I took maybe twenty careful steps into that smoky void and then a new sound entered into that acoustical clusterfuck. Hundreds of tiny footsteps began to slap against my eardrums. The footsteps came from all over, but I was not fooled. I knew where they were really coming from. The drones in the back chamber had finally managed to unfuck themselves and were now pouring into the passageway.
My mind began playing tricks on me. The smoke clogging my eyes and nose, the competing sounds hitting my eardrums from all over, the half-pain/half-numbness in my leg, the dope-fog mixed with adrenaline in my brain… it all combined to disorient the fancy orange fuck out of me. I lost all sense of direction. I was adrift in an endless sea of grey haze and carbon stink. I blundered into a wall, feeling the rough dried sagisi snot against my side. I reversed direction and limped across a space that seemed much larger than it had when I could see. I ran face-first into another wall, reversed direction, and headed off into the void once again.
Something brushed my leg. I turned toward it, awkward and wobbling on my wounded leg, and fired into the smoke, not knowing if I hit anything or not. The gunshot blotted out all other sounds for a moment. The blast died away quickly, as if the smoke was snuffing out any echoes before they could form. It was immediately replaced by the tap-tap-tapping of hundreds of tiny feet slapping the ground, running as if imbued with sudden purpose.
A drone ran into the front of my legs, almost knocking them out from under me. I felt it clawing at me, trying to gain the leverage it needed to sink its fangs into my flesh. I could not see it, and it was way too close to risk shooting blindly, so I tried to pistol-whip it. I slammed the butt of my revolver down in the creature’s general area, again and again and again, until I finally made contact with something solid. There was no time to feel relieved. Another drone ran into the back of my legs. Another took the place of the one I had just dropped. Two more came at me from the left. Three more attacked from the right.
They swarmed me. They were everywhere. I stood in that smoky, stinking void, feeling countless unseen claws and mandibles raking at my pant legs, searching for purchase. I experienced a moment of indecision… not because of an inability to choose an available course of action but because of a complete lack of available courses of action to choose from. My mind was a mirror image of the smoky nothingness surrounding me.
The drones made my decision for me. One of the nasty little fuckers managed to bite the same leg that had been bitten before. Then two more sunk their fangs into the other leg, one in my thigh and the other down near my ankle. A fourth of those evil midget shitheads rammed its vicious face-knives right into the center of my left ass cheek. The venom from all those bites lit up my nervous system like I was a Christmas tree from Hell. Everything from my ass to my toes felt like it was on fire. The synthetic opioids in my bloodstream did not do one goddamn thing to blunt the pain. I howled like a werewolf stepping on a seashell in bare feet. I wanted to keel over, curl up into the fetal position, and cry myself to death. Then that pesky little instinct started preaching about self-preservation again, urging me to get moving.
Numbness was beginning to replace the burning in my lower half. My legs felt like they were made of flaming cheese. I picked a direction at random and stumbled that way. I plowed through the unseen scrum of drones surrounding me and wobbled a zigzagging path through the void. I made it about ten steps, knocking invisible insectoid midgets out of my way, pins and needles replacing the burning below my waist like ash after fire, and then my lower extremities finally gave out. I toppled over onto the floor.
My head bounced off the floor. Bright light exploded behind my eyes. I was certain that I was fucked. After so many standard-decades of surviving some of the most supremely sketchy situations and some of the longest odds the galaxy had to offer, Solomon Jobs was about to be done in by a pack of giant, nut-less grasshoppers. It was both tragic and hilarious. A morbid chuckle began to rumble up from my gut... but it died in my throat. I realized that the explosion of light in my eyes had not come from my head striking the floor. It was not coming from me at all.
I could see. Tears poured from my eyes, blurring the shit out of my vision, making it seem like I was trying to see underwater... but, still... I could see. I was in the corridor just outside the hive. Five motorized carts were parked facing me, bathing the entranceway with their headlights. That was where the light was coming from.
I looked back at the hive. The entranceway was filled with smoke. A few wisps escaped from the top of the hole and billowed up toward the roof of the corridor, but most of the smoke clogged the opening like a churning greyish wall. My useless legs were still halfway inside the entrance. It looked like they had been amputated at the knees.
I got myself up on my elbows and began pushing my body backwards, pulling my legs out of the smoky wall an inch at a time. My knees emerged, then my shins, then my ankles. My feet were just about to emerge when something grabbed ahold of them and tried to yank me back the other way. I did not need to see through the smoke to know what that something was.
I braced myself, then lurched away from the entrance, hurling my body backwards as hard as I could. My feet burst out of the wall of smoke and two drones came bursting out with them.
My gun came up and I fired without thinking. A drone’s head exploded. I adjusted my aim instinctively and fired again. The other drone’s head turned inside out.
More drones came from the entranceway, emerging from the smoke and gradually coming into focus, like ghosts materializing out of thin air. I fired again and again and again, killing a drone with each shot... but then I was empty and more were coming. I tightened my grip on my revolver, prepared my body to fight, and prepared my mind to die
The vicious insectoids advanced. They were only three-feet-tall but they looked enormous from where I lay. They scurried forward, past the bodies of their fallen brethren, past my feet, past my knees. The first one was nearing my waist, and I was gearing up to let the pistol-whips fly, when I noticed it was not looking at me. All six of its eyes were staring past me, at the carts that were painting the entranceway with their headlights. I looked beyond the first drone, at the alien faces of it siblings following behind it. That same glazed expression was mirrored on all of them. That light seemed to have them hypnotized.
