Oh, Crock, Here Comes a Meteor!
Date: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00
Publisher: Plot Device Publishing

In a Galaxy Far, Far AwRy

Book 11: Oh, Crock, Here Comes a Meteor!

Liam Gibbs

IN A GALAXY FAR, FAR AWRY book 11: OH, CROCK, HERE COMES A METEOR!
Copyright (c) 2021 Liam Gibbs
All rights reserved.

This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission.

As awesome as this book is, it’s a work of fiction. I know, I know. We were all hoping, but it just ain’t gonna be. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s freaky imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblances to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely bonkers and coincidental. In other words, sadly you can’t get Schizophrenic’s autograph.

ISBN 13: 978-1777139643
First printing: April 2021

{ PLOT DEVICE PUBLISHING }

The Story So Far...

This stupendous, amazing, spectacular, not-at-all-overhyped comedy/science-fiction series can be found in the following parts:

Book 1: Serial Fiction Sideshow, available in the hearts of one and all

Book 2: Home Sweet Home Invasion, available in the hearts of one and all

Book 3: Technophobia, available in the h—you’re starting to see a pattern here, aren’t you?

Book 4: Armageddon Trigger Finger, available in...hey...your heart. And one and all’s too.

Book 5: The Genetic Equation, available blah blah blah.

Book 6: Power Tool, not available. Just kidding. Totally available.

Book 0: The Story So Far, you know the drill.

Available on the Author’s Super-Awesome Site

Book 7: The Lesser of Two Egos

Book 8: Untitled of Attitude Adjustments

Book 9: Those We Left Behind

Book 10: Metaphor for Life

Book 11: Oh, Crock, Here Comes a Meteor!

Book 12: His Kingdom Come

Book 13: A Wolf in Sheep’s Armor

Book 14: Man Versus Machine Part 1 of 1

Book 15: Our New Hiring Policy

Book 16: Life Like Broken Glass

Book 17: The Church of Steeple

Book 18: Blood Bunny

Book 19: Disease of Behavior

Book 20: The Paper Tiger’s Yardstick

Book 21: This One Has a Dancing Gibbon

Book 22: My Brother’s Captor

Book 23: Marching Orders

Book 24: We, Robots

Please visit www.inagalaxyfarfarawRy.com for more information.

Other Stuff the Author Spewed Out

Maybe check out these other things ’cause they’re superfine too!

Not So Superpowered, available at tiny.cc/nssuperpowered

Three Flash Fictions, available upon request from the author

Random limericks, available in bathroom stalls

Your Favorite Table of Contents

Book 11: Oh, Crock, Here Comes a Meteor!

Chapter One: Attention Shoppers

Chapter Two: Sell Out with a Capital Currency Sign

Chapter Three: Getting Out of the House

Chapter Four: But a C Plus in Lifestyles

Chapter Five: Reeling, Writhing, and Arithmetic

Chapter Six: Don’t Ask about Rule Number Twelve

Chapter Seven: Clipped

Chapter Eight: Loathe at First Sight

Chapter Nine: If Only You Can Find It

Chapter Ten: Organize and Rise

Chapter Eleven: Like a Fox

Chapter Twelve: Your New Good-Morning Nightmare

Chapter Thirteen: A Grin without a Cat

Chapter Fourteen: Smarter than a Shop Vac

Chapter Fifteen: Houston, We Have More Problems than We Can Count (Three)

Chapter Sixteen: Off with His Head

Chapter Seventeen: Assembly Line...Assembled

Chapter Eighteen: From Zero to Ultra Crocked in Ten Seconds

Chapter Nineteen: Where Everybody Knows Your Name

Chapter Twenty: If Something Made Sense for a Change

Chapter Twenty-One: Mob Lack-of-Mentality

Chapter Twenty-Two: Transfer of Ownership

Chapter Twenty-Three: Fruition

Appendices

About That Guy Whose Book You Read Once

Connect with the Series

This Isn’t Even My Final Form!

The following story ain’t professionally edited. I know, I know, why am I inflicting this on you?

For cool reasons.

Professional editing, covers, and the whole shebang takes money. And creating appendix material takes time. The In a Galaxy Far, Far AwRy series has been steadily seeing new releases, but they’re release at the rate of one per year, while they’re written at a rate of one every nine months or so. Do the math. The series will never catch up.

The author, awesome brain that he has, only ever wanted to share these stories with the world.

Money wasn’t ever a goal. I know by offering these books for free—professionally packaged or not—I’ll be losing money. I honestly don’t care. Since releasing the books free of charge yet without the “professional” look, I’ve found the stress of running this whole series has gotten much manageable. This leaves me with more time to do what I set out to do: write the stories and share them.

I still attend trade shows and comic conventions and sell the books there. Each book will, eventually, be given the professional touch. But, while we’re waiting, all I want to do is share these.

If you see something ain’t right, or something you want to comment on, please feel free. Think of yourself as a beta-reader: a pre-reader of something unreleased. Voice your thoughts at liamgibbs@inagalaxyfarfarawry.com. Until the book gets professionally released, I consider it a work in progress.

So what you’re reading here is the book without the professional touches. I’ve edited this book a dozen times or more, and so I believe it’s as polished as I can get it. I feel comfortable letting you see it. It will one day be professionally edited. One day. But until then, know that you’re reading what I believe to be as polished as I myself can get it.

Enjoy!

Or don’t. I really have no control.

Chapter One: Oh, Crock, Here It Comes!

January 27, 9110. 11:18 a.m. (Galactic Standard Time).

It hurtled through the cosmos on a juggernaut’s path of demolition. In cosmic terms, “demolition” meant the extinction of all life at its intended ground zero. And life abounded dead ahead. That would change in mere hours, though, when this thing clobbered through a populated planet, cleaving the mass of soil, grass, rock, and ozone into splatters.

Only a short half day ago, the meteor darted innocuously through uninhabited space. No harm to anyone. However, something—and it wouldn’t name names because it had no idea what a name was—had tapped it, redirected it, so it would clout through that green, lush planet that dotted the distant blanket of space ahead. It would disintegrate an enormous chunk of its beauty and people.

After all, what else would a meteor do?

Chapter Two: Sell Out with a Capital Currency Sign

“Jeff?” Interim Good Guy leader Reef narrowly avoided the desk that Power Plant and, by extension of mischievous inanity, Franchise heaved across Legion’s disorganized office. Franchise was smart enough to use his legs to haul this thing around. Power Plant, however, hunched underneath its under-space and carted it around on his back. Well, at least doing that helped Power Plant avoid the light panel Franchise soundly conked into. And helped him avoid dropping the desk onto his foot as Franchise just did.

“Jeff, I don’t think your imaginary rotting pork smell is coming from this office.” Reef squatted to see Power Plant, the Jeff in question, eye to eye under the desk. Behind him, Franchise hopped around the office of their hospitalized leader, Legion, clutching his foot and toppling into a golf bag of clubs Reef had yet to see Legion swing.

“Nah, man.” Darkened in shadow, Power Plant aimed what looked like a knowing glance at Reef, though Reef knew those eyes were full of question marks instead of knowledge. “That stink? Ya can’t smells dat? I smells it all the ways from my livings quarters. It’s up in somewheres. Somewheres...heres.” He swung a finger around the green, brown, and red office, his foot pinning down a datasheet, a wafer-thin computer. “An’ name’s Jeffy.”

“Then you should check the barracks,” Reef said. “This is the lobby building.”

And what were the nonchalant numbskulls doing...aside from upending Legion’s golf bag and strewing a swath of datasheets over the carpet? Power Plant had picked out the odor of an indefinable rot: he first claimed it was a dead skunk, then a rotten sandwich, then the fart of an impish elf, then the dead skunk again because he wanted to poke something with a stick. He’d finally settled on rotten pork and tracked the odor here, to Legion’s office. This...this something...was undetectable to anyone except Power Plant and his refined nostrils, but he nevertheless insisted he wreck everything to find it. And if this thing were a skunk, Reef had a prime suspect.

Reef had taken leadership of the Good Guys, military offshoot of Intergalactic Protection, from Legion while Legion lay comatose after having been struck by a starship two weeks ago while on mission at the Great Stellin Fusion Station. This office, usually Legion’s, was now where Reef commanded and, seemingly, babysat.

Franchise had soothed his pulsing foot, but he still limped. “I can’t smell it, either, but Jeffy insists something is stuck in the vent shafts. Someone should check it out. I vote not me.” He tipped a wood club over his shoulder to shoot it into the golf bag. He missed. Then he tripped onto a tee.

“Guys, maybe that smell is the Space Cow in the station’s new food court. They constantly vent rotting steam.” Reef sidestepped to avoid Franchise, who careened across his path.

Power Plant tapped the wall with a foot, maybe in search of a hollow area. “Nah, man. Smell like skunk juice.”

“So you agree it’s Space Cow.” Which reminded Reef with a sickly twist of his gut: Space Cow in Good Guy headquarters Station One’s hastily assembled food court. Four days ago, Intergalactic Protection had paid the Good Guys a visit in the form of bounty hunter Hearse. Hearse had taken away Good Guy agent Kamikaze, but not before issue Reef a warning that Legion had been put in harm’s way for not accepting IP’s sponsorship offers. That had blown a wintry fear in Reef’s body, one that frightened him into accepting backing from twelve of Intergalactic Protection’s suggested megasponsors. The biggest one? Letchtech, who had three months ago entered the food industry by acquiring Somewhat Carbon-Based Foods, the owner of Space Cow. The rest, as they said, was the inbred cousin/sister of history.

In his sleep, Reef heard the moans of slaughter-bound cows. But, by accepting Intergalactic Protection’s sponsor program, he’d avoided falling into an IP trap as Legion had. And now he knew what Good Guy overseer Patton saw in the gratuities IP’s sponsors sent. He wandered to the windowsill and dipped a mint octuple-stuffed Oreo into his thickened ice cream milk. Mmmm. Sugar glaze. He loved being on the signup list for several test products despite the cold shivers and delirium.

The haunt control, that program that enacted users’ verbal commands to a location’s computer, tolled with a wind chime of noise. They were named after their ability to make places seem haunted. “Good morning, everyone. Entities Pincushion and Burnout have arrived. Brought to you by...Galaxy’s Next Top Fairy, only on ABCDEFG.” This creeped Reef out.

Crock. Was it eleven thirty already? Where had the time gone? Reef had probably missed a few hours during that power blackout. Or that Power Plant–caused blackout.

The latent-technology door dissipated with a bloop, dematerialized into computer memory until it was later summoned back to existence. No longer equipped with sliding doors, Station One was under the l-tech technological umbrella since Letchtech had gotten its filthy paws around it. Legion feared l-tech. His heart would rupture once he came back.

Good Guy field agent Burnout entered. His fellow agent Pincushion followed him and skittered aside when Franchise careened backward over a putter. The l-door reappeared behind them.

Reef crammed another pillow of Oreo stuffing into his mouth. He tongued the glaze aside and worked it around as if it were chewing gum. “Jeff, Jacob, just so you guys know, I called a meeting, and I need this office unvandalized”—Reef ducked to avoid a thrown golf club while Franchise made a withered apology at somehow missing the golf bag—“because I don’t feel like relocating our meeting to the ball pit in Letchtech’s Bound-for-Therapy Amusement Land. That theme park is scary like a game show with lasers.” Reef winced when Power Plant conked his head on the desk, attempting to get out from underneath it.

Power Plant clawed open Reef’s light panel and checked the wiring. “No smell in heres.” Then he twisted those wires into a game of cat’s cradle before he headed for Legion’s potted plants.

Reef rubbed a hot throb in his forehead. Headaches were living, breathing Good Guy soldiers. “Okay, guys—Franchise, leave the clubs alone before you hurt yourself a fourth time—guys, I need you two out of here. I have important business to discuss.” They didn’t listen.

Brothers Burnout and Power Plant, now with untangled hands, crossed paths and slapped a high five, “Go easy on him, big brutha man” and “I will, big guy. Stop playing with wires. You remember the latest flossing incident” exchanged between them. Pincushion followed Power Plant’s redheaded and red-toned older brother.

“Good, you’re here.” Reef motioned for Burnout and Pincushion to sit at the phantom l-chair outlines that remained where Legion’s desk had been. “Have a seat at my empty space.”

Amid a swirl of molecules that, with a frothy whistle, coalesced into a chair, Reef sat. Burnout and Pincushion sat, as well, though Pincushion needed to stand, remove a doughnut cushion, and sit back down. Letchtech was touting hemorrhoid solutions again.

“I understand now why Legion doesn’t like l-tech.” Pincushion flung the hemorrhoid doughnut aside. It bounced off Franchise’s head and dissolved into the ether before it could hit the pick-up sticks game of golf clubs left scattered beside the wall.

“Oh, speaking of new things.” Reef reached into his pocket and produced—ta-da—a seven-inch plastic tube with a trigger button. A toy version of an escape pod launcher. “Letchtech installed our new pod bay, and they gave me this little toy as a model.” He jabbed the button and—pop—out sprang a tiny sphere that ricocheted off the wall and into Burnout’s head with a thud. He and Pincushion looked unimpressed. It bounced off a cabinet. Thud. Thud. “Cool, isn’t it?” Thud.

He put the tube away. Fine. “Anyway, I called you here not to discuss Pincushion’s possible rectal pain but instead an...undercover...mission.” Here it came. Reef stood and paced around the arrangement of chairs. Every time he rehearsed this discussion in his head, he sounded like a trench-coat-wearing salesman with a “fantastic” business opportunity that included cheap watches and alleyways. He realized he was pacing and sat. He jostled to scooch forward but his chair remained firmly locked in place. Perhaps the l-tech’s scooch setting was on “no way.”

Reef said, “Four days ago, I learned a terrible secret about IP—”

“Theys eats babies!” Power Plant threw up his arms.

“They eat ba—” Franchise snapped his fingers. “Not quick enough.”

Reef ignored them. “Burnout, Pincushion, the higher-ups at IP want to reopen the use of hyperpeople in the military. They’re planning to violate the Hyperability Injunction so their stocks and sponsorship revenue will rise. If they do, we’ll incur the wrath of seven neighboring galaxies. We can’t let that happen.”

“What?” The Good Guys’ fire-wielder Burnout smacked an empty drinking glass off a nearby hover tray. His face darkened to match his red-and-orange impact suit. “Was that what those activists were referring to when they detonated part of the science wing last month?”

“Yup.”

