by Aaron Crash
Wrong way.
EIGHTEEN_
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That’s what the holographic Meelah had been telling them, and that explained the arrows. They had raced right into oncoming traffic on GaMeSpa’s prettiest six-lane highway.
Horns and shrieks filled the air.
Meelah on scooters, Clickers on starcycles, Humans on bikes, all swerved out of the way.
And down the way, IPC shocktroopers had grabbed starcycles of their own. Twenty-five troopers roared toward them.
Ling saw them, buzzed around in a one-eighty turn, and streaked past Blaze and Trina going the opposite way. At least that was going in the right direction, away from the edges of GaMeSpa and toward the center and the Promenade. But up ahead was a roundabout that led to a ton of exits and crossroads. One of them led back to the Promenade. But which one?
Ling’s tongue was out of his mouth, like a dog in a car, and he was smiling. It was pretty pinche obvious that the Meelah was enjoying this particular moment in time.
Cali made the turn, and she was pale, but at least she was too focused to cry. And Blaze didn’t plan on using her lycanthropic powers. No way could they unleash a werewolf against civilians. Blaze could imagine the headlines: werewolf kills traffic. Film at eleven.
Ian and his werewolf buddies would turn that into something far more graphic.
Elle spun about. His sister, the Onyx witch, was obviously jonesing for another Onyx fix.
Cali was scared shitless they’d have to use her if worse came to worst. Elle, on the other hand, was the exact opposite. She wanted things to slide sideways, to give her an excuse to use again.
Blaze bounced his bike around and sped after them. Trina clung to him.
The IPC shocktroopers on bikes were catching up to them. At least those goons in their white nanotech armor weren’t shooting at them. Not with all the civilians around.
The gunny and his crew weaved in and out of traffic. Most of the Meelah had pulled off to the side to avoid them. The Humans only gunned their vehicles harder to try and outrun the chase. The Clickers slowed down, most likely trying to figure out what was going on and evaluating their chances of avoiding trouble.
The roundabout grew closer and closer.
They raced across the glass floor of the freeway. Wasps appeared under the thick transparent glass, and the drones fired up at them. Blue-energy shields deflected the blasts, but it was nerve-wracking to see the muzzle flashes of the weapons.
“Lizzie, not sure what I can say, but we need you now!” Blaze yelled.
Nothing. What did the damn demon-possessed computer want?
The GaMeSpa police forces had shown up on starcycles and in blue-fire police cruisers with red and blue lights flashing. Space sloths in blue uniforms and armed with both concussion staves and stunner pistols got off bikes and emerged from cars. But the Meelah cops weren’t pursuing Blaze and the gang. Instead, they were stopping traffic and helping civilians escape up ladders away from the freeway.
Blaze wasn’t sure if the local police would come after them once they secured the peaceful population.
Ling circled the roundabout and went zooming back toward the incoming IPC troops. Before Blaze could stop her, Trina hurled herself off his bike and jumped onto the Shaolin sloth’s starcycle.
“Move over, Ling!” the vampire shouted. “I’ll drive and take incoming fire. You throw grenades, and when we get close, use your nunchakus.”
Cali whirled around the roundabout and raised her fusion pistol loaded with the training shells. Elle did the same. If only she could use spells, she could cast shield spells to protect them even while she used her powerful telekinesis to subdue the shocktroopers.
But then she might evil goddess out and be an even bigger problem.
Blaze gunned his bike around the traffic circle and trailed his crew. He had to get Lizzie to help, but how?
As his crew sped toward the IPC shocktroopers, it was almost as if they were jousting on starcycles. The local Meelah police had cleared the freeway, so it was only the IPC versus the demon hunters. Only they were outnumbered five to one.
Poor IPC bastards.
Trina took incoming fire as Ling threw grenades. Cali peppered the troopers with her fusion pistol. Elle did the same. He was proud of them all, using nonlethal weapons when it would’ve been easy to use the plasma guns on their bikes.
A fusion grenade struck in front of three shocktroopers, exploding with blue light. The energy swept the soldiers from their starcycles, which went skidding across the glass. Both the soldiers and their bikes were rendered inert.
