"Reptar," he wheezed.
After a very satisfying lunch downtown with her new boss and co-workers, Ari settled at her desk to work on the Intergalactic Inquiry.
She made copies of everything she could find. Hard copies, which she printed out, bound and stuffed into locked drawers in her brand-new office. She made digital files as well and beamed them back to Fleek’s ship.
She created a new folder in an entertainment drive and called it "hub files." The boring title paired with the unlikely event that anybody would ever look for something important buried in a space ship's entertainment drive made her feel much better. The information was secure.
All of that done, she could finally get down to the actual work of the Intergalactic Inquiry itself. This was big. The kind of thing that put an entire planet on the map big. Now Ari understood why her new boss wanted a second opinion before proceeding. One does not want to be the person responsible for bringing unprecedented attention from galactic-level governmental authorities and make a mistake.
Ari scrutinized every detail and went over every concept. It was still just an Inquiry, not an actual complaint. Not yet, anyway. There was no question in Ari's mind that there was enough information for a complaint, but there were procedures in place. Ari assumed that they were there for a reason, and she was prepared to respect them.
She finished the form and triple checked it. It was fine. She should have just taken it to her boss, but she wasn't quite ready. She backed up the actual form the same way she had backed up the other information. It left all her saved paperwork in a neat little bow. She liked neat little bows.
She carried a copy of the finished paperwork across the hall and presented it to her boss. "Here you go. Feel free to check it yourself, but believe me, it's perfect."
His face beamed as he skimmed one page and then the next. "Well done, Ari, well done. I knew you could do it." He looked up at her and smiled. "Of course, I suspected it as well; it's just that nobody believed me. And I couldn't prove it. And now here I am, staring at it in black and white, proof and all."
He smiled again. This time it bothered Ari a little. Partially because his mouth was more round than wide and when he tried to go wider with it, well it just looked hideous. And partially because in his hand was a laser gun that was pointed at her head.
"Surprised?" he asked. "I knew you would be. Isn’t this a great secret? I’m going to file it myself."
Ari slumped into her chair. Not again.
She should have known her first day on the job was going way too well. Kirian would throw this right back in her face.
Oh yeah, Kirian.
"You're making a big mistake," she told him, raising her hands. "I'm not here alone. I'm with a Celestial."
"That's the worst lie I've ever heard. Celestials are just a space myth. Like Seahorses."
Despite the threatening gesture with the gun, if he was in a hurry to kill her it didn't show. Maybe she could use this to stall. She was here with Kirian, and with any luck, she would show up in time to save her. Again.
"It's true, believe it or not." Ari leaned forward enough to whisper conspiratorially, but hopefully not enough to make him shoot her.
"I'm here with Kirian, Destroyer of Planets."
Stars, Kirian was right, it was a pretty great title. For a moment, the certainty in her boss's face faltered.
"I doubt it," he said. "But hey, I've got some time. I'm going to look this Inquiry over some more. We'll wait for this Planet Destroyer of yours together."
He looked down, shuffled a few of the pages, and then looked up again.
"Just in case, though, I'll call security and tell them to scrutinize all new hires in the last forty-eight hours and any unidentified persons acting suspiciously. Security just loves blanket excuses to round people up. Your friend, if she isn't imaginary, is about to be captured." He picked up the phone and dialed.
Ari swallowed. Sorry, Kirian.
Chapter 11
Spika pulled his brand new, specially made, heat resistant boots up on the console in full view of the handful of prisoners in the holding cell behind him.
"Cobalt blue, the last pair in my size. I've been waiting eons for these babies. What do you guys think?" It was very hard, as a Staar to find stylish, mega heat resistant clothing.
"Hot!" a prisoner in the back of the ship yelled.
"What are you talking about? It's only," he checked the space ship's temperature gauge, “a hundred and five degrees. It's down several degrees since last time, bunch of whiners. There's plenty of water back there." He was irritated that they didn't appreciate his new boots.
He shook his head. Prisoners these days were so self-centered. They just weren't as conversational as in ages gone by. Back then you had your real bad guys, beings who could talk your ear off, nearly get you to set them free, even. It had almost happened more than once.
Then, he would drop them off at the correctional facility, after exchanging contact information for taunting purposes. What good was a nemesis if you didn't keep in touch? Later, if he was really lucky, they would escape. Then the chase was on. Information gained from each other during hours or days of back and forth during interstellar travel would be used in the search. It always made the reunions epic, with one-liners and name calling. Those were the days he missed the most. Now all he got were intermittent complaints about being hot. Lame.
A beep told him the ship was approaching the appropriate correctional facility.
"You know," he said, "for a bunch of small time, garden variety criminals, you sure are complainers. I remember the Ice Marlin bounty hunters in the Sardoff system eons ago. Kept their ship at twenty below. Only ten percent of them ever reached the jail alive. And I'll bet they complained less than you guys."
He landed the craft, then went to the door to check the identification of the guards who had come for the prisoners. Standard and boring procedure. Here are the prisoners. Sign the documents.
Spika paused before hitting the button to resume flight. Where to? And what was the point, exactly? Were there any real villains left in the universe?
