Pew! Pew! - Bad versus Worse

by M. D. Cooper

  “They’re still catching up to us,” Milton reported with some strain as he tried to be useful through obvious discomfort from the jolty motion and acceleration.

  Red lights flashed across the dash again as the image of their pursuers amplified on the screen. Crude rotary turrets dropped from the belly of the sleek fighters, spinning up and spraying out hundreds of pounds of polytetrafluoroethylene-coated bullets. Hard matter projectiles were a lot more effective against shields than blaster cannons, but they were also a lot harder to hit with. To overcome this obstacle and the implicit delay of projectile-based weapon systems, they often fired at an insane speed, spraying as many rounds as possible in the shortest time possible.

  Krample dipped the Hopper, punching one of the vertical thrusters on the top of the ship and quickly moving them out of a dangerous barrage of metal as it whizzed over them. “They are not getting anything for Galaxmas once I’m Krample Claus,” he declared.

  “With their hostile AI disruption attack, we’re too short on power to keep the shield up and activate the jump drive,” Xallia cried, reading the data from her console.

  “I see that,” Krample grumbled. “This is going to be more than uncomfortable.” He pulled down the shield, moving some power to the jump drive while increasing the strength of the jamming disruptor to try to mitigate the effectiveness of the predictive aim of the enemy turrets. It seemed to be working, but the two fighters were moving farther apart from one another, trying to cover a wider area with their lethal turrets.

  There were just too many bullets flying and Krample cringed as the impacts rang out through the hull, most of them inflicting some serious damage as the polytetrafluoroethylene-coating proved its value against the hard angular shapes of the hull. Normally, these shapes were good at bouncing hard-matter projectiles like this, but Krample was seeing and feeling that wasn’t really the case right now. The hits shuddered through the chassis which was holding up for now. He he pressed the accelerator up to 6Gs, struggling to retain his coherence as blackness swam in the corners of his vision, slowly trying to pull him under. The enemy pilots ramped up their acceleration, still pressing forward and closing the gap.

  The cabin hissed as one of the bullets passed through the hull. The automatic sealant system set to work immediately, but it was a cruel reminder that they wouldn’t hold up much longer against this onslaught.

  Krample overclocked the CPU, blasting it with pressurized liquid nitrogen to hopefully mitigate any long-term damage as the cores strained for more output—saving Krample his most precious and short-lived resource right now—time.

  Krample cut the acceleration completely, feeling the pressure on his body stop suddenly. As he sucked in a deep breath which washed away the blackness from the corners of his eyes, he waited for the flash of green, saw it, then slammed his fist on the button. This time, he did pass out.

  4

  When Milton came to, he found a murky blue orb of gelatinous liquid floating in front of him. He was in a lot of discomfort—a cramping stomach, aches all over his body, and a splitting headache. The smell of the floating orb alone told him all he needed to know. Somehow, Krample’s crazy pre-jump maneuvers hadn’t caused him to lose his belly full of cookies and milk, but his admirable attempt at impressing Xallia by suppressing his fear and sensitive stomach stood no chance against the milliseconds of 30G acceleration from the jump itself.

  The orb containing the previous contents of Milton’s stomach was drifting away from him, but it was still only a third of a meter away. It looked like Xallia and Krample were conscious, but they were still reeling from the unpleasant sensation of what must have been a forced jump. Milton was surprised he was still alive, and once they were through with all of this, he would make a point to avoid flying of any kind.

  “Ughhh, my head,” Krample complained. “Well, looks like we lost them. There is no way the J.E.F. would let them use the Hyperlane system in those fighters. My guess is they’re already heading back to Thelas to hide in whatever underground bunker they’re from. Hold on, turning the aGrav back on.”

  “Wait!” Milton yelled, but it was already too late. Fortunately, the blue orb in front of him was far enough away that it didn’t hit him as it fell, but it would still be more difficult to clean now. Milton unbuckled from his seat and stood on shaking legs, now sure he was the only one who had vomited.

