The table’s underside punished me for not keeping my head down with a ringing clonk to the skull, dizzying me for a few moments. By the time I had cleared the spots from my eyes, I finally peered out at the dance floor to see that Carlos wasn’t there.
Something hit the floor heavily to my immediate left, and the snooker table was brushed aside as if it were a shopping bag being blown by the breeze. I looked up and saw something massive and fist shaped silhouetted against the light for a split second before I rolled, and Carlos punched the floor where I had lain, instantly turning thick-pile shag carpet into a sheet of wafer-thin cloth.
I’d had a feeling he hadn’t shown up for a friendly checkup and a fist bump. I scrabbled away on my back with my feet and elbows, pain grinding away at my Zoob-stricken knee, unable to look away from his black, beady little eyes. With few options left to me, I tried to talk. “Carlos! D-don’t kill me!”
Had it been a decent kind of enemy, I might have been able to provoke him into gloating or toying with me, which would buy me enough time to exploit the inevitable moment of weakness, but Carlos didn’t even seem to register my words. If anything, he looked bored. This was his usual day at the office.
His fist swung around again, and again I rolled to the side, but he’d learned from my tactics. He let his own momentum spin him around and his other hand came out of nowhere, grabbing me around the injured leg gently but firmly.
For one insane moment I genuinely thought I’d gotten the wrong impression and he’d just been offering to put pressure on my wound. Then he swung me around like an Olympic hammer thrower.
The room whooshed past in a disorienting blur, then the entire side of my body slammed against the floor. The carpet was thick enough that it should have been like falling onto a crash mat, but it was also sprinkled with chunks of broken plexiglass. They weren’t jagged like shards of glass-glass, but that was small comfort. Pain flooded my senses like ink in a tank of clear water.
I had just enough sense about me to drag myself toward the door, my injured leg now numb and useless, as Carlos lumbered toward me for the kill. My vision was clouding at the edges, giving me an almost literal form of tunnel vision in which Carlos was playing the role of an oncoming train.
I tried to think. My most dominant inward voice was screaming continuously that everything hurt and that I didn’t want to die. A secondary level of thought was mainly listing all the swear words in my repertoire. But a third, much quieter level, struggling to be heard through the din in my mind, was able to direct my attention to Carlos’s hands. In a slow-motion moment of desperate enhanced perception, I saw that his knuckles were raw and bleeding.
Between this and the hundreds of aches along the side of my body, I was gaining a renewed, fearful respect for plexiglass. It hadn’t stopped the monstrous bodyguard, but it had made a crack. And any crack can be widened with the right tools.
One of the Zoobs, still stunned and woozy from being bounced around the room, was trying to steady itself about a yard away. Focus regained, I rolled myself over to it just as Carlos drew close, and I managed to knock it toward him with a sweep of my arm.
Carlos attempted to casually backhand it away, but once the Zoob was close enough to him to sense the fresh blood on his knuckles, it acquired a second wind with amazing speed. It clamped its teeth down on one of his massive fingers at the moment of impact.
Carlos must have had an astonishingly high pain threshold, because he didn’t seem to notice until his hand came back from the swipe with the intended target still attached. He looked at it quizzically as it noshed away at his flesh, more confused than anything else. Then he tried to shake it off.
That was about the biggest mistake he could have made, because it sprinkled the floor around him with numerous fresh spots of blood. And for the many dazed Zoobs that were still scattered about the room, he might as well have been farting smelling salts.
I didn’t wait for them to put the pieces together in whatever passed for their minds. I had already crawled to the next Zoob and swatted it toward the bigger target, making sure to use my less bloodstained hand. This one latched onto Carlos’s mustache, which it chewed on experimentally in a bizarre moment of interspecies romance.
I’d gathered enough wits to shakily get to my feet, and kicked another Zoob into the growing fray with my good leg, bracing myself on a karaoke machine to take the weight off my bad one. By this point, my efforts were hardly necessary. Carlos was capable of getting a Zoob off his person with a single finger flick, but in the time it took for him to do so, two more leapt onto his bulk and started digging in.