They moved around me. They moved past me. Many of them, too many to count, moved over me. Shit-tons of spikey insectoid feet stomped down on my legs, my gut, my chest, my groin, my everywhere. I thought to myself that, after all the combat I had seen, all the adventures I had braved, all the jobs I had done, being trampled to death by an army of nut-less midget insectoids would be a pretty anticlimactic way to go. Then a drone stomped down on my face, slamming my head into the floor, and everything went dark.
Chapter 4
Everything hurt. My head, my chest, my back, my legs... everything. At first, I thought I might be dead, but the pain convinced me otherwise. There was no way that death could hurt so much.
My eyelids crept upward, allowing a dagger of horrible, horrible light to slice into my brain. They snapped shut out of pure reflex, but the damage had been done. White, hot agony ricocheted around inside my skull until, mercifully, I lost consciousness once again.
Everything still hurt the next time I opened my eyes, but it hurt a little bit less. I was able to get a glimpse of my surroundings before the horrible, horrible light became too much to bear. There was not much to see, but there was enough to figure out where I was. It was a tiny room, about eight feet cubed. There were three solid steel walls, each covered in collages of dents and rust and stains. The fourth wall was constructed of steel bars, each as thick as my arm. The only furnishings were a low shitter in the corner and the metal bunk I was lying on. It was a jail cell. The recognition came easy, even in my fucked-up state... I had spent more than my fair share of time in jail cells over the years and they all tended to have a similar appearance.
There was a flicker of movement in the corner of my e
ye. I tried to focus on it, but the horrible, horrible light got to be too much. I shut my eyes.
A voice spoke near my head. It was familiar, very familiar, but I was still too fucked-up to access the part of my brain responsible for remembering acquaintances.
“I shouldn’t do this,” the voice said. “After that clusterfuck you created in my spaceport, I should just let you suffer. But you might die and it would be partially my fault. What kind of friend would that make me?”
I felt a hypo-injector press against my neck. I heard a sharp hiss, and then pure, wonderful opioid bliss surged into my bloodstream, exploding in my brain and trickling down my spine. The disembodied voice had said it was my friend and the evidence certainly suggested that it was telling the truth. Anybody that gave me my drugs was okay by me… especially at that moment. Everything did not hurt anymore. That hard steel bunk felt like a cushion of feathers and sunshine. I allowed sleep to take me, a slight, satisfied smile creasing my lips.
The hurt was mostly gone the third time I opened my eyes. There was a weird, shaky feeling in its place, like my body could not quite figure out how to power its muscles. I pushed myself up so that I was sitting on the bunk and waited, giving my muscles time to remember how to work and my eyes time to adjust to the light in the cell. I rubbed my eyes, ran a hand over my head, and then massaged my arms and legs… trying to force my various parts to recover faster. I realized that my hat and coat were gone. A burst of panic exploded in my chest when I realized that my gun was also missing and, even worse, so was my hypo-injector and my drugs.
I was alone in the cell. The owner of the voice was nowhere to be seen. My vision gradually came into focus. I became aware of a break in the wall of bars to my right. The door was ajar. It was like an invitation to go look for trouble and I was never one to turn down an invitation like that. I took a few deep breaths to quell the panic in my chest, then pushed myself to my feet. My legs wobbled and shook. I leaned against the wall to steady myself. The tremors eventually subsided. I crossed to the door and stepped out.
I was at the head of a long hallway. There was a steel door to my left with a biometric control pad on the wall beside it. The hallway stretched out to my right. Each side was lined with cells identical to the one I had just vacated, except all of the other doors were shut. Most of the cells appeared to be empty. Shadows moved behind the bars of a few, but I had no desire to find out what was making them. I turned toward the door, my mind automatically running through what I knew about hotwiring a biometric control pad.
“Let me out of here!” a voice shouted from behind me.
I looked back. There was a figure inside a cell near the other end of the hall, pressed up against the bars, its arm thrust through the bars, waving at me. I could not see much detail about the prisoner, only that it was human and wearing the standard coveralls of a brown worker.
“Let me out! That fucker had it coming! The sheriff has nothing on me!” the prisoner shouted.
Recognition hit me and, with it, a wave of relief so strong it almost made my legs start shaking and wobbling all over again. I knew where I was.
I turned back to the door and pressed the palm of my hand against the control pad. I had a hunch that I was not going to have to break the thing to get myself out of the cellblock. It recognized my palm print. The door slid open with a grinding squeal of metal parts that had not known preventative maintenance for a long time.
“Hey motherfucker! I’m talking to you!” the prisoner screamed.
I ignored him and stepped through the opening. The door slid shut behind me.