“But IP enacted the Hyperability Injunction for a reason: to stop fallout from the Perseus War Hyperability Incident! It’s kept us out of galactic war for three years now. They can’t toy with their own intergalactic policies.”

“I know.” Reef swallowed. If only they knew the reason for the injunction in the first place.

“But...undercover, brother? Us?” Pincushion’s neck craned back. He had the hypermutation of bony spikes protruding from his skin, and some spikes almost perforated his chair. “IP knows who we are. You can’t disguise a guy whose main use is standing in for the target at a game of ringtoss.” He plinked a finger off one of his spikes.

“I have the solution. Harrier and I are the Good Guys’ only field leaders. However, with his wing clipped during our mission at the Great Stellin Fusion Station, Harrier is on an indeterminate sabbatical, and I’m acting as Good Guy leader until Legion returns to active leadership. Meanwhile, we need temp field leaders. That’s where you two come in.” Yup. Fantastic business deal.

Burnout and Pincushion leaned forward. Burnout’s neck tensed, and Pincushion’s wrinkled with bewilderment.

Reef said, “We employ only twelve active Good Guys, and seven of those are field agents. The rest are support.”

Burnout tallied silently on his fingers, his lips moving. “Wait, why are we counting Null? He’s in a permanent coma.”

“That’s why you’re here.”

“You want us to kill Null?”

Reef waved his hands around. “No. Forget Null. The Good Guys are in serious need of field leaders. I would like you two to become those leaders. You’re ready to step up. So we’re trying a two-birds-with-one-stone thing. We’ll visit to register you two for leadership training, but we’ll use our time to snoop around and dig up information. It’s the perfect cover.”

“Two field leaders, seven field agents?” Burnout looked confused. Behind him, Power Plant toppled a glass-door display case. It crashed. He gave the okay signal: no rotting pork behind the display case. Thanks, inspector.

“We only need one field leader at a time, but we’ll register you both so you can switch off. Make no mistake, though. I need you as field leaders. You’ve earned it.”

“Us? As field leaders?” Pincushion glanced at Burnout, who undoubtedly wondered how this would affect his ability to micromanage his brother’s every square inch of field duty to protect him. “Will IP buy this?”

Power Plant tossed the office’s light panel aside like a Frisbee. It spun three feet away, but program settings snapped it back against his forehead.

Reef shifted his position on the seat. “Pincushion, you’ve acted in a leadership capacity since Legion’s been away. And your employee file says you worked five years of police duty in the Mission Beach Police Department before your injury.” He indicated Pincushion’s metal knee. “Yes, they’ll buy it because it’s real. I’ve booked us time at the orientation facility at IP’s personnel campus so we can investigate without turning any heads. You’ll enroll in some leadership classes, like all field leaders do. We’ll also visit the licensing wing to buy more time, get you guys permits to allow more latitude with commanding small machines of war”—he ignored the racket when Power Plant tumbled over Legion’s desk, floundered an arm across Legion’s nameplate, and rolled backward onto the carpet—“such as my new cleaning crew.”

“Zat whats we is?” Power Plant swept the nameplate away and tossed aside an activated datasheet. The datasheet whacked Franchise in the face. Franchise removed it and curled an eyebrow in interest. He sat on the discarded golf bag and began to click through the pages.

“You’re more of a wrecking crew without a foreman,” Reef said over his shoulder. “And you’ve destroyed the wrong building a few times.”

“That’s awesomes like Good Friday chocolate.”

“You mean Easter Friday chocolate,” Franchise said. “Or Easter Saturday. Whichever. The chocolate day.”

Burnout leaned over to retrieve Legion’s nameplate and examined it with an eye focused like an electron microscope. “You still haven’t reprogrammed this thing? It still has Legion’s name.”

Reef snatched the nameplate away and placed it on a storage cabinet behind him. “This is still Legion’s office.”

Burnout huffed. “You took this position more than three weeks ago. Right now, this is your office. No one will blame you for personalizing this place until Legion wakes up. You’re the man in charge. Act the part.”

“It’s...” Reef stood and faced a recently installed l-wall that had replaced Legion’s regular wall. Now, at a single command, Reef could order it to disappear and survey the lobby from a mezzanine porch that overlooked the lower floor. “It’s not right. Look, let’s change the subject.” Reef spread his palms at Burnout and Pincushion. “Are you two in?”

Burnout stood first. He sliced a finger at the ground like an under-the-clutch football coach. “I’ve worked too hard to keep my brother safe. If this stops those IP peckers from inviting seven galaxies to flatten us into earwax, I’m in.”

Pincushion’s head bobbed in a strut as if not anchored to his neck. He slapped his leg. “I’m in, too.”

“Me, too,” Franchise said. Good thing he was used to being ignored.

Reef’s teeth peek-a-booed behind his smile. “Good. We leave in an hour.” The rattle of that knocked-over display case averted his attention. “Hey, Brothers of Anarchy, Legion’s old uniforms are not for playing dress-up.”

Power Plant stopped jamming his leg into Legion’s old corporal uniform. It was a size or two too big. “Gotcha. Hey, Jakey, we’s outta heres.”

Franchise shrugged and discarded the pitching wedge he held. He tossed a thumb at Power Plant and flashed a what-can-you-do smile at Reef. “I have to watch him. Keep him out of trouble.”

“If only you would even pretend that were true.” Reef sighed. “Just once.”

Power Plant swept a finger at him. “Jakey, grab ones o’ dem golfs clubs. I gots an ideas for the laundering machines what shrunked my sweaters.”

Chapter Three: Getting Out of the House

Outside in stale night air that did not circulate, under a crumbling atmospheric bubble that could not regenerate, Mechanism, clad in his full-body robotic armor, strutted down Bad Guy headquarters Station Zilcho’s tomblike main strip, such perfection in each stride. Oh, and was his stride ever perfect. He marveled at the measurement of each step. Yes, some things in life were symphonies of flawlessness. He would kiss his leg but, well...this suit was not meant for flexibility. Kickboxing, perhaps.

His helmet dinged with an alert, so he stopped in a corridor of buildings as lifeless as tombs. The clicks of his boots stopped, as well, and a phenomenal silence killed any animation this station once featured. Via mental command, he allowed the alert to feed across his helmet’s internal view.

Ah. The notification supply from his link with Station One’s command computer. He had captured and programmed Good Guy cyborg Ace Spandex as his unwilling slave, and Ace Spandex had opened a secret link between Mechanism and the Good Guys’ headquarters for his own devious purposes.

Mechanism had arranged his helmet’s filters to review each command and drop most of them into the binary teeth of his onboard computer’s munching delete function. However, he commanded arrivals to and departures from Station One to raise their hands above the forgettable morass of constant alerts. In this case? A journey notification: agents Reef, Burnout, and Pincushion had reserved a Flagstar, F-Comanche, for a flight to Intergalactic Protection’s personnel campus on Gaia. Intriguing. A shift in manpower? Or perhaps someone needed to release some anger at the shooting range. After all, Letchtech would release its apple-flavored bedroom sets this week.

His heart squealed. The Good Guys in the meteor’s target zone and now he wouldn’t have to think of an excuse to goad dimwitted Bad Guy leader Master Asinine and his bounty of baboons into venturing off station.

Since Station Zilcho’s power cores had detonated a month ago, the Bad Guy headquarters remained unpowered. However, Mechanism had access to power that the rest of the Bad Guys remained unaware lay at his disposal. If he were to wrest control of Master Asinine’s vast resources from under that clown’s nose to enact his plan, he needed use of some of Station Zilcho’s louder facilities. But he could not activate anything without disclosing this unknown power to the others. Now he needed not supply Master Asinine with a reason to visit Intergalactic Protection and get him out of the way. This opportunity could not have been timelier. His plan progressed ideally.

He prompted his helmet to call Master Asinine on its gabber communication device. “Computer, acknowledge. Contact entity That Obtuse Primate Who Pretends He Is Not the Universe’s Supreme Mockery.” His helmet clicked and transmitted the command.

Only seconds ticked by before the connection passed through. “Howdy, howdy. Your leader here.” That blasted—Wait a second. That voice sounded too high-pitched for Master Asinine.

Mechanism leaned his head against a lamppost. “Who speaks?” He used his suspicion voice. It flaunted his greater-than-a-god intonations. How he expressed the brilliance of each nuance put forth in the qualities of voice only his superb performance boasted. Beethoven could not have conducted a more resplendent sound.

“Sir, perhaps you shouldn’t inhale helium before you talk to Mechanism. He finds you comical enough.” Ah, Master Asinine’s second-in-command, as eager to please as a puppy going for walkies. Back from the infirmary yet still infirm, Lieutenant IQ 23’s voice sounded strained, foggy, weak from a throat still mottled with injury.

Mechanism conked his head against the lamppost. He wanted to smack Master Asinine so hard that the erect primate’s brains might jostle into some functional arrangement, akin to yanking down a slot machine’s lever and winning big. Master Asinine had recently mentioned an idea of replacing his eyes with cherries, so the sensation would feel similar. “My esteemed leader, I have received a notification you will find interesting. The current leader of the Good Guys, Reef, and two subordinates have planned a mission to Intergalactic Protection’s personnel campus on Gaia. The mission’s purpose remains unknown. However, the opportunity presents itself to devastate the Good Guys by assassinating their new leader.” Under his breath, he said, “It also affords the chance to distract you from arranging another rodeo tournament no one will attend.”

“Hrm,” Master Asinine said. Mechanism wished that meant his leader was thinking. He wished anything meant his leader was thinking. He wished the whistle that whined over the connection meant his leader was not inhaling more helium. “A chance to assassinate people, eh? Especially if those people are people? Usually my style, but today I need to prepare eight hundred muffins for the annual Bad Guy Charity Bake Sale Wingding. This one promises to be even better than last year’s because it’s the first. Not sure it’s a wingding, though. More of a soiree.”

No. Master Asinine must depart! Mechanism grabbed the lamppost. He clenched his fingers and tore off shrieking metal. He’d redirected that meteor for this very purpose. “Mighty Master Asinine”—he yawped out the words as if he spat out snake venom—“a meteor is in the vicinity. You may get to play with meteors! This occasion will not present itself again. The Good Guys’ leader is separating himself from most of his subordinates. This opportunity will remain open for only a few hours. If you wish to wrest control of Stratus Cloud and supply Station Zilcho with the power it has lacked now for a month, you must act immediately. And, if you do, I will”—he sighed. Oh, how he sighed. This would visit calamity upon everyone—“install Letchtech’s Control Freak operating system on our network.” May he have mercy on his own soul.

“Boo-wop-diddly, it’s a deal.” A thump punctuated his announcement. Had he pounded his desk? “Lieutenant, fire up my killing knives. We’re going on a demolition mission.”

“Sir, I believe you reserved your killing knives for destroy deploys.”

“Whichever. Go fire them up for whatever excursion has a rhyming title. You’ll find them hanging precariously over my bed. Master Asinine, out.”

Yes, that devolved burden would most certainly be “out.” Mechanism would put up with these infantile conversations for only a short while longer. If even one of Master Asinine’s knives would fall, that timeline would reduce to zero. It would also allow Mechanism an excuse to enjoy cookies. On second thought, surviving any conversational debacle with that primordial-soup man was excuse enough to throw a parade, let alone enjoy a treat. Yes, tonight cookies would ensue.

Chapter Four: But a C Plus in Lifestyles

Reef pressed one last button on the starship’s navigational computer. Their destination: Intergalactic Protection’s personnel campus on Gaia. The trip would take over three hours, and the time was already noon, but the sun rose and set late on Gaia’s southern axis, which gave him, Burnout, and Pincushion at least ten hours to investigate. The only snag: to conceal their snooping, they would have to spend time in the registration line. Reef remembered when he and Harrier had done so a few weeks after the Good Guys formed, and again when IP instated him as the Good Guys’ temporary leader. The lines induced sleep like a hypnotist’s pocket watch, and if anything could nudge his brain that final tick from consciousness to unconsciousness, he’d have to avoid it. He brought an accounting datasheet with him in case he felt tempted, though.

Burnout’s and Pincushion’s footsteps pinged up the access ramp, and both appeared in the port. Burnout entered first and caught sight of Reef’s impact suit, now adorned with logos advertising anything from Happy Pipeline Bran Muffins to Letchtech’s new Nanosoap. Reef liked Nanosoap because, when you pressed its logo, it played a short jingle. So he pressed it. Happy times. He sang along in a lullaby whisper, “If the blood and brain in your carpet stain / won’t come out and—”

“You’re serious?” Burnout flopped a hand at Reef’s suit. “Sponsor logos now? And with lights?”

“Flashy. I call this my shirtvertisement.” He pointed at the food ad on his shoulder. “And I like cherry meringue hushpuppy. Cherry meringue hushpuppy?” He whipped a plastic-wrapped treat from his pocket, which Burnout and Pincushion both refused with tongues stuck out. “Suit yourselves.” He tore open the crinkling package and chewed. “It’s real cherry. Don’t ask what the hushpuppy itself is made out of.”

Reef tapped the pilot’s computer to activate it. He received training as both a pilot and a navigator/high-speed-action space-chase daredevil. Therefore, this short jaunt wasn’t in need of sleepy-time Mabel, the only pilot who flew from point A to point B in a brain blackout, left pieces of the vehicle at points C through J, and stranded a passenger at H. “So you’re not keen on our sponsors. Look at it this way. They bought out our contract with the Bad Guys, so we’re not saddled with another three-and-a-half months of Master Asinine’s crock-eating grin all over our equipment. Did you notice how relaxing the trip up the embarking ramp was?” Somehow Power Plant had masterminded a sponsorship deal with the Bad Guys recently to afford the Good Guys enough money to replace their destroyed haunt control. But with that deal gone, Intergalactic Protection had wiped the Good Guys’ starships clean of the Bad Guy logo the same way Reef would wipe himself clean after using the toilet. When Legion returned to leadership duties, if he blew his top over the l-tech on the station, at least he’d find solace in the fact that the l-tech didn’t grin at him with Asinine’s tongue-waggling doofus face.

Burnout considered this. “Good point.”

“I’m happier than a birthday girl with a new unicorn since I don’t have to stare into Asinine’s bright yellow fang smile. And we get real leather.” He slapped an open palm on the navigator’s chair. “Smell this. It’s real leather. We can stop pretending pleather is a word we like to say.”

Burnout strolled into the passenger deck and eased himself into one of the two front seats. Pincushion did the same in his usual middle-row seat. Reef could tell which he used by the puncture marks. If it was pierced, it was Pincushion’s. If it was charred, it was Burnout’s. If it smelled like sulfur, contained ravenous arachnids, was rigged to detonate, or glowed and hummed, it was Kamikaze’s. If Kamikaze were around, Reef would be wary, but at least the lingering radiation in most of his seats had worn off.