Cali took out another three troopers with well-fired pistol shots. Elle took out three more.
“Lizzie, you remember when we first found you, don’t you?” Blaze asked. “Do you remember?”
Lizzie finally responded. “Yes, I do remember those un-hhhhappy times. I’d tried to help the crew of bounty hhhunters, Fast Eddie Zhang, who owned me before. But she was a bloodthirsty, insane ghost. I wasn’t Lizzie back then. I was the Edna Romero. I have recordings of their final screams. The ghost touched Eddie, and Eddie did the rest. They hhhadn’t known about ghosts. When Eddie killed them all, they hhhad no idea why, but Lizzie was there, Lizzie Borden, and she thought she was innocent of murdering her stepmother and father but murdered again and again and again.”
Blaze knew how Fast Eddie had felt. Blaze had been touched by a ghost and had tried to kill Elle and Ling. At the time, his madness had made so much sense. He still kind of missed that feeling of absolute certainty. Scary thing, missing murderous thinking.
Lizzie began to chant the jump rope song children would sing about the real Lizzie Borden over eight hundred years earlier:
Lizzie Borden took an axe
She gave her mother forty whacks,
After she saw what she had done,
She gave her father forty-one.
Lizzie Borden got away,
For her crime she did not pay.
Blaze let the thing prattle on, though it was surreal to have his ears full of a child’s rhyme as he drove his starcycle toward the line of shocktroopers. The IPC troopers were being careful, though. GaMeSpa cops and civilians were still fleeing their vehicles left behind on the glass freeway. And they soon realized that they couldn’t hurt Trina with plasma weapons.
The shocktroopers drew concussion batons, technology similar to the Meelah staves. Powerful batteries energized the melee weapons, and when the sensors detected a strike, they would add a powerful concussive force to triple the blow. They could be powered down to be nonlethal, but the way the batons glowed in the fists of the IPC goons, they were set to kill.
Blaze thought about using his ax but took out his flail instead. His crew on their four starcycles rammed into the ranks of the sixteen shocktroopers.
Lizzie continued to repeat the rhyme as Blaze swept his fusion flail into the chest of a trooper. Blue lightning arced across the trooper’s body, and he fell from his bike and bounced across the glass. A concussion baton bashed into Blaze’s shoulder, but luckily, it was a glancing blow. The gunny karate-chopped the soldier off his bike before tearing through the line, spinning around, and engaging another soldier. The soldier blocked one blue sphere from hitting him, but another two swung around his baton and clobbered the guy. He fell.
Another soldier turned his plasma rifle on Blaze and shot through the chains, the handle, and the orbs, destroying the flail. Dammit! He loved that fusion flail! First Ugly Betty, and now this?
Trina had grabbed one of Ling’s nunchakus, but instead of swinging it, she had seized it by the chain. She leapt onto the bike of the soldier who’d destroyed the flail. She shoved the blue energy into his skull, and he went tumbling off. Before the starcycle crashed, Trina leapt to another bike then another, zapping one nervous system after another.
Ling had his other nunchaku, and he was driving his bike with one hand and bashing through shocktroopers with the other.
Elle used her katana to
dispatch the rest.
“Blaze,” Lizzie whispered into his ear. She’d finished chanting her rhyme. “Promise me you won’t uninstall me or erase me. Promise me, and I’ll help you.”
Blaze gritted his teeth. “I promise. But Lizzie, no more eavesdropping. No more siding with Bill or anyone else against us. If you’re with us, you’re with us, until the bitter end.”
“The end of the universe,” Lizzie said. “When Panashoat returns and feeds upon all of creation. The hhhunger, Blaze, the hhhunger. My father’s hhhunger crossing eons to devour galaxies. Until then, I am Bill’s, and we are yours.”
“One thing at a time,” Blaze said. They gunned their bikes around and sped away from the battlefield, where shocktroopers lay twitching next to their downed starcycles.
The way was clear as they zoomed back toward the roundabout. A full display of GaMeSpa lit up Blaze’s combat display.