I had not taken two steps before I ran into the boss of this particular corner of the spaceport: Sheriff Anton Kabamas. He was a head shorter than me, but still an imposing figure. He was a walking pile of muscle. They bulged out all over his body, mostly in the usual places, like arms, legs, and chest, but also in a few places that I did not know muscles were supposed to be. I mean, seriously… how do you lift weights with your neck? He was wearing coveralls that were impeccably clean, but still well-worn. A magnetically-propelled projectile pistol was slung in a holster on his hip.
“Well, well... look who’s not dead,” Anton said when he saw me.
“Thanks for that,” I said.
“Don’t mention it. I’m sure if you ran across me, half-dead from venom and smoke-inhalation, being trampled by midget aliens, you would pull my ass out of there.”
“Probably,” I said. “Thanks for the cell, too.”
“At first, we put you there because it was the only bed we had available. But, once you were in there, it just felt right.”
“You’re a funny guy.”
“The best jokes are based on truth,” Anton said.
The spaceport Sheriff’s Office was a complex warren of tunnels and chambers. Everything Anton and his deputies needed to maintain order was housed somewhere in the maze. We walked past an armory filled with racks upon racks of energy rifles and magnetic projectile pistols... more guns than Anton had deputies to shoot them. We passed an open doorway leading to a small square room. An oversized metal table was bolted to the floor in the center of the room. The table was rigged up with wrist, ankle, and neck restraints. A hulking mechanical arm, sporting an array of vicious-looking needles and pincers and electrodes, extended from the ceiling above the table. I did not give the room a second glance... I knew interrogation equipment when I saw it. We crossed a stretch of floor that was coated with a thin film of semi-dried goo. Our boots made squishing and smacking sounds with each step. I caught sight of a closed door out of the corner of my eye. It was emblazoned with a sign that read “Corpse Processing.” My mind digested that little factoid and told me what kind of goo we were walking through. I did not worry about it. I had walked through worse.
We passed deputies every several steps. They were human. All of Anton’s deputies were... that prejudice had been ingrained into Anton’s soul during his time doing blue work for the Great Bank. They were all over the maze, performing all sorts of tasks. The joint was an exercise in organized chaos. It was a blue work machine cranked up past redline. Most of the deputies were too busy to notice us as we passed by. The few that did notice all shot me dirty looks.
“Do you feel strong enough to get the hell out of here?” Anton said.
“You want me gone?” I said.
“Fuck yes. Ok-Lem knows you’re here and she’s not happy about it. We haven’t had to fight to protect you yet and I’d like to keep it that way. The sooner you get the fuck out of here, the better.”
“You should be good for a while. I killed a bunch of those little fuckers.”
“Not as big a bunch as you think. That hive is huge,” Anton said. “What the hell inspired you to attack that gagglefuck of venomous sagisi in the first place?”
“I was a job,” I said.
“No shit... but why’d you take it?”
“I was extorted.”
“Someone threatened you into taking a job? They must’ve been some hardcore heavy hitters to force the great Solomon “Odd” Jobs into doing something he didn’t want to do.”
“It was Naak and his new black work crew.”
“Ah,” Anton said, nodding his head. “The Nemesis Group.”
“Stupid fucking name,” I said.
“I know, right? It’s like they were deliberately trying to be as cliché as possible.”
“That’s what I said.”
“Why’d you go through with it? Why didn’t you just walk away once you were out of Naak’s reach?” Anton said.
“I took the job,” I said.
Anton made a noise that was part laugh, part cough, part hiss, and all contempt. “Oh yeah... your stupid personal code,” he said.
“It’s not stupid,” I said.
“It’s fucking idiotic. It’s not even really a code. It’s barely a concept. You should just get rid of it. I’d imagine it would be very liberating to have absolutely no ethical center whatsoever.”
“I can’t do that.” I said it casually, but there was nothing casual about the strength of my one remaining conviction. Accept a job, finish the job... no matter what. Without that principle, I would have had nothing. If I gave up that principle, I would have finally completed my devolution into the lowliest kind of scum the galaxy had to offer. I valued my code like a man with no sight or hearing or taste or smell valued his sense of touch. The code was everything. Without the code, there would have been no me.
Our path cut through an open stretch of floor beneath a vaulted ceiling that ballooned to a peak about fifty feet above our heads. This was the office’s garage. It was where Anton stored the motorized carts that he and his deputies drove around the spaceport, zipping from crisis to crisis, along an infinite spiderweb of avenues and pathways, most of which were too narrow to accommodate normal-sized vehicles. A plethora of carts were parked haphazardly around the garage, in no discernable order, like a chaotic schoolyard populated by the dwarfish offspring of fully-grown pickup trucks. We passed carts smeared with goo leaked from corpses hauled into the office from whatever violence had created them. We zigzagged around carts pockmarked with energy burns and projectile holes, but otherwise functional. We crept through debris fields of vehicle parts encircling carts in varying states of disrepair. We took short detours around burnt-out hunks of metal that had used to be carts, left around the garage at random like somber monuments to the dangers of planetary blue work. We hopscotched our way through a mechanical analogy of the cost of maintaining order in the spaceport until we finally reached the far side of the garage and passed through a set of yawning bay doors into the outer office.
Odd Jobs 2: Solomon's Code Page 4