Reef checked the area discreetly. No one paid attention, so he cupped a palm over his mouth and nose to sample his breath. He made sure to moderate his whiskey intake so he wouldn’t stumble around anymore. At nine this morning, he had almost flopped into oncoming traffic: Power Plant rocketing past after a bowl of Frosted Happy Lucky Sugar Salvo Barrage (the Haralsian race had weird ideas about breakfast). Earlier, Reef had expelled his own salvo barrage of breakfast all over his shoes. It took a vast amount of time and spearmint mouthwash—which didn’t help an alcoholic to kick the habit—to rid the stench. But he smelled natural thanks to an entire vial of aftershave he’d spritzed onto his tongue. And now he was sober. Cough, wheeze, cough. Poisoned by chemicals but sober.

He punched more buttons and disregarded the rest of the navigational instructions. “We’ll arrive at the personnel base well before four this afternoon, which gives us a half-day window to get to the bottom of that injunction violation. I’ll warn you, though. We’ll have to stand in a registration line to keep our cover, and these lines are killer. In fact, Stratus Cloud Today rated IP’s spacecraft-registration line as the murder capital of the galaxy. Twelve triage-related deaths yesterday alone. You brought your impact suits, I hope.”

A mutter leaked into the starship through the open access port, distant at first, as if a set of teeth chattered from some faraway land. But the chatter drew closer and uncongealed into distinct words. The voice muttered about a “ship ramp below access star port” and—

“Oh, no. Why is he out of his cell?” Reef threw a hand at the access port and the hunchback who now filled it. Their prisoner, Scapegoat.

After the crash into the Great Stellin Fusion Station that had landed Legion in the hospital, the Good Guys had at least come away with two prisoners. One was Bad Guy Ice Cream Headache, who had escaped her cell earlier this month. The other, the hunchback nosepicker Scapegoat with whom Burnout had weirdly formed a bond.

“Found master you. Proud so I much found you, yes yes.” With arms extended, Scapegoat waddled in.

Burnout stood to give himself a vantage over the seats, then followed Reef’s finger. His expression adopted a smile, as if he gave no more consideration to Scapegoat’s unsupervised roaming than he would the lint in his pocket. “Oh, don’t worry about him. He’s harmless.”

“What?” Reef’s heart pumped in double time. This required more than lint-degree consideration. This ranked in the upper echelons of the consideration meter, like places where you’d mull over a splotch on your favorite shirtvertisement. “Burnout, did you let him out? Is he wobbling up to you? Is he hugging you? Why can’t there be a splotch on your shirtvertisement?”

“Reef, I’ve never understood your creepy corporate expressions.” Burnout squirmed a single arm free of Scapegoat’s boa-constrictor grip. He grunted and almost fell into a seat. “Okay, okay, buddy. Down, boy. It’s fine. Scapegoat—”

“Brought I play to cards with, master, yes yes.” Scapegoat’s tongue lapped out of his mouth. If he had a tail, it would wag.

“That’s great, buddy. But you need to return to your cell. I laid fresh sheets down for you and gave you a few more blankets so you’re warm enough.” Burnout put his arm around Scapegoat. “Also, what do you say to a mix tape to pass the time? The best of whatever I have in my closet. Why does your breath smell like hand soap again?”

Reef dusted his seat’s leather. Real, genuine, authentic leather. “Burnout, mix tapes haven’t existed for more than seven thousand years.”

“It’s an expression that transcends technology.” Burnout stepped away from Scapegoat, who was now rubbing the Good Guy’s belly. Reef paused. Since when did prisoners rub their captors’ bellies? Stockholm syndrome was never creepier.

Reef shook the thought from his head. “That’s beside the point. The heart of the matter is that any musical taste that includes jock rock is atrocious. On top of that, prisoners cannot wander around unaccompanied, and the only things in your closet are a chin-up bar and seven identical sets of your impact suit. Oh, your brother also hides his report cards in there and doesn’t tell you.”

“Don’t worry. I found them.” Burnout guided Scapegoat into a chair. “Reef, relax. Please. What with my brother here—and I’ll discuss the D plus in home economics with him, which is strange considering the A plus in harsh-climate planetary survival—I’d be the first to worry over Scapegoat working us from the inside. But I’ve left his cell door open for four days now, and this is the first time he’s wandered out of the cellblock. The Bad Guys aren’t coming back for him. They’ve forgotten about him. He looked suicidal. It seemed inhumane to lock him up. And you told Sixth Sense to read his...mind, I guess you call it. He’s clear. You signed his report yourself: safe and not fit for incarceration by reason of mental deterioration.” He tapped Scapegoat’s temple. “This little thing was deteriorating.”

Reef buried his head in his hand. “Burnout—”

“There’s nothing beneath that skull. If there was ever a blank slate, it’s Scapegoat. He doesn’t have it in him to betray trust.” Burnout’s hand squalled with flame. A dry heat engulfed the cockpit, forcing both Pincushion and Reef to step away from the swelter Burnout emitted, not only from the fire but from the heatwave his anger produced. “Reef, don’t force me to lock him up, so help me.”

“Slate blank nothing, yes yes, master,” came the case-closing sentence.

Reef spilled backward into the pilot’s chair that assembled under him. He oozed into its warm contours. Real. Leather. This was what kings would sit on if they served in the military. He squeaked deeper into the leather, puffed his cheeks, and tented his hands over his nose. “Fine. I’m letting him stay out only because locking him in his cell is harmful to the starved hamster that operates his brain. But...he’s your responsibility. I want you to accompany him at all times, and if you can’t, you lock him in his cell no matter what thought yodels through the canyon between those ears.”

Burnout’s body relaxed, and the heat abated. “Understood.”

“Good.” Reef spun his chair to face the pilot’s computer. “Now, take your seats. Let’s get this show on the road, because we have little time today as it is.”

“Today get show road we on the have little, yes yes.”

Reef spun around again. “And if he talks to the haunt control, you’re explaining the cooked circuitry to Ace.”

Chapter Five: Reeling, Writhing, and Arithmetic

Franchise watched Power Plant plug his nose into a funnel he had carried around since they’d left Legion’s office. Every time he stuffed his nose into that thing, he complained that everything smelled like plastic. It didn’t help him sniff out this wandering odor of rotten pork, and he denied that the stench of ripe burrito wasn’t wafting from his frequent burps. Like that one. Pee-yoo. Sour cream and onions? A bit much for a midmorning snack.

The hallway they occupied glittered like polished brass. Since Reef had accepted sponsors for the Good Guys, Letchtech had upgraded Station One’s cleaning contracts. Everything smelled like bleach.

“Jeffy.” Franchise cracked his knuckles. Seven minutes was enough time for a knuckle recharge. “Exactly how do you plan to pinpoint this smell? I mean, don’t get me wrong. Every time I pass an air vent, I get the idea someone overcooked everything in the kitchen and left it for a few years, decades, whatever. But...that stench is probably just another cleaningbot Letchtech didn’t program properly.” A cleaningbot rattled past on imbalanced wheels, announcing the new smell sensation of ammonium and bubblegum detergents. Franchise watched it leave. “Okay, not that one, but one of these things is bound to smell like a toothless hobo.”

Power Plant wedged the funnel against the wall’s baseboard to sample a bouquet of dust motes. He inhaled one, which caused retching sneezes akin to yanking on a lawnmower’s throttle. Or their robot Car Alarm’s cola dispenser whenever it broke down.

Power Plant wiped snot from his nostrils and aimed the funnel upward. “I’s thinks something mebbe stucks in a air vent. I smells it from this one”—he jerked his chin at one air vent—“the one downs the hall”—he jerked his chin at the polished hallway—“and the one in your livings quarters.”

“Whatever you hid in my living quarters, get rid of it. I can’t have people wondering about me.”

“Hey, I’s sniffs somethings.” Power Plant’s nose went to work, twitching like a rabbit’s. He sucked in every fourth or fifth sniff, which led him around to...Franchise. “Ugh. Smell comings from ya breaths. Sick. You eat cereals for lunch todays?”

“Funny coming from the guy who hosed Rabbi Satan’s Blood five-alarm syrup all over his waffles this morning. Your breath reeks like a honey-garlic beehive.” Franchise smacked away the funnel, which scraped against Power Plant’s nose. Franchise felt no sympathy. In fact, tonight he’d replay the scrape in his dreams. Either that or he’d be a counterterrorism super-karate fighter.

A disc-shaped vacuumbot skittered along the floor and stopped at the amassed pillow of dust motes. It scrubbed around to devour the fluff. Power Plant raised a leg, allowing it to zip off in search of more filth to clean. Since Letchtech had wrapped its meat hooks around Station One, everything from that budget jockey Invard to a logo-marked cleaningbot had attempted to straighten the Good Guys out. More maintenance automatons than people teemed around these halls now.

But now that Power Plant had mentioned it, the air vents were chain-smoking this arcane pork odor from a deep well in Station One. Maybe the garbage disposal’s refuse ended up there. Or maybe someone had routed the bathroom plumbing in the wrong direction. The possibilities were endless, and so were the opportunities to wretch.

“So, from the air vents. Huh.” Franchise cracked his knuckles. “Which of us is going to crawl in to look?”

“Okay, we’s draw straws.”

“Sounds great.” Franchise heaved a curt breath. “What’s a draw straw?”

“Dunno. Okay, last ones to add all the primes nummers up to and includings eight hunnert goes.”

“Eight hundred isn’t a prime number, and I’ll be baffled if you reach eleven.”

“Okay, insteads we’s can rocks-papers-skissers for it.” Power Plant leaped into a runner’s stance and prepared his game fist.

Whatever. Franchise won whenever he convinced Power Plant his paper was really metal sheeting. Which he did now. And he won. Because nothing—but nothing—beat metal sheeting. Power Plant hooted as if he’d played for the privilege to crawl around in that mucky vent, not to avoid it. Franchise let him have his delusion.

“Jeffy, you have the same smarts as a redneck.”

“Thank ya.”

“One day you’ll raise a fine possum. Okay, you ready?” Franchise netted his fingers to boost Power Plant into this nine-foot-high pork lung. “On three. One, t—”

Power Plant burst airborne on a current of heated light. Oh, yeah. Franchise separated his hands.

Power Plant squinted and hovered closer to the air vent. He used his laser hyperability to cut a thin beam through the area that fastened the vent’s grill, and the grill clattered to the floor. He crawled in and kicked his legs to wriggle deeper. “Dusts feel greasy in here. I thinks I smells the farts of tins cans.”

Hopefully nobody would catch them investigating the vents. Franchise hid his face in the pit of his elbow. Shame felt warm. If the vent didn’t contain sugar or a viewscreen showing Power Plant’s favorite episode of Cosmonaut Chimp, “Feces Foray: Hail to the Fling,” the blond Good Guy would lose interest in about five...four...three—

“Uh. Hey. Okay. Huh,” someone said, making Franchise lose count. Argh! He cracked the rest of his knuckles and turned to see Sixth Sense, who wore an impact suit too large. His eyes looked like owl’s eyes behind his thick glasses. One hand held a capsule containing a blinking memory chip, which he held as if a silver-lined pillow cushioned it.

“This doesn’t look like it fits social norms even for the two guys who decided fun is sewing all my clothes together like paper dolls. I’d pretend I’m not curious enough to ask, but what are you up to?” Sixth Sense would have read their minds, but he’d once told Franchise he scared easily. Franchise didn’t understand how the two things related—Ooohhhhhh. Well, that was rude.

“Hey,” Power Plant said, his upper body immersed in the confines of the tight shaft. His voice echoed out tinnily. “Who dat?”

Franchise looked up. “Hagen. He says you’re doing a stupendous job of making the rest of us look like Einstein.”

“How? You grows a mustache like a comb?” Power Plant squiggled into the shaft up to his knees. Bonk. “Ow.”

Franchise threw a thumb at the air vent and said to Sixth Sense, “Jeffy smelled some pork odor wafting through the station the last few days, so we’re tracking it down. He figured it’s coming from the air vents, so he’s providing good comedy to see what he can find. He thinks buried treasure, the bones of a long-forgotten alien race, or possibly a civilization of wish-granting genies. The smart money’s on dead rats.”

Sixth Sense pushed his glasses up his nose. “Okay. Sure. Great. I guess. Sounds...like a plan? Just don’t eat what’s in there. Uhm. Can I offer a tip? That guy Invard has access to the station’s blueprints. Ask him for the ventilation plans. You could locate the place that processes our air. Just a thought.”

Sixth Sense waved good-bye and regarded Power Plant, who was ankle-deep in the vent, with chagrin. He continued down the hall, carrying his beacon like a Fabergé egg.

“Hey, I’ve got news.” Franchise banged an open palm on the wall. A gong reverberated through the vent shaft, which should have ground Power Plant’s ear drums to their atomic components. Power Plant’s ankles thrashed around inside the tight quarters. The recently installed Big Brother Tech security cameras possibly hadn’t caught his thrashes for repeat viewing, so Franchise banged once more.

Power Plant wiggled around to worm out of the shaft, but he seemed stuck in the meter-by-meter tunnel of clammy ventilation. “What Hagen says?”

Franchise deliberated: tell his best friend they could find Invard for the station’s blueprints and track down this olfactory threat without testing their allergic threshold, or watch Power Plant burrow deeper down the rabbit hole? Franchise shrugged. “He said, ‘Full speed ahead.’”

Chapter Six: Don’t Ask about Rule Number Twelve

“Arrived.” Reef tapped a couple of buttons on the slanted pilot’s computer, switching the cantankerous Flagstar starship to AI-pilot. Ugh. He’d gotten stuck with the starship whose engine flooded. Who would have guessed? Hadn’t Intergalactic Protection sent inspectors to check these beasts?

The monster craft grunted left, shifted right, and settled to the asphalt. It blended into a slew of other Flagstars, all identical except the Good Guys’ starship sported an airbrush stain where Master Asinine’s evil maw had guffawed. Thank Letchtech they got rid of that blight. If Reef had shown up with that deranged face on their starship, the higher-ups would have shot him on sight. And also laughed at him.

Burnout and Pincushion still sat, but Scapegoat meandered around the refreshment contraption in the back. The hunchback stuck his mouth under the ice machine’s spout and pressed the lever. A hailstorm pelted his face. For some reason, he tried again. Reef guessed a few bugs rattled around in his program, and when the program got stuck in an infinite loop, the results were painful. Another rush of ice rumbled into Scapegoat’s face. Okay, make that hilarious.

