“You pressed the button!” Bryman sobbed.
“A button was pressed. Who or what is responsible is open to debate,” Cal argued. “The point is, we’d rather you didn’t shoot Mizette. It’ll only make her angry.”
“Oh, I’m totally angry already,” Miz snarled, shifting her weight onto the balls of her feet.
“See? And that’s just going to get messy,” Cal said. “So, how about you lower the gun, go make your escape, and we’ll sit on Bryman here so he can’t trigger the alarm?”
Bryman’s sobbing intensified, but he offered no other objections.
Topa flicked his tongue back and forth across his lips, weighing up his options. “Or, maybe I shoot you all now so you can’t follow me.”
“You could try that. I wouldn’t recommend it, but you could try,” Cal said, shrugging. He lowered his hands. “Trust me. My plan’s better.”
For a moment, it looked like Topa might be in agreement, but then he tightened his grip on the blaster. “I never leave witnesses,” he said. “Sorry.”
Loren moved before he could fire, swinging her leg up in an arcing outward kick that redirected his aim just as his finger tightened. The blaster bolt missed Mizette, ricocheted off Mech’s shoulder, then exploded against the ceiling.
While this was happening, Loren had bent Topa’s wrist, twisted the gun from his grip, and followed up with a punch to his throat.
Topa caught the blow before it could land, drove a headbutt into the bridge of Loren’s nose, and spun her around so her back was pressed against him and his arm was across her throat.
“Wait!” he warned the others, pressing the blade of a home-made shiv against Loren’s cheek so the point of it was directly below her right eye. “Make a move, and I gouge this bedge’s heart out through her face.”
His blue eyes blazed cruelly as he pulled Loren more firmly against him. “When are people going to learn? You don’t fonk with Reduk To—”
One of Cal’s breasts exploded from inside his jacket and cleaved an L-shape through Topa’s skull, entering through the crown and exiting a millisecond later below the left ear.
Topa’s arms became limp and flopped to his sides. The shiv slipped from his fingers.
He gurgled faintly, as approximately one-quarter of his head slid sideways, dangled from a flap of skin for a few moments, then fell to the floor with a clonk.
Loren fired a kick behind her, launching the wheezing Topa backward off his feet. By the time he landed, he was dead.
Almost certainly before he landed, in fact, but definitely after.
Cal rushed to Loren’s side. “You OK?”
“Fine,” she replied, clearly annoyed. She dabbed at her nostrils and came away with the faintest smear of blood. “I shouldn’t have let myself get grabbed like that. It was reckless.”
“Are you kidding? You saved Miz,” Cal told her.
“Uh, no she didn’t,” Miz insisted. “I totally could have ducked.”
Bryman shuffled past Cal, his hand over his mouth, his eyes wide and staring at the body on the floor. “He’s… He’s dead. You killed him.”
Cal grinned and tucked his boob back into his jacket. “He is. And you’re welcome.”
“Welcome?” Bryman spat. “Welcome? What are you talking about? Do you have any idea what you’ve done?”
“Uh, saved your life, for one thing,” Cal said. “So, there’s that.”
“You idiot,” Bryman hissed. “You absolute cretin! You don’t get it, do you? You don’t understand? The Controller has been building up the Reduk Topa narrative arc for years. He’s invested millions in financing. Countless hours. This was his baby. This was to be his crowning glory.”
He gestured to the corpse on the floor. “And you’ve killed him.”
“Hey, it was him or us, buddy,” Cal said. “Would you rather we’d let him kill you?”
Bryman grabbed him by the front of the jacket, his face white, his eyes wide and blazing. “Yes! It was part of the narrative! He was supposed to kill me. He was supposed to kill all of us! We were going to capture him when he tried to steal a ship. We were giving him one final killing spree to cement his reputation with the audience. To make them hate him even more.”
His eyes were drawn to Topa’s body again, just as the pirate’s brain oozed out onto the floor.
“But you ruined it,” Bryman whispered. “You broke the narrative.”
He looked at Cal again, his voice coming as a throaty whisper of fear. “And now, you’ve doomed us all.”
