“You’ll notice: I’m not laughing. I dunno. Maybe I happened to get the worst shooter out of the entire race.”
“In addition,” said Marve, “the sniper didn’t go down when I shot it in the head.”
Turlock stopped, even though they were halfway through crossing a street. “Excuse me?”
“You said that you heard me shoot. Didn’t you think it odd that you heard me shoot twice?”
“To be honest, I was clinging to the side of a building that was probably going to collapse at any second. I had bigger things on my mind.”
“I forgot about humans’ inability to multitask.” Marve tugged his triangular head in the direction they were heading. “Speaking of which: Can we get back on the sidewalk now?”
Turlock looked around, unable to spot a single vehicle. “Sure, back where it's safe.” He started walking again. “Uh, it’s not all humans that can’t multitask. Just males.”
“Fascinating bit of biological information but let's return to my point: My first burst did considerable damage to the sniper’s head. A lot of material sprayed out into the street below.”
“Congratulations. Why the second burst?”
“It stood, swung that ridiculously large rifle toward me, and shot. Wildly, praise Garra. At least its eyes were destroyed by my first shot.”
“So…Tullians’ brains aren’t in their head?”
“No. Tullians’ brains are in their head. I returned fire, this time into its thorax. I hit something of import, because it fell after that.”
“So what did you do with the body?”
“Nothing. That’s the incredible part.”
Turlock chewed on this for a moment. “You’re saying someone else helped himself to the body? Or do you think the Sheriff was lying to me? Why would he need to do that?”
This got a mandible-clack out of Marve. “Do all humans come to a fresh conclusion at the end of each new sentence? I didn’t have to do anything with the body because it disappeared.”
“Whoa. You mean, just poof and gone?”
“Imagine a flamethrower, full jet, aimed at a pile of snow.”
“Creepy. Have you heard of any species that does that? Because—and I realize it ain't saying much—I haven’t.” Turlock stopped, this time mid-block on the sidewalk. “Wait a minute: where are we headed?”
“You always seem so proud of those things where you guess but it feels like a rational decision. Haunches?”
“Close enough.”
Marve extended an arm toward the large building across the street. “I have one of your haunches that involve this store. You see, when the sniper melted away, I detected a blend of volatile compounds such as hexane and perchloroethylene.”
“Andajar has rivers of crude oil, so I can’t say I’m too surprised.”
“These are refined products,” said Marve with his usual Lotian patience. “The only place to get such chemical supplies in any volume in this particular settlement is here.”
#
“That really cemented our reputations as badasses,” grumbled Turlock as they walked out.
“I didn’t realize you wished to be known as a ‘badass’,” Marve replied.
“You don’t shake down a shopkeeper, and then buy something from him.”
The bug-man didn’t reply, but instead held the canister he'd purchased to his throat-vents and turned the valve.
“Odd time for you to be huffing.” Turlock stopped, and squinted over his shoulder at the store. “Say: you don’t think he’d have a fifth of whiskey for me, do you?”
“That was not pleasurable, I can assure you,” hissed Marve. “I’ll explain later.”
They trudged away from the general store and after two blocks turned onto an unpaved track that ran along the edge of town. Here and there sat rickety sheds and hovels, some of stacked modublock with or without mortar, others sided with faded sheets of corrugated polyplast. To their left, the flat, scrubby plain that surrounded Tramin ran unbroken to the badlands, from which rose the distance-hazed plateau where the city of Pendshelem sprawled. The flat nothingness that separated them from the mesa distorted the thre days’ walk it would take to get there.
“I see you looking that way,” said Marve, “and I still don’t recommend we try showing our faces there.”
“Central Bank of Andajar ought to have a branch or two on the outskirts. We wouldn’t have to go far in.”
“If we obtain the right vehicle here, anything else is just as close.”
“Well, let’s hope this Gribble has a vehicle, then.”
One of the cubic structures covered more territory than the others. As they approached it, Turlock could tell its sides met each other a bit more square than the surrounding structures. Its windows, while a bit warped, all hung intact in their frames.