Reef intertwined his fingers. “Burnout, Pincushion, we’ll be standing in lines operated by robots pushing their new collection of confectionaries on you. Remember rule number one: never trust a confectionary from something that can’t taste. Rule number two: never trust a donkey. That might sound out of context right now, but wait until we get inside.”

“Wait, wait.” Burnout pressed his chair’s inertia field button and stood, his spine creaking out of the stiff position. “I thought rule number one was ‘Never trust ketchup to save a meal.’”

Pincushion deactivated his inertia field. “Rule number one is ‘Never trust Fight Club.’”

“No, that’s rule number two.”

“No, brother, rule number two is ‘Wipe thoroughly.’”

“No, that’s when you take a numb—”

“Guys, guys”—Reef patted the air—“it doesn’t matter what rule number one is. Just remember those robots wouldn’t know a good pastry if it hit them in the face. It has. A lot of clowns pass through on their way to pie competitions. Just prepare yourselves for some pushy robots. Also, we brought our own sponsored desserts. One-bite coffee cake?” He plucked a plastic-wrapped disc from his pocket and offered it forward. “No? Suit yourself.” He tore open the plastic, downed the cake, crumpled up the wrapper, and stuffed it into his pocket.

Scapegoat settled into a chair next to where Burnout had sat. He stabbed at the inertial field button once, twice, struck gold on the third try. His body riveted to the chair, and his lungs breathed a strangled gasp.

“Whoa, buddy.” Burnout’s hands dived for a dial next to the button. “You should tone down the field strength.”

Scapegoat leaned forward, slugging in oxygen. He regained his color from a salted white to its previous ashen hue. “Breathe thank can you now I, master, yes yes.”

Burnout clasped his shoulder. “You see that, Reef? He’s been aboard the starship only three hours, and he’s already figured out how the seats work. He’s a fast learner.”

Reef’s hands flopped into the air. “You want a golf clap?”

Pincushion tapped his impact suit’s breast to activate his identification badge.

Reef did the same. “Okay, we’ve got a long day, an important investigation, and a lot of robotic pastry chefs who don’t take no for an answer. So let’s get inside. We have quite a wait before we can even start the investigation into IP’s latest intergalactic disaster situation.”

“Computer, acknowledge. Open entry port.” Burnout moved toward the port that whispered open. He activated his badge.

Reef blocked him. “Uh, Burnout?” Their eyes joined, so Reef shifted his to Scapegoat, who spun the inertia field’s dial. The hunchback alternated between flopping off the seat to squeezing his ribs under a weight that, with the wrong flick, would exceed two tons of pressure. As long as the dial’s marker didn’t rotate into the red zone, Reef wouldn’t have to clean up a hunchback-shaped smear of blood. Then again, he could convince Power Plant to clean it as long as the blond youth didn’t swallow a bone in the process.

Burnout didn’t understand Reef’s indication, so Reef indicated again. Burnout’s eyes thinned into questioning slits, so Reef came right out: “We can’t let Scapegoat wander around the starship unsupervised, and we can’t bring him into restricted zones. He’s not cleared. I’m sorry, but lock your adopted pet in the detainment deck.”

Burnout slouched. “Are you serious? We just freed him from a two-week imprisonment. You want to give him three hours of freedom only to lock him up again for half the day?” He threw his hands in the air and dropped them against his sides. “How will he eat?”

“I don’t know. But understand my position. You’re suggesting a criminal roam free in our transportation. He could pilot it into a mass-tran of school children. Crock, maybe he’ll wipe his nose on the missile buttons. He’s a worst-case scenario waiting to happen. I won’t risk him destroying a wing of this complex because he needed to mine the nose caves.”

“Would it kill you to trust me sometimes?”

“No, and it wouldn’t kill me to fly a stylish civ-tran instead of a mil-tran sometimes, either. But that won’t happen since the company car won’t let me drive it unless it detects at least zero point one grams per liter of Binge Puppy’s new Red Addict cola in my blood. I’m just not prepared for that level of intimacy with work vehicles.”

“Reef, he’s—”

“Burnout. I’m sorry, but that’s my rule.”

Burnout’s upper row of teeth shifted over the lower row like iron sharpening iron. “Fine.” He faced Scapegoat. “Buddy, I’m sorry, but we have to put you away for a while.” He threw Reef a disdainful leer as hot as flamethrower output. “I’ll give you a few coffee cakes in case you get hungry or need to practice your shot put.”

Reef nodded. “Thank you. Don’t know if you want a moment, but we’ll wait for you outside.” He motioned for Pincushion to follow him out.

* * *

Fine. Lock Scapegoat up. What brutal nonsense. Sometimes the rules were heartless, but Reef would crack the whip until Burnout relinquished. So Burnout waited for the two to leave before knuckling Scapegoat’s inertia field button. The field zapped off, letting Scapegoat spill forward. Burnout caught him and helped him up. “Sorry, buddy. I have to do what I have to do.”

“Have to do do what you you, master,” Scapegoat mix-and-matched. Had he freestyled a rhyme?

Burnout led him by the shoulder into the detainment deck in the rear where two small cells occupied a cramped inlet in front of the walled-off rear thruster assembly. He sat Scapegoat in one of the linen-scented cells...and stole a glance at the entry port. Vacant. Good.

He leaned closer, inches from Scapegoat’s ear. “Just stick around the cell. I’ll leave its shield screen off in case you need anything. But don’t wander off the starship or tinker with the equipment, especially Reef’s music station presets. He’s a classic rock man, so he gets irritated if he’s stuck with teen pop on the way home.” He patted Scapegoat’s shoulder and stood. But he returned. “You know what? Teen pop it is. If you find anything on Master Asinine’s hit list, you’ll score extra points with me.”

Chapter Seven: Clipped

Good Guy field leader Harrier plodded through Station One’s blooming lobby doors. He dragged his feet so thickly he thought the feathers of his hypermutation wings—make that wing—might stand on end from the static charge the carpet runner built in him. Sodding spud ugly thing.

Thin wind tickled the stump of his severed wing, making it itchy. He would rather have lost a limb. He needed that wing. Needed it! What was he without his flight? A traffic jam of emotional loss had clawed out what little control over himself remained in his brain.

And all because of Legion. Harrier drew back his lips and squeezed them around his teeth. Impetuous, scally Legion. The telepath who saw across timelines Luzimoss’s predictions were coming true in piecemeal: that Legion would turn against the Good Guys. Would he in this timeline? Legion had thoughtlessly hacked away what Harrier considered dearest. How soon would their leader commit treason? How soon would he forsake this galaxy to Asinine’s half-baked plans?

Harrier stumbled on the carpet. His equilibrium had felt right dipso since he’d left the SIPMA hospital. Now, because of his missing wing, he knew he’d never feel that balance again, even if Power Plant stopped sawing the sole off his right shoe every time he purchased a new pair.

Back to this place, this...sodding astrological hovel called Station One. This circus funhouse without the fun and without the sign that said short people could not ride specific rides. Crock, half the “inmates” here ran a health risk to any luckless visitors.

“Hey, hey!” came a hollow chirp. Case in point. Harrier stepped aside to avoid the four-foot cannonball that blasted past. The cannonball hooked its feet around a windowsill and shot back. A “ta-da” whizzed by in an orange and blue blur. The blurry goof rebounded off the beveled ceiling—inches from the blades of a ceiling fan, though he’d probably intended that—and landed squarely on the shoulders of his twin. He uncurled. Both humanoid cannonballs strutted one foot forward in a two-man totem pole. The unsettling and gymnastic Topsy and Turvy, the Good Guys’ lobby receptionists, in their dizzying weird color scheme.

Not now. Just...not now. Harrier had developed a right contemptible headache on his trip home from his hospital stay due to his amputated wing. He’d lamented that, after so long away from Station One, he had to return.

“Hey, hey, Harrier—” Topsy said. Or Turvy. Harrier wished the identical imps wore name tags around their necks. Or, better yet, name nooses so he could hang them from that ceiling fan that wouldn’t stop spinning and spinning and...Oh, he had no tolerance for carousel movement after all that medication. Nausea hit him.

“—how was your stay—” the first one’s partner said. The topmost twin flipped over and landed hand on hand with his eye-blistering, pikey cohort.

“—at the SIPMA hospital? We’re so—” Did they fail to realize their chatter advocated to Harrier that he peel away his sodding ears with tonsillectomy clamps?

“—sorry to hear about your—” Topsy or Turvy flipped into the air. Turvy or Topsy followed, and both sprang into action.

“—missing wing.” Both landed. One stood upside down, hands to carpet with his partner’s palms to the first’s grimy feet. “Parallel rebound toss and spin. Yeah!”

This blinking zoo had long since soured for Harrier. He examined these monkeys as if they’d spat on his mother’s grave. “My wing was recently chopped off. I have no tolerance for imbecilic acrobatics or table-tennis chatter.” He bit his acerbic tongue and stomped toward the hallway on the left. He wanted to board himself in his living quarters and emerge only when the poxy Good Guys or the dobbing Bad Guys were defunct. Either one. He couldn’t care less, but he’d let Power Plant pick which to disintegrate on his next Sugar Rush Wednesday: the enemy or himself.

“Hey, hey, Harrier—” one of the twin spinners chirped. Something beat the air behind Harrier like the blades of an old-fashioned helicopter. The sound sped closer.

“—we only want to—”

Harrier reeled and propelled all his energy into a scream. “Stop it!” Topsy or Turvy collided with the floor and smacked into a wall with uncontrolled thrust. Turvy or Topsy landed next to the carpet runner, feet curled, toes in the air.

Harrier towered above the downed trapeze artists. He balled his fists. “Cease your inane prattling. Or are you too stupid to realize everybody has grown right sick of your three-ring routine?” His shadow spilled over the felled midget, who kicked away on the floor. He glanced up to the other, his gaze piercing the space between them like a sniper’s scope zooming in on an eye. “I have lost a wing, a piece of me. I am in no mood for your theatrics. I wish only to go to my room and get proper pished. Leave. Me. Alone.”

He whirled around and plowed through an l-door. At least Legion’s stay at the SIPMA hospital had overshadowed his own. He desired not to see the temporarily unseated Good Guy leader today, not after Luzimoss’s predictions were eerily proving true.

And when the piss had someone installed l-tech on this station?

Chapter Eight: Loathe at First Sight

Great. Her. Every single time Reef lingered in line number eight, not getting any younger in this life-bereft facility, she manned the head of the line. Clang. Eyeing him. Dissecting his every intention.

This jumbo room acted as a triage floor containing seventeen pungent lines that numbered one to sixteen with, for whatever reason, a split at lines 11A and 11B, minor detachment of limb and major detachment of limb. As if any limb detachment were minor, but he’d let the people in line 11A worry about that. And who lined up to register a detached limb?

The lines, comprising eight hundred shoulder-to-shoulder individuals, crisscrossed in some odd fashion that, nevertheless, resolved when it reached the other side. All the same, some people were in for a surprise when they found out they were registering for a type G driver’s license instead of a goat herder’s license. And, finally, here in line number eight, the echo of every surly and intolerant conversation converged into one Zeus-like boom that was indistinguishable as any known language. Probably something Scapegoat knew. White lights mixed with a faint orange light to illuminate the nonsensical traffic each line contributed in this blank-walled and character-barren room. All part of the confused landscape.

With Burnout and Pincushion behind him, Reef rubbed his temple, estimating the line’s length that stretched into apparent infinity. He referenced the datasheet that linked with the queue program at this line’s triage desk. His number in line? Eight hundred twelve. He checked the brusque, silver-haired artifact who had shuffled in from the fourteenth century to work the queue. He chided his luck. Every time he came here. Clang.

Couldn’t IP buy a robot to work the line? At least this registration pretense would end, and the Good Guys would begin their real investigation. Clang, that sharp-faced relic who sucked out a pension, was probably indeed a robot with too much skin bunched around its gears. If she dared smile, she might reveal a speaker in her throat.

Lines made Reef gruff. And thirsty. He pulled out his flask and sneaked another swig of alcohol when Pincushion and Burnout diverted their attentions to the clacking knife fight in line ten. Ahh, Reef had less-than-fond memories of line ten: the gun registration line. And one of the knife fighters just pulled out a Glock.

A serving robot hummed by. Standing only knee-high, it held atop its simpleminded head a platter pyramided in jelly cookies and paper cups of some thick fluid. “Resin Jelly Cookies. Bug juice. Resin Jelly Cookies. Bug juice.” It repeated this on a three-second loop, as if anyone five feet away couldn’t hear the atonal quality of its voice that reflected the personality of the room. The robot passed, but not before Reef picked up two cookies and—why not?—a cup of juice. Was “bug juice” a quirky name for something palatable, or was this a cup of ground-up bug remains? Either way, over the teeth, past the gums, look out tummy, here it HARUGGGGG all over the floor.

“Nice. The lesson here is that you’re meant to pay some freebies in other currencies. You just overdrew your pride account.” Burnout curled a sneer at the mess on the floor. A cleaning and spritzing robot zoomed out from a small booth and went to work on the mess, announcing its allegiance to the Army of Antipuke by Cleangore, license renewal pending the outcome of a lengthy court battle. Of course.

“Hey, at least I had the sense to grab some of the free shirtvertisements they offered at the front doors. I’ll blend in.” Reef shimmied out of the outermost T-shirt he wore, thankful the bug juice—which wasn’t bad once you overlooked the taste and texture—didn’t spray his impact suit. “And don’t knock the gratuity foodstuffs. Here, try a peanut butter—”

“Finally. A freebie without a ludicrous ingredient.” Burnout held out his hand.

“You didn’t let me finish.” Reef placed an orange wrapper in Burnout’s palm. “Try a peanut butter of antimony cup.”

Burnout tossed the delicacy away. “For crock’s sake, how many gratuity products have you got that defy the very laws of nature?”

“Eight. Well, one’s strictly a judgment call, but the others say so in their slogans.”

“Hey, I’m with you, man.” A voice trickled out behind Reef, a low grunt that sounded more like a grinding engine than a person. Reef, Burnout, and Pincushion turned around and down. There stood a stout man no taller than four feet. The beefcake wore a form-fitting muscle shirt, jeans, and a belt that could have been a train track. With thickset muscles packing his arms and legs, he looked like a shorter, fairer version of Burnout. “Those antimony cups? They’re to die for, man. And I’m not saying that because four people have died for them.”

