Naak’s many eyeballs glared at me. The moments ticked by. No one spoke. The silence stretched out, seeming to grow until it had a roar of its own. I began to worry that I might have overestimated my chances.
Finally... Naak spoke. “I’ll give you red rate times three,” he said.
“Times four,” I said.
“Three and a half.”
“Deal. I’ll kill your mother-in-law for you.”
Naak glared at me for a little while longer, then his plethora of small eyeballs rolled in all different directions, back toward the variety of security monitors adorning the walls, leaving only his two big eyeballs pointing my way.
“The doctor has Ok-Lem’s identifying information. Remember... don’t drag her corpse through my casino. That would damage the image I’m trying to project here. Call me on my sat-com when it’s done and I’ll come to you,” Naak said. His two big eyeballs rolled away, each toward opposite sides of the room. It was obvious that I had been dismissed.
It had been quite a while since I had taken a job without being completely broke. I barely even remembered how I worked when not driven by desperate financial necessity. I figured that I would just go at it in my usual balls-to-the-wall manner and let circumstances dictate any change in my approach.
I reseated my fedora on my head, more out of habit than out of vanity, and turned to leave. Doctor Watkins stood off to the side, staring at me with a look in her eyes that suggested she wanted to harvest me for spare parts. She held a tiny holo-identifier chip in her outstretched hand. I snatched the chip away from her and tucked it into an inside pocket in my trenchcoat, right next to the shoulder holster that housed my revolver.
“I can find my way out,” I said.
I moved past her and then past Mister Timmy, deliberately averting my eyes to keep from glancing at his giant weapon-arm. I hurried through the gaudy wealth-museum, back to the elevator, and down to the casino floor. I was not running away from Naak and Watkins... I was running toward the job. There was a sagisi matriarch that needed killing. I wanted to get it done as soon as possible so that maybe I could salvage a little downtime on the other end.
Chapter 3
I went in shooting. Sagisi drones were miniature versions of their reproductive kin. My high-caliber rounds shattered their tiny bodies. I dropped six drones with every cylinder. I emptied my revolver, stuffed a hand into a coat pocket that bulged with spare ammo, reloaded without looking or even slowing my stride, and resumed shooting.
Ok-Lem’s hive was several levels beneath the Promenade. It was on the outer edge of the level, away from the hustle and bustle of the area surrounding the Big Staircase. From the outside, the hive looked like a large hole in the spaceport wall. The steel surrounding the hole was jagged and irregular, as if it had been torn open with rudimentary tools or alien claws.
The hive was a mixture of artificial and organic. Great splotches of dried sagisi excretions were randomly smattered around the opening, the greenish-brown of the crusty snot starkly contrasting with the dull silver of the spaceport outer wall. A hulking rectangular generator was just outside of the opening, grumbling and vibrating and spewing exhaust fumes into the air above it. Several thick black cables poked out of the generator on all sides and ran into the darkened recesses of the hive. Both the generator and the cables were anchored in place by generous helpings of that greenish-brown dried sagisi snot.
There were about thirty drones outside. Some were attending to the generator and some were vomiting more of that excretion onto every surface not already coated with it. Most of the drones were simply milling around, standing guard, three-foot-tall insectoid sentries protecting their home from attack.
I did not run. I advanced on the hive, moving methodically, careful to avoid tripping and falling on my face. My plan was to throw them into confusion through the combination of the element of surprise and the precision of my shooting. I was not disappointed. My sudden violent onslaught caught them completely off-guard.
This breed of sagisi was light blue in color with black stripes running down their bodies... until my bullets slammed home. The large-caliber rounds obliterated torsos and heads, transforming blue and black bodies into greenish-grey pulp as their guts were blasted out of exit wounds. Those that were not hit jumped and scurried in all directions, behaving like a startled swarm, which was precisely what I had expected a group of insectoids to do. They had six large eyeballs on their triangular heads which spun like pinwheels as they tried to look everywhere at once. They darted about on four large legs, flailing six spindly arms as if to ward off the speeding death that was streaking toward them. Their confusion was a death sentence. I picked them off easily.
