Pew! Pew! - Bad versus Worse

by M. D. Cooper

  “So we gather. And how did you accomplish this feat?”

  The face’s frown deepened. “By means of a network of wormholes in space and time, brought together in a central nexus.”

  Bouffard boggled. “You created the Wormery?”

  “We did. Sort of. But you must know of this, Joth Krantor. Wormholes are as superior to hyperspace as bacon is to turkey bacon.”

  Krantor released Bouffard, letting his arms fall to his sides. “But…”

  The voice boomed, somewhat indignant. “Hyperspace is shit, Joth Krantor. It takes ages, you can’t use it in a gravity well, it takes ages to plot a course... Wormholes can be opened anywhere.”

  Everyone looked up at that. “They can?” asked Krantor eagerly.

  But the face had contorted beyond puzzled frowns, and now looked deeply worried. “We do not understand the purpose of your visit. But we sense you are meddling in dangerous matters. You must leave.”

  “Leave?” said Krantor loudly. “You’re kidding! How can we generate new stable wormholes? How can we -”

  “LEAVE!”

  Krantor blinked, and found himself standing next to the shuttle, and the splintered wreckage of the Rosetteish Stone. Around him, the frags were looking confused. And on the shuttle’s ramp, the unluckiest member of the squad lay with holes in his face, chest and throat, razor leaf bonnet still strapped to his head.

  Krantor wished he could take a picture. Universe hates smartarses, he’d call it. It would be exhibited. But the frags would moan, and he’d had about enough of Bouffard’s whining. Which was a point…

  “Where’s Bouffard?” he asked aloud, just as the frags started chorusing, “where’s the Frag Prince?”

  He wasn’t sure who was more panicked, although for different reasons. Then with a pop, Bouffard was standing on the grass beside him. He looked shaken, his moustache drooping.

  “We’ve been invited to leave,” Krantor said. He hated stating the obvious, but the frags had demonstrated time and again that they needed things to be spelled out for them.

  “You certainly were,” Bouffard muttered.

  Krantor decided to ignore that, and nodded to the ramp. “Nice of them to return your lad, though. So at least now you’ve seen that these little trips aren’t entirely without risk and there’s nothing at all unusual about one chap not quite making it back.”

  “Yes, I got clipped by one of those damn leaves as well,” Froll said, holding out a bleeding forearm proudly.

  “Two chaps. This has been a tricky mission,” said Krantor smoothly.

  “I’m not dead or nothin’,” Froll muttered darkly, glancing at the remains of the frag on the ramp.

  Krantor was staring at Bouffard. His delayed teleportation was plaguing him. What had the Elders said to the Frag Prince.

  He eventually returned Krantor’s gaze steadily. “Well,” he said. “That’s that, Joth Krantor. The frags followed you and served you all the way to the Elders of Klirrip. Sorry you didn’t get your brave new world, but we’ve held up our end of the bargain. You owe us a homeworld.”

  Krantor shrugged. “Did you ever doubt you’d get it. You’ll have a place among the stars, Bouffard, just as I promised. Your soldiers’ part in this is almost done, but you’ll forgive me if I take a few hours to ponder our next step after this setback.”

  He strode away up the ramp, stepping over the frag corpse as he did so. As he passed Froll, he said softly, “I’d get that looked at, trooper, looks nasty.”

  The frags surrounded Bouffard. “What’s going on?” asked Froll. “We might not be as learned as you just yet, but there’s some unspoken weird between you guys.”

  “I’m not sure,” the Frag Prince replied. “But when they told Krantor he must know about the Wormery, they didn’t mean in an abstract sense. He’s literally been here before.

  “Joth Krantor’s been leading us in circles this whole time.”

  Chapter 5: Archives of Pain

  The Space Bastard slipped through the wilds of hyperspace. It now had a new mission. Having completed the quest to find the Elders of Klirrip, they were now heading towards the frags’ new homeworld. Not that Joth Krantor would tell them where that was. Whenever Bouffard or one of the braver frag troops asked, Krantor would just sing, “Down to Fraggle Rock!” and wander away, chuckling and babbling incoherently.