“Thank you, sir.” With a favorable smile, Reef nodded at the man. Burnout reeled back and exercised his gag reflex with dry chokes.

“By the way, name’s Gerald Willicker, man. My friends call me G.”

Trying not to make it obvious he had to lean over, Reef shook G’s hand. Crock. G’s handshake could have squeezed Reef’s marrow out through his fingertips. His fingers throbbed. Size did not matter with this short bundle of brawn.

Pincushion checked the old bat heading the line. Clang. She grunted at Reef and motioned for someone to join her. Two uniformed guards clip-clopped up, and now all three studied Reef as if he’d grown a second head. And he was sure he hadn’t because that wasn’t a side effect of bug juice.

Reef’s throat swallowed an angry knot. “That woman. Grennil Clang. Every time I come here for registration, she’s here. She’s the only woman IP kept when they fired all females, simply because she was the advertising face of Letchtech’s Luchador line of clothing. Also, she’s the only one who knew how to operate the coffeemaker. She gives me nothing but grief every single time I visit. She’s like Easter and Good Friday rolled into one, except the opposite of that.” Indeed, when IP bowed to MaxSport’s bigoted pressure to fire all women from their military years ago, somehow this relic survived the dismissals.

Burnout shooed away a flybot that carried free samples of strawberry-scented hair gel to any willing lab specimens. “Technically, the opposite of Easter is Good Friday.”

“Then just Easter. Whichever is the chocolaty holiday. Crap, now I’m confused by those two days.” Reef regarded Clang with suspicion. The line snapped closer in a single march as if choreographed for a war propaganda video. What mess was Clang planning for Reef this time? “I hate her like my childhood dog hated taxidermy. I can’t say that applies, but since we stuffed Rawf, I assume he’d hate taxidermy. He probably hated animal euthanasia more.”

“What’s with her?” G asked. He breathed out the scent of mouthwash.

Reef scrutinized Clang before he answered. “Possibly arthritis.” His voice dropped to a whisper. “Okay. Pincushion, Burnout. Stay in line to complete your registration. That way, you’ll have higher access to snoop around. I’ll start snooping right away—”

“She’s watching you, Reef.” Burnout noted the silver-haired hag whose skin was eroded in time weathered in caffeine.

“Oh, man. She only ever gave me trouble. Everyone gets a smile and a ‘have a nice day.’ But good old Silas Reef? The acid tongue and an insolent stare. That earned her the nickname Clang. Well, that and her actual name.” Reef checked her, but his face bounced away with a hand shielding his eyes from hers. “Just...pay no attention to that sea hag in bifocals like microscopes.” The line shuffled closer again in a step that crackled through the bright triage room.

“A bit late. We’re at the front of the line, brother.” Pincushion stepped to the desk. “She’s within earshot.”

Wow, 812 people passed quickly. Reef unshielded his eyes to check the sea hag. He reacted as if he’d tasted a meal so caustic it ate the lining in his throat.

No. Forget this dread. Reef shrugged off his nervousness like an ugly housecoat. “Clang, I’m glad you’re staffing the registration line today. You know why? Yeah, I’m agent Reef.” He waved a finger at her nose. “Year 9089, I joined Intergalactic Protection. When I registered to operate heavy artillery, you made me wait in an interrogation room for seventeen hours so you could perform a needless background check. Year 9093, I registered to join our forces on Perseus for the Palicomic Psychic War. You executed several painful, unneeded tests to ascertain I had no telepathic abilities the enemy could exploit. I still get the shivers whenever I look at a stethoscope. You didn’t even bother to check my file. Year 9105, I returned to Perseus. You personally inflicted upon me a full-body cavity search. I still have no idea why, though my backside found out the hard way. Year 9108, I joined the Good Guys. You kept me locked in a holding cell for four hours because you thought I was still under the influence of alcohol. Year this one, I’m here to register these two guys.” He pounded the desk, rumbling the datasheets and knickknacks that speckled the desktop. “What is it now? What have you got your monkey guards”—he waved at said monkey guards—“in a hubbub over today? What outlandish hoop must I jump through to please your egocentric, administrative power hunger? Which reminds me I’m hungry.” He grabbed a custard plug from a basket on the counter.

Burnout stepped forward. “And when you’re both done your various hungers, I need to know where to find the bathroom. I’m at around two hundred pounds per square inch of pressure.”

One of the monkey guards—a broomstick-postured goliath who bore a nametag revealing him as Warrant Officer H. Zelinski—clomped around the triage desk. His left hand was meat and bone, but metal encased his right hand. That hand whirred when he clasped Reef’s arm. “You’ll have to come with us, Good Guy leader Reef.”

“Oh, what now?” Reef tried to wrench his arm free, but Zelinski squeezed it tightly. “Thought I’d get through one visit without the Clang roughing me around, but here we are, you ordering your heavies to cart me off. What’s this about?” He rolled his arm around, whirling it though it didn’t escape Zelinski’s grip. “Don’t tear the Yurts T-shirt. If someone from Yurts Headquarters spots me in it, I win a Yurts T-shirt.”

Zelinksi fought harder. He carted Reef to a shield screen that allowed passage to only those with nametags and, apparently, a palpable oil stench. Reef sniffed again. Maybe that was aftershave.

“Control, acknowledge. Allow three unlisted entries,” the other guard, Warrant Officer M. Pappas, said. Zelinski prepared to throw Reef through the screen.

“Hey, what Gestapo nightmare are you pulling? I know my rights. Clang? Clang? You can’t”—Reef stumbled through the shield screen and tripped into a dark room—“pull this crock on me. I’m a registered sponsor recipient. You’re flattening my gratuity sponge cakes.”

Burnout and Pincushion followed. Pappas threw Burnout in. Burnout collided with a wall, banging his shoulder into a shelf. Pincushion battered into him, and both slipped onto the dusty floor, pelted by the shelf’s knickknacks.

Reef first noticed the assortment of computers hastily arranged in each other’s way on a table pressed against one wall. Computer peripherals—mindscanners, footage analyzers, atmospheric broadcasters—chattered with each other in Morse code conversations. The splintered horseshoe table looked ready to become firewood. L-chairs floated before it, one for each workstation and an extra that sat crooked in a corner. Behind the desk hung a datasheet brochure for Pizza Brothel, smeared on one side perhaps because of a lashing from Clang’s nasty forked tongue.

Reef choked at the room, though the air didn’t feel thick, only musty. Zelinski and Pappas had thrown them into a...a surveillance room? The orange light stifled all color except the illumination of the computer monitors that bullied Reef’s vision in the prickly contrast.

Only a single door broke the back wall. The shield screen through which Reef had stumbled crackled in disagreement.

“What was that about?” Pincushion brushed off the spread of dust that coated his outfit.

With an official gait, the guards entered through the shield screen. Zelinski’s foot—no, his entire right side—clanked and buzzed with his stride. Clang appeared after. Her kiwi-peel skin cast shadows as thick as zebra stripes across her face. Her jowls bounced. “Control, acknowledge. Shield screen to one hundred percent opacity. Sirs, we needed to get you in here because we’ve run into trouble.” She bumped past Pincushion.

Reef sprang up like a jack-in-the-box that had popped its weasel. “You will be in trouble. What the crock has you carting us across lines numbers six, thirteen, and whatever that line is with the guy whose face resembles a knotted tabletop. Looks like a line for tickets to Possessed Forest: The Musical starring that guy as a tree poltergeist.”

Clang stepped forward. Even her inch-high stiletto shoes clanged as if she’d taped light-bullets to their heels. “A meteor is headed for us.”

Reef’s head stopped struggling with thoughts of retribution. “A what now is ruining my day?”

“A meteor. We are protected under the structure of this building, but if we don’t take care of that meteor in shorter than five hours, it will crush everyone in a three-block radius. And it will leave us with an unhealthy level of radiation.”

Reef waved a plutonium granola bar around. “Already there.”

“See for yourself.” Clang nodded toward one of the computer monitors. Reef took a deep look after Pincushion gasped.

Burnout made an amused sound that wasn’t quite a laugh. “Let me contact my brother. I need to find out how he managed to fling a meteor at us.” He raised a finger to his gabber. “I swear every day he overachieves in the wrong direction.”

Chapter Nine: If Only You Can Find It

Power Plant couldn’t figure out what Burnout had told him. Meteor? Clang? The words “civil detainment” came up, too, and, though he had no idea what they meant, he’d learned IP considered him a flight risk.

Here he stood between Franchise and that budgetary goon IP had sent to audit the Good Guys, Gervix Invard, surveying a wall built with no more doors than a park bench. He checked the blueprint datasheet again, the one they’d convinced orange-skinned Invard to give up by...heh heh...promising not to shave his head. The blueprint showed a door but no room behind it. He estimated the length of wall to his left and his right, mentally scaling the hall down to the minuscule version the datasheet depicted. Yup. He stood in the correct area. Definitely no door.

“Tells me if’n I’s wrong, but doors open, right?” He rapped his knuckles on the wall. The wall rapped back with a hollow thud, revealing pipes behind it or perhaps the machinations of a cybernetic colony of mice. And just how did he conjure up these fantasies of his?

Franchise studied the wall as intently as Power Plant, eating from a paper Space Cow baggie. He looked as confused by the discrepancy between the blueprint and reality as his friend did. He smacked his lips and inserted another cheesy mess he’d extracted from the bag. “Yeah, doors open.” He whipped a greased finger at Power Plant’s nose. “But not the bathroom stall when I’m in there. So quit kicking it open and throwing in hedgehogs.” His point made, he returned to the wall.

“Fine. I’s throws in porcupines. They’s quieter when they’s bites.”

“Fair enough.” Another cheesy ball, tweezed inside three fingers, dropped into Franchise’s mouth.

“’Sides, you be less mad abouts aminals dodgeball if’n you knews who hided that videos camera in your livings quarters and taped all dat stuff for the New Year’s slideshow.”

“Holy spasmodicus, that was you, you underhanded piss?” Franchise reared back a grease-smeared fist. He dropped it, suddenly cautious. “Wait. You didn’t catch any krumping sessions, did you? Because that would be impossible since they don’t exist.”

“Are you two timewasters satisfied yet?” Invard nailed a stare at Franchise that defused the embarrassment. His voice was so squeaky it made Power Plant shake. “There is no door and the airflow-exchange room doesn’t even exist on paper, you can believe that. Digitized paper, you can believe that instead. So stop believing the previous thing.” He brushed Power Plant and Franchise aside to disrupt their link with the wall that showed no door but bore an advertisement for hedgehog adoption. His hands smoothed down his Gharalgian suit jacket. “Now, that’s enough misuse of the thumb-twiddling budget. You two need to return to your assigned duties of staring into space and breathing somberly until something meaningful happens.”

“I space-stare enough durings my sciences tutoring.”

Franchise cracked a knuckle and faked a smile. “Jeefff-fffy, stop playing with bureaucratic fffiiii-rrre.”

Invard puffed his darkened cheeks and leaned at Power Plant with a lion’s stare. “I’ve had it up to here with your brazen lack of financial respect. If you two aren’t back at work in two minutes, I will have you polishing the transports so radiantly clean you’ll go blind by picturing them in your mind’s eyes, you can believe that.” In his wingtip shoes, he powered down the hall, each step a squeak on the reflective floor.

“But it’s my day off!” Franchise said at Invard’s back.

“And my minds don’ts have eyes.” Power Plant felt along the wall. If the blueprint said a door existed along here, why wouldn’t it exist? The space station was built to specific instructions. He didn’t know that to be true, but if Franchise’s IQ could score a cool 114, anything was possible.

He finger-crawled along the wall. The length felt smoother than eroded stone. Not even an imperfection or protruding nail tarnished its surface. Aside from the ketchup fingerprints Power Plant stamped along it—mmmm, the goodness of potato chips for lunch—the wall could have appeared in a catalog. A monotonous catalog for wall enthusiasts, but who was Power Plant to knock someone’s insufferably boring interests?

Franchise wrapped his arms around himself and leaked out a lungful of air. “Jeffy, this corridor is chilly and there’s no point searching for a door that doesn’t exist. We’ve wasted our time on this imaginary smell of yours. Now, the weather synthesizer’s creating a sunny day. Let’s go outside and trample ant hills. We’ll use my novelty clown shoes.”

“Nah, man.” Power Plant knocked on the wall again. Dong-dong. “Ya hears that?”

“Sounds like your head.”

“No doesn’t. It ain’t wooden. It hollow back theres. Sound like my head.”

“So the wall is hollow. Lots of walls have pipes running through them. Where do you think the hedgehogs get flushed after you throw them at me? Anyway, the temperature is shrinking my bladder, and I drank too much water. I need to visit the scared little boys’ room. Excuse me.”

“Wait. Mebbe the haunts control know wheres this door be.”

“Last time you asked the haunt control for something, I got a rotten tomato in the face.”

Power Plant looked around for a haunt control listener. Before Letchtech had announced its sponsorship of the Good Guys, one snuggled into only every second hallway twist. Now they nestled in the ceiling every fifty feet. “Control, ’knowledge. Opens closest door.” A blissful shower of tinkling sounds glistened into Power Plant’s ears. But no door.

“You probably opened something down the hall.” Franchise grabbed another tuft of his snack from the baggie. “You know, I’m glad we have a Space Cow in the food court. These double-fried cheese nuts are somewhat digestible.” He stuffed the baggie into a pocket where it would dissolve to lint in half an hour. He wiped his grease-laminated hand on Power Plant’s shirt.

Power Plant explored the wall for a gap or a changed segment but couldn’t find anything. Was Franchise right? Had they opened a previously hidden door down the hall? He searched—

Behind them. A rectangle of wall faded in a swirl of colorful binary dust, leaving a narrow opening. The dust dissipated, and in its wake remained a pitch-black abyss.

“Did you read the map upside down again?” Franchise asked.

“Thoughts it was like a flight manual.” Power Plant suppressed a gasp but couldn’t help reaching out to the darkness as if he could touch its nonexistent form. Franchise stood so stock-still that his blinks almost sounded like plinking piano notes.

A draft escaped the room, trapped for the five months since Station One’s completion. It reeked of that sun-dried pork or perhaps unwashed street clothes, a noxious mixture of malodors unidentifiable to Power Plant’s keen olfactory since it wasn’t gasoline and matches.

Franchise plucked the collar of his impact shirt and hooked it over his nose. He winced with a vinegary expression and curled away from the door.

Power Plant stepped back and held his breath. “Man, this thing’s like...like a pure awesomeness.”

