Lars Breaxface- Werewolf in Space Read online

  He couldn’t say no. It meant retirement, if he wanted it. Sunside hut on some paradise planet, all the booze and pussy he could buy. No more cruising the black, finding brawls and battles to shove his mercenary snout into. No more oil-and-sweat waystations like this fucking spinner. He looked out the porthole at the row of rocketships, imagined never seeing another like it, maybe even hocking old Sheila, though he doubted he could. She was the only constant, the only friend, he had in the big black empty. He’d probably get her a new paint job.

  “Where’s our ride?” Jay said. She was behind him, a thin black bag on her shoulder; its leather-mimetic fabric matched her dress. Frank stood next to her, branches laden with luggage, a growler of chlorogin full and fluorescent in his primary limb.

  Lars nodded toward the porthole. “Little number to the left, with the flame job.”

  “About what I expected. Except shittier.”

  Lars snarled. “That’s Sheila. Two things I don’t abide: shit-talking Sheila, and shit-talking my mother.”

  A voice hissed in the crowd, “Your mother’s had more cock in her ass than a two-ton Plasticon whore.”

  Lars whirled, and there in the hub throng was a gaggle of Siskelian smugglers, mouths askew, bruises still blooming on their chins. The leader, the one he’d knocked out first back at the Quasar, had an old acid scar down one side of his face, blue keloid flesh where his left eye was supposed to be. The rest were a motley gang in pirates’ armor bedazzled with meteorite, some bluer than others, all of them big and pissed off and swinging heavy asteroid-hauling chains.

  He felt the wolf in his veins, trying its best to make him turn even lightyears from the nearest moon. He swallowed the urge—too far from a lunar recharge to go wolfing out for this blue waste of life—and instead rested his hand on his blaster.

  “She look like you, motherfucker? Some half-evolved ape swiveling her hindquarters toward anything with a nickel and a hard-on?” The one-eyed Siskelian cracked his neck. His one jaundiced eye was a slit between cheekbone and brow.

  Sinews, leverage, kinesthesis. Animal motion. The hub seemed to hush. Lars’ blaster cleared leather before the smuggler knew to stop smirking. The Siskelian stood for a moment, mouth frozen in a gap-toothed sneer, dark blue blood seeping over his lips from the simmering jag of flesh where the rest of his face used to be. Blood, bone, and brains sprayed the smuggler’s comrades, their faces progressing through a stop-motion animation from shock to rage as their leader toppled and Lars blew imaginary smoke from the blaster’s barrel. Around them, a wave of realization rippled through the crowd, radiating from the dead man. Sound came back, muffled screams growing loud in the claustrophobic hub.

  “Lars, holy fuck,” Jay was shouting behind him. “You never heard of keeping a low fucking profile?”

  “Never let Greedo shoot first.” Lars holstered the ray gun and kissed the knuckles of his chin-punching hand. “Besides, already punched the bastard once.”

  Those in the crowd who’d noticed the gore were panicking, pushing into the oblivious, the screams drowning out chitin music and chanted prayers. The smuggler gang was charging through the crowd, their heavy chains reared back to whip the wolfman. And then they weren’t, snatched into the air by tentacles of wood and leaf, flung into sections of the crowd not yet disrupted by the panic. A tornado of white, black, and purple landed blows on the necks and kneecaps of the rest of the smuggler crew before they even had a chance to raise their chains. The smugglers collapsed, blue hulks bleeding all over their stone-studded suits.

  Jay settled into some kind of ninja pose and surveyed the fleeing crowd. “StatSec will be here any second. They must be in the brothels tucking their dicks into their fatigues. We should run.”

  Lars looked around the hub for the proboscis girl, or even the little cat-person. Nothing but folks tripping over each other, giving him cold white stares like he was some kind of monster, which he was.

  “Hello? Breaxface?” She punched him hard in the face, a sudden crunch in her fingers, and she swore loudly. “I said let’s go.”

  He wasn’t ready. Goddamn smugglers, trash-talking his mother. He hadn’t gotten that blowjob. He hadn’t loaded up on crates of jerky and salty snacks for the long haul. He was nowhere near drunk enough to drive.

  “Just wait,” he said. “Just a minute.”

