PeeDee3, Intergalactic, Insectiod, Assassin in: Another Time Perhaps (Season 1, Episode 3)
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PeeDee3, Intergalactic, Insectiod Assassin in:
Another Time Perhaps
season one, episode three
TA Cuce’ & RiFT
This is a work of fiction. Any similarities to
persons living or dead are purely coincidental.
Copyright 2011
Another Time Perhaps
TA Cuce’ & RiFT
From out of the nothing, of the unending, incorporeal non-existence, a light flickers and another memory starts to play. Weird how lack of anything turned out to be so much harder to describe than something—so why bother? But these ‘my life on rewind’ experiences are slightly more than nothing. They’re sorta like a trip to the Warp-in Spaceport Theater and I’m the main attraction. Except it’s more like I’m in my body again, watching, hearing, smelling the stink, feeling the pain but unable to control the outcomes. When I was alive I caused a lot of suffering and suffered a lot of hurt. Having to go through it all again...it’s better than nothing.
Earth.
I’d always hated dead planets; everyone looks so depressed. Most of the beings here didn’t even know they were dead and they still managed to look depressed. I’m dead, but I don’t let it affect my mood. Thing was though, it looked like a crummy place to visit dead or not.
Wait, I remember this now. I was freelancing, chasing a metered mark. I’d forgotten all about this guy, maybe I’d wanted to forget, or maybe it was another lost memory from that time Serrano ‘serrated nose’ de Berrykrac sawed my head off. That was a difficult molt. But this memory was going to hurt in a way I couldn’t take. Maybe nothing wasn’t so bad.
I didn’t have a lot of information about the planet. Its dominate species were insectoid, like me, but the insects let the humans believe they ran the place. Dopes. But then most livestock is stupid. Humans, yuck, hard to believe they don’t have exoskeletons anymore. How do they walk around like that, with their insides on the outside? I remember seeing some ancient humans in a holo-museum once. They had these impressive, shiny outer shells and rode tamed equestrians while spearing, stabbing, and slashing one another—man it looked fun. So what happened to their armor? Maybe their race was devolving, or maybe I just happened to be visiting during a mass molt. Either way, a guy as good looking as me would have to keep a low profile, especially if I was going to catch a jumper.
This guy was good; he’d managed to evade capture this long so he had to be good. Most time jumpers get caught pretty quickly. Once you knew who they were you just went back in time, waited for them to be born, then whammo! Slap on the cuffs.
But this guy was different. No one knew who or what he was, partly because he kept constantly moving backwards in time—much harder to track, but also more dangerous. One slip up and he could have erased his own past, present, and future; as well as anyone who happened to be chasing him. Then there was the havoc he could be wreaking on the time line. Galactic PS 40001 was not paying for a whole new set of history books, especially after that new math fiasco. That was probably why the bounty was so high, and I had plans for that loot.
Most professional assassins blew all their dough on hookers and booze, but not me. I carefully invested in stocks, bonds and genocide futures that paid handsome dividends each month, dividends that I spent on hookers and booze.
The thought got my hearts beating faster. I jammed my arms into my old quadra-sleeved trench coat, slid my antenna through their respective holes in my fedora, then donned my Dr. Scholl’s Inviso-Soles and checked my weapons. I hated jumping. It always made me queasy. It also tended to mess up your weapons. I checked the readout on my jump locator for the hundredth time. Not that I expected the display to change, but I'd paid good money for my mark’s jump box serial-numbers and parting with cash always made me nervous. Of course I robbed and killed the guy right after I paid him, but it still felt like money lost. Caveat emptor Kacekian, never trust a bug—when will beings learn?
I powered up my jump-box and set the place and time coordinates. Man, I always hated ancient history, and never bothered with research, I never did much to prepare at all except for making sure I was armed to the mandibles, so I’d be jumping blind. Not the first time. I took a deep breath and pressed the activation key.
I closed all six thousand retinas as my stomachs churned and all three of my complex nerve centers spun. I hoped I’d invested well. Jump boxes were illegal everywhere except for the Dreaded Dump Star Cluster, also called the Galactic Cesspool. The locals call it outer-most Newark. The secondary star in the cluster went supernova an eon ago. The resulting black hole destroyed the remaining stars and sucked the only settled planet inside. Now the hole is used by most of the greater societies as a waste dump. But every century or so the thing starts to fill up and someone has to pull the jump box lever and send the entire thing back to a time it was empty. I’d been told there’s an unusual swirling draw of matter inside the hole, and an accompanying gargling and sucking sound. Apparently it’s quite an event. There’re legions of fanatical followers of the event, they call themselves Flush Fans. These Flush Fans travel millions of light years to witness it, vendors set up space barges and sell commemorative T-shirts, and plungers, and countdown wristwatches with an alarm that mimics the flush sounds. These wackos take pictures with their heads stuck through a cardboard cutout of the black hole and send friends and families postcards of their faces surrounded by swirling intergalactic sludge. And every time one ship or another gets a little too close and sucked inside to the cheers of the spectators. Some beings have way too much free time.
So the only way to procure a jump box was the black market. Time geeks are all crazy, or worse. It seemed the time travel formulas were so complex they tended to relieve the brain of a sense of reason. Most of these boxes did little more than spread your atoms thinly over time and space. Brains are so damn fragile, glad I never had one. But this box came from a highly recommended time geek, one who also happened to be a DeMilo, a silicone based race from Venus. By custom the Venusians always placed their planet of origin in front of their name, but I was never one to stick to custom. I’m sure she would have slapped me for it, if she had arms.
I always liked those DeMilos, a very statuesque race; meaning they’re curvy, crusty, and carved from stone—literally. The bonus lack of arms meant they never put up a lot of fight either. But she was all too happy to accept a little PeeDee3 special attention as payment, and I worked hard for it; DeMilos are known for being hard, and hard to satisfy.
So that little, black box of hers had better have worked. If it didn’t, and I survived, the DeMilo would answer to my Tuba-Blaster. That is she would have if I hadn’t eaten her; sometimes my ancestor’s mating instincts are too hard to resist.
But it worked. I landed in broad daylight on a busy human thoroughfare. I almost threw up; the combined effect of jumping and seeing all those humans squiggling around me was almost too much. The inviso-souls must have survived the jump intact because no one paid any mind to my seven foot-six inch, four-armed, complex-eyed form. The humans just slechped about, and either looked straight ahead mumbling into some kind of electronic suckling devise they held to the sides of their heads, or stared down at their feet; so creepy.
I hoped I was in the right year and in the right city, some place called Neau-York, early twenty-first century by local time, and began checking my weapons. The tuba blaster was down, probably magnetic interference as I passed through the rift-horizon. That meant all my weapons would have to be recalibrated,
everything but my backup, the Drilling, an antique triple barreled shotgun/rife—human design, a primitive weapon that used a chemical charge to launch a barrage of small projectiles; slow and inaccurate, but reliable, often overlooked, and surprisingly powerful. That beauty could knock a rhinelephant off a barstool at fifty paces and he wouldn’t get up again, even for last call. It would do the job.
I checked the locator. According to my calculations this guy was gonna land right in the middle of one of those human hives. I had to say, they weren’t much in the way of engineers. No hexagons here, their hives have too many corners, too much wasted space, and are far too fragile. They’re too static, made of manufactured rock instead of