Real villains. There was the Intergalactic hot list, of course, no pun intended. A dozen or so of them, give or take, at any given time who had committed serious enough violations to be chased across galaxies. Of course, villains with the intelligence and ability to escape the galaxy were few and far between in the first place. And it would take a being of infinite patience to pursue them into endless space. Infinite patience, lots of research and a wormhole full of luck.
Spika considered himself a patient Staar. He had waited a long time for the new boots. He admired their shiny-ness as well as the hard-core buckles. Some things were worth the wait.
But his patience and research budget weren't endless. So, he had set very specifically, thoroughly-researched probability traps into the void hoping one of them would be triggered. It was a very, very, very long shot. Sort of like the odds of catching a fish by blindly throwing a spear into a river that had a decent population of fish.
He tapped into the console to check on the traps. One of them had, in fact, been triggered. He pulled out his phone. Oh yes, there it is.
He frowned. The notification had been sent to him decades ago, but the phone had been on mute. He checked, but there were no additional messages.
Maybe he should get out more. Meet people. Do the fun stuff he saw on television. He thought about it and decided it was a bad idea. Television existed so he could experience all of those things without having to encounter other beings on their turf, endure their mindless banalities, and laugh at their stupid jokes.
Cheers to you, television.
Television and take-out food. The two best inventions in the history of the universe.
Okay, back to the trap.
Step one, wait for a trigger. Step two, send out a warning. He tapped in the standard intergalactic “we're coming for you” tripe.
Done.
The message w
as transmitted to everything within twenty light years of the trigger. The actual triangulation of the galaxy and planet to narrow down the quadrant for the trigger would take a while to calculate. So, he set the program running on the computer and then turned his mind to more pressing matters. Take-out food. Pizza or burgers? Maybe BBQ.
The alarm had been triggered, and that was something to celebrate. Tonight, it would be steak. Steak take-out was tricky, though, and would take a lot of sifting through restaurant reviews.
While he ate, Spika glanced at the area still triangulating on the console map.
Huh, that's weird.
A massive area within the triangulation was running dangerously low on Palladium. Maybe he should send out a tracer. He hadn't sent out a tracer in years. The thought excited him. The old cat and mouse game.
The tracer process was a secret and a long shot. Less than three percent of tracers hit a target. It only worked on living Palladium. If it did hit a target though, it boosted the Palladium level in the whole area. Of course, he could never enter that type of thing into the console if prisoners were watching. They couldn't know the secrets of the Staars. But he had just dropped them all off; the place was empty. Just him and dinner.
He decided to go for it. Another job buzzed in, but he ignored it for now. He deployed the tracer. Then, with a feeling of satisfaction, he sat back. Maybe his luck was finally turning.
Chapter 12
Kirian made her way toward the office where she’d left Ari. It was obvious that she had been made, security was everywhere now.
She exited the elevator, ran down the hallway, and approached the executive level. She ducked into Ari's office. Nothing.
She searched room to room, kicking open doors. She'd have been more polite about it, but this planet was pissing her off. A different alarm went off on her watch. Not again. An electric shock pulsed through her bracelets. Dropping to her knees, she screamed.
"Kirian?" It was Ari's voice.
The electric buzzing stopped. Kirian got up unsteadily and ducked her head into the office Ari’s voice had come from. Ari was sitting in a chair, and her boss was behind the desk. The boss had a gun out, and it was trained on Ari. The minute Kirian stepped into the doorway; the gun pointed at her instead.
"Hello, Ari," Kirian announced, unfazed by the gun, "I haven’t checked the deletion data yet for this planet, but I’m assuming you’ve changed your mind about staying, yes?"
"Thanks for not throwing that in my face,” Ari answered. “I appreciate it.”
“What’s going on?” New Boss got tired of being ignored.
“Told you," Ari said triumphantly. "Meet Kirian, Destroyer of Planets."
Ari glanced at Kirian behind her. "Kirian, what happened? Are you okay?"
"Look," said Kirian, taking a step toward him. "I'm not in the mood for this. It's been a crappy day so far. Just let Ari go, and I won't hurt you." She turned to Ari. "The blood isn't mine."
"You're not going anywhere," New Boss answered. "Either of you." He waved the gun from one girl to the other and then back.
"Ari, what's going on here? We don't have time for this. I assume you're planning on coming with me now that your boss has turned on you. Again. How many of your bosses do I have to kill, anyway?"
The boss tried to look more menacing in light of these new revelations, but he was already maxed out. Kirian squinted at the gun in his hand—a Jkeasden 550, mostly decorative. Probably hadn't even been charged in a while.
"That's a pretty toy," Kirian said, and then dove to her left behind a water cooler. As she suspected, the gun followed her.
Kirian pulled out her sleep ray and fired from the cover of the water cooler. New Boss fired too, but the weak ray simply bounced off of the cooler and ricocheted into the wall, making a small popping noise. Kirian’s blast hit its mark. New boss’s head fell forward with a thump onto the desk.