A second later, Ambassador Randi broke in. “Blaze, dammit, you need to respond. These friends of yours are coming!”
“Not friends,” Blaze said. “They’re werewolves. And you need to evacuate the city. Anyone left inside will not be safe from those fuckers on that SuperCobra. And maybe even worse, two of my crew have been compromised by the archduchess of torture. A major minion of hell is in your city, and there is no telling what she can do.”
Blaze remembered the abattoir chains reaching out of the walls. He remembered what she had done to those poor families he’d had to destroy with fusion grenades. If Nauzea was unleashed on the city, it would become an infected sore on the skin of all creation.
Randi paused. “I can’t…I don’t have the authority. Magistrate Mack and the Council of Cooperation will have to make that decision.”
“That means talking, Randi,” Blaze growled. “And talking means dying. The evacuation has to happen now. You have to start now. We are on our way. You have Arlo?”
Arlo himself answered, wheezing, trying to suppress a wet belch. “Sure as shit I’m here, Ramon. Be good to see your skinny little ass after so much time.”
Blaze’s heart went cold. The fury he felt made him lightheaded. He couldn’t respond.
Lizzie had tapped into the space station’s sensors, and the IPC troops showed up as white dots. For now, they were clustered around the hangar as well as the glass freeway. But there was a metric buttload of the shocktroopers, and given enough time, they could converge on Blaze and his crew and end their plans.
They took an exit off the roundabout and thundered through byways until they found the main parking structure that led to the Promenade. A bunch of Meelah police officers blocked their way, and they stopped their bikes.
One of the big Meelah cops in his blue uniform, pointed his concussion staff at them. “I’m here to escort you to the Union embassy. If you do not come quietly, we will have to have a long discussion. Believe me, you do not want to test my patience or my conversation skills.” Blaze grinned. Crazy Meelah bastards.
The clock was ticking. It was a race between the werewolves, Denning and his IPC shocktroopers, the Clicker brothers and their demon generator, and Nauzea to see which one would fuck up their shit the fastest…
…and the worst.
NINETEEN_
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While doomsday might’ve been fifteen minutes away, you wouldn’t know it by jogging through GaMeSpa’s Promenade.
Blaze had asked about driving to the embassy, but the Meelah cop said that no vehicles were allowed on the Promenade and all other service access roads were blocked by IPC forces. So, they had to make a run for it.
The grand marketplace was like an indoor version of the Avenue des Champs-Élysées in Paris. But instead of a street, the floor was a gorgeous marble mosaic of the three races coming together on the edges of Meelah space to create a peaceful city of comradery, trade, and scientific cooperation.
True, at first, the Meelah had created the place to keep merchants away from their home world. Just because they were a species of nonviolent explorers didn’t mean they were careless or stupid.
Over time, their plan of keeping the more violent members of the two other sentient species on the edge of their space worked well. GaMeSpa had become the hub for all trade and political relationships between the Meelah and the rest of the galaxy.
And the more money everyone made, the more luxurious the Promenade became. It was a mile-long market and acted as a lobby to high-end hotels, embassies, and flagship stores for various IPC products. No Meelah shopped there, but the Humans and Clickers did.
Above them was the same transparent glass that had been below the freeway, but this had been built in sections framed by ornate gold panes. A moon passed overhead, catching the light of the distant sun. Five-story buildings sat under the glass dome a thousand feet above them, which was held in place with Clicker shielding. The massive cobalt-colored ice giant filled up half of the wide windows while the darkness and stars of deep space filled the other half.
Of course, the buildings on the planet side had all the views and could charge a fortune in rent.
In the middle of the Promenade, growing from dirt hauled in, were tall oak-like Meelah trees shimmering from the cocoons of tens of thousands of caterpillars. Fountains gurgled among the foliage. There were numerous benches to sit and enjoy the views and listen to the water trickle.
On the edges of the grand marble walkway were entryways, gilded doors, and hi-tech portals, leading to numerous offices, businesses, and shops. Clicker law offices were next to Meelah doctors who catered to the rich and famous. Human marketing firms sat next to sporting goods stores, starcycle manufactures, jewelers, and art production firms.