  He was drinking, and spending more and more time in the cargo decks. Even Lokhnakh couldn’t get hold of his Master, and became so agitated that Bouffard relieved the psychotic old retainer of his blaster. That meant that at least Spydus could be joined by a reconstituted crew without the constant fear of puddle-based mayhem.

  With the Space Bastard’s full crew, it took a while before Bouffard was able to put his finger on what was bothering him, but he got there in the end.

  “Where’s Froll?” he asked the frags one night in the bar. “I’ve barely seen him since we got back from Brothokk.”

  “His arm went a bit manky,” one of the troopers replied. “He went to sickbay.”

  “They have a sickbay on this ship? People last long enough to get sick around here with that mop-slinging fart’s itchy trigger finger?”

  “I think it was Joth’s own medical facility, now you mention it.”

  Bouffard’s jaw worked silently for a few moments. “Lads,” he said. “Does it not strike you as a bit odd that we’ve lost so many men on missions which have consisted almost entirely of shooting up remote villages?”

  “We’re flattered you even noticed,” said Trooper Brell. “He’s kept you safe enough, hasn’t he?”

  Something clicked in Bouffard’s head, his stolen princely education and his frag legacy meshed for one moment. He didn’t have quite the full picture yet, but… “We’ve been played for mugs,” he growled.

  Bouffard strode the echoing corridors of the Space Bastard’s habitation decks, wondering how he could possibly have been so blind. Putting his trust in a sinister black-armoured man from a whole dynasty of grubby capitalists who even went and called his ship the Space Bastard for crying out loud!

  He’d known what the Elders of Krillip would say. He’d been there before. That might or might not be significant. But it definitely meant that the previous half dozen trips to moons, asteroids, and assorted planets, had definitely been a sham. But they’d destroyed those worlds. What had Krantor really been doing? His disappearing frags, the random shuttle trips, the suddenly depopulated ship, the ‘evil experiments’ that had somehow zapped a whalesteroid the size of a gas giant… now that he was at last thinking clearly, the data was coming at him too thick and fast to process.

  Bouffard found the ladder he’d previously climbed in the dark, clinging to the rungs and staring up at the blackness where he presumed Lokhnakh’s boots were floating just ahead of him. This time he headed downwards.

  The cargo decks were vast, but they were also largely empty. Bouffard moved through dark warehouse-like spaces with high vaulted ceilings, his ears straining for the slightest sound that might lead him to Krantor and Froll.

  It took him what felt like hours, and countless shinning up and down ladders in the dark, but eventually he heard some metallic jingles in the corridors up ahead. Bouffard checked his position, he was near the outer hull. According to the schematics there ought to have been workshops and hydroponics facilities back in the epoch when the Space Bastard had been ferrying colonists for a new life among the stars. It wasn’t the worst choice of places to set up a sickbay, he supposed, but every instinct told him that wasn’t what he was about to discover.

  Sure enough, he rounded a corner to come face to face with Krantor wheeling a gurney along a corridor, whistling. The gurney was empty, but the disarray of the straps suggested it had been recently occupied.

  The Frag Prince expected Joth Krantor to try and bluff his way out of the confrontation. Instead, on seeing him, the last scion of Krantor-Huang dropped the gurney’s handles, and froze. “Oh, bugger.”

  Bouffar
d favoured his sword, but he was well aware it was an affectation that had its limitations, especially with his footwork. He snapped up his arm and trained a borrowed blaster pistol on Krantor’s face. “This ends now. Where’s Froll? What twisted game have you been playing with us? The truth, Krantor!”

  “I promised you a place between the stars, didn’t I?”

  Bouffard kept his blaster trained squarely on Krantor’s head. “I asked you a question. Where is Froll?”

  Krantor’s fingers twitched, as he considered taking his chances at zapping the frag with a quick burst from his gauntlets. But he remembered the ossary back on the prince’s asteroid, where Bouffard had shown surprising resistance to his energy weapons. There was a risk he’d withstand a blast for long enough to get off a shot. He’d probably best come clean. He could always try and fry the frag later.

  “Froll was walking wounded. Now, I guess you could say… he’s walking home.”