He swept his fist along parallel to the ground, knocking back a wave of pouncing Zoobs with the force of a freight train, and of course they simply bounced off the walls and came back for more, unharmed. More attacked him from behind, and soon there were Zoobs all the way along both arms, clinging like barnacles. Trails of blood, sheer black against his red skin, left his body looking fully tiger striped. The more blood they drew, the more relentless the Zoobs became.
I’d already made it to the door, clinging all my aching and bleeding bits, but I paused at the threshold. Carlos was swinging his arms left and right madly, doing serious damage to the nearby decor but none to his attackers, and his motions became weak and quivery as the Zoobs sucked noisily on his exposed veins.
For some reason, all I could think of was the game of rock-paper-scissors. In a straight fight, Carlos destroys humans. Humans destroy Zoobs. And Zoobs . . .
Carlos collapsed to the floor, outstretching a massive hand toward me. I caught his blank gaze one last time before his eyes disappeared behind wobbling green blobs, and felt a sting of sympathy. Not for the pain and injury he was suffering, but because I’d finally seen an emotion I recognized. The one you feel when you have been denied your chance to succeed at the only thing you’ve ever been good at.
Then my aches and pains flared up again, and my pity disappeared. I blew a short raspberry and shut the ballroom door behind me as I hobbled for the stairs.
I carefully climbed the stairs and found Jemima and Daniel loitering in the passage near the vent by which I’d entered. As I limped toward them, the door at the opposite end slid open and Warden entered. She gave a little double-take when she saw my wounds, and almost seemed about to display sympathy before catching herself.
“Are you guys all right?” I panted.
Jemima’s wide-eyed gaze tracked a drop of blood as it fell from my scalp to the floor. “Uh. Yeah. We are.”
“Daniel?” I asked.
The son of Henderson seemed physically unharmed, unless someone had impaled him on some kind of spike that went up his arse and all the way through to the top of his head, which was what his stance implied. His skin was chalk white, his eyes were the size of golf balls, and his mouth quivered, half shaping words in reply that never quite made it out of his throat.
“Daniel?” repeated Warden, placing her hands on his shoulders and snapping her fingers in front of his eyes. “It’s Ms. Warden. You’re safe now, understand? What happened?”
“They just grabbed onto the ship and came aboard,” said Jemima. “Dan had kind of a close call, and then he went like that.”
Warden glanced at her for the merest fraction of a second, then took Daniel’s unresisting wrist and pressed his palm onto Jemima’s chest, without warning.
“This may be serious,” said Warden, as Daniel showed no reaction whatsoever. “This may mean additional trouble with Henderson.”
Jemima folded her arms tightly and made an offended noise. “Oh, because Mr. Henderson’s the only one that matters. You could be, you know, worried about Dan ’cos he’s a human being.”
Both my hands were occupied with clutching injured parts, so I gestured to the open vent with my head, sprinkling a bit more blood around for everyone to enjoy. “Argument won! Daniel Henderson is a human being. Now can we please get the hell off this ship? Don’t ask me how, but Carlos showed up.”
&
nbsp; “Carlos?” said Warden as Jemima crawled into the vent, leading Daniel by the hand. “And you fought him off?”
I got halfway through adopting a smug, heroic stance before pain shot through my broken leg and made me cringe. “Sort of. The Zoobs did most of the work.”
“Carlos,” she repeated, stroking her imaginary beard. “I hadn’t thought Henderson would be rash enough to take such a step.”
I decoded something in her tone of voice and sagged in resignation. “You did it again, didn’t you. You called him and told him where we were.”
Warden gestured behind her, toward the bridge. “Of course.”
I was far too pained and exhausted to do more than sigh at that point. “I really wish you would stop doing that.”