  He felt himself lifted, the bite of rough wood grinding his arm. He was on his feet, and Frank was collecting the luggage, his growler smashed and glistening green on the station floor. All of the tremuloid’s eyes looked heavy with melancholy, sticky sap-tears forming at their edges.

  “We don’t have a minute,” Jay said, walking quickly past him. “You blew somebody’s face off in a neutral station. In front of hundreds of witnesses. They’ll throw you into the black alive, won’t even waste a bullet. And I can’t allow that—I need you.”

  He smirked, feeling the blood crack, already drying on his face. “Sheila’s got a king-size bed. Thousand thread-count sheets. A little stained, but—”

  “Shut up.” Jay shook her punching hand, as if considering hitting him again. “Shut your mouth. And don’t open it. Not even to breathe.” There were shouts in the distance, official-sounding. Station Security. “Come on. The ship. We need to leave now.”

  Some of the smuggler crew were starting to rouse, all of them soaked in blue-black blood. Lars could take them, if he wanted to. Even without Jay and her pet plant’s help. That blaster had charge enough to make a hundred shots at that power level before clicking empty. And there was always the wolf—however long he could last without a nearby moon. But what was the point? Jay was right. They had to go.

  “So,” he said, “no snacks?”

  A branch thumped him heavily in the back. He nodded, surrendered. StatSec was louder, too loud, too near, nearly through the crowd. Jay started for the docks, her pace almost a run, and Lars kept lockstep. Behind them, the vegetal Frank, lumbering with surprising speed.

  Chapter IV

  They ran, pushing past arriving crewmen and cybernetic stevedores. Crates tumbled as the dockmen’s hand-clamps lost their grip, and more than once Lars almost went sprawling, only to feel Frank’s wooden limbs reach to steady him; Jay vaulted each obstacle with ease. Behind them, concussion slugs dented the walls. A couple of bystanders, hit with the dull shells, dropped like sacks of moondust.

  In a spinner this big, there were too many docks. Sheila was too far away.

  “They’re gonna route us,” Lars shouted over crashes and gunshots. “Second squad rounding the other end to head us off, no doubt. They’ll pop us like a dick blister.”

  Jay glanced back, amethyst eyes sparkling in the fluorescent light. She skidded to a stop. “Give me your hand.”

  “Are you fucking crazy?” A slug thudded against the ceiling above them, bounced hard to the corridor floor. “You said it yourself. We need to run.”

  Frank lurched past them then turned ponderously, his tree-bulk menacing behind Jay. From some enchanted pocket in her boot, the pale woman pulled a long knife, curved and ornamented with baroque blood grooves. She repeated: “Your hand.”

  He thrust his hairy mitt toward her, and she slid the blade across his palm. He barely felt it. Slugs pounded, and he thanked his luck that StatSec at a station like this were so poorly trained. Not like the jackbooted fascists he’d run into near Fed Prime. Red bubbled to the surface of the thin cut across his hand. And then it rose. Blood lifted from the wound. Not the chaos movement of zero-grav, but a deliberate rising: liquid sculpture, his blood given shape.

  “The fuck is this?” he said. He didn’t dare move his hand. He felt a sucking in his veins.

  Jay’s brow furrowed with concentration. “Shut up.”

  Blood twisted in the air above his outstretched palm. It became a storm, a miniature hurricane, crimson and gore. He felt it pulling from him, his heart pumping, feeding it. StatSec were on them. Riot guns raised. He could smell their sweat and fear. Slugs wouldn’t kill you, n
ot unless they hit your braincase, but fuck did they hurt. Lars tensed his back, expecting impact. Blood swirled. Blood roiled. Then Jay thrust her hand toward the security force, and blood flew. Lars turned in time to see the armored officers raise their arms against the bloodstorm; some fired at it impotently. With a wet slap, his blood flattened and spread, stretching across the width of the corridor, pitted with the slugs it stopped.

  A blood wall.

  Jay dropped her hand and wheeled. Bystanders and stevedores hugged the walls of the dock tunnel, terrified. Someone was vomiting.

  “Fucking run,” she said, and Lars shook the last drops of blood from his hand, boots thundering as he ran.