Twenty-Four
For the first time since Cal and the crew had first seen him through the forcefield, the Controller was perfectly still. Not an arm moved. Not a thumb twitched. Not a patch of his silver skin ebbed or flowed. He just sat there in the center of his desk, staring at Bryman as if frozen in time.
“I think you broke him,” Cal whispered.
He waved a hand in front of the Controller’s face. “Hellooo?”
Cal snapped his fingers a few times.
“Anyone home?”
He waited to see if this would elicit any response, then shrugged. “No, you killed him. Way to go, Bryman.”
“What? No! I didn’t… He isn’t… This isn’t on me!” Bryman spluttered.
“Well, you are the one who insisted we tell him the truth,” said Mech.
“Exactly,” Cal agreed. “We were happy to pretend we had no idea what happened, but oh no. Someone—naming no names, but it was you—had to go telling the truth. And now look.”
He waved a hand in front of the Controller again. “Totally dead.”
A hand came up and caught Cal by the wrist. The Controller’s features twisted into a mask of fury.
“OK, maybe not totally dead,” Cal announced.
The doors at either end of the office opened. Juggacrush was the first to come through. This involved quite a lot of ducking and maneuvering before all available parts of him were fully in the room.
Behind him came a purple-furred creature wearingly only a dirty brown loincloth. The new arrival had an ape-like face, a hunched back, and arms that ended in two long rusty blades. He grunted out a series of animalistic noises as he loped along behind Juggacrush, leaving a trail of molting fur behind him.
The figure who appeared through the other door was the closest thing to a space cowboy—or cowgirl, he realized as she drew closer—that Cal had ever seen. She had it all—the big hat, the long coat, and two ornate blaster pistols that she expertly twirled around her fingers as she moseyed toward the Controller’s desk.
“Oh, no, no. Please, no,” Bryman whimpered. “Not them, please, not them!”
“Like, who are these clowns?” Miz asked.
“And why is the furry one making sex noises?” Cal added.
“J-Juggacrush, Eviscerator, and Plasmoid. They’re the Hunters,” Bryman replied, instinct driving him to remain as helpful as ever. He turned back to the silver figure behind the desk, his tone beseeching. “Please. It wasn’t my fault, Controller, sir. It wasn’t my—”
Two blaster bolts punched holes clean through Bryman’s eye sockets, and out through the other side.
Still held by the Controller, Cal twisted to look behind him. His eyes met Loren’s through the holes in Bryman’s head, then the tour guide toppled sideways onto the carpet.
“Kill them,” the Controller instructed, his voice dull and lifeless. “They’ve ruined everything.”
“Hey, hold on there, Silver Surfer,” Cal managed to say, before he was jerked off his feet, launched backward over the desk, and sent crashing through a display case containing a little red hat with a feather in it.
As Cal struggled to untangle himself from the wreckage of the case and remove a few rather large and uncomfortable shards of glass from his face and neck, the room was filled with the sounds of violence and death.
Guns fired. Blades clashed. Flesh tore. Liquids of some description spurted, although Cal could only take an educated guess as to what
they might be. From the sounds of things, it was a decidedly one-sided battle, and over in a matter of moments.
“No, no, no,” he hissed, kicking free of the broken display cabinet. His breasts grabbed the edge of the desk and dragged him toward it across the floor. Cal jumped up in time to see the last of the bodies hitting the floor. The legs landed first, the top half landing a few seconds later, several feet away.
“Well, they all sucked,” said Miz, picking something purple and furry out from between her teeth.
“Seriously, those were your top guys?” Mech snorted. “What the fonk was the big one made of, paper mache?” He gestured to the rubble that lay strewn across the floor. “I ain’t never seen no one explode like that.”
“The gun guy was a pretty good shot,” Loren said. She shrugged as she returned her blaster to its holster. “I mean, not good enough, obviously. Not by a long way. But still. He showed promise.”