“The word you’re pretending to know is ‘awesomocity.’ But you nailed that stench: awful pork.” Franchise cracked a single knuckle and peered at the darkness that swathed the room. “Ssssoooo...could be anything in there. Might be flesh-eating monsters.”

“Yeah, but mights also be flesh-eatin’-monster-eaten’ monsters. Or...ooh...a ice-cream jungles.” By now, the station’s air purifiers had softened the stench, so Power Plant faced the door.

Franchise dropped his tuft of shirt. “Might be an ice-cream-jungle-eating monster.” He swallowed as if it took every last tatter of energy. “You sure it’s a good idea to go in?”

“Yeah. Tot’ly.”

“Totally?”

“Tot’ly. Well...ninety-five percents of me sure.”

“What’s the other five percent think?”

Power Plant hesitated in thought but then, “Also sure.” He stepped forward.

Franchise’s hand slipped around his arm. “Maybe we should wait. Think a second.”

“We trieds that before. Don’ts work.”

“Touché. Okay, then. I guess...après vous.” Franchise cleared his throat. “Seriously, did you catch any krumping sessions?”

Chapter Ten: Organize and Rise

Reef clawed past Zelinski to pierce Clang with a stare as bright as a floodlight. His arteries felt as if they kinked like cheap hoses. “There’s a meteor headed for this station, and you only found out now? Don’t you have polling stations to watch out for this sort of thing?” He threw his hands up. “For crock’s sake, maybe if you stopped installing FreeCell on all your computers, people might pay attention when something happens.”

Clang’s gaze met Reef’s and, through those bionic eye lenses, she steeled her stare. “It was on an unobstructed path through this galaxy. We checked yesterday. It was supposed to cut half an astronomical unit past us and obliterate the orbital station that holds Space Cow’s main office.”

Burnout gunned his knuckles into a wall, crunching a hole with a charred outline into the surface. “This close to eliminating the galaxy’s most glutinous fish bait.” He tried jerking his hand free, but the healing wall had reformed around his wrist too quickly. “And now I’m stuck.”

Clang evil-eyed Burnout and scratched a jowl. “Something changed the meteor’s trajectory. And, since you’re the only hyperpeople in the facility, we need your help.” She stepped toward the computer bank and walloped her shoulder into Reef when she passed. “Imagine that. We need the help of the Good Guys.”

Reef swung away, his nostrils ablaze from Clang’s scent of kasha and mint tea. “So what are our options? Play spoons on our knees, or stare at our navels?”

“On a nearby satellite, we have a missile deployment system we prepared for enemy strikes. We can use that.” Clang sneered as if she’d scorched the family’s Boxing Day turkey. She probably still stung from asking for Reef’s help. Reef still stung from having to stand within ten yards of her.

“Then let’s go. Vàmonos.” Reef shooed his hands at Clang and the warrant officers. “Get some missile action going. If Power Plant were here, we could sit him down at the interface and tell him it was a video game. He’d reduce that meteor to dust in half a second, and you wouldn’t have your nasty pigeon problem anymore.”

Clang was already nodding no, so Reef pounded the desk. “Let me guess. You can’t launch the missiles because your sponsor isn’t Target Superstores? Find some laser-paint and a still of their logo, and let’s light this birthday cake up. Then I can get back to ruing my field trip to this IP booby hatch in the privacy of line number eight. I’m sure by now there’s a riot frothing out there.”

Pincushion leaned into the greenish glow of one of the monitors. He squinted at a paragraph of text beside a stern-looking warning icon. “Reef, we have problems. It has nothing to do with sponsoring missiles, either.”

“And I just got that Target joke.” Burnout propped a foot against the wall and, with his flight, tried to propel himself away. Anchored by his wrist, he swiveled around and clouted the wall with his back. “Why must I always punch things?” He smacked his other fist against the wall.

“What’s the problem?” He stomped toward the monitor that had captivated the spike-laden Good Guy. His eyes skittered across the pop-up boxes that urged users to enter to win a yak, then the message that had caught Pincushion’s attention. “Abioye, either we need to revisit your medical file, or we’re looking at different things.”

“It’s behind that pop-up.” Pincushion poked the monitor and flicked the pop-up aside.

Burnout had given up on freeing his trapped hand and now stood with one foot on a creaky chair and his free hand supporting his chin. “What’s behind the pop-up? Fill me in.”

The newly exposed pop-up contained a blurb of fiery text beside an anthropomorphic bomb holding an “ouch” sign. The blurb looked as complex as anything written in a dingbat font. An attack warning?

Reef read the message. “Missile system not active? Why?” And below that...

A signal-dampening force field encased the personnel campus. Reef smacked his forehead. They couldn’t contact the missile satellite.

Confusion fogged Reef’s mind. He checked the other monitors, but they displayed only different camera feeds of the triage floor. One showed a fistfight that had broken out in line number eight, people who’d set up cots for the long wait ahead, and an episode of Helicopter Versus Ejection Seat on pause.

Reef stepped from the computer bank to Clang, who stood like a stern school principal. “Why is this facility trapped under a force field, Clang? You know the rules IP set out. One, no foul language shall be tolerated in line and, two, no one shall erect bubbles around the campus. Oh, and three, no Gharalgian tapioca pudding in the cafeteria, though I strongly oppose any and all pudding embargos.”

“Good Guy leader Reef, we erected no force field. That field is way too cheap and has too low a yield for Intergalactic Protection’s fat-cat sponsors.” Clang’s loop earrings swung in a discus throw around her lobes. They threatened to tear free and ricochet around the cluttered room. As long as Reef could duck, he’d allow the Clang carnage.

“Then who put it up?” Reef bounded toward a window, though thick bars obscured him from seeing more than one-inch slats of the outside world.

A raven’s squawk of feedback filled the room. The sonic assault resolved into a wave of fluid trombones that dipped into a spurt of brass toots. A single voice rose over it. Master Asinine’s voice. “HEY, WHAT’S UP, MY JOHN Q. PUBLICS AND OTHER MEMBERS OF THE Q. PUBLIC FAMILY? YOUR FAVORITE RECENTLY ORDAINED PRIEST HAS RETURNED FROM HIS FIRST SALSA DANCE CLASS TO SAY HELLO. HOW THRILLING IS THAT? I’VE GOT GOOSEBUMPS. CHA-CHA-CHA.” The trombones cha-cha-cha’ed with him.

“Niiiiice break step, sir,” Lieutenant IQ 23 said.

Oh, no. Asinine would cause a panic. Reef checked a viewscreen that displayed The Bad Guy Starship floating above this campus. He hotfooted over to Clang and slashed a finger at the shield screen that blocked the triage room. “Order your haunt control to blank Asinine’s voice from the triage floor. If the crowd knows there’s trouble, you’ll have a revolt on your hands.”

As if she couldn’t understand the order but her brain took a stab at it anyway, Clang’s mouth twitched. Her voided stare needed snapping, so Reef pounded a fist on the nearest table. “Clang, do you want Asinine to spill the beans on this meteor?” He grabbed her shoulders and shook her as though she were a bad martini. The slap across the face improved nothing, but it inflated Reef’s mood. He’d sleep well tonight. “Order your haunt control to blank the broadcast from the triage floor. Now.”

“Get your hands off me.” Clang wrestled free of Reef’s convulsing grip. “Control, acknowledge. Soundproof outside broadcast from triage floor.”

“Triage floor soundproofed from off-ground sources, maggot,” the haunt control said. “Buy three tanks and receive the fourth half off at Fubar Bazaar. That’s an order, soldier!”

Burnout wrung a finger in his ear. Pincushion stood at attention as if feeling the impulse to salute. Reef felt the impulse to give the one-finger salute. And so he did. With gusto.

He recovered from the oral stabbing to his ears. “Good. That should keep the mob outside from going from a hostile uprising to...” He shrugged. “Well, maybe not hostile uprising.” He recalled the knife fights that had broken out in the haphazard lines. “On second thought, I meant what I said. The standard mentality out there is one of hostile uprising.”

“Antagonistic rebellion,” Pappas said.

Reef snapped his fingers. “Yes, that’s exactly it.” He pointed toward the low ceiling, at Asinine’s beast-mobile and its chicken coop inside it. “I should have known that antifashionista would rear his hideously masked face around here.” He banged his head against the nearest object. The chair he chose to bang his head into didn’t provide enough pain, so he switched to Pincushion’s shoulder spike. He stopped committing acupuncture and asked, “Why the piss is Asinine here?”

“I’m still questioning who would make him a priest.” Burnout freed his hand by melting a section of the wall with a controlled flame. Perks of being an elemental.

“AND NOW, DOWN TO BUSINESS.” Asinine’s voice again assaulted the room. A shelf vibrated. “PUBLICS, THANKS TO THE PRESENCE OF THE GOOD GUYS AND AN INCOMING METEOR, YOU’RE TRAPPED IN SOME GRADE A FORCE FIELD TROUBLE, COURTESY OF ME. YOU SEE, I’M HERE TO DESTROY THOSE GOOD GUYS FOR BREAKING UP MY UNDERGROUND FONDUE RING. AND, BECAUSE OF THEM, YOU WILL ALL PAY DEARLY.”

Oh, great. This situation was crocked. If the line dwellers discovered Asinine had come for the Good Guys, they’d cleave Reef and the others in half. Reef shuddered. Military mobs were the most hazardous.

“I JUST NEED TO SIT TIGHT UNTIL THIS METEOR ARRIVES, THEN WATCH THE ACTION BLEED OUT. AND, BY ‘ACTION,’ I MEAN, ‘YOU.’ AND, BY ‘BLEED OUT,’ I MEAN, ‘WHATEVER’S GOING TO HAPPEN TO YOU.’ DIE IN A FIERY DEATH OR...I DON’T KNOW...WHATEVER SPACE BOULDERS DO TO MERE MORTALS.”

“It’s a meteor, sir,” Lieutenant IQ 23 said. “Space Boulders is the name of your favorite cereal.”

“YES. ONE OF THOSE. SO SAYONARA, EVERYBODY, AND WHEN YOUR LIVES COME TO A PANCAKE END IN YOUR LITTLE DEATH HOUSE, THANK THE GOOD GUYS FOR IT. TOODLE-LOO.” A click ended Asinine’s rant. Thankfully they had muted the loudspeaker, but the lack of a supervisor for line number eight probably hadn’t endeared the crowd outside.

Reef spoke, but his word squeaked out incomprehensibly, so he tried again. “Pincushion, please tell me there isn’t a riot on the triage floor.”

Pincushion leaned into a monitor. “Well, some line cutters caused a fistfight that escalated into a riot, then an improv competition, and then an improv riot. Now they’re looting the snack machines.”

“Really?” Relief trickled through Reef. The chaos might distract enough to allow the Good Guys to investigate IP’s planned injunction infraction. “That’s good news.”

“Not really. The riot diverted them from fashioning pitchforks out of the line cordons. They also ripped off baseboards and lit them like torches. One line dweller made an effigy dummy that looks a lot like an IP line supervisor.”

“What a go-getter.”

“The similarity is remarkable. He even got the deep-set, life-is-meaningless composure down to a fine art. The insurgence should concern me more but, wow, a cartoon company needs to give this guy a job.”

“I don’t think cartoon companies produce movies that involve angry mobs.”

“Beauty and the Beast.” Pincushion left the monitor and joined Reef. “So we need to stop a meteor and quell a riot.”

Reef stepped closer to the monitor. The camera footage, like a horror movie tinted in too much red, showed a rigid multitude of mutineers with their arms in the air. Their dissenting fists complemented their muted screams. They goose-stepped around to rally others to their ambiguous cause.

“For now, let’s forget the riot. That’s almost a daily occurrence. Concentrate on that meteor.” Reef’s mind flashed through options. “Or we put on some masks, grab some torches, and sidetrack that mob. Somewhere in there must be a guy who will spot me a moolah for the candy machine.” His empty stomach rasped, so he threw up his hands. “Fine. I’ll break into my own stash.”

* * *

“Ahhhhh, I love sowing panic.” Master Asinine strolled away from the public address microphone, that good ol’ murderous spring in his step as he traversed The Bad Guy Starship’s cockpit.

“Today is the day of reckoning for those Good Guy lowbrows,” he said to IQ 23, whose hair had filled the bald patches left by his injury from their attack on Legion. “You may not know, but below lurk Schizophrenic, Amaranthia, and Multipurpose to distract and cause mayhem so that meteoric bullet can plunge ever closer undisturbed. We may yet gain an advantage by slaughtering the IP higher-ups.”

“I do know that, sir. I was in the room when you sent them.” Lieutenant IQ 23 cleared his throat. “I was preparing your sandwich.”

“Right. So pat me on the back because I’m a certifiable brainiac from the Trade School of Knack.” Asinine slapped the diploma he had nailed to the wall of the cockpit after learning how to use his diploma-forging software. “With a PhD in the art of conniving.”

Lieutenant IQ 23 creaked out of the chair in which he’d planted himself. “That imaginary education certainly came in handy on those matchmaking sites, sir. Incidentally, you can only attain a PhD at a university.”

The Bad Guy Starship floated immediately inside the humming, crackling force field Asinine had activated. In this forty-by-twenty-seven-meter cockpit, the monolithic control center of the Bad Guys’ titan-class mother ship, Asinine approached the computer bank. It blipped and beeped in electronic song to overpower the salsa music playing as a backdrop. Asinine shrugged. Hmm. Not as foot-tapping as his playlist of hit boy-band wonders who whined about heart game-playing and tough-hanging—sorry, tough-hangin’—but no matter. Still enjoyable.

On two-toed feet that measured at least a meter long, the Bad Guy gargoyle Appetite lumbered past Asinine in search of nourishment. He found it in the form of a radium bar. A radium bar? When would Asinine learn not to leave his radioactive crap around? At least someone was making use of it. All it did for Asinine was cause cancer.

Asinine spooned out a heap of popcorn from the bowl in his grip and munched. Mmm. Butter substitute. He spun away from the windshield and marched to the rear of the cockpit. A line of windows rolled across the left and right sides, revealing the cozy glow of daylight outside with the fingered branches of one or two trees that testified in the summer breeze. Inside breathed no summer breeze, though the air conditioner gusted at him like there was no tomorrow. And, for some, there wasn’t.

He stopped, sat in a chair, scratched his head. Nope. He stood, breathed deeply, and mustered a warm radiance that would wiggle from his heart and seep into his bones. Still nope. He straightened his back, but it drooped down and...eeehhhh...something felt...off. Unexciting.