“I would not expect you to understand, McKeown. As we have established, you do not plan ahead.” Daniel’s feet disappeared into the duct, and with a single shared look we wordlessly raised the subject of who was going next. “Are you going to require assistance?”
“Don’t worry about me. Crawling I’ve about got down at this point. You go next. Chivalry’s not dead, remember?”
She nodded, turned, and half crouched, then suddenly paused, and looked back at me. “Aren’t you forgetting something?”
Another wordless exchange took place, and I fished the little envelope out of my back pocket. I felt the little lump of plastic with my fingers for a single sorrowful moment, then flicked it down the stairs to the lower hallway. This done, I followed Warden into the vent.
As I hauled my way through that tight space a second time, I heard a series of metallic thuds from deep within the ship. Then there was the hideous groan of rending metal. I swallowed. “Tell me Carlos can’t still be alive. That’d just be unfair, wouldn’t it?”
“I saw Carlos do many things during my employment,” said Warden’s arse as it wriggled through the space just ahead of me. “I would put nothing past him.”
I heard another bang as Warden slid into the shuttle, this one more like a balloon bursting on a very large scale, possibly caused by that hull breach in the ballroom opening up again. The fail-safes were probably doing their best to isolate it, but all the same, I pulled myself into the shuttle as fast as I could and shut the airlock door.
The space inside the shuttle was at even more of a premium with the addition of two new passengers, despite them being underage. I propped an uncomplaining Daniel up against the cabin’s rear wall and squeezed myself into the pilot’s seat like toothpaste trying to get back into the tube. I couldn’t fold my injured leg back in without the pain flaring up, so I just left it dangling over the armrest, where it would continually kick Warden in the arm, with any luck.
There was another sound of metal being tormented from somewhere deep within the Jemima, so without further banter, I detached the shuttle with a rather comical popping noise, cranked the speed all the way up, and yanked the steering column hard to the left.
So I almost ran us straight into the star pilot fleet.
They were hanging clustered in space like a gaggle of Roman emperors, waiting to give the thumbs-down as soon as the winning gladiator looked up. I recognized more than a couple. Jim Gunn’s ship was there, as were the Hopeless Endeavour and the generous curves of Gareth the Overcompensator’s freighter, always recognizable by its hot-pink spray job.
They were big names. Which meant they were also the most frequent targets of plagiarism by Jacques McKeown. And judging by the initial scan, every single one of them had their weapons powered up.
There was one particular ship that was even easier to recognize than the others. I hailed it, making sure to broadcast the call to every other ship in range. Angelo’s musclebound silhouette appeared on the communication screen, lit from behind by fluorescent light this time, rather than an open fire. I had a feeling that this was a very serious gesture for him.
“Hast thou delivered what thou promised, knave?” he demanded.
“How nice to see you too, Angelo. Why yes, I am fractionally still alive.” He didn’t even respond. I sighed. “ID scan that ship. The Whale Shark, not the Zoob one harpooning it.”
I could almost detect an increase in radiation in the area between the Jemima and the star pilot fleet as every single ship ran the necessary scan. I subtly edged out of the way.
“Jacques McKeown,” read Angelo from the screen in front of him. “So, thou would abandon the man whose name thou stole aboard a vessel stricken with beasts? To do that even to a betrayer lacks honor.”
That wasn’t exactly the reaction I’d hoped for. “I—”
“Hold,” said Angelo, suddenly leaning forward urgently so that his shovel-like face was illuminated by his monitor. “The creature known as Carlos. The one that slaughtered my comrades. It, too, is aboard?”
“Oh, ye—”
Angelo opened fire with every weapon at his disposal. Two rotary machine guns and two missile tubes sent streams of burning death into the Jemima’s exposed underbelly, reopening all the old battle damage.
Once he had broken the tension, every other ship joined in. The space between them and the Jemima became a solid cylinder of firepower that poured into the two connected ships like a stream of boiling water onto an ant’s nest. If I hadn’t moved the shuttle out of the way, we would have been reduced to a puff of shrapnel, spreading across creation for eternity.