I made it to the mouth of the hive. Mutilated insectoid corpses littered the ground. I felt good. The job was going easier than I had anticipated. I had not moved too quickly or did any fancy bobbing or weaving so there had been no physical toll on my body. I was not out of breath. I had not even broken a sweat. The only thing I felt that resembled discomfort was a slight lessening of the loving opioid bear hug that I had been enjoying all day. The feeling was nothing close to the gut-churning agony of withdrawal. It was like my stoned-tide was slowly ebbing, gradually receding at a rate that was almost imperceptible, leaving behind uncomfortable normalcy and an insidious whisper of a craving that clawed at the back of my mind.
But that was easy enough to fix. I filled my hypo-injector with a booster shot of a few milliliters and fired it into my neck. The effect was instantaneous and glorious. The headrush washed over me like a wave, obliterating my cravings and that feeling of horrible, horrible normalcy.
That initial ecstasy was still caressing the insides of my temples when I heard a loud bang come from the generator to my right. I spun in that direction, bringing my weapon up, my vision still hazy from the headrush. I saw a blurry insectoid shape crouching on top of the generator. I opened fire, pumping all six rounds in the cylinder into the sagisi’s general direction.
The headrush subsided and my vision cleared. The top of the generator was covered with big bluish insectoid parts in a swamp of gooey greyish insectoid innards. Even half-blind, I was still pretty good with a firearm. Good... but not perfect.
A few large-caliber holes marred the generator’s steel skin, staring out at me like lifeless, disembodied eyes. Dense, black smoke billowed out of the holes. The rumbling coming out of the generator had developed a squealing and clattering quality. Gunfire was obviously not compatible with this model of generator. There was some kind of malfunction going on in there. I resolved to not be around when that malfunction became catastrophic.
I readied my weapon and moved into the hive. I stepped into a large circular chamber. The walls and ceiling were coated with that greenish-brown organic excretion. Everything was covered. No shred of the dull silver steel original walls could be seen anywhere. It looked like a giant sagisi vomit-receptacle turned upside-down. The chamber was illuminated with faint greenish light. I could not see a definite source. The light seemed to be emanating from the dried snot coating the walls. I briefly wondered what in the holy blue fuck these bugs had to eat in order to spew glow-in-the-dark puke, then my eyes fell on the drones lurking in the chamber and my mind snapped back to the task at hand.
I sighted on a drone standing close to the far wall and pumped a round through its torso, splattering its greyish guts on the wall behind it. I turned toward a drone lurking just a few feet from me, aimed between two of its many eyes, and fired. Its triangular head disintegrated into a blur of brains and eyeballs. I pivoted one-hundred-eighty degrees, bringing my weapon to bear on a drone running toward the back of the chamber. My first shot caught one of its twig-like arms, tearing it clean off and spinning the drone like a top. I instinctively adjusted my aim and fired again. My second shot caught it in the throat, obliterating its neck. The drone’s body dropped. Its head hit the floor an instant later, bounced twice, then rolled to a stop a few feet away.
I killed
my way across the chamber. There was no system to the slaughter... my eyes found targets at random, my arm moved as though it was attached to my eyeballs with an invisible string, my finger twitched, and my weapon killed. When my revolver ran dry, I expelled the spent shells with a couple of flicks of my wrist, reloaded with a movement that was nearly pure reflex, and then I killed some more.
The malfunctioning generator sent plumes of thick smoke wafting into the chamber, adding a hazy, dirty quality to the greenish light emanating from the walls. Panicked drones scurried about in the gloom, moving every which way except toward the threat that had moseyed into their home. I killed them at my leisure. My drugs were surging through my brain, giving my body a weightless feeling. I floated forward, blasting high-velocity death through every terrified sexless insectoid I passed. I killed and killed and killed and, somewhere in the middle of all that killing, despite the noxious black smoke and the ever-present threat of the unknown, I discovered that I was enjoying myself. God, I loved my drugs.
