Ronda spun, swinging her bag out and flicking a hidden switch on the handle. Twin blades snapped horizontally outwards from the base. Voss ducked, but cut it too close for it to be premonition. Still, she was fast and well-trained. That could be a problem.
Giraffe-face was neither of those things. Ronda arced the bag upwards and the blade made a satisfying thunk as it embedded in the side of the woman’s skull.
Blaster-fire screamed across the room. Ronda ducked for cover behind the giraffe-woman, who still teetered on her long, slender legs. With a flick of her wrist, Ronda yanked the bag-blade free and the woman folded like a house of cards, her arms and legs all splaying in different directions on the floor.
“Get her!” roared one of the Xandrie, but Voss’s screech brought them to a halt.
“Wait!” the Imbuka screamed. Her eyes danced behind her curtain of hair. “The nun is mine.”
She lunged, without warning, hands outstretched, hair wafting back behind her to reveal a vicious leer. Ronda swung with her bag, but Voss was already too close. The Imbuka’s hands found Ronda’s throat. A knee found her solar plexus. Ronda’s chest constricted, forcing her to gasp for breath that would not come.
Trying to break the grip was pointless, so she went for the eyes. Her thumbs pressed hard against Voss’s eyeballs, and the Imbuka pulled back, hissing and spitting with rage.
Ronda swung with the bag again, but Voss’s leg snapped up, her foot slamming into the older woman’s wrist. Pain flared up Ronda’s arm. Her grip on the bag slipped and it clattered to the ground, spilling coins, handkerchiefs, mints, reading glasses and half a bag of Spit Nibbles across the floor.
Voss struck like a cobra at Ronda’s throat with her three middle fingers. Ronda managed to deflect, twist, and drove an elbow towards Voss’s face. The younger woman half-dodged, turning a devastating nose-splitter into a glancing blow.
Arms moved, twisted, struck, blocked. There was nothing flashy about the fighting, no flying kicks or spinning backhands. The style could best be described as ‘devastatingly functional’ and, had either woman been fighting another opponent, the emphasis would have been heavily on the ‘devastating’ part.
Ronda landed a solid forearm strike across the bridge of Voss’s nose, staggering the younger woman. For a moment, the future poured back into Ronda’s head like sand, but then the Imbuka recovered and it was gone again.
It bought her an extra half-second warning for the next strike, though, and she ducked quickly, then followed up with two firm strikes to Voss’s kidneys, or whatever the local equivalent of kidneys was. Whatever Voss kept down there in her lower back, the strikes hurt. She stumbled forwards, and Ronda moved in to finish her off.
The Imbuka spun sharply. Ronda caught a glimpse of something shiny and metallic, but her momentum carried her on.
She barely felt the blade slipping into her stomach. It wasn’t until Voss twisted the handle, and that hiss of a giggle escaped her lips again, that Ronda fully grasped just what had happened.
The floor came up to meet her. Ronda heard the cheers of the Xandrie as she fell. She saw them, blurred by tears. Aside from the Greyx, who remained seated, they were all on their feet, whooping and cheering and baying for blood.
Ronda breathed. It gargled in her throat. She clutched her stomach where the knife was buried, and felt the blood seeping out from beneath the ornate handle.
Voss stood over here, giggling, her hair falling back into place in front of her face. Her laughter, and the cheering, were drowned out by the whooshing of Ronda’s heartbeat – fast and frantic, but slowing rapidly.
The Greyx was sitting down. That was important. Ronda thought she remembered something about that, but the pain and the fear and the panic pushed the thought away.
hingIt was something she was unused to, panic. There was no need for panic when you knew what was going to happen next. Now, she didn’t even know if she would have a ‘next’. At the rate her blood was seeping from her gut wound, she doubted it.
Her eyes fell on the scattered contents of her bag. Her homemade Spit Nibbles lay strewn around her, partially crushed from the fight. She found herself reaching for one. Her fingers flaked off the pastry, revealing the dark orange filling inside.
There were Spit Nibbles.
And the Greyx was sitting down.