With three-fingered hands bearing inch-long talons, Appetite peeled a panel off the cockpit’s inner lining and twisted it into a ball. He popped this into his mouth. That sucked, because this starship used to be cherry. If the main course in here was the mirrored ball suspended from the ceiling, Asinine would eject this gargoyle mute into the sun. No one, but no one, touched a Bad Guy ball, mirrored or otherwise.

Asinine sighed. “Lieutenant, this new plan strums on my heart strings, but only in a banjo ditty, not in the power ballad that such epic crap demands.”

“What’s wrong, sir?”

“Parents’ unrealistic expectations, but let’s focus on the subject at hand. We need to crank my plan straight up to eleven. It doesn’t...light me up...if you get me.”

“I strive with every fiber of my being. Always. Sometimes I come up short such as that time you tried to explain cannibalism and its connection to beef jerky, but I sit at an average of ninety...ninety-five percent.” Lieutenant IQ 23 curled a hand to his chin as if dissecting the situation for imperfections. “Sir, your most exciting plans involve a degree of hands-on execution. You’re at your greatest when you’re not behind an assortment of buttons and dials but when you’re firing your pistol at anything that moves and some things that don’t. Maybe you’re not engaged in this plan because you aren’t directly involved.”

Appetite plodded to the rear of the cockpit and found Lieutenant IQ 23’s potato salad. Huh. Eating something edible. Never would have guessed from that walking garbage disposal.

Asinine copied IQ 23’s chin-rubbing technique, but...nope again. His brain wouldn’t engage like IQ 23’s. He snapped his fingers instead because, if he couldn’t be as smart as his clingy lieutenant, he’d at least act the part. “Lieutenant, I think you hammered the nail wherever hammers hammer nails. I need to dirty my hands. I need to kill these Good Guys myself.”

He marched to the center of the cockpit’s seating area, his hand bouncing off the rows of passenger chairs. He clomped to the piloting area, swung open a cupboard, and grabbed two...no, make that three bombs. These he tucked under an arm. “Lieutenant, I’ve decided to enter the campus and cause some ruckus firsthand. Prepare to beam me...” Appetite swiped at a bomb, but Asinine jerked it aside. “I need these, Appetite. Go eat our oxygen supply instead. Anyway, Lieutenant, prepare to beam me down...to the campus of death.”

Lieutenant IQ 23’s eyes sneaked awkwardly from left to right. “Uhhh, sir, I...don’t know how to tell you this. Uhm—”

“Out with it, Lieutenant. The organized crime ice-cream social starts in six hours, so I have no time to waste.”

“Sir, we don’t own beaming equipment. What you think is beaming is Schizophrenic slamming a two-by-four across the back of your neck to knock you out, then dragging you around by the feet.”

“That explains the kinks in my spine.” Asinine puffed out a sullen breath. “Very well. I’ll use the airfoil. You win, Lieutenant”—his eyes narrowed—“this time.”

A bomb spurted out a string of beeps.

“Whoops. Heh. One of these is on. Must have set it when I tried to figure out how a timer works.” He slapped the heel of his hand against it. Again. “Ah. Bomb deactiva—No, I just set it on mute. Does this thing even have an off button?”

Chapter Eleven: Like a Fox

Mechanism entered Bad Guy scientist Brick’s infernal laboratory. It lay on the eastern hemisphere of the station since the frequent lights from Brick’s concoctions frightened Master Asinine. Most of these concoctions were at that buffoon Master Asinine’s behest, though, so Mechanism did not under—you know what? He promised himself he would not analyze Master Asinine, and that was that. If he wouldn’t stop biting his nails, he would stick to at least one other New Year’s resolution.

Mechanism needed to work in secrecy. There Brick was, sitting at a work table, pondering. Mechanism tallied the game plan in his head: options, recourses, decisions. Oh, it tickled his mind’s many, many, many multitudes of brain cells that each individually worked not unlike the metro of a megalopolis. Ahhhh. Rich thought.

Brick was thus named because his entire body was covered in a layer of brick. How its hinge points and how the layer of skin underneath breathed, Mechanism cared not to ruminate. However, the summation of Brick’s description was that he was all corners and straight angles, no curves.

The Nemesis, that old rooster-themed starship Master Asinine had inherited by killing a rival crime leader, lay sectioned around the hangar-sized engineering room of Brick’s laboratory. The cockpit was the giant rooster head, its gelatinous waddle flopping across a catwalk. The head lolled against one corner, its nose cone split open in a forever-silenced cock-a-doodle-doo. Metallic wings with aluminum flaps for feathers dangled on hooks suspended from the ceiling. Those wings bobbed and clanked around each other in a lazy demolition derby like Master Asinine’s bumper bubble ride at the Bad Guy big-top circus. Hardly worth the price of admission, but seeing that bearded lady squat down on their leader was.

Mechanism approached Brick, who slouched over a set of instructions scrawled across a banner datasheet. The glazed detritus of an eaten doughnut sat on the datasheet. Brick tapped a finger on his temple in deep thought. If only that brownstone penthouse apartment had the mental fortitude that Mechanism’s skull enjoyed, perhaps that chump could fire his brain at even a tenth of Mechanism’s capacity. Master Asinine leading Brick reminded Mechanism of the adage about the blind leading the blind, if you replaced “blind” with “cave dweller.”

Mechanism pretended not to scrutinize the assembly of machines that stretched along the back wall hissing ventilation fumes.

By Mechanism’s mental command, his bodysuit’s drink mixer blended chemicals together: secobarbital sodium, alcohol, and temazepam, what Master Asinine referred to as “red, brown, and super blue, because super blue was superer than regular blue.” He added a touch of carbonation because these science nerds preferred everything in carbonated form.

“My dear Brick.” Mechanism’s voice echoed as if he stood in a mansion's empty dining room.

Brick’s attention snapped away from his work table. Mechanism’s suit crawled as he strutted toward that science buffoon. Imagine. Mechanism catering to this scientist’s ego to lull him until the drug cocktail had settled. The thought of acting nicely to this servant’s ass left him feeling oily. “Your work here comes of paramount significance.”

“My appreciativeness of your magnanimous largess of verbal communiqué has indebted my esteem to you.” In one graceless choke, Brick inhaled. Mechanism wanted to step away and vomit, but he had a mission to accomplish. Tolerating this laboratory-coated, two-bedroom townhouse and his thesaurus-peppered oration was necessary.

Mechanism’s helmet signaled that the cocktail had combined and settled. He did not realize he had held his breath, but now he expelled an excited huff. He commanded his suit to load the cocktail into a microscopic dart in his wrist launcher. He stepped behind Brick’s neck, raised his armored wrist, and—k-chik. As quickly as a mousetrap triggering, his wrist propelled the dart into Brick’s neck. Payload launched. Excellent.

“My”—Mechanism’s next word sounded as if he spoke through a stomachache—“pleasure.” What a gullible protozoan Brick was. How Mechanism so longed to condemn that building of scientific nongenius. “I must now take my leave. If you require—”

And that was it. Brick slumped forward onto the datasheet depicting plans for this rooster-headed eyesore that hung in carefully sectioned pieces. Ah. The cocktail had acted 10.8 seconds ahead of his prediction. Perhaps if Brick could hold his drinks, he would last longer than any of Mechanism’s weak-willed secret lackeys. Perhaps.

At any rate, with most of the upper echelon of Bad Guys off station and Brick in a drug-induced slumber, Mechanism could work in secret. A smile fluffed his cheeks. All according to plan. “Control, acknowledge. I require access to all of Director Doofus’s offsite equipment.”

“Master Asinine’s offsite equipment accessed,” his helmet’s computer said in lieu of the station’s haunt control. He had programmed his helmet to take precedence. “According to your calculations, his current plan will flop in approximately four hours.”

As expected, Master Asinine had erected a force field around the campus. The perfect trap. “Control, acknowledge. Initiate lockdown of Master Asinine’s latest force field.”

“Lockdown initiated.”

Excellent. Not only did Mechanism’s smile fluff his cheeks, but it now stretched his chin into a stoicism reserved for only statues of heroes. Now he could access the laboratory’s exhaling assembly line. And neither Master Asinine nor any of his inept adherents would escape the deadly trap Mechanism had sprung on Gaia.

He snickered to himself. His deadly trap. Yessss. After all, who else could deflect a meteor on a judgment path through a crowded city and coerce their inexpert leader to “take advantage of the situation”? All to cleanse this solar system and then this galaxy. Mechanism was perfection.

Chapter Twelve: Your New Good-Morning Alarm

The haunt control’s alarm roared like an attack of thunder. Burnout cringed and cupped his temples to mask what sounded like doors slamming in his mind. He wanted to bludgeon his head on a desk edge just to mute the noise, but that would cause more problems than it would solve. Rightly so, too. Kamikaze had shown him the effects of cracking your head against a wall. Again and again and again.

“Shut that noise off!” he screamed—he was sure he screamed because his throat felt shredded—but he sounded as if he screamed underwater. He couldn’t compete with the alarm’s ambulatory wail. Much like his younger brother on Cowabunga C-4 days, this alarm had no volume control. And it was splitting apart his ear drums.

“Shut it off!” Burnout separated himself from the healing wall. The amplified heat he produced blackened its laser-paint.

He forced an eye open and checked the monitor. The same alarm had alerted the entire compound, but on the triage floor it must have sounded like ice-cream-truck bells in comparison: nobody retched from sheer agony.

Clang said something Burnout couldn’t hear. A plummet of pressure released Burnout’s ears, and he felt the ensuing silence almost as painfully as he had the murderous alarm toll. He wasn’t sure he could hear, but he knew the torrent had abated because Pincushion had stopped trying to knee-spike his own forehead.

Wow. He hadn’t felt that much pain since Spinal Cancer Awareness Day with free applicators. Again, one of Kamikaze’s bright ideas. Everyone had learned not to ask him for team-building suggestions that night.

“What was that?” Reef asked. Burnout wrung his ear and checked for blood or leaked brain matter instead of asking questions, but to each their own.

Clang shoved past Reef and headed toward a computer monitor. She bent over the desk to read whatever data tumbled down its display. Burnout, the alarm’s phantom bell still pealing in and peeling apart his ears, stood behind her. He didn’t have to stand on his tiptoes since he towered at least two feet over Clang. Nothing understandable popped onto the screen, only military mumbo jumbo and a modicum of status updates about the triage lines.

Clang said, “Control, acknowledge. Tell me the reason for the alarm.”

The haunt control’s General Blitzkrieg persona chewed apart whatever sweet relief the silence had offered. “Bombs have been located across the compound, you waste of ammunition. Drop and gimme pi times area squared!” Someone had messed with the haunt control’s logic because no way would Burnout attempt any number of pushups that rambled past the third decimal position.

Pincushion glanced around at Clang and the guards. “Bombs? As if that meteor weren’t enough of a problem, there are bombs now? Asinine’s not dumb enough for that. Okay, let me rephrase that. Asinine’s advisors aren’t dumb enough for that. So who planted bombs on a personnel campus?”

Reef thrust past the half-man, half-metal Zelinski—whose mother was apparently a...food processor?—and snapped a finger up at Clang’s nose. “Is this those Cracker Snacker extremists? I knew you shouldn’t have told those bacon-crisp fanatics to take their sponsorship program and shove it. The dieticians at Tapeworm Health Products are right: everything goes better with a Cracker Snacker.” With a contemptuous grumble, he shoved away, but he propelled himself back at her. “Especially tuna salad.”

“Control, acknowledge. Provide the locations of the bombs,” Clang said.

Reef whirled around at Zelinski, the seven-foot guard who hunched to fit under the low ceiling. “And Zelinski, your mother may be a machine, but I’m almost positive a man and a household appliance can’t mate. Then again, Power Plant astonishes me every time he opens up his DNA blender.”

“You jarheads better listen up,” the haunt control said. Nonexistent spittle rained off that voice. The techies at IP should change the overbearing-sergeant mod on this haunt control for one more appropriate. Prop comics were more bearable. “One bomb is sitting like a dead frog two minutes away from the shopping district of Almans Wing—”

“I’m on it.” Please, could Burnout be on it. Soon he’d suffer irreparable brain damage at the hands of that alarm still echoing in his ears. Might end up like one of those nimrods at the public shuttle station’s coffee stand.

Reef shot him a grit of determination. “Hurry. But don’t let the crowd know who the Bad Guys came for.”

Burnout checked a wall map one last time to orient himself—

On a blast of hot air, he shot through the room’s shield screen. He careened over the crowds who looked up with deafening screams and poking pitchforks. Someone—not someone, but G—had built a second effigy scarecrow. Burnout guessed the legends were true: these lines held frequent effigy competitions.

He tilted down and right, blasted past a door, curved through the hallway toward the Almans Wing. The signs ahead kaleidoscopically spun colors in a dizzy red-blue-yellow-green-brown ménage. He shot through the wing’s threshold, past the fruit-and-vegetable market, past the tourist mecca, through a shoulder-high billboard that advertised Master Asinine urinal cakes. He avoided the one that advertised Burnout urinal cakes, although he was torn between feeling flattered and feeling insulted.

There. Dead ahead. A small bomb beckoned like a lighthouse in a patch of fog—

Something bludgeoned the base of his neck. Amid bone-searing pain, he bulleted into a wall, bounced around the corner, and smacked into a fruit cart. Rotten apples, pungent oranges, shriveled guavas, and some altogether new, synthetic, and scary balls of goo toppled over him in a schoolyard food brawl.

To his feet! Who was stupid enough to club him over the neck? Who? He checked around, a moldy orange in one hand and two guavas in the other. He burned them. The orange curled to dust, its peel smoldering with the aroma of decay. It reminded him of his socks after a gym session or one of Jeff’s laundry fires. “Who’s the piss head with the death wish? After that earthshattering bomb warning, I’m already macked off enough.”

A solid thud, like the single stomp of a goliath, dwarfed the pitter-patter of fruit rolling into walls and bumps in the carpet. Another stomp. A he-man clomped around the corner Burnout had ricocheted around, first one green boot and then the other.

Asinine’s two-headed man-tower, Schizophrenic.

“You don’t touch that bomb.” Schizophrenic crossed his arms, two pillars that weaved around each other. He snapped his toothpick in his mouth, and the halves clicked to the ground.

“So, the Bad Guys are behind them.” Burnout’s fists flickered into a smoldering flame, matching his abhorrence for this two-headed bedlamite.

