kept coming, who let him stab as many times as he wanted, made the mercenary shudder. “I can walk if I have to.”
“Good,” added Zeena, perhaps a bit too eagerly.
Turlock slowly rose to a sitting position, and though his head wasn’t exactly happy about it, it didn’t explode. He tried glaring at the woman, but it was too hard holding his head up. “So who the hell are you, really?”
“You wouldn’t believe me.”
“Probably not, but why don’t you tell me a story anyway? It’ll keep my mind off my skull.”
“I will admit,” added Marve, “it is a bit difficult to believe you chose to fly on a direct route over a tiny drug lab in the middle of thousands of hectares of wasteland.”
Zeena extended a hand to Turlock, who looked at it with a scowl. “Oh, right.” She switched to offering him her left hand, which he accepted. With deceptive strength, she helped pull him up onto his feet. Wiping her palm on the front of her shirt, she said: “I suppose you two wouldn’t have dug me out of that wreck if you were in with them.” She pointed in the direction of Ariagist.
“We were hired to check out the lab,” replied the Lotian, who began to ascend the rocky slope to their west. “Not to do anything about you.”
Before following, Zeena said: “Fine. My real name is Lanae Eldevoro.”
Turlock would’ve laughed, but she’d said he wouldn’t believe it. Catching up to her, he asked: “How often do you get mistaken for the famous one?”
“Hardly ever, since I am the famous one, and I took great pains to not be recognized.”
This time he did laugh. The bark that escaped his throat brought a fresh wave of thudding around the inside of his cranium. “Great. You know, if the kidnappers hadn’t actually killed Ms. Eldevoro before her parents could deliver the ransom, I’d have almost given the story serious consideration.”
“Well, that was all staged,” Zeena continued, as if it would dismiss all his doubts. “My parents weren’t going to let me do anything but parade around in front of paparazzi and get married to somebody else as rich and vacuous as them. I almost really did get killed when I staged the explosion, by the way; having my face redone was actually the easy part.”
“Okay, so let’s say I bought that load—which is highly doubtful—”
“—I really don’t care if you buy it or not.”
“So let’s say I did. What would bring you to a toilet bowl like Andajhar? Besides the fact that a gossip columnist wouldn’t last five minutes on this planet without being made into some Gimp’s chew toy.”
“Let’s just say I answered a higher calling. As part of my assignment to this planet, I traveled to Ariagist to infiltrate the Cartel. I’d gotten inside the Home Compound itself when a Pentarian bodyguard identified me.”
They reached the pinnacle of the slope, which turned out to be the top of a mesa. Turlock heaved himself up one last obstacle and paused, stretching his hands above his head. “Ah. Nanos are finally doing me some good. So I thought you changed your face. How’d they identify you?”
From ahead, Marve said: “Pentarians have a highly-evolved sense of smell.”
“I figured that out later. I changed my appearance but couldn’t do anything about my pheromone signature. He gave me a look that swept a very bad feeling over me, so I got out of there in a hurry. Stole the first Cartel hovercar I came across.”
“Oh… so you’re some sort of vigilante like that old folk-hero… you know, the one with the bats…”
Zeena rubbed her temples as if Turlock’s headache was communicable. “Batman.”
“Right. So, you were sent here to clean up the Ariagist Cartel? By yourself? You’re good, hon, but nobody is that good.”
“No. The Cartel is small-time.”
“So why mess with a shitty little lab in the middle of nowhere?”
Zeena stopped, and scanned the heavens for a second. Turlock tried to follow her gaze, but the sun’s brightness jammed his eyelids shut.
“Those horrible creatures that someone put around the lab… how do you think they got here?”
Marve fielded that one. “They were smuggled, obviously, but that would be full of challenges, even to a backwater like Andajar.”
“Right. Galactic Customs puts a bioscan on every object approaching the planet that’s larger than your head.”
“What they can’t confiscate and levy fines for,” said Turlock, “they want to tax.”
“So someone with either the technology to cloak through a Class One bioscan, or with the influence to get Galactic Customs to look the other way, brought an invasive species—a particularly nasty one, from what I could see—to a planet just to put a damper in a regional drug cartel’s operations.”
“They’re sadistic,” grunted Turlock.