With some effort, Ronda began to laugh. It was weak and frail, yet it soon rose to fill every space in the room as Voss and the Xandrie fell quiet.
“What’s so funny, nun?” Voss demanded, spitting out that last word like it left a bad taste in her mouth.
“Spit Nibbles,” Ronda wheezed.
Voss frowned behind her hair. “What?”
“Do you know when I learned to make Spit Nibbles?”
When no response came, Ronda shrugged. “No, me neither. See, no-one showed me. I just saw the recipe in my future, and started making them.”
She caught her breath. In the silence, she heard the Greyx groan.
“But I must learn the recipe at some point, otherwise how would I know it now?” said Ronda. “And if I know it now, then I survive this.”
Ronda’s face darkened. “And if I have time to learn the art of Spit Nibbles, that means I haven’t dedicated myself to hunting down everyone in this room and killing them all.” She adjusted her position on the floor. “And the only way that would happen, is if you’re all already dead.”
Across the room, the Greyx stood up sharply. He clutched at his stomach, his eyes bulging in panic. “What … what is h-happening to me?” he managed to wheeze, and then everything from his crotch to his chest exploded, spraying his colleagues in blood, guts, and burning chunks of furry flesh.
Thundercrotch erupted from the wolf-man’s torso, a tiny blaster pistol in his hands and an expression of unbridled rage twisting up his face.
“Die, you motherfonkers!” he howled, rolling on the ground and spraying blaster fire at the shock-frozen Xandrie.
Voss gawped in surprise, then looked down at Ronda, but the old woman was gone.
A blood-soaked blade pressed against the Imbuka’s throat. “I could be wrong, dear, but it’s quite possible I did see all this coming, after all.”
Voss jabbed back an elbow, but Ronda had anticipated it and edged aside. “Isn’t it funny how things work out?” Ronda whispered, then she pulled the blade across Voss’s pale skin, and a thin line of red followed behind it.
The future returned. Ronda turned and hurled the knife through the air, burying it into the chest of a tall, angular Xandrie with a hooked nose and feathery hair.
The semi-transparent orange blob raised a rifle and fired on her. Ronda marched forwards, avoiding each shot before it was fired. The gangster’s eyes became larger and more panic-filled as she drew closer.
He lowered the gun, too late, and tried to hit Ronda with the stock, but she was on him then, her arm around his neck. She removed what was left of his life with a surgical crack, caught his blaster as he fell, and killed three of the remaining Xandrie with one perfectly-aimed shot.
She let Thundercrotch take care of the last one – a particularly stocky creature with skin like a dirty potato – then nodded at the little man in acknowledgement.
“Thank you, dear,” she said.
Thundercrotch sniffed and shrugged. “We’re square now, right?”
“Yes, dear. We’re square.”
Tucking his blaster into the back of his doll-sized pants, Thundercrotch nodded at the blood stain blooming across Ronda’s front.
“You should get that looked at.”
“I do,” Ronda assured him. “It’s touch and go for a while, but ultimately, it looks worse than it is.”
She nodded, pleased, and allowed herself a smile. It was good to be back.
Thundercrotch looked over to where Narp was still at his terminal, text flooding the screen before him. There was something else on the screen, too. A diagram. A diagram of something very large. “Want me to go unplug him?”
“Hmm?” said Ronda. “Oh, no. It’s fine. Leave him to it.”
The little man frowned. “Huh? I thought you wanted to get him out of here.”
Ronda tilted her head left and right. “Well, that wasn’t strictly true,” she said. “This weapon, I don’t want Zertex keeping it, but I couldn’t let the Xandrie get their hands on it, either.”
“So … what? You’re taking it for yourself?”
“Me? Goodness, no, dear. I wouldn’t be able to make use of such a device.”
The future unfolded before her, and a grin spread across her face. It was a good future. Not perfect, because nothing ever is. But good enough.
“But I know a man who can …”
THE END
This story is set between Space Team: Song of the Space Siren and Space Team: The Guns of Nana Joan. Ronda appears in the latter story, where you get to find out who ‘the man’ she refers to in the final line is. So, you know, go check that out if you like.
