A commotion in the service area yanked my attention fully out of my head. The crowd ahead of me was parting, leaving an almost-empty space. An altercation was taking place in that space. A heavy forklift had just collided with an enormous grindle. A bright red gash was torn into the greyish scaly skin above the grindle’s knee. The creature was not backing down though. Some supremely perverted evolutionary path had caused fish to develop into grindles, but their scaly skin and their fishy faces were the only similarities between them and their aquatic ancestors. When fish were threatened, they swam away fast. When grindles were threatened, they fucked shit up.
The grindle balled up a fist that was twice the size of my head and threw a punch that rocked the forklift on its axles. The grindle roared, although I could not tell if it was from pain or rage, then it threw another punch, and another, and another, and another. Each punch impacted with a boom like cannon fire and left huge fist-shaped dents in the forklift’s frame.
The forklift backed up until its rear bumper nearly brushed the crowd at the edge of the open space. Then it reversed direction, gunned its engine, and rammed the grindle. One of its forks caught the grindle’s leg, shearing away another patch of scales, leaving a second bloody gash in its greyish hide. The grindle roared again and redoubled its attack, swinging away at the forklift like a boxer working a heavy bag.
The situation escalated. The grindle punched and metal bent and broke. The forklift rammed and scales and blood flew. The crowd around the area was even more chaotic than the altercation within. Some creatures fled. Some jostled each other to get a better view. Some placed bets on the outcome. Most of the creatures simply went about their business, with just a little more pep in their step than usual. These things were commonplace on the Promenade. Everyone knew how it would end: blood would be spilt... the only questions were “by who” and “how much.”
I adjusted my course to give the fight a wide berth and resumed my zigzagging path through the crowd. The altercation had sent reverberations through the mob, like sticking a twig through a hornet’s nest... enough agitation to speed up the buzzing but not enough to launch a full-fledged swarm. The creatures around me moved a wee bit quicker and a tad more erratically than usual. I picked up my pace to match the speed of traffic and navigated the crowd easily enough.
The danger diminished as the fight fell farther and farther behind me. However, the thought of the fight did not diminish with distance. It had been a contest of pure brute force... the same kind of fight that I usually initiated. Brute force was a gamble. The grindle might have pounded on the forklift until the operator was killed and the vehicle was scrap metal. The forklift operator might have gotten lucky, taking out one of the grindle’s legs and then running over its head. The fight might have gone on and on, a stalemate of fish-man versus machine, until the sheriff’s deputies showed up and shot them both to pieces. There were no guarantees when it came to brute force. The outcome was dictated partially by the level of brutality, partially by the intelligence of the tactics, and mostly by a whole lot of motherfucking luck.
I left the spaceship service area and entered the docking concourse. This area was the gateway to the planet. Here, finished products came in and processed fuel went out. There were significantly more creatures here than there had been in the service area. Ships were constantly arriving, disgorging an endless parade of merchants, pirates, smugglers, mercenaries, gangsters, scavengers, miners, craftsmen, mechanics, bounty hunters, fugitives, slavers, and slaves. Some were here to try to make money. Most were running from something. All were one misstep away from becoming fodder for the meat grinder I called home.
The crowd was packed almost shoulder-to-shoulder. I did not have the space to dodge and weave anymore. I sidled and squeezed and occasionally shoved my way across the concourse. My head was still on a swivel, as before, but I also kept my hands near my pistol and my coat pockets... pickpockets always proliferated when the crowd grew thick on the Promenade.
I was about halfway across the concourse when a bright white flash lit up the air to my left. An instant after the flash, the quacking-fart sound of an energy rifle reached my ears. The crowd surged away from the weapons-fire, taking me with it, like I was caught in a rip current. There was no fighting it. All my energy was dedicated to maintaining my footing, to keep myself upright and un-trampled-to-death.
