanded. “Only thing the man’s gonna fit in now is a bathtub.”
Cal sighed. “You’re right. No way we can Weekend at Bernie’s our way out of this one,” he said. He gestured to Loren’s comm-unit. “I know we get a fortune for bringing him in alive, but ask Kevin what we get for killing him?”
Loren passed on the message. Kevin took a moment to check the job listing before replying.
“The death penalty, ma’am.”
Cal tutted. “Fonk. See? This is the reason I hate jobs. This always happens.”
Loren side-eyed him.
“Not this exact thing. This is a first. But shizz like this,” Cal said. Splurt finally finished pulling himself back together, looked between Cal and Loren a few times, then finally rolled up onto Cal’s back and clung to it.
“We should get back to the ship,” Loren said.
“Agreed,” said Cal. “Miz, go find Tyrra. She and I are going to have words about the importance of not knifing people through the forehead.”
Miz tutted. “Fine,” she said, then all four of her limbs went in opposite directions and she crashed to the ground. “Like, what the fonk is wrong with this floor?”
“Loren, could you help Miz?” Cal asked.
The lines of Loren’s face drew tighter. She chose not to reply to him, and instead just swung her rifle up onto her shoulder.
“Come on, Miz,” she said, holding a hand out. Miz took it and Loren braced herself as the wolf-woman hauled herself upright. “Let’s go,” Loren continued, shooting Cal a glare. “Captain’s orders.”
“Wait, what’s that supposed to mean?” Cal asked, but Loren didn’t respond. Instead, she and Miz teetered off across the slippery floor, holding onto each other for support.
“You’re an idiot, man,” Mech grunted. “I hope you know that.”
“What? What did I do?” Cal asked.
He watched until Loren and Miz had gone sliding off between two crate stacks, then sighed and shook his head.
Bending, he picked up a set of robot legs and supported himself on them like an old man with a couple of walking sticks. The metal feet gripped the floor, drastically cutting C
al’s chances of falling over.
“Come on, Frodo,” he said, glancing back at Mech. “Let’s go find the rest of you.”
Sixteen
“Medical study on Pallton Minor,” said Kevin.
“What kind of medical study?” Cal asked. He was holding a little piece of one of the robots in his hands, turning it over and over as he examined it.
While searching the place for salvage, they’d figured out that the little rectangular box Cal was now holding had been what allowed Nushtuk’s battle suit to directly control the robots. Cal was hopeful he could find a way to attach it to Mech without the cyborg noticing. Oh, the fun he would have.
“It doesn’t say, sir,” Kevin replied. “But there is a sizeable list of potential side effects, and an airtight legal disclaimer.”
“Hard pass,” said Cal. “What else?”
“There’s a sewer blockage that requires clearing on Pallton Major,” Kevin said.
“Sewer blockage? Why’s that on there?” Cal wondered, looking up from the remote control doohickey. “Shouldn’t that be something the authorities handle?”
“It’s become sentient, sir,” Kevin explained. “They’ve already lost over three crews.”
Cal glanced up. “How many over three?”
“One, sir.”
“So… they’ve lost four? Why didn’t you just say they’d lost four crews?”
“Dramatic effect, sir,” Kevin replied.
“Like, I am not going into a sewer,” said Miz, flicking her eyes up to the screen.
“Agreed. It’s a no to the shizzmonster,” said Cal. “Next.”
“How do you feel about psychic parasites?” Kevin asked.
“Negative to indifferent,” Cal replied. “But leaning heavily toward the negative. What about the game show thing? Any more of those?”
There was a pause as Kevin checked the job listings. “I’m afraid not, sir.”
Cal tutted. “Damn. Because I think I’d be great on one of those.”
“You’ve said that already,” Mech told him.
“I know, but seriously, I’d be great.”
“There is one available position that’s related to television, sir.”
The Hunt for Reduk Topa Page 14