SPLURT HOME ALONE
A Splurt Solo Adventure
SPLURT HOME ALONE
Cal was upset. Splurt could tell from the way thousands of red hot needles were jabbing into his psyche.
One of the Not Cals was shouting at him. It was the metal one, who shouted at Cal a lot. Cal was shouting back. Splurt understood the meaning, if not the words themselves. The things Cal was shouting weren’t very nice, but then the things the metal Not Cal was shouting weren’t particularly pleasant, either.
The other Not Cals were getting involved. The red hot needles became a sort of coarse yellow sandpaper across the surface of Splurt’s mind, and he briefly debated whether to retreat into the safety of the ship’s overhead vents, or to kill everyone who wasn’t Cal, thereby effectively ending the argument.
He opted for the overhead vents. Even though the Not Cals shouted at Cal a lot, Splurt knew Cal liked them. He didn’t fully understand why, but then there was a lot Splurt either didn’t understand, or simply chose to ignore.
The laws of Physics fell into that latter category, for example. The card game, Snap, fell into the first.
Splurt could spend hours in the vents. He could explore the whole ship, getting into every nook and cranny, while something about the insulation shielded him from the psychic barrage of whatever Cal’s current emotional state might be.
If he stretched himself out long enough, he could criss-cross through the ducts and pipework until he met himself coming the other way. That was always fun, although the sandpapering his mind had received meant he didn’t really feel like it today.
Instead, he formed himself into a little bicycle and trundled off along the largest vent, weaving and zig-zagging from side to side as he set out to explore the ship yet again.
He was somewhere near the back when he heard the hatch open. Splurt rippled back into blobbiness as Cal thundered past beneath him and hurried down the ramp. The metal Not Cal clanked along at his heels, but stopped just inside the ship.
“Don’t think we’re coming after you, man!” the Not Cal hollered. “I mean it. We ain’t. Storm off all you like.”
Although the words were just unintelligible noises to Splurt, their meanings lit up like animated pictures in his subconscious, and he understood them perfectly.
“Like, where’s he going?” asked the hairy Not Cal with the pointy teeth.
“Don’t know, don’t care,” replied the metal one. “We ain’t going after him.”
“We should go after him,” said the Not Cal who kept crashing the ship. She and the hairy one pushed past the metal guy.
“No! What did I just say? We ain’t going after him!” said the metal one. He tutted, muttered something shaped like an unexploded bomb, then hurried down the ramp. “Wait up. You’re all going to get yourself killed out here.”
Splurt wobbled slightly, waiting to see if anything else would happen.
Nothing did.
He shrugged, then tumbled into a forward roll. He enjoyed forward rolls. Backward rolls made him nervous, but he could forward roll until the space cows came home.
“They’ve left the door open,” said The Voice.
Splurt stopped rolling. His eyes flopped around inside him for a moment, like Bingo balls in a machine filled with barely set jello. He looked around, searching for the source of The Voice, but failing to find it as usual.
“And they’ve gone out without their coats on,” said The Voice. “They’ll catch their deaths out there.”
There was a long pause. Splurt didn’t move.
“No, wait. Desert planet. Forget that.”
The Voice sniffed. Splurt wondered where its nose was. He’d looked for it before, but had never managed to locate it.
“Well, if they think I’m going to close the hatch for them, they’ve got another thing—”
There was a sound like an old-fashioned camera flash bulb popping. Splurt had found out about old-fashioned camera flash bulbs while browsing through Cal’s head. He’d also found out about Skittles (the candy), Skittles (the game), and learned all the lyrics to the song Cool Rider from the movie, Grease 2.
The Voice stopped. Splurt listened – or, more accurately, thought. He expected The Voice to start again, because The Voice seemed to like the sound of itself, but it said nothing.
And then Splurt heard something else. It wasn’t The Voice. It wasn’t any voice, in fact. It was footsteps, softly padding up the landing ramp.