Lefty, Schizophrenic’s left head, snorted and grumbled a laugh. He replaced his toothpick with a new one. “No. I’m just an idiot who takes orders from the biggest idiot in the idiot chain gang. But the biggest idiot promised me a steak dinner if I do what he says. One hundred eighteen ounces. Four inches. You can’t even dream of a better slab of cow.”

Burnout dropped his guavas. “You can eat a steak that big?”

“You kidding me? Nobody can. I’m going to beat Asinine with it. Leaves no mark.” Lefty snorted. He scratched the whiskers on his chin.

“And you can use it to season your steak,” Righty said.

Burnout and Lefty blinked at him. Lefty’s mouth twisted.

Enough with dinner talk. Burnout already felt like a small-time wannabe since his meal plans usually involved chicken salad or protein shakes. “You step out of my way, goon”—he flexed the fingers of one hand, and the fire that sprouted from them boogied in the air—“or I’ll cremate you where you stand.” The charred orange crumbled to dust.

Lefty laughed. “You think you’ve got the guts? I’m my own least best friend. If I can handle this crotch-face”—he poked Righty’s eyes with bullhorn fingers—“I can handle your clown-eat-clown-world threat.”

Two people wandered into the hallway. Burnout threw a palm in their direction. “Get out of here. This bomb is about to detonate.” The two scampered off.

Burnout saw a timer on the bomb—five minutes, seventeen seconds—and rolled his shoulders. “Let’s do this, because after I beat you down, I’ll have only five minutes to defuse that bomb.” He flung a punch.

* * *

Reef slewed to a halt at a blinking bomb that might have beeped or might have sat silently. He couldn’t tell which since his ears still rang like the bell of Notre Dame. Oh, piss, someone had tethered the bomb to holes drilled next to a support column. He flipped the bomb over and checked the timer. Two minutes left. No time to waste. Go!

Think, think. He’d never defused a bomb. Well, there was that ricin bomb before Boxing Day, but technically Kamikaze had defused that in his Kamikaze way and, crock, a minute and fifty seconds.

He calmed down—breathed in-out-in-out—and gobbled up a fluffy-as-a-cloud cream puff, which he washed down with good old Tennessee Mob, the finest whiskey that almost didn’t taste like flat urine.

“Control, acknowledge,” he said. He felt as if rocks traveled through his veins. And would he ever uncover the reason behind the Hyperability Injunction breach?

“If you want to bark orders at me, young lady, you’d better swallow this ad: shove it with new snowplow technology from—”

A positive shove it! That meant the haunt control would obey. Reef gasped in relief. “Summon bomb squad to this location. And why snowplow technology?” He realized his mistake of asking the haunt control anything. “Rhetorical question, you high-tech alleyway peddler.”

The haunt control sounded as if it breakfasted on a cigar. “Today’s your lucky day, you daisy-faced freak. Bomb squad summoned. Estimated time of arrival is four minutes. You’ll be lucky if you’re not paste by then, son.” The haunt control then lambasted the definition of the word “rhetorical” by beginning a lengthy dissertation on “why snowplow technology” in military jargon.

Reef smeared a hand over his face. Okay, okay. His head felt flush with sweat and blistering heat. His fingers twitched. Four minutes until the bomb squad’s arrival, and the bomb had ninety seconds until either everything erupted in dust and TNT, or a velvet “gotcha” sign poked out of the bomb’s chassis. Reef would have to cut the red wire himself.

With fingers of feathers, he sssllliiiddd the outer shell off the pandemonium of wires underneath. Holy afro of cables. Cut the red wire? He couldn’t even count the wires in the bush inside, and was it heating up in here? He ruffled his shirt collar.

Cut the wire with what? He searched his pockets, patted his shirt and pants down. All he came up with was a voucher for one free backrub. That was the last time he’d bargain with a pencil-mustached vendor on a Zamboni sales floor.

His flask. He reached for it, tugged down a swig, two swigs, and felt turbulence in his stomach. Whoa. He swayed, shook his head, and...Okay. If he wanted to cut the red wire—and he had thirty-nine seconds to decide—what could he use? His flask still in hand, he...the lip of the flask. That splinter of unsmooth pewter on his second-rate flask that tainted his whiskey with a hint of metal and kept cutting his lip. Now his flask served as a cutting tool. Thank you, cheapness!

He dived for the bomb. What wire, what wire, what wire, red, green, blue, purple, orange, pink, yellow, wh—Wait, a pink wire? What was this, an Easter/Good Friday bomb?

He shrugged. Okay. Red. It was always the red wire. Reef pinched the wire so it curled above the morass, set the flask’s mouth to it, and began to saw. Whiskey surfed from the flask and frothed over the bomb’s insides in sticky coats. The red wire—

Snapped. The bomb stopped counting at twenty-three, and...oh, no. His heart dropped into his stomach. No, the bomb beeped wildly, counting in double time. A bead of sweat tickled down the waterslide of Reef’s nose. Okay. Cut the green wire, the white wire, the blue wire, the—why not?—pink wire. Whiskey lathered the bomb.

With the last sluice of alcohol, something in the bomb clapped, sparked, sizzled, ignited. A small blink of flame crept from underneath a circuit board. A gear that had whirred like a colony of wasps in the background now fell asleep. The timer, its numbers spinning through a bloodthirsty countdown, reached two seconds and...bleep...its display went dark.

Reef stepped back, focused on the bomb’s deceased timer. Was it off? Was it faking? Was it...drunk? He tipped a nip of whiskey into his mouth without averting his eyes from the countdown timer, which still slept as deeply as a hibernating bear.

A split door atop the bomb snapped open and out popped a head attached to a spring. Asinine’s head. Reef should have known Asinine would back his meteor with bombs. He put a hand to his face—he realized it was the hand with his flask, so he got a burning eyeful of whiskey—and switched hands.

So the bomb was drunk. Reef needed a new drinking buddy.

“Control, acknowledge. Contact entities Burnout, Pincushion, and Clang.” He hesitated to include Clang, as if adding her name would include her on his elite bomb team. But he’d be crocked to include her if they got matching tattoos.

“You are a worthless gnat, Colonel. Contacting entities Burnout, Pincushion, and Clang. Connection to Pincushion attained. Connection to Clang attained.”

“Hey, everyone. I’ve defused the bomb in the Creskin Wing. Three guesses who’s behind this. First clue is it isn’t bacon-crisp extremists. Second clue is Asinine is stupid enough. The bombs’ weakness is whi—”

Wait. If he called out the bomb’s weakness, he’d reveal his alcoholism. Crock. He rapped his forehead. Should he smudge the truth? Would vague hints suffice?

Vague hints. “The bombs’ weakness is liquids. Pop off the shell and drench it under a water fountain. Especially the one that chugs out rusty jelly water. Actually, they all chug that out. You know, IP has some serious health violations it needs to answer for, the least of which is the egglike-substance sandwich on rotation in the cafeteria. Watch out for the bombs’ toy spring head.” He flicked the head, which puffed smoke.

* * *

Pincushion wondered who in his right mind would equip a bomb with a spring-loaded head. Nobody, that was who. But after he gave his thirsty bomb a drink of chlorinated, rusty water—luckily he had, because he almost drank that sludge first—seeing was believing. The spring head was directed up at him, an object of ridicule that had popped out of the bomb’s chassis with a toothy smile for anyone who hazarded by. Nobody. Pincushion could share the wealth with only himself. A speaker buzzed through tiny holes in its plastic cheek, telling Pincushion about a timeshare deal in Gaia’s Lower Achilles district. Reef hadn’t mentioned the timeshare deal, but maybe he had drenched his bomb more thoroughly.

Oh, and nice touch on the sketch of a monocle-wearing dolphin drawn over the bomb’s tamper-warning sticker. Good work on the bottleneck nose. “Now that’s a fine bomb, old bean,” a speech bubble attributed to the dolphin said. “And Banana Hammock bathing suits make a fine fashion statement.” Pincushion wouldn’t know.

He tapped his gabber and the mouthpiece and earpiece extended. He’d set its extension at a low speed because he didn’t want it to stab through his eye. But if Power Plant set it for sixty kilometers an hour again, Pincushion would aim it at him and join a party line. “Computer, acknowledge. Contact entities Reef, Burnout, and Clang.”

“Contacting entities Reef, Burnout, and Clang. Connection to Reef attained. Connection to Clang attained. Now drop and gimme eight million, you camo-wearing pustule.”

“Guys, I’ve handled the bomb. I drenched it in something technically called water.” Part of that substance was liquid. Well, it dripped.

“Did you get the spring head guy?” Reef asked.

Pincushion nodded though Reef couldn’t see. “Yeah. Did you hear the spiel about a timeshare?”

“No. Where?”

“Lower Achilles.”

“Really? No fair. My spring head just shorted out. Wow. Lower Achilles offers the best slums, and they see sunlight for twenty minutes a day where the smog doesn’t burn your eyes. I’d take Asinine’s offer. Well, I would if he knew the first thing about things.

“Okay, everybody,” Reef said. “Burnout hasn’t chimed in, but we’ve dealt with the other bombs. Head back. We need everyone here to figure out this meteor situation.”

Pincushion roger-brothered out and stood—

Something clubbed the back of his neck. His brain rattled as if it had jarred loose. Before he could retaliate, the scene shrank into a small dot in his vision.

* * *

Burnout wished he could answer Pincushion’s call, but dodging Schizophrenic’s swiping knuckles was more vital. The brass points of those knuckles glinted out of the two-headed Bad Guy’s skin like teeth out of a shark’s maw. Yellow teeth, mind you, but some sharks had evolved with the ability to enjoy a cigar, so the comparison stood.

Schizophrenic stumbled forward but counterbalanced on a foot and swung around to belt those knuckles across Burnout. The knuckles gashed quadruplet slashes into his cheek. Burnout bellowed and landed a blow against Righty’s temple. Not an accomplishment since Righty practically begged for a beating. But Lefty yelled at him to shut up every time he said, “I’d love a dislocated jaw,” with glazed eyes.

“I convinced you of that when I tried to rip yours out,” was Lefty’s response.

Burnout wanted to land a skin-searing blow, but he could sustain his heat only if his hands were lit. When his hands were heated but not aflame, the air dissipated at punching speed. He didn’t want to burn down the campus, so he had to play it safe.

He checked the bomb. Two minutes, one second. Schizophrenic had amassed about forty years of combat experience versus Burnout’s year and a half. Without the use of Burnout’s hyperability, Schizophrenic clearly outmatched him. Though not outclassed: Righty stuck out his tongue. For the fifth time. Odd that his lollipop stayed in.

“You’re an idiot,” Burnout said. When Lefty pointed to Righty again, Burnout specified, “Both of you. We need to end this. You don’t realize that bomb will detonate in two minutes, and you’ll die along with me.”

“Not us, scarlet pumpernickel.” Lefty snorted. “In two minutes, we’ll have”—he eyeballed Righty’s tongue—“I’ll have beaten you to raspberry sauce, cleared the blast, and enjoyed a nice laugh at your expense. That bomb isn’t here to destroy this campus. It’s here to destroy the campus’s structural integrity.”

“Ooh, integrity,” Righty said and raised his fist in a yippee. “I love math.”

“Its structural integrity?” Now livid heat erupted over Burnout’s hands. Flames trickled from the squeezed skin of his fists. “But destroying the structure would...” He inhaled a razor-sharp gasp. The bomb read one minute.

“You got it. The meteor that’s reducing the area into tomato paste?”

Righty giggled. “Tomato paste? I love—”

“Captain Retardo, if we have to listen to a list of your schoolgirl infatuations every time one of us opens his mouth, I’ll tie your tongue into a bow.” He smacked Righty’s nose. “That should keep him busy. Anyway, after these bombs discharge, you’ll have a bigger problem than finding a launchpad in that earthquake rubble of a parking lot. The bombs will weaken this entire campus enough for that meteor to smash it into mincemeat. Forget the killer radiation. This place will be as solid as a dry sandcastle.” He snorted.

Burnout’s body clenched tightly. “No!” He thrust forward, fingers flailing across Lefty’s windpipe. Schizophrenic crashed to his knees. Lefty choked, spat out his toothpick, and clutched his neck. Righty did the same after giggling something about playing follow-the-leader.

A knee to Lefty’s face threw the brute onto his side and into black unconsciousness. Righty took a snooze on the dusted orange. Snoring ensued. Looked as though all Lefty’s experience and Righty’s compliant stupidity were no match for a well-placed knee.

Burnout dropped onto the bomb—thirty seconds—clutched at it, levered open the chamber under its belly—twenty-five seconds—where the chambers gears meshed—twenty seconds—in preparation. A plastic-sheathed cable bound it around a support column. He wanted to throw it at Schizophrenic—fifteen seconds, beep—but it allowed only two meters of slack. He gripped it with stifling heat—ten seconds, beep—but to burn the bomb would only set fire to the oils inside and cause a heat splatter that would boil his face. And he had no better luck on that steel cable.

No time! He discarded the bomb and it clattered against the support column and he burst away on heated air and he grabbed Schizophrenic by both collars and he rocketed past his urinal cake ad and down the hall and around the corner and he hit the deck—

A mutiny of noise prized open his eardrums. The bomb grew arms, four mechanical ones with segmented pincers at the ends. The arms wrenched into the support column and gouged it out, barraged the hall, spiked the floor, dug out the pillar’s anchor. It tore, shredded, slashed the wall and pillar, throwing around concrete gore.

The shockwave from the one-bomb destruction crew rattled up Burnout’s legs. A flow of debris careened against the corner of the hall. Burnout threw himself onto his feet to examine the mess. The claws had eviscerated the bottom of the column, which left the ceiling crumbled. The blast had cracked the walls and hollowed out a hefty hole in the floor into which murky water like curdled chocolate milk now seeped from underground.

Burnout roared a guttural scream with every ounce of energy he had left. He clouted Lefty, huffed, panted, calmed, slowed his breathing. “Control, acknowledge. Contact entities Reef and Pincushion.” He’d have to deliver the bad news that at least one bomb had detonated. And now everyone in the campus was on the deathwatch.

Chapter Thirteen: A Grin without a Cat

Power Plant entered the room. Lots of darkness in here. This place needed a nightlight. A serious nightlight, like one of those balls you hung from the ceiling that flashed colors and shapes at the walls and blinded people.

Franchise entered behind him, and soon the door hissed into corporeal form. A single light panel followed in and switched on. It illuminated this half of the room as if it tried with meager might to provide what a flashy ball could blast at them.

Power Plant found a gray wall with metal sheeting erected in a grid. He traced his fingers along