  “Ehh, sorry about that, Milton,” Krample said, standing as well and looking over to see the damage with a grimace. “Had to do a forced jump, and the Gs were a little higher and more sudden than expected. We should be to Circle-S in a little less than an hour, though.”

  “Is the ship okay?” Xallia asked, unbuckling herself from her chair and standing as well.

  “Xallia, our dearest Milton has a sensitive constitution—I’m surprised I didn’t join him in his gastric festivities, actually. The ship, however, will be fine.”

  Milton felt a fire burn across his face as the embarrassment settled in. Why did Krample have to call it that in front of Xallia? There was nothing festive about it. “Sorry, Xallia, I don’t fly well sometimes.”

  “Happens to the best of us, don’t worry about it,” she said before turning to Krample.

  “Do you really think Bargland would try to kill us?”

  Krample seemed to consider this for a few moments. “I really don’t know who else would. We have nothing of value on this ship, and they sure as galactamint weren’t trying to capture it for themselves. The hull is banged up pretty bad from those bullets. I’m going to have a full suite of weapon systems installed once all this is over.”

  Milton made a beeline toward the nearest cleaning bot, removing it from its slot on the wall and putting it to work. “Are you sure Gordon is working today?”

  Krample nodded. “He works every day but the weekends. He’ll be there, we just need to get to Chunky Cheddar’s before closing. He still lives in the third storage closet still, I think.”

  Milton grimaced. Last time they had met with Gordon in his ‘home’ there had barely been any space to walk between the broken arcade games gathering dust and the unstable mountains of mostly empty pizza boxes threatening to spill over at any moment. That and the giant vat rats lurking beneath their grease-coated cardboard lairs.

  Fortunately, the rest of the trip to the Circle-S station was uneventful. Repair shops, seeing the damage to the Hopper blasted the ship with bids for the repairs as they approached the main docking bay of the station. Krample didn’t seem too concerned about having the repairs done now, so Milton just tuned out the ads, cutting the auxiliary comms channel from the grid to drown out the noise and unimportant advertisements.

  Without any cargo on board, there were no duties to pay to land, not that it would matter, anyway. Krample paid for a week of storage on the Hopper in one of the cleaner dry docks on the station with instructions to debit his account for any overages if their stay ended up lasting longer. With the last few minutes it took to scan the hold, Krample loaded all the blasters in a transferable cargo crate which could be moved to another ship if needed, grabbing a blaster pistol for each of them and distributing one to Milton and Xallia.

  Milton had never really practiced shooting before, but tucked the weapon into his suit jacket as he put on his backpack. The blaster was small enough to avoid suspicion, but packed enough of a punch if he needed it. The three of them exited the boarding ramp and joined a throng of foot traffic as people walked from the docking bays toward the central mall sector of the massive ring-like station.

  “Let’s go see Gordon first. I can get started with him and you can probably take Xallia shopping for new clothes, Milton. You did bring your computer, right?” Krample asked.

  Milton nodded. “It’s in my bag. Doesn’t Gordon have his own though?” He tried to hide his worry, but was failing miserably. The last thing Milton wanted was for Gordon’s fingers to go anywhere near his keyboard. At best, he would have to replace his keycaps, at worst he would need a new lap
top.

  “Yeah, he does. It’s good you have yours just in case, though.”

  “Did you bring yours, by chance?” Milton ventured.

  Krample shook his head. “Nope, I actually don’t own a personal computer that doesn’t belong to the company, believe it or not.”

  Milton decided to let it go for the time being. Maybe he could borrow a sheet of plastic wrap from Chunky Cheddar’s kitchen if Gordon was going to use his computer. If it got to that point, he would do whatever it took to protect his property from that man’s horrible hands.

  “This place really has grown, hasn’t it?” Xallia commented as they stepped onto one of the massive space elevators which would drop them several kilometers to the mall in only a few short minutes.

  “Sure has. This was the second station we opened a virtual kiosk in,” Krample said.