The number of drones in the first chamber thinned out. The few that I had not managed to kill were retreating toward the back of the room. I squinted through the haze of smoke. There was a passageway back there that I had not noticed before. I walked toward it, not hurrying, confident that my prey would eventually run out of room to flee.
The last drone disappeared through the passage. I followed a few steps behind. Darkness fell as I passed the threshold. I listened for sounds of attack, trying to use my ears to guide my weapon. I knew from experience that my accuracy was way worse when I was listening for targets instead of looking for them... but it did not matter. I heard no hostile sounds... only my boots knocking on the hard steel floor and my own breath pushing and pulling at the blackness in front of my face.
I crossed another threshold. The darkness shattered like a thin pane of glass. Greenish light poured into my retinas, temporarily blinding me. I thrust my weapon outward, straining to hear any approaching threats while I blinked the sunspots out of my eyes. This was worse than the darkness of the narrow passageway. I could sense that I was out in the open, vulnerable to attack from any direction except behind. Tension twisted every muscle in my body until they cramped. I was not enjoying myself so much anymore.
I heard no sounds. No insectoid snuck up on tiptoes to attack me. Eventually, my vision cleared.
I was in another chamber. This one was much larger than the first. The walls were coated with the same glowing dried snot as every surface in the previous chamber, but this snot was different. It did not have the same rough and lumpy quality as before. This chamber had been meticulously crafted. Everything was smooth, like the raw clumps of puke had been sanded down until they almost gleamed. The walls were divided into hexagonal compartments, about a foot-long on each side. There were hundreds of these compartments. It was like I was surrounded by a giant greenish-brown honeycomb. The only gaps in the honeycomb were the passageway I had come from and another passage on the opposite side of the chamber. The opposite passage was blocked by a steel grating. A metal door control panel, polka-dotted with blinking red and yellow lights, was immediately to the right of the grating. The door and its controls were the only original parts of the chamber that had not been coated with sagisi slime. They stood in stark contrast to their surroundings, like islands of artificial in an ocean of organic.
I was the only living creature in the chamber. The drones that had fled here were nowhere to be found. I moved toward the steel grating, the only place my prey could have gone. The place was eerily quiet after the chaos I had created in the previous room. My nerves were jingling and jangling, even with the copious amount of drugs in my system. Every time I took a step toward the grating I expected it to spring open and vomit a counterattack out at me.
The counterattack did not come. I crossed half the chamber, then two thirds, and, still, the grating stayed shut. I kept advancing, my weapon thrust out before me, ready to kill the first six things that came at me through the door. The grating loomed before me. I closed to within twenty paces, then to within ten.
Suddenly, drones exploded out of the surrounding honeycomb.
They poured out of every compartment, dropped to the floor, and rushed toward me. In an instant, there were hundreds of furious three-foot-tall insectoids converging on me. There were so many. It was impossible to pick out individuals. They were a raging flood of bulbous eyeballs and snapping jaws.
I picked a direction at random and opened fire. Six rounds slammed into the advancing horde, each dropping a different drone, but it did not put a dent in their number. I did my fancy speedy-reload trick and fired my weapon dry again... and again and again and again. Every salvo left six drones in pieces. Every salvo did nothing to stem the tide.
I kept moving forward despite the waves of angry insectoid midgets coming at me from all sides. I knew that my target was just up ahead. That steel grating was just too damn conspicuous to be guarding anything besides the queen. I was five steps away... five little steps and then I could hotwire the door panel, kill my target, and get the holy purple fuck out of that vomit-encrusted alien nightmare.