The push of the crowd turned me in slow circles. My line of sight fell on the altercation that had triggered this current bout of chaos. I saw lone human facing off against a pack of angry kabebes. The human was probably an off-planet pirate, by the look of his clothing and his gear... and the energy rifle he was sporting was a definite indicator of a well-moneyed professional. The kabebes could have been from anywhere, specializing in anything. All kabebes were between two and three-feet-tall and were covered, head to toe, with a pelt of razor-sharp quills. In other words, they all looked the same to me.
The push of the crowd turned me in another slow circle. I was treated to a creeping panoramic view of panicked creatures, pushing and shoving and jostling each other as everyone tried to get out of the reach of the energy rifle.
When my line of sight fell on the altercation once more, the pirate was blasting kabebes as fast as he could pull the trigger, leaving nothing but scorch-marks on the floor and piles of blackened quills scattered about. The kabebes were undeterred by the slaughter of their brethren. They rushed the pirate, using their tiny bodies as weapons, their quills stabbing into the pirate’s legs on all sides. The human was red from the waist down and a pool of blood was growing beneath his feet. He kept shooting, obliterating another kabebe with every shot, but more and more kept coming.
The crowd turned me around again. I lost sight of the battle. Unbidden, my mind compared the pirate/kabebe fight with my little dust-up with the sagisi drones. A chill raced down my spine as I realized that the two situations were identical. Both involved a lone human with a gun versus a pack of diminutive aliens using their bodies as weapons. Both involved shitty tactics versus natural defensive instincts. Both involved brute force versus brute force. Both involved betting life on a metaphorical roll of the dice.
The crowd abruptly stopped surging. It was like someone had flipped a switch... in one moment everyone was frantically trying to get away and, in the next, the quacking-farts stopped sounding, the white light stopped flashing, and the crowd resumed it’s relatively calm chaotic commute. The current slacked off and I was able to pull my body away. I looked toward the site of the altercation. I caught a brief glance of a plethora of kabebes swarming all over a motionless clump of chewed-up pirate, and then the crowd closed in, absorbing the vacant area like the tide swallowing a sandbar, and the carnage disappeared from view.
I left the docking concourse, merged with the commuters trudging along the main thoroughfare, then veered off and took a shortcut through the gold marketplace. My route took me past booths hocking all manner of innocuous goods. Tools, produce, jewelry, clothing, electronics, cooked meat-on-a-stick that might have been pig or rat or human or who-the-fuck-knows... pretty much any small-ticket item was on sale somewhere in the gold marketplace. Big-ticket items, like weapons or drugs or slaves, were traded elsewhere in the spaceport.
The crowd was thick and the avenues between the booths were narrow, but I still moved easier than I had in any other area I had passed through. Creatures meandered here. They paused and browsed. It was easy to zigzag past them.
No one paid any attention to me. The shoppers were focused on browsing the stalls. The merchants had all seen me numerous times before. They knew that I was not there to buy anything. The thieves had all also seen me before. They knew that I was usually broke and always quick to start shooting.
My thoughts turned inward again. I could not just wage a second frontal assault and hope for different results. Brute force was a gamble and the odds were way too long as far as the hive was concerned. I would need better tactics if I was going to get past that army of drones,
but I had no goddamn idea what those tactics might have been.
I was nearing the far edge of the marketplace. The main thoroughfare was just up ahead. After that, my office was five minutes away, give or take, depending on foot traffic.
A booth selling produce was on the outer edge of the marketplace. A long table was set up facing the footpath. It was piled high with a wide array of exotic fruits and vegetables. It looked like a rainbow had dropped onto the table and shattered. The produce was obviously genetically-engineered and that meant it was from off-planet. There were many greenhouses and hydroponic gardens on-planet, but their products reflected the world that grew them... drab, utilitarian, valuing subsistence over enjoyment. The shit on the table was luxury food.
The merchants behind the table were just as fancy as their merchandise. There were three of them, all human, two males and one female. They were not wearing the usual coveralls worn by most humans on-planet. They all had actual pants and shirts. Two of them were sporting chains that looked like real gold. I did not see any obvious weapons, but I knew that they had some hidden somewhere. It was suicide to wear real gold out in the open without being armed.