“So,” he asked, “do we just…knock?”
“I suppose, if you wished to enhance our reputations as ‘badasses’, you would rather we kicked the door in.” Marve clacked his mandibles. “Actually, you’d rather I kicked the door in. It looks solid.”
“So what: ‘hi, we’re sure you built the organic android killing machine, and I’m the human you tested him out on?’ Is that how we do this?”
“If he’s intelligent enough to have constructed that sniper, he’ll appreciate any data we can provide.”
“Let’s hope he’s Lotian, then. Because a human like me would shoot us in the face two seconds after we knocked.”
“He’s not human. Don’t you remember what the shopkeeper said?”
“He wouldn’t tell us what Gribble was.”
They approached the house. A walkway of age-rounded bricks connected the door to the road. Nothing delineated where the property met the countryside—not even a change in vegetation.
“Alright,” said Turlock, “you do the knocking.”
“Kindly put the pistol away. We won’t need it.”
They mounted a concrete pad just barely large enough for them to stand on without hugging. Suddenly, the door pulled open and the human couldn’t keep himself from saying: “Oh, hell no.”
The eyes of the creature that answered the door shown silver and translucent. The eyes of a Keminar.
“I’d been expecting a visit,” he said. “Please, we can all sit inside, away from the chill of the day.”
Turlock couldn’t help backhanding the sheen of sweat off his forehead as Marve said: “Of course.”
“Are you nuts?” whispered Turlock as Gribble—or at least his Keminar doorman—turned and walked down an entry hallway without displaying the least concern.
“For him to react this way,” hissed Marve out of a throat-vent, “he’s either got a trap prepared for us, or he’s ready to die.” It sounded strange: the human was certain the bug-man had never used that particular throat-vent before.
“I vote 'trap'. That sniper thingy didn’t kill me. No inventor is ready to die after a failed test.”
“Good,” the bug-man hiss-whispered. “Hurry up, he’ll suspect something. And do leave the pistol stowed.”
He led the way inside, and after a second’s hesitation to pull the hem of his shirt back over the grip of his sidearm, Turlock followed.
“Please,” Gribble swept a mostly-humanoid arm toward a pair of stools best described as two-by-sixes on splindly legs. “Make yourself comfortable.”
Despite the four-sided exterior of the building, this room was octagonal, walled in warm, ochre woods that could not have come from closer than a day’s hover-car ride. At least it was adorned by no more than a basic geometric pattern, unlike the walls of a certain monastery that now lay in ruins back in Pendhselem.
The walls were the second thing Turlock noticed about the room. The first were the five heavily muscled, hairless humanoids that stood with their backs to said walls. Each stood silently, like art-deco bronze statues about halfway in height between him and his Lotian partner.
<
br /> Nobody made any moves. Marve said: “You are Gribble. I assume you know our names.”
“Actually, no.” Those inscrutable Keminar eyes could be pointed at him, or Marve, or the ceiling above them. “Honestly, it was nothing personal to you, human. This was my first live test, and as the first such trial, the objective had to be as basic and easily-defined as possible. And…entry level, in terms of difficulty. No offense.”
“It’s been a long time since I’ve tried to stick up for my race. It’s a pretty futile exercise.”
“How did you survive?” Gribble leaned toward Turlock. “Were you warned? Hidden armor? Or are you actually a human-analog cyborg?”
Turlock wished he had a fart to cut so he could dispel the cyborg theory. “He missed.”
The Keminar tutted, turned his head toward one of his remaining prototypes. “I knew I should have spent more time in optical calibration and hand-eye coordination. It wasn’t by a lot, was it?”
“Burned my face.”
That seemed to assuage Gribble somewhat. “Well, then it was only by zero-point-four rekos, then.”
“How were you able to obtain a Kasparov K7-J?” asked Marve. “That seems to be a rather expensive tool to hand a first-run prototype.”