  When they reached the mall, they joined thousands of shoppers as they walked through the massive space filled with stores and lifeforms of all kinds. There was no time for shopping though—not yet.

  They reached Chunky Cheddar’s where the noise of digital games, screaming children, and outdated music poured from the decorated glitter-glass doors, leaking into the general space of the mall. Milton sighed heavily as they walked in and the smell of greasy pizza flooded his nose. The pizza wasn’t horrible—it wasn’t good, but it wasn’t horrible. Milton just associated the smell with Gordon and that seemed to ruin it for him. He could hardly see through the glass through all the ads plastered on the surface, advertising family specials where you could get two liters of galactic cola with any purchase of a pizza, and the new games and prizes that were available for the month.

  As they walked inside, Milton cringed.

  Chunky Cheddar himself, an oversized mascot wearing a purple space suit, walked over to greet them. “Welcome to my arcade. I’m Chunky Cheddar!” the man in the giant vat rat costume declared. Milton took a measured step back from the mascot he despised. He never did understand why Chunky Cheddar’s still had living mascots—it was almost strange to the point of being creepy. It seemed like it would be a lot cheaper just to throw a cheap android in the suits and have them work all day without pay.

  “Thank you. We’re here to see Gordon, actually. He’s the assistant manager,” Krample said.

  “Ah, yes. He’s actually the assistant assistant manager here, it’s his gig on the side when he’s not coding or working maintenance on any of the broken games,” Chunky Cheddar said. The giant mascot turned to face Milton who was scowling at him. “Heyya, buddy! You’re my new best friend. What’s your name? Are you excited to play some games and win some prizes? My friends make some great pizza, too!”

  Milton looked at the mascot with disgust. “No, I’m not here to play games. I’m here for business with Gordon, nothing more.”

  “Are you sure? You look like you want to play some games, maybe buy a couple beers at the bar,” Chunky continued.

  Milton decided to ignore him. He really hated this place more than he wanted to admit, and he was starting to realize that wasn’t just because of Gordon.

  Chunky Cheddar decided to give up on Milton, turning back to Krample. “You know where storage closet three is?”

  “Yeah, I know the place. Thank you, Chunky Cheddar,” Krample said, patting the costumed man on the arm and leading the party to the back. Milton had really hoped Gordon would have moved to a new work space. He knew he shouldn’t be hopeful that Gordon cleaned the place up, but some small part of him wanted to believe.

  The three of them made their way through the arcade, passing through hordes of kids with pockets bulging with golden Chunky Cheddar tokens and their ticket winnings which they would redeem for cheap prizes when they were done playing or their parents decided it was time to go. It was a brilliant business model, Milton had to admit. The full-service bar for the parents in the corner of the arcade’s space was also probably helping the bottom line. The constant omnipresence of the creepy Chunky Cheddar mascot crew were enough to drive a lot of people to the drink, the bar was the only place in the whole building where they weren’t lurking.

  Milton took in a deep breath as they opened the door to storage closet three. While the space was huge, it was loaded to the brim with discarded Chunky Cheddar’s pizza boxes. They were stacked in massive piles reaching the ceiling. Some piles had spilled, filling even the floor with greasy cardboard and forgotten, molded crusts. “Looks like he didn’t clean the place,” Milton sighed. “We’ll go shopping soon, Xallia, I promise.”

  Xallia, while she didn’t look thrilled to go inside, set her jaw and trudged forward behind Krample and Milton with determination.

  “Gordon, buddy, it’s Krample!”

  “Krample! What brings you to my humble abode? Sorry about the mess, there’s a bit of a vat rat problem at the moment and I don’t want to disturb them,” Gordon called from some unseen part of the room.

  Milton restrained himself from commenting that Gordon had caused the vat rat problem in the first place. This room was the reason why Milton would avoid eating Chunky Cheddar’s pizza at any cost. Food inspectors didn’t think to check what was supposed to be a maintenance closet for arcade games for conditions which might compromise the health safety of the rest of the building. If there were vat rats here, there were vat rats in the rest of the building. What kind of business picked a cartoonized vat rat as their frontrunner, anyway?