  “You spaced him?”

  Krantor raised an admonitory finger. “Not precisely. I hyperspaced him.”

  “You maniac!”

  “Well, yes. What gave me away? The battle mask or the electro-death gloves?”

  Pew! Bouffard fired. Krantor’s personal shielding absorbed the blast, but not before he felt the heat of the laser pulse on his forehead. Running lower on power, he’d not survive a second shot.

  “OK, I probably deserved that. No one likes a smartarse.”

  “You murdered a wounded man.”

  To Bouffard’s obvious incredulity, Krantor shook his head and smiled. “No, I ejected him into hyperspace.”

  “That’s murder!”

  The prince raised the gun again, and Krantor spoke a little more urgently, the grin faltering ever so slightly. “Is it? How much do you know about hyperspace, beyond it being handy for getting around fast?”

  Bouffard frowned. “What’s your point?” It didn’t escape Krantor’s notice that he didn’t answer the question.

  “I promised you the frags would have their space among the stars. Do I look like a particularly poetic man?”

  Bouffard narrowed his eyes, his thoughts racing. Observations, clues and half-remembered comments coalesced and he started reaching some unpleasant conclusions.

  “Take me to the frag production plant you installed on this ship. Right now.”

  For the first time in their acquaintance, Bouffard saw that Krantor was genuinely shocked. He was now determined that it wouldn’t be the last time.

  “Oh,” said Krantor. “You… know about that?”

  “Bitch, please. I’m the Frag Prince. How could I not know?”

  Krantor had been busy. There was a full frag production plant in the cargo deck. As he herded Krantor in at gunpoint, Bouffard looked at the vats, and the engines, stretching away into the distance across the warehouse-like space. He’d felt the presence of frag tissue aboard the vessel, above and beyond his comrades. But he hadn’t been expecting anything on this scale.

  “You had mere moments to study the plants on my asteroid. How did you recreate them?”

  “What? Oh, I didn’t,” Krantor said. “I nicked them. Of all the naughty shit I’ve ever done, I thought it would be OK, to be honest. You’ve not mentioned that frozen rock you called home once since we left it.”

  Now that he’d been discovered, Krantor seemed to be enjoying watching Bouffard piece the puzzle together.

  “So you’ve been experimenting on frags all this time?”

  “Hah!” His laughter echoed around the vaulted ceiling, and the nearest vat made an ominous glooping sound. “No, I experimented on frags long before you and I met. I’ve been perfecting frags.”

  Bouffard calmly fired a shot into the nearest instrument panel, reducing the machinery to so much molten slag. “Tell me exactly what this is all about.”

  “Revenge,” said Krantor simply. “Hyperspace travel brought down my family’s company, reduced us to the level of merely extremely rich minor aristocracy. So I’m bringing down hyperspace.”

  “What? How? Hyperspace is like a whole alternate dimension!”

  Krantor grinned wolfishly. “I know. And they never really stopped to think about it, or analyse it, they just bomb ships through it fast as you like. But what if those ships never made it to their destinations?”

  He ignored Bouffard’s gun, assuming rightly that the Frag Prince’s need for answers would outweigh his instinct to blast him down, and stepped further into the space, waving at the frag birthing vats.

  “I’ve modified frags’ genetic sequences, and ejected them into hyperspace. They’re beyond space, beyond time. They’re still alive, for want of a better word, maybe even quite happy in their way. But they’ve been primed to cling to spacecraft passing through hyperspace and, well, detonate.”

  “What?”

  “I’ve mined hyperspace. Once the process is complete, and the production plants themselves are within hyperspace and fully-automated, the odds of any ship making it safely through even a short jump will be slashed. Some will come apart in hyperspace itself, adding to shrapnel and navigation hazards. Others will be forced back into space-time, generally with gaping holes in their hull, at a respectable fraction of the speed of light. And once they realise they can no longer use their precious hyperdrives… guess where they’ll go for their space travel?”

  “The wormery.”

  Krantor snapped his fingers. “Bingo.”