“I invented them,” said Gribble, possibly affronted that neither had known that. “I have a whole rack in the basement. I had a nice life on Galladan Six, but the Kasparov somehow made me a war criminal.” He made a snort-cough somewhere in the back of his throat. “I needed to move somewhere a bit more…lawless. That’s what makes Andajar perfect.”
“You understand,” said Turlock, “that lawless places are full of people that take the law into their own hands.”
“These prototypes have long ago satisfied me in terms of hand-to-hand ability. Your arm would be broken before you could extract that pistol from the back of your waistband.”
“Just because the thought crossed my mind doesn’t mean I was actually going to act on it.”
Tilting his head toward Marve, Gribble asked: “How much of the trial run did you observe?”
“I’m the one who ended it.”
“Amazing. I thought I’d gotten that auditory algorithm down. He should have heard you coming.”
“I won’t tell you what I did, but I’m certain your prototype’s hearing was not defective. Nice touch to locate its central processing unit somewhere besides its head.”
“I tried to stick it in an extremity, but that kept giving me less-than-optimal neural connections.”
“As much as I’d love to continue this little technical discussion,” said Turlock, “we humans are notoriously impatient. How about we talk business?”
“I doubt my potential buyers would consider stepping aside for you two,” Gribble replied. “And in any event you aren't a planetary government, so you can't afford one.”
“I’m thinking,” continued Turlock as if he hadn’t heard, “five thousand ought to be enough for us to leave town before we say anything to the Sheriff. He’s pretty upset about his deputy, of course.”
After another throaty snort-cough, Gribble asked: “Were you in on the human’s brilliant plan, Lotian?”
“No, I realized you didn’t intend for us to leave this room alive.”
“Yet, you entered anyway. Why?”
Instead of replying, Marve hissed out of his thorax-vents. The breath came out wet and bubbly, like Turlock’s coughs when he’d once picked up a nasty case of bronchitis.
“I’m not familiar with Lotian slang. What did that mean?” The Keminar had meant for it to sound haughty, but his voice wobbled a bit near the end.
“It means,” said Turlock, not entirely sure what had just happened, “that the five thousand I just talked about became ten thousand. And your car: you’ve got a hovercar, right? We’ll be taking that too. And screw telling the Sheriff: this is to keep your metal-eyed ass alive now.”
“Is this what humans do when they’re panicked, Lotian?”
“No,” replied Marve, and clacked his mandibles more sharply and rapid than a mere laugh. “It’s what they do because they’re not very good negotiators. He forgot to mention we’ll require you to load those Kasparovs into the trunk of your hovercar. And whatever ammunition we can still fit within its weight capacity.”
Gribble’s jaw hung open for a split second. Then he said: “Kill them.”
The first motion of each of the golem-like creations came out in a synchronized blur. But one step into advancing for the massacre, the units stopped. One tipped over, smashing a spindly side-table, sending trinkets and electronic knick-knacks spattering off the walls.
“Kill them!” shouted the inventor.
As Turlock trained his pistol on the Keminar, Marve calmly said: “I suppose we can kill you and still get what we want.”
“Now that’s being a badass,” said the human.
Gribble slumped. “What did you do to them?”
“Pure genius, making your creations from volatile materials. If they fail their mission, they simply vaporize, vanishing into thin air.” Marve kicked the creation that had tipped over, and its arm tore loose from the rest of the body. As it thumped to the floor, it began to melt like it had been dropped in acid. “Of course, with those materials the challenge is always keeping them stable, as opposed to an untimely decomposition.”
“The electrochemical balance required a lot of power,” said Gribble, his scientific curiosity seeming to get the better of his fear. “And I wouldn’t have been able to market it on certain gas giants—”
“Because simple methane would upset the balance, rendering the matrix unstable.”
As soon as his partner had said methane, Turlock noticed his light-headedness. He turned his pistol sideways. “Uh, I probably shouldn’t fire this, should I?”