I passed the booth. The merchants did not pay any attention to me. A beaten-down, middle-aged, dirty and disheveled on-planet mercenary was definitely not in their target demographic.
A loud fluttering sound jerked my attention toward the table. A yandoc swooped down from somewhere up in the rafters supporting the overhead dome that shielded the Promenade from the inhospitable planetary atmosphere. The creature, which looked like the result of a bat fucking a lizard, dive-bombed the table, seized a purple gourd with its talons, and leapt back into the air.
The three merchants reacted, rushing toward the flying thief, shouting and waving their arms, stumbling over each other as they tried to retrieve their stupidly-expensive purple produce. The yandoc flew in graceful arcs and figure-eights, cutting through the air just out of the merchants’ reach.
After several moments, one of the merchants stopped acting on instinct and began to think. He reached into the waistband of his pants and pulled out a magnetically-propelled projectile pistol. The yandoc was ready for him. It dropped the gourd and surged straight upward, its wings turning into a blur of leathery flapping, trumpeting an ear-splitting screech that echoed across the marketplace.
The purple gourd plummeted. The three merchants all dove to catch it, ending up in a tangled dogpile on the floor.
The yandoc’s screech had apparently been a signal. While the merchants were still on the floor, trying to extricate themselves from each other without damaging their hard-won purple prize, a metric fuckton of yandocs descended on the table. They came in rapid-fire single-file, too many moving too quickly to count, swooping down, seizing something on the table, and then rocketing back up toward the dome. The table was empty in less than a minute. The merchants were left with their one purple gourd and nothing else.
I was impressed. That clan of yandocs had robbed the booth blind without shedding a single drop of blood. It had been fucking beautiful.
I stepped onto the main thoroughfare. My office was just a short distance away, at the bottom of a stack of converted shipping containers. I thought about what I had just witnessed. The little sentient bat-lizards had provided me with the solution to my dilemma. I needed a diversion, something to distract the drones while I snuck in and killed their queen. It was obvious. I felt like a damn idiot for not considering it before. Once again, I reflected on how impaired judgement was a side-effect of excessive opioid use.
The door to my office was a rectangular sheet of steel. It had probably been silver and smooth once upon a time, but now it was maroon with rust and twisted and dented by countless attempts at forced entry. I stopped and pressed my ear against it, listening. I did not hear anything moving about within. That was comforting, but in no way a guarantee that nothing was waiting to ambush me when I stepped inside. I popped the lock, drew my revolver, and threw the door open. The glowglobe stuck to the ceiling sensed the movement and flared to life, bathing the office in sickly yellow light. I sprang through the door, my revolver thrust out before me.
There was no ambush. I was alone. I closed and locked the door, then returned my pistol to its holster. Adrenaline drained out of my system like there was a hole at the base of my spine, leaving behind exhaustion so deep even my bones felt tired. I crossed the office and dropped into the chair behind my desk.
I pulled my hypo-injector and my vial of dope out of my coat and set about readying a dose. My plan was simple: shoot up, pass out, wake up tomorrow, and try to think of a diversion to use on the hive. My eyes scanned my disaster area of an office while my fingers worked the hypo-injector. It was filthy in there. It occurred to me that I should clean it up a bit, but I pushed the thought away. Cleaning was a luxury. It could wait until I did not have a job to do.
My gaze crawled past my desk, a battered chunk of metal, pockmarked with rust-holes, which looked too fucked-up to even be salvaged for scrap, let alone to be used for office work. I looked at the piles of garbage and debris on the floor, like rolling dunes in a desert of filth, and at the couch in the far corner beside the door, a decrepit relic so beat to hell it was as if some mystical furniture-eating monster had chewed it up and then spit it out because it was so goddamn unappetizing. My eyes moved up the dingy brown steel walls and across the dingy brown steel ceiling, finally coming to a stop on the lone glowglobe.