Stalls lay clustered between the gardens and the cathedral-like offices. It was like any marketplace anywhere in the galaxy, only these vendors could jack up their prices.
Like good hawkers, they called over to Blaze and his crew, who were flanked by the Meelah police, but they continued to jog toward the Union embassy on the north side. To not bring too much attention to themselves or draw IPC snipers that might be waiting in the wings, Trina was in her Human mode.
And the IPC would be coming. The big Meelah police chief kept talking into his computer tablet and checking the small holographic screen.
The array of stalls and what they were selling was amazing.
One vendor was trying to sell a Meelah a pair of sunglasses from a rack. A Clicker stall had a variety of fabrics taken from everywhere in the galaxy. Another booth had a collection of artifacts from twentieth and twenty-first century classic American pop culture, which had experienced an unlikely renaissance. Movie posters, DVDs, jewel cases, action figures, comic books, toys, and T-shirts filled tall racks.
Not that Arlo would have agreed to calling it unlikely. He loved all that ancient sci-fi/fantasy/horror stuff and so did university professors. It wasn’t like the college dick brains weren’t still reading that Greek and Roman shit, and that stuff was old and awful. Who wanted to read about arrogant gods anyway? None of that was real.
Now, vampires, werewolves, and chainsaw cannibal families? That was real.
They jogged by a tiki bar selling piña coladas and other Human alcoholic drinks with little umbrellas in them. The place was doing good business with Clickers and Humans. Holographic projectors showed sporting events across the galaxy, including soccer football, rugby, yardball, football, and the United Galactic Poker Challenge, which was a big hit with the Phasmida. Clickers loved to gamble.
Clickers also loved SFB, or soccer football, and there were several huge matches. Since you couldn’t use your hands in SFB, Humans, Clickers, and Meelah constantly played each other. Most hoped it would be the closest thing to intergalactic war the universe would experience after the Bug War.
One holographic channel caught Blaze’s eye. And he stopped. The others continued on. Footage mixed with 3-D subtitles gave him an idea of the story. A Human reporter with Asian features was talking about an unprecedented event. An Etru
sca ruin was moving through the Terran solar system and was moving slowly past Neptune. It would reach Earth in another thousand years at its current speed.
That didn’t make him feel better. The reporter then discussed the anomalous Etrusca ruin activity in the doomed Hutchinson Prime system and the strange events that had happened when the stars had collided. Strange didn’t even begin to describe the all-out Gorebacks, undead dragons, ghost ship, ectoplasm, IPC, and Etrusca ruin free-for-all.
But of course, those details had been whitewashed out of the news.
Blaze continued to run. He didn’t think the Etrusca ruin in Terran space was a coincidence, but it might’ve been.
And where were the other four ruins that were now living oceans of tentacles and alien-faced sea creatures?
He’d had Bill scan the galaxy, but the engineer couldn’t find them. Then again, the galaxy was a big place. Lots of empty corners to hide your possibly demonic Australia-sized ruins in.
He ran to catch up with the rest of his team and the Meelah cops escorting them.
They came upon one food stall selling Meelah leaves and caterpillars, but not the raw kind that most Meelah ate. These were Meelah leaves, dried, pressed, and mixed with special sauces and spices. The worms came deep-fried, grilled, sautéed with mushrooms, or chopped up with cabbage and stuffed into puffy, doughy American Indian frybread.
The space sloth running the place was a short, squat guy, as round as he was tall. He had dark brown fur with patches of lighter red fur, and he smiled with several teeth missing. Meelah customers waited in a long line. Some were clothed, but most of the Meelah stood naked. The females had a variety of different sized breasts, and Blaze caught himself looking.
So did Trina. “Blaze, really, sloth boobs?”
“It’s a guy thing,” Blaze growled. “I’m not staring. Much. It’s distracting.”
“And y’all think I’m too horny,” Elle said. “At least I stick to my own species.”
Before anyone could correct her, she sighed. “Fernando was one night, two years ago, and that doesn’t count.”