  

  Sheila was unguarded. Near the airlock, a couple of sailors from a neighboring slip were playing a card game on a pair of crates. They didn’t even bother to look up as the trio raced into the dock. Lars punched the lock interface the way he’d punch a chin—hard—and the sphincter constricted, interlocking, a kaleidoscope of flat steel blades closing between the wolfman and the two oblivious sailors. Lars fished his keys out of his jeans. As he turned the tumbler in his cruiser’s bay door, a pink rabbit’s foot dangled from its keychain.

  Thuds against the airlock door, but the sphincter blades didn’t dent. Even armor-piercing rounds wouldn’t scratch an airlock. All a concussion slug would do is bounce.

  “They’re through the blood,” Jay said.

  Lars pulled the door open, reaching in to unfasten the trip wire inside. “You think?”

  “They’ll have that door open any second. Now that they know where we are.”

  “Thank the hot Cosmic Jeezus for bureaucracy. Union dockers won’t haul ass, even for StatSec. We got two minutes, at least.”

  He stepped inside the cruiser just as the sphincter began to dilate.

  “Well,” Lars said, “fuck me. Overachievers on this crew.”

  A slug slapped against the starship, scuffing Sheila’s paint.

  “Hey, assholes, that’s a custom job!”

  Jay drove her shoulder into his ribs, forcing him into the cruiser’s cargo bay. They tumbled and flopped into a maelstrom of empty beer cans and crusty takeout containers. Taking the impact of the conc-slugs in his hard trunk, Frank ducked into the cruiser and pulled the door closed behind him. Jay was on her feet, cans rattling as she ran for the cockpit.

  “Don’t you touch my baby,” Lars called after her. He pulled himself to his feet. His hand stung. Frank was looking at him with all his morose, sallow eyes. “What, Frank?” The eyes blinked. “Sorry about the growler, man. Some hooch in the fridge. Take what you want.”

  The tremuloid was hunched under the ceiling of the small bay. He rooted himself where he was, waiting, that spooky smattering of eyeballs now fixed on the door. Slugs rained against the hull.

  Jay was already strapped into the pilot seat when Lars found her. He saw the pink rabbit’s foot in her hand, the ignition turning. The cruiser shuddered as the engines fired. Her long, white fingers skipped easily over the holographic displays, punching in coordinates and travel codes faster than Lars could read them.

  “That’s my seat,” he said.

  “You should hold onto something.”

  “Nobody flies Sheila but me. Nobody.”

  Trid holograms flashed across her eyes. “I’m serious.”

  As she pushed the throttle, a pre-recorded soundbite blared from the stereo: the revving engine of an oil-burning muscle-rig. Nineteen sixty-seven Chevy Impala, if the sound library was to be believed. Metal whined as Sheila tore from the airlock, and the cruiser was free, suspended in space between two blocky cargo ships. Lars gripped the pilot seat to keep from toppling.

  “Goddamn,” Lars muttered, “you probably just killed fifty people with that depressure.”

  Her pale shoulders shrugged. “It was us or them.”

  The cruiser dropped below the cargo ships, and Jay steered it left, the big dying sun coming into view through the windshield.

  “Is there anything uglier,” she said, “than a dying star?”

  “This hooker I met back in Sibyl Twin. Moon populated by ogres. She was ugly as sin, that one, teeth all busted out. Had its advantages, though.” He shrugged. “Come to think of it, a lot of—”

  Jay punched the throttle, and the small white dots of the cosmos began to stretch into lines, splinter into crystalline psychedelia, the universe breaking up as the cruiser burrowed into subspace, FTL-drive grinding in its chassis at the back of the ship, Sheila futtling as she’d done a thousand times but without the werewolf at her wheel, Lars watching space uncouple with itself—and then velocity finding him, carrying him, his whole weight up and slamming into the back wall of the cockpit, knocking him flat out on his ass with a dull metal thunk.