  Bouffard looked around him. The plant was indeed vast, and would be able to produce dozens of frags an hour once fully operational, but… “Hyperspace is a whole universe. The odds of the largest frag army meeting any craft would be infinitesimal.”

  Krantor’s grin was the broadest Bouffard had ever seen. “You’d be surprised. Hyperspace is a vast subset of our universe, sure. But it’s so far beyond our physical laws, that at the same time it’s also kind of small. Trust me, I know I don’t look like the bookish type, with the armour and all, but I’ve looked into the maths.”

  “But, what was this whole mad trip for? Why pretend you were asking anything of the Elders of Klirrip? Why tour those moons, if it was all just a sham? Why kill all those people? Destroy all those planets?”

  Krantor laughed. “I thought that was obvious. They were all the remaining frag production plants in existence. I was covering our tracks. Oh, except Brothokk. I needed DNA from the stone petals, to beef up the frags’ skin a bit. Just in case.”

  Bouffard reached surreptitiously behind his back with one hand, but kept the warrior talking. “Our tracks? This is nothing to do with me.”

  “Oh but it is, Frag Prince. Hyperspace. Your people’s place among the stars. That’s what I’m giving you. What we’ve both been working for. Don’t you see? It’s not like people are going to run ships through it once they realise it’s been comprehensively mined by living torpedoes. The frags will have a whole universe, all to themselves. I don’t expect you to approve of my methods, but… you have to admit that’s not bad, right?”

  Bouffard stood straight, his moustache bristling. “This is monstrous. Wholesale slaughter, on an intergalactic scale, just to restore your business? I will stop you.”

  Krantor sneered. “You? I think not. You’re a spirited fop, Bouffard, but a fop for all that. If you’d primed your soldiers properly, you might have a chance, but as it is… if you were serious, you’d have shot me already.”

  It was Bouffard’s turn to smile, as he spotted something over Krantor’s shoulder. “Fop, is it? Joth Krantor, weren’t you listening when I told you just how I became the Frag Prince? Did you really think you were the only villain on the Space Bastard who could bring things aboard in secret?”

  There was a slithering noise in the shadows cast by the birthing vats, just behind Krantor. He turned, alarmed, then relaxed when he saw it was just the bouncing pink slug shape of an unprimed frag.

  Then it spoke.

  “Remember when you blew apart that poor frag in a sulk? I told you, you shouldn’
t have done that,” it said in a low voice.

  “I impersonated and murdered the entire royal family of that asteroid,” Bouffard said. “Several dozen times over, until we got the level of memory print right. All you need is proximity to the target’s natural habitat, and the smallest sample of genetic tissue.”

  “Ah. Good job you don’t have any of my DNA,” Krantor pointed out, though he took a nervous step back from the frag.

  “That would have been tricky, if you hadn’t tried to hump me at the bottom of that blowhole,” the frag agreed, and then bulged, the unmistakable shape of a human hand pushing against the inside of its unformed body for a moment.

  “Cuckoo,” called Bouffard in a mocking tone, as the frag bulged a few more times, then began to rear up towards the ceiling, stretching, almost to the height of a man…

  “Fuck this,” Krantor said, and blasted it with both gauntlets. The transforming frag was hurled across the deck, until it slammed into a vat, with a wet splatting sound, and then slid to the floor in a boneless heap.

  “So, any other great plans up your sleeve, Bouffard?” Krantor sneered. “Or are you just going to shoot me and have done with it? And throw away a whole universe for your precious people.”

  But Bouffard was still smiling. “It’s funny you know. Even though I made that exact mistake several dozen times, it’s still funny watching someone else do it.”

  “What?”

  “Take a good look at that frag you think you just killed.”

  Krantor turned, his shoulders sagging as he saw the creature had vanished.

  “The best bit is you’ve even been dabbling in frag engineering. You know frags need a surge of energy at the priming stage to help complete their physical transformation.”

  Krantor turned in an unsteady circle as the two men heard the sound of bare feet slapping against the floor of the deck in the distant shadows.

  Bouffard holstered his blaster. “This is going to be fun, Joth Krantor.”

  The two men stumbled slightly, as the floor shook. Bouffard frowned. “Another trick?”