The onslaught of missiles didn’t even let up when the chain reactions started. Pounded into submission, the volatile materials in the engines and power reactors did what they did best, sparking off explosion after explosion that gutted the Jemima and the Zoob battleship, reducing them to clouds of white-hot metal and ruined internal fixtures. Half a glittering mirror ball sailed past our windshield. It was all rather cathartic.
Only then did the star pilot ships stop firing. Angelo sent one last shot into the silence, like he was putting a signature on it, or shaking off the last drop at the urinal. “Our dealings are complete,” he said, grudgingly, and ended the call.
One by one, the ships drifted away, without a word. They were the crowd at the public hanging, dispersing after the adrenaline comes down, uneasy with the guilt of having been part of the moment.
“Jacques McKeown is dead,” said Warden. “At least, as far as your colleagues are concerned. You must be relieved.”
“Yeah, things’ll be peachy until whoever he is brings another book out and all these guys ring me up wanting to know what the ply we were all doing out here today.”
“You’re . . . going to take me back, now, aren’t you,” said Jemima, sitting on the floor behind us with her back to the back of my chair.
“Yes, back to mum, or alternatively, we could have not come and left you with the monsters that were trying to eat you,” I said, jiggling my injured leg. “You gonna complain?”
“I’m sorry, all right? We just wanted to see more,” said Jemima weakly. “I never even left Earth until this trip. Just wanted to get an idea of what else was out there.”
“And you did,” I said, nodding. I felt I was well within my rights to get good and angry at her, but I was too exhausted to be anything but infuriatingly reasonable. “And then it tried to eat you. Because that’s what it’s like, this exciting star piloting life you read about. If you want the adventure and romance, you have to also accept that something might come along and start chewing on your head.”
“Or invent something that makes it all pointless,” added Warden.
I shot her a look that ricocheted straight off her stony gaze, then returned to Jemima. “In the meantime, we have to get you back to the naval fleet. You know, the one you said your mum wouldn’t send?”
“She won’t,” said Jemima immediately.
“Tadaa,” I announced, grandly nodding my head toward the scanner screen, and the swarm of pixels around Salvation Station that were all colored an official militaristic green.
I wish I’d had my camera out to capture her face. Her lips parted in wonder as she took i
n the sheer size of the fleet, but then she caught my gaze and leaned back. “Well, she only sent that because I’m part of her stupid image.”
I groaned and slowly leaned forward until my forehead rested on the screen in front of me. “Of course you’re part of her image. Doesn’t mean you can’t be important to her as a daughter, as well. It’s possible to be more than one thing.”
“Yes, take that from Mr. McKeown,” said Warden, distractedly. She was half turned in her seat to eyeball Daniel’s condition.
I didn’t let her throw me. “I don’t know your mum, but I’m pretty certain that she cares about your safety. That’s what the United Republic’s all about, isn’t it? Keeping everyone safe?”
“Secure might be a better word,” said Warden.
“I wish I could live in space,” said Jemima. She was sitting with her back to my seat again, and from the way her voice was muffled, she must have brought her knees up to her chest. “I hate living in the UR. You’re getting watched all day and all night. Mum keeps having people black bagged for complaining about it.”
“Would your mother ever black bag you?” asked Warden.
“No . . .”
“Then maybe you should complain. On behalf of—” Warden suddenly grabbed my dangling leg, and the pain was like someone banging a tin bathtub next to my ear. “McKeown. The fleet.”
I grimaced. “What fleet?”
“The star pilot fleet. The ships that came to blow up the Jemima for us. It was not the entire star pilot fleet.”
Jemima (the real one) appeared between us, one hand on each backrest. “So where’s the rest of it?”
Warden pointed to the scanner screen. “They seem to be currently clustered in and around Salvation Station.”