I stared at the light, watching it wax and wane and flicker as its expired battery coughed out electricity like a dying man hacking up phlegm. My hypo-injector was ready to go. I brought it up to my neck, my eyes still locked on the light. The nozzle easily found the sweet spot over my carotid artery. It was all well-worn muscle memory. My thumb caressed the trigger.
I paused. My thumb froze. An idea had begun to take shape in my mind.
The light flickered, cutting on and off too quickly for the naked eye to catch the individual intervals. The flickering stopped. The light got brighter for a few seconds, then settled back to its usual dim glow.
My idea came into focus. I knew what my diversion would be. I took the hypo-injector away from my neck and placed it on the desk before me. Then I dug my sat-com out of my coat.
Anton answered on the second ring.
“What nonsense have you gotten yourself into now?” he said.
“No nonsense,” I said. “I was just wondering if you could do me a favor.”
Chapter 6
The cart was pulling slightly to the right. I had to wrestle with the wheel to keep from veering off course. There were a lot of pedestrians on this level. Not nearly as many as there were up on the Promenade, but it would only take two or three living speedbumps to pop a tire or knock the cart’s axle father out of alignment than it already was. That would not do. The cart was the linchpin of this entire operation.
The sheriff had not wanted to loan the cart to me. I had known in advance that he was going to be reluctant... public support for private business ventures was a massive no-no in Anton’s book. So I started huge, asking for a platoon of deputies, with big guns and bigger vehicles, to help me storm the hive and stamp out any resistance. Anton laughed and told me to go fuck myself, of course, and then I talked and talked and talked, eroding his patience like waves against a beach, and I negotiated my way down to one cart with a working engine and a slightly fucked-up alignment.
I fought claustrophobia as the cart sped down the corridor. I always felt it a bit when I went Underground. The Promenade was all open spaces and vaulted dome. The lower levels were all complex warrens of narrow avenues and low ceilings. The claustrophobia jacked my anxiety-level up a few notches, but it was still manageable. I ignored it as best I could. I needed to focus on my plan of attack. Shit was going to move quickly once I rolled up on the hive.
The anxiety felt like a low-level electric charge, radiating out of the pit of my stomach and vibrating under my skin. An insidious voice i
n the back of mind whispered that I should fire a fuckload of dope into my system, enough to obliterate every shred of emotion in my body and reduce me to a drooling, euphoric blob on the floor. There was no silencing that voice, so I forced myself to ignore it. It was not an ally today. Excessive opioid use impaired judgement. I had been very aware of that fact lately. I was going to need access to all of my wits if I was going to avoid walking into another clusterfuck like last time. So I had fixed with a purely maintenance dose, enough to quell any withdrawal symptoms but not enough to mess me up. That was going to have to do until this thing was over... for better or worse.
I went through my mental checklist of supplies for the hundredth time. Electrical cables: check. Two pounds of industrial explosives: check. Steel rebar cage wrapping around the outside of the cart like a 360-degree bumper: check. Sat-com: check. Miscellaneous tools: check. Revolver: check. Lots of extra ammo: check. Trenchcoat: check. Hat: check. None of it had gone anywhere in the 30 seconds since the last time I had taken inventory.
The hive was just up ahead. It looked completely undamaged, like my first attack had never even happened. The generator was off to the side of the entrance, humming along like all of its insides were brand new and not full of bullet holes, pumping grey exhaust into the air above it. There were several drones standing sentry outside and I could see the dark shapes of several more three-foot-tall insectoids moving about inside. They did not seem to see me rolling down the corridor on my battle-hardened motorized cart, but I knew they would soon enough. There were other creatures in the vicinity of the hive, commuters mostly, keeping a respectable distance from the sagisi drone sentries as they went about their business. I began to mentally debate the ethics of involving innocent bystanders in the shitstorm I was about to set off, but I squashed the dilemma before it could become a distraction, dismissing the momentary bout of morality as just another side effect of not being properly medicated. Most of the bystanders would flee once shit started to go down. The ones that did not have the sense to run were not destined to survive for long on-planet anyway.
Odd Jobs 2: Solomon's Code Page 6