Grinning, Cal clapped his approval. “Holy shizz. Nice work, guys. Seriously, classic Space Teaming.” He shouted in the direction of Mech’s forearm, where he assumed the comm-link was located. “Kevin, if you can hear me, can you record all that audio? I want to listen to it again later.”
That done, he turned his attention to the Controller. “Looks like your tough guys weren’t so tough after all. Now, you’re going to pay us what we—”
The Controller spun up out of his seat, helicoptering his arms wide. One of them smashed into the side of Cal’s head, twirling him several times on the spot before sending him crashing to the floor.
Mech raised his arms to open fire, but the Controller was suddenly on him, his multitude of limbs wrenching Mech up and over his shoulder, before smashing him through the desk. The sudden flight and the impact jerked Mech’s faulty arm from its socket again, leaving it hanging from coils of colorful wire.
Growling, Miz pounced, but two of the Controller’s other hands slammed into her ribs from either side. They connected like pneumatically powered sledgehammer blows, crunching her ribcage and dropping her onto the plush carpet, squirming and gasping for breath.
Loren tucked and rolled, avoiding a grasping silver hand. Springing onto her knees, she drew her blaster, only to have it torn from her grip by the Controller and crushed to pieces before her eyes.
She spun, sweeping a leg toward the towering figure. Her heel made contact just below one of the Controller’s knees. Pain exploded through it as her foot came to a dead stop against the living metal.
The Controller’s foot tucked in beneath Loren, then flicked her across the room. She tried valiantly to correct her flight, but then tumbled through the glass of another display case and lay groaning on the floor.
“You idiots!” hissed the Controller, his silver skin turning a shade of bronze. “You’ve ruined it. You’ve ruined everything! We promised the system Reduk Topa. We owe them Reduk Topa! And now he’s dead?! The Prey. The Hunters. They’re all dead!”
“You’re next, motherfonker,” Mech grunted, pushing himself up off the floor.
One of the Controller’s feet smashed against his back, driving him back down again.
“SHUT UP!” the Controller boomed, stamping on Mech over and over again. “SHUT UP, SHUT UP, SHUT UP!”
Jumping to his feet, Cal vaulted over what was left of the desk. “Hey, Controller, what’s that?” he asked, pointing past the now bronzed figure in the direction of the landing platform where the Currently Untitled stood.
It was a bog-standard distraction technique, but as it happened, a guard did choose that moment to walk through the shielding, and the sound was enough to make the Controller stop stamping and turn.
Cal swung with a punch. One of the Controller’s hands came up and caught the fist, quickly enveloping it in liquid metal all the way up the wrist. Another hand caught Cal’s left breast as it leaped to his defense, and tugged sharply until, with a schlop, Splurt was torn free.
Frantically, Cal grabbed at his front to stop his inside parts becoming outside parts, but to his immense relief the damage to his torso—while still raw and pinkish—had mostly all healed over.
The Controller flicked his arm out, launching the detached pair of women’s breasts across the room. They transformed as they flew, becoming a green blob just in time to splatter messily against the far wall.
Cal jerked his arm, trying to pull free, but the Controller’s grip was too strong.
Slowly, moving as if it had all the time in the world, the Controller’s face turned Cal’s way. The head itself didn’t move, just the face. It oozed around the side of the skull until it was glaring hatred down at Cal.
“Look, I’m sure we can discuss…”
Another movement by the forcefield caught Cal’s eye. He watched as the armed guard led a procession of little people, all chained together in a line. They chattered excitedly, their oversized heads swaying as they skipped along.
“What the hell?” he asked. “Those are Floomfles. Where did they come from?”
“From your ship, you cretinous fleshmumble,” the Controller seethed. “I told you, you were delivering food for the Sloorgs.”
Cal’s eyes went wide with horror. “Wait, those guys? That’s the Sloorg feed?” he asked. “Also, ‘fleshmumble’? What the fonk is a fleshmumble?”
The Controller tightened his grip on Cal’s hand, grinding the bones together and forcing a gasp of pain from his lips.