The drones closed in. I fired my weapon almost straight down as the vicious sagisi monstrosities clustered around my legs. A round caught a drone in the chest, shattering its torso, leaving behind a random pile of arms, legs, head, and innards. A round entered the top of a drone’s head, passed straight through its body, and exited out its groin, splattering its guts on the floor beneath it like the galaxy’s most explosive diarrhea. A round hit a drone, point-blank, in the center of its face. Its head went off like a bomb. Its body took three more steps before collapsing.
Then they were on me. They crowded around my legs and jumped up at my arms. They climbed over one another to get at me. They clawed at me with the hooks protruding from their spindly arms. I could feel their spiky toes scraping at my pant-legs as they tried to climb me. Their small but still razor-sharp mandibles snapped at the air near my flesh.
I fired my weapon dry then turned it around and used the butt to bludgeon sagisi skulls. My forward momentum ground to a crawl. Slugs had been known to move faster. I tried to keep going, tried to force my body through the tightly-packed midget insectoid scrum around my feet. I had come too far to turn back now. I brought the butt of my revolver down again and again, hearing skulls crack and feeling gooey fluid flow over my hand. I struggled and pushed, moving my feet through the glut of bugs a millimeter at a time. The grating gradually drew closer.
Then one of the nasty alien fuckers managed to sink its fangs into the flesh of my thigh… and everything changed.
It felt like two tiny knives stabbed deep into my leg. A split second later, a fierce burning flared up at the site of the bite and spread out into the muscles surrounding it. It felt like liquid fire was being injected into my leg.
I knew what it was immediately. These fucking things were venomous. Nowadays, most sagisi did not produce their own neurotoxin. The Great Bank had done an especially thorough job exterminating the venomous sagisi bloodlines. Still, every once in a while you ran across a breed that had managed to avoid the Bank’s pogrom. It was just my shitty luck that today happened to be one of those whiles.
That pesky little thought of self-preservation that had been bothering me lately shot through my brain again. I weighed my options in an instant. Pushing another three feet through a swarm of ravenous insectoid midgets was one thing... pushing another three feet through a swarm of ravenous insectoid midgets with neurotoxin injectors attached to their faces was something else entirely. I stole a last fleeting glance at the steel grating protecting my target... and then I began to fall back.
The drones kept coming. I retreated as fast my injured leg would allow. The swarm immediately filled every space that I vacated. They pushed and shoved and crawled over one another to get at me, clawing with their spindly arms and snapping with their poisonous jaws. I did not have a spare moment to reload. I resorted to swinging my revolver like
a madman, pistol-whipping with every step I took, back toward the passage I had come through.
The burning in my leg backed off a bit. It was replaced by a tingly, pins-and-needles feeling. My thigh twitched and quivered as the venom did its insidious work. My leg felt like it was ready to give out at any moment.
I crossed the threshold of the passage. The narrow opening created a bottleneck. The flood of drones bunched up at the opening, all of them trying to get through at once and none of them succeeding in doing so. I managed to gain a little breathing room.
My bum leg was making walking difficult. I limped down the passage, moving as fast as I could, trying to put as much space as possible between myself and the swarm before the little retards figured out that they could not all fit through the doorway at once. The brief respite afforded me the opportunity to reload my revolver. My fingers moved on their own, plugging rounds into the cylinder by muscle memory, completely uninhibited by my lurching gait. The weapon was ready to get back to killing by the time I exited out the other side of the passageway.
I plunged into a cloud of smoke. The generator had apparently been malfunctioning that entire time. The smoke was like stinging daggers in my eyes, sending a torrent of tears streaming down my cheeks. I could not see. I could barely breathe. The smoke seared my nostrils and sent carbon-encrusted fingers down my throat. I could hear, but the acoustics were massively distorted. The grumbling roar of the wounded generator seemed to come at me from all sides. My footsteps sounded like they were coming from behind me, instead of from below. I moved, blindly, stumbling toward where I thought I remembered the entrance to the hive might be. The smoke hung in front of me like an endless series of curtains. Every time I pushed through one wall of grey, it was immediately replaced by another... and another and another and another.
Odd Jobs 2: Solomon's Code Page 3