Kirian turned in the direction of the doorway to go, but Ari was headed for her now sleeping boss. What now?
Ari unceremoniously wrenched the man's head up, grabbed the papers underneath, then let go again. His head fell hard and made a loud, hollow thud that echoed around the room. Then she kicked him in the shin.
Atta girl. "Feel better now, Ari? Let's go."
"One more minute." Ari darted in Kirian's direction, which was good, then back toward her office, which was decidedly bad.
"We're out of minutes, Ari. Security is all over the place looking for me."
She waited for a sign that Ari understood what a hurry they were in.
"Ari, are you listening?"
Ari tapped furiously on her keypad. "Done," Ari announced.
"Look," said Kirian, "what was so important that you continued to put both of our lives in danger despite me telling you that we absolutely, positively had to leave?" The answer had better be good, or she would save Ari only to drop her off at the equivalent of the first interstellar truck stop they happened to come across. She clenched her fists.
Ari was up from behind the desk and running towards her now. "Sorry. I had to file an official Intergalactic Inquiry."
"You did what?" Kirian asked, but as soon as the words left her mouth, she found it impossible to focus.
"Aren't we supposed to be leaving?" Ari asked. "Kirian. You okay?"
Kirian started deep breathing. "Do you have any idea what you've done?"
"The Inquiry? Oh, believe me, nothing to fear. All my ducks were in a row. I kept copies of everything and—"
An alarm started blaring overhead accompanied by menacing red flashing lights. Kirian gulped in some air, grabbed Ari, and ran.
"Reptar," Soda repeated. "Isn't that where your girlfriend is? That Kirian?"
Soda concentrated on Kirian. It made her slightly dizzy, but sent electric shocks into Kirian’s handcuffs. It was the only thing she could think to do in her rage.
"Do you know what this means?" she quaked. "Meetings. Formal interviews. You have no idea what it's like. These board members are so stupid and tedious."
Soda took a breath and attempted to stop shaking.
Drexyl was still suspended in the air by his neck, hanging from a trembling tentacle. Soda blinked and released him. He fell and landed with a thud which, ironically, seemed to knock the wind back into him.
"Sorry. And you're welcome."
"That's you," coughed Drexyl. "Always coming to my rescue after you nearly kill me."
She watched him gulp in air.
"Why do you care?" he asked. "What does a single complaint even matter? In fact, let me point out that it is not even a complaint, it's just an inquiry."
"What does it matter?" The anger was causing purple spots in her vision now. She laid down all of her tentacles and tried to assume a relaxed posture like it said to do in the Ancient and Special Species Relaxation Manual she had just spent oodles of money on. So far it had not worked as advertised.
"It matters," Soda said, inhaling in through her nose and out through her beak, as per the book's instructions. Unlike most of the advice, the structured breathing was starting to help.
"Because now they have a way into my world, my life, my time. I was insulated by the lack of complaints. I know all of this because I wrote my contract. And now it's only a matter of time before—"
The console emitted a beep. Drexyl hit a button to answer the communication.
"Take a message," she ordered.
"Um," said Drexyl. "Her Supreme Overlord, Highness of the Galaxy can't come to the communicator right now." He turned to stare at her before continuing. "Can I take a message?"
"The Intergalactic Civilian Oversight Committee requests your presence immediately for an informal question and answer session regarding a recently received Inquiry."
"Great," deadpanned Soda, "just perfect. Now I have to find my formal jeans."
Kirian led Ari out of the labyrinthine building, using her watch to navigate.
"Why are we hurrying so much? Is the planet going to b
e deleted or not?"
Kirian realized that she hadn't checked. “Because security is looking for us. Let’s get out of the building first, or would you like to spend the last few moments of your life in a prison cell?”
They exited the skyscraper into daylight and ducked down an alley. Kirian checked her communicator, fully expecting a planetary deletion order but she was wrong. She checked again.
"Weird."
"What?"
"It's a green light. The planet won't be destroyed. There hasn't been a green light in quite a while."
"This stupid planet gets to live?"
"I'm as unhappy about that as you, Ari, but hey," she said, "those are the breaks."
A large, green, heavily-muscled creature stepped into the alley with them and put a gun to Kirian’s temple.
"Hello, Kirian. We gotta stop meeting this way." He looked Kirian over. "You look even worse than usual."
"Ari," said Kirian, "meet Kracken. He's been trying to kill me for the last three dozen planets."
Chapter 13
"How's the research going, Trish? Nothing like waiting until the last minute."
Trisha started and closed her laptop. "You can't just sneak up on people like that."
Jen smirked and continued to lurk in Trisha's dorm doorway. "You look like you just saw a ghost. What topic did you get stuck with, anyway?"
Jen was right, though. Trisha waited too long to choose a thesis topic, and all the good ones had already been taken, so she was stuck sifting through the butt end of the dark net investigating conspiracy theories. To graduate, each of the seventy-three members of the senior class of the Benadign University of Journalism had to study conspiracy theories.
In fact, hers was one of the last classes to do so, if she were graduating just two years later, she'd be able to investigate something normal, like local politicians or criminals or something useful.
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