“You had to go mess everything up, didn’t you? You had to go screw with the narrative. Killing the Hunters is one thing, but do you have any idea how much processing power I’ve dedicated to the story of Reduk Topa over the years?” the Controller seethed. “Do you have any idea how many people I had to have killed in order to build up his legend, so that those facile lumptards watching at home would finally have the villain they so desperately crave?”
“Six?” Cal guessed, then he grimaced when the Controller tightened his grip again.
“Thousands. Tens of thousands! Reduk Topa was nothing before I found him. No one. Just another vermin pirate in a galaxy infested with them. I made Reduk Topa. I am Reduk Topa! I built his legend from nothing so that The Hunt would have its greatest villain of all. And now you’ve ruined it!”
“Right, right,” said Cal. “Sorry about that. But, can I just…?” He pointed past the Controller again. “You’re not actually going to feed those little guys to the dogs with the ballsack heads, are you?”
The Controller, sensing Cal’s disapproval, twisted his face into a wicked grin of delight. “Oh, yes. I am. Feet first. Slowly. One at a time, starting with the cutest. Something about the taste of them drives the Sloorgs into a murderous frenzy. Even more than usual, I mean.”
His face darkened again, becoming a throbbing sea of brass and bronze. “Of course, the point was to get them riled up and ready for Topa—”
“But we ruined it. Got it,” said Cal. “But seriously, you can’t feed those guys to the Sloorgs. OK? You just can’t. Look at them.”
The Controller briefly regarded the procession of Floomfles as it was cajoled toward the door. There were four guards in all now, two in front and two behind. They were all trying very hard to watch what was going on in the center of the room, while pretending equally hard not to be.
The Floomfles themselves seemed to be having a great time. They bounced and skipped happily along, those with wings occasionally fluttering into the air before the chains binding them together went tight and they landed with a bump and a giggle.
“Come on, let them go,” Cal said. “You said it yourself, you don’t need to get the Sloorgs fired up, you don’t have a show.”
The Controller’s flowing metal flesh seemed to become pliable and runny. He took a step back, his eyes darting left and right as the enormity of it all finally sunk in.
“I don’t have a show,” he whispered. “But… The sponsors. The marketing. I don’t have a show.”
“I feel you’re going to blame us again at this point,” Cal said. “And, ca
n I just say, that we really are sorry. It was all just a big misunderstanding.”
“I don’t have a show,” the Controller said again. “No Topa. No Hunters. No…”
The sentence stopped before reaching its conclusion. Behind the Controller, unnoticed, Mizette got to her feet. Cal tried very hard not to look at her as she lowered herself on her haunches and extended her claws.
The Controller raised four of his arms. They were all holding the little round pads again.
“Unless…” he whispered, and then his thumbs began to tap. A smile played across his face, and his bronze tones became a dull, murky silver. “Yes. Oh, yes.”
Miz snarled. Her legs tensed.
Then, just before she leaped, the Controller’s body emitted a blinding white flash, and darkness rushed in to fill the space it left behind.
Twenty-Five
Cal was in a transparent tube. That was the first thing he noticed. The reason he became aware of this so quickly was because he had awoken with his face pressed up against it, mouth open and drooling, nose squished so the contents of his nostrils were on display to anyone standing on the other side of the glass.
Fortunately, at that particular moment, nobody was standing on the other side of the glass. In fact, there wasn’t much going on outside the tube at all, aside from a small windowless room with stone walls, a metal door, and a glowing red panel that—once the visual translation chip in Cal’s eyes kicked in—had the words ‘On Air’ emblazoned across it.
“What the fonk?” Cal grunted. His breath fogged the glass, and his voice echoed tinnily inside the tube, making him feel suddenly claustrophobic.
The tube was just a few inches taller than he was, with a circle of metal above him and another serving as the floor below. There was no other way in or out, as far as he could tell. The narrow diameter of the cylinder meant he couldn’t move more than a few inches, so building up momentum to smash his way free wasn’t an option. Besides, his arms were stuck down at his sides, and he couldn’t bend his legs enough to deliver any sort of meaningful kick.
The Hunt for Reduk Topa Page 21