  Chapter V

  He is floating. The junk of the sky—abandoned space-race capsules, orbit station discards, the thousands of dead satellites decommissioned over the centuries—hangs around him in the thermospheric strata, barely in the pull of a dark and haggard Earth. He sees it, through the slow swirl of metal: Home. Brown continents, gray clouds, the sky a velvet nighttime blue. He’s tagging old telecoms, he remembers, marking their dark solars for salvage. Rare-earths embedded in their panels. Singer and Muerta somewhere else among the wreckage, tagging the same, the rest of the crew sleeping off hangovers in the orbiter till shift change, and then he sees the piece of scrap like a razor, and he sees his tether, his link to the orbiter, severed, and he grabs for it, the far-off end of it frayed and snaking away in zero-grav, kicks the mini ion-thrusts on his ankles, tether still out of reach, and he’s gasping now, oxygen leaking out, reserve tank kicking in but nominally, it isn’t much, five minutes, maybe ten. His helmet slams into a heavy piece of junk, a windowless capsule turning on its own slow axis, the red flag of the Asian Union rolling in and out of view, he turns the airlock, no rust in space though it must be a hundred years old, the Union down below, on the surface, still radioactive and burning decades later. The airlock gives. Dust scatters as air rushes to fill the universe, or to try, and inside is a corpse in a red suit, mummified and skeletal, but it isn’t right—too much hair on its face and limbs, fingernails long and black like talons. He closes the hatch and seals the lock, gasping, smelling his own acrid breath, the reserve tank empty, he hits the capsule’s emergency trigger, O2 flushing the small cylindrical room, Lars unlatching the suffocating helmet, and that corpse, the desiccated skin of its face retracting, a sick smile of jagged, animal teeth.

  

  His bunk was so soaked with sweat when he woke he thought he’d pissed himself. Wouldn’t have been the first time. His boots were still on, and his mouth felt like the hair on a buffalo’s asshole. He needed a drink.

  Blue bits of brain still clung to his shirt, so he peeled it off and crawled into a new one, a black T-shirt with military-grade thermal weave. Five minutes in open space, and only his arms and head would freeze off. He flicked a skull fragment from his pants and figured they were good enough. He didn’t want to have to take his boots off to change.

  Outside the bunk, Lars followed the sound of music—the raging rock ‘n’ roll that comprised his playlist—back to the cargo bay, where Frank was opening another beer and sucking it into his system through the siphoning end of his prehensile limb. Old trash had been pushed into a pile near a rack of salvage tools, and a new set of empties clattered in a ring around the drunken tree. Frank’s eyes seemed to focus on Lars for a moment, vaguely, then he dropped the empty can and opened the nearby fridge for another.

  “What is it,” came Jay’s voice from behind, “that werewolves dream about? Fat full moons? Pastures full of virgin sheep?”

  He turned; she’d changed from the leatherette minidress into black fatigues, heavy boots, and a fitted sleeveless top that shimmered with spider-silk sheathing. Bulletproof. She wasn’t

  dressed to tease his dick anymore, to sap the blood from his animal brain. She was dressed to kick ass.
r />   “All my ex-girlfriends, a never-ending erection, and a couple gallons of bacon-flavored lube.”

  “You were whimpering like a kicked dog.”

  “Must’ve been my ex-wives then.” Then, with a growl, “You took my ship.”

  “You’re the idiot who murdered somebody in the middle of a crowd. We had to get out of there, and you were bumblefucking around, whining about chipped paint.” She pushed past him, grabbed a beer from the fridge, and sat on a steel crate that was secured to the floor with nylon. “Keys are in the ignition.”

  “The popped seal,” he said. “StatSec blown into the vacuum, plus a few dozen crew. Sure, I killed one asshole. You killed half a hundred did nothing but park at the wrong dock.”

  She chugged the beer then showed her sharp white teeth. “Collateral damage.” She rested her elbows on her knees, fumbling with the label on the can. “Anyway, we’re clear. Even if the station beams our faces to central authorities, we’re too far from Federation Prime, going nowhere they’d care to follow. It’s the frontier, Breaxface. People die out here every day. Little people on little spinners, whole planets burned up in galactic genocide. Shit happens.”

  “Nowhere they’d care to follow, huh?” Lars nodded to Frank, big hand gesturing, and the tree-hulk tossed him a cold brew. “Where we headed, then? I mean now, in the immediate. Don’t give me that need-to-know bullshit again.”

  “Canal City,” Jay said. “Someone there knows something about toys. He might be useful later on.”

  “No thanks,” Lars said. “Persona non grata on that pond planet. Ran a job there once for some up-jumped gangster-wannabe puppeteer. Job was too hot, I bolted. He wasn’t too keen on that.”

  “Then let’s hope we avoid a reunion.”

  “I said no, lady. Find another rock with a toy store.”

  “Canal City,” Jay said. “There is nowhere else.”