“They’re sending a message,” corrected Marve.
“Right. And if I told you that I was sent to Andajhar alone, and that I’m still relatively new at this, you’d rightly conclude that this sort of thing is happening all over.”
“Who sent you?” asked Turlock.
“We don’t work with contractors,” she replied, with an air of finality that let him know that was all the answer he’d get.
Marve, seemingly unfettered by the lack of an answer, said: “Is someone trying to monopolize the drug trade on multiple planets? Or all illicit activity?”
Zeena shook her head. “The opposite. Someone’s trying to end it.”
“So if you’re some kind of crusader,” said Turlock, “Why fight it?”
She gave him a look of disgust tempered with pity.
“What?”
“You, of all people, should understand how wrong it is for morality to come at the end of a gun, Hinover Martin Turlock.”
The urge to slug her shot through his thoughts like lightning. Their eyes locked, and he barely noticed Marve move into position to interpose himself. Maybe the bug-man’s zen demeanor was rubbing off on him. Instead of matching insult for insult, he muttered: “You don’t know shit about me.”
Then he spun and started to walk away.
Right into a quartet of hovercars as they touched down around them, doors popping open, occupants spilling out and taking aim with an armory of rifles and hand-cannons. Turlock had his guns dropped and hands up before a fifth vehicle, wider and shinier, touched down directly ahead. Its nose bore the star-inlaid hexagon of Nazoran Trans-Works, making him whistle despite the ominous nature of the situation.
The sides of the Nazoran blipped open in silence, movement too quick to be seen by the naked eye. Two burly, expensively-clothed individuals exited: a Pentarian who, had Turlock read old Earth comics as a boy, would have reminded him of the Fantastic Four’s Thing; and a wiry, whip-quick Solaani, whose diminutive stature did little to mitigate the air of menace that radiated from his purple face.
The last man to exit the vehicle wore a nice civilian suit, tailored perfectly to his segmented body and broad neck. His familiar features included compound eyes that wrapped around to the back of his head, six mouths, and a trio of horns tipped in intricately-carved titanium spikes.
“Break your compass?” the horned creature’s voice slithered from his mouths like a team of cultists chanting.
“So good to see you again, Mr. Kvolash. What’s a compass?”
The Pentarian turned his massive head toward the boss, who held up an appendage in abeyance and advanced another step. The scent of cloves and oregano wafted into Turlock’s nostrils; he couldn’t remember which was the natural scent of Kvolash’s race and which came from the ground-up plant they constantly snorted. “You know who your friend is?”
“She claims to be a resurrected celebrity. What I do know is she’s a crappy driver.”
Kvolash took a few strides while admiring the waning afternoon sun. After a moment, he rested a tentacle on the shoulder of the Pentarian. “Rulo here used to work security for the Eldevoro family. He too claims she
’s a—how did you put it? Ah, yes, a resurrected celebrity. The uppermost pair of mouths broke out in grins. That would make her worth a great deal of money to us, though it’s a shame we’re forced to choose between commerce and making a proper example of one who so brazenly snoops around our business.” He advanced toward Zeena, who glared at him with those fascinating eyes. “Gleenax wishes to know where you parked his car, incidentally.”
She pointed in the direction they’d come from. “Back there a few klicks. Not a scratch on it.”
The little Solaani bodyguard’s shoulders twitched in poorly contained mirth, while Kvolash now smiled with four mouths. Turlock couldn’t remember for sure, but he had an inkling those mouths were like the starter-lights at a Dragstrip; when all six lit up, shit hit the fan.
“I’m certain it’s in the same pristine shape that Gleenax so lovingly keeps it.” He twisted his upper segment and head to face Turlock. “Now: what to do with you two? I hire you to bring me answers, and instead I find you crossing the wasteland in an unexpected direction, accompanied by a woman who garnered enough of our attention to necessitate all this.” He swept a tentacle toward the circle of hoodlums and vehicles.
Turlock, mystified that Marve had remained silent for so long, turned to ask his partner: “Hey, why am I doing all the talking?”
“It seemed rude to interrupt you.”
“Well, at the very least, you ought to get our side of the story,” he told Kvolash. “Since it includes what happened to your lab.”
“Oh, you mean the