Splurt forward rolled until he found a grille in the vent. Two men – one tall and skinny, the other short and stocky – were creeping into the ship. One of them was studying some sort of gadget he had on his wrist. It wasn’t a watch – Splurt knew about watches, too – but something more complicated.
The smaller man carried a tool designed for breaking things. Splurt had never seen one before, but its shape made its purpose obvious.
“You sure security’s down?” the smaller man asked.
“We got a few minutes,” his companion advised. “But whoa, this ship is weird. I haven’t seen a system like it. So, let’s not waste time.”
“Agreed. Let’s split up. Grab anything that isn’t fixed down, and rip out anything that is.”
Splurt rippled in the vent above them. If he’d had a mouth at that moment, or had been capable of emitting a sound, he’d have gasped. These were bad men. They wanted to steal from Cal and the Not Cals.
That wouldn’t do at all.
* * *
Marvok Uns-Krill snuck into what he assumed was the ship’s engine room, although it was like no other engine room he’d ever seen.
There was a warp disk, which was good. He could shift that for a few thousand credits. The housing would go for less, but it’d still be worth something. The value of the other stuff was a mystery, though. He had no idea what most of it even was, but someone would pay good money for it. Someone always did.
Checking his wrist scanner to make sure the alarm system was still deactivated, Marvok slid a crack-bar out of his sleeve and approached the warp disk.
* * *
There was some things Splurt knew, and some things he just sort of felt.
He didn’t know what the form he had taken actually was, for example, but he felt like it was the right one. Like it was somehow appropriate, given the circumstances.
He was still up near the ceiling, but he was stretched out across part of the floor, too, and running up the wall between them. It was a complicated shape in some ways, and yet so very simple in others.
If he could’ve giggled, Splurt would have done so. Instead, he just watched and waited as the taller intruder drew closer.
* * *
Marvok’s foot snagged on a tripwire made of string. He stumbled a little, then looked up in surprise as a pot of paint swung down from the ceiling towards him.
It cracked him across the temple, fracturing his skull and blinding him in one eye. Marvok emitted a sort of lowing wail as he staggered backwards, green blood oozing from the wound on his e
ye socket.
CLANK!
A bear trap snapped shut around one of his legs, its serrated metal teeth chomping deep into his flesh. The lowing wail became a burbling scream as he fell backwards and thudded his head against the warp disk housing.
Instinctively, Marvok grabbed for the bear trap, trying to prize its jaws apart. As he touched it, it collapsed into slime, then rolled out of sight.
Clutching at his bleeding leg, Marvok turned, searching for the goo-ball. In its place was a smiling blond-haired boy who punched the air in delight, whispered a silent, “Yes!” then ran out into the corridor.
“Wh-what the fonk?” Marvok whimpered.
* * *
Jarty Boorsk was trying to jimmy a control panel out of the ship’s dash when he heard Marvok’s screams. The fact he was screaming was not particularly unusual. Marvok was easily startled, and probably not really built for a life of crime. The way he was screaming now, though, suggested he wasn’t just scared, he was hurt.
Racing out into the corridor, Jarty had barely made it four big bounding paces when his foot found the skateboard. He careened along the corridor on the thing, balancing clumsily on one foot with his arms wobbling at his sides.
Then, as he neared the door of the engine room, the skateboard slid out from beneath him. Jarty went horizontal in the air, then slammed against the ship’s metal floor. He watched, frozen in confusion, as the skateboard sailed up, up, up, then plunged down, down, down towards him.
The wooden edge of the board bounced off the bridge of his nose, shattering it.
Then it did it again, because it had been so much fun the first time.
“J-Jarty!” cried Marvok from the engine room. “Where are you?”
“I’m here!” Jarty managed while gagging on his own blood. “I’ve been hurt.”
“You’ve been hurt?! Get in here, quick.”
Jarty rolled onto his side and clumsily got to his feet. The skateboard was nowhere to be seen.
“Kroysh. What happened to you?” he asked, as he entered the engine room. Marvok’s leg was hanging off below the knee, his face was awash with blood, and his right eye looked like it had exploded.
Space Team: A Lot of Weird Space Shizz: Collected Short Stories Page 13