  The walls of pizza boxes narrowed as they passed through toward the back where Gordon’s computer equipment was set up. As they cleared it, Gordon stood to greet them, a smile fixated on his face. “It’s been quite a while, I assume you’re here to hire me for some freelance work? I got a promotion here, you know. I became the assistant assistant manager, but I’m now Chunky Cheddar’s only certified pepperoni captain.” Gordon was impossibly skinny for his diet of three large Chunky Cheddar’s pepperoni pizzas every day plus whatever other spare pepperoni he could scrounge up. His long black hair, covering a rod of pepperoni tactically perched behind his right ear, looked like it had been coated in industrial oil, but the truth was that it was just pizza and pepperoni grease.

  “That’s great, Gordon,” Krample said, seemingly unphased by the man’s greasy appearance and the odor of the room. “Yeah, we’re here to hire you. Any minute now the media streams are going to break a huge story. I’m finally going to become Krample Claus.”

  “Would that have to do with this?” Gordon asked, fishing around his desk before handing Krample a card Milton knew all too well. It looked like Circle-S had already been hit by the funkiller initiative Krample had pushed out.

  “Yes, it would. That was all us, but it doesn’t seem that way, does it?”

  “It doesn’t seem that way, I only pieced it together once you showed up. How did you do it? I’m quite impressed.”

  “Milton can answer that better than me, this was a joint idea, but he was the one who made it happen.”

  Milton beamed at the praise. “It’s a catalytic reaction within the components. The chemicals form a barrier then synthesize the reaction to convert the physical product to that card. The atoms align themselves in away so that the text becomes visible. It’s all preprogrammed.”

  “Where do I come in? It seemed you already have a well-developed plan,” Gordon said, taking a seat again and pulling up the Circle-S newsfeed on one of his monitors. Milton couldn’t see anything on the disappearance of Krample Co products yet.

  “We were hoping you could help us track down Galactic Claus,” Krample said. “In lieu of immediate pay now, we would offer a percentage bonus of total profits from Galaxmas sales to the government up to a mutually agreed limit.”

  Gordon shook his head, grinning. “I’ve tried to track Galactic Claus for you many times, Krample. And you know I love your company even if you do owe me a new Galamax X7000 for the one you just vaporized for your evil scheme. The problem is this Galactic Claus is good—he has no digital fingerprint across the entire holonet, and i
t seems he’s spent quite a lot of money on some very high-end, discreet contractors to encrypt or erase everything with his identity attached to it. Even when I allegedly busted into the Jolian government private records for you, there was nothing other than a few dateless, locationless mentions of Galactic Claus and the system’s policies on distribution of Galaxmas presidents to its citizens.”

  “Galactic Claus will have to talk to us this time, though. The Jolian government has no choice but to make a statement—they’re going to revoke the contract with Galactic Claus, and we can win that bid,” Krample urged.

  “If you’re so sure of that, then why do you want to talk to Galactic Claus in the first place?”

  “Because it might be in our best interest to buyout what will become a worthless company. We can leverage its resources to meet the Galaxmas quota this year. I think the Jolian government is going to expect a lot of revolt and expect that it won’t be able to deliver presents to citizens in good standing this year. If Krample Co promises to deliver this year, in just three months, then we eliminate the excess competition.”

  Gordon frowned. “I guess I still don’t understand. You don’t think Galactic Claus is a mega corporation with many investors who are all going to want a piece of the pizza?”

  “That might be the case, but they aren’t a public company in the Jolian system,” Krample said. “Their investors, I believe, will be quite eager to liquidate their holdings and exit the venture. Krample Co does have the cash reserves for a modest buyout which would be a much better offer than they would be likely to get otherwise.”

  “Look, Krample. You’re evil, I get that, but you’re actually a pretty all right man to be friends with. I wouldn’t go as far as to call you a villain, but like me, you’re willing to bend the rules to get what you want when it doesn’t harm others directly.”