“Don't worry: I’m still quite capable of manually pulling a Keminar’s head off his shoulders,” assured Marve.
#
“Hope we can trust this thing’s computer,” said Turlock as the hover-car’s turbines spooled up.
“As long as we don’t have to outrun somebody, we’re still two hundred kilos short of being unsafe. I’ll hover low, just in case.”
“That reminds me of something.” Turlock poked the car’s CPU panel a few times, called up system diagnostics, and switched off the car’s pre-collision foam system. “We should put on our seat belts. Wouldn’t want to crash in the middle of nowhere and get foamed, would we?”
Easing the car, a utilitiarian Stoutbox, out of the garage, Marve looked over his shoulder. “Uh-oh.”
Turlock was about to ask what when the flashing lights came on.
They grounded the car and slipped out, hands high, as the Sheriff stepped from behind his cruiser. Another four just like it had been arranged in a semicircle on and across the gravel street, and behind each stood a deputy with a rifle.
“You okay with us like this,” asked Turlock, wiggling his fingers in the air. “Or do you want us on the ground?”
The Sheriff signaled for his men to lower their weapons. “No need. More of us than there are of you, plus there’s one more in the sky. So, tell me: how do you get from on your back in the clinic to stealing a resident’s car in less than two hours?”
“It’s the Lotian’s fault. He’s a badass.”
“All the evidence you need regarding your deputy’s murder is in the house,” said Marve, “including partially assembled assassins and a pair of Kasparov KJ-7s.”
Glad we ran out of room for those, thought Turlock.
“I knew that,” replied the Sheriff, who held out a stubby finger. An insect landed on it. “I had this fly-drone following you two the second you left the clinic.”
“So…” Turlock tried his best smile, for all the good it would do. “You, uh, see that we're not the bad guys, right?”
“Doesn't mean I'll just let you two walk. There’s the matter of impeding an
investigation. Plus, I noticed this Stoutbox, which you didn’t drive into town and has a local registration, seems to be riding a bit low.”
“I see. Um, can I at least drop my hands? The gravity here is a bitch.”
Marve asked: “May I ask what we’re being charged with, and what the penalty for each offense is?”
“Hmm…impeding an investigation’s a good five hundred, hovercar theft is blue book plus one thousand…I’m really not feeling ambitious enough to search the damn thing…so open 'er up and hand over any sniper rifles and Deaconite that may have found its way into the trunk. You can barter them for your fine. Or you can spend sixty days’ confinement in our workhouse and walk off with the slugs. Um, that’s assuming I don’t have to add a manslaughter charge?”
“No. Gribble is restrained but otherwise unharmed.”
“Very well.” He called over his shoulder. “Eagabag and Tarru: would you do me the favor of levying the fines and giving these two the speech about leaving town and never coming back? The rest of you: inside with me.”
“One last question, if I may,” said Marve. “Does this Stoutbox, after we pay the fine, of course, revert back to its owner?”
“Its owner won’t have much use for it. And if it gets you away from here faster, then take the damn thing. But don’t expect us to approve a bill of sale or registration – that’s your problem.”
#
“I can’t believe we couldn’t even keep the Kasparovs,” muttered Turlock. “And I’m pretty sure this thing is low on fuel.”
“They allowed us a thousand a piece for them,” said Marve. “Would you rather have seen if you could have survived the workhouse?”
“An addict looking for drug money could get ten thousand for a Kasparov in Pendshelem! They really shook us down good.”
“We still left town ahead. Besides, we have money waiting for us.”
Turlock pouted and rested his head on the window as the featureless landscape scrolled by. “Ugh. I can’t wait to drive over something interesting.”
“Perhaps you’re in one of those “bad moods” that afflict your race?”
Instead of telling the bug-man to mind his own business, Turlock found himself saying: “I can’t help but notice that you did everything useful back there.”
“You were the one who kept Gribble occupied while I released the methane. And I couldn’t have gotten close to the sniper if its attention wasn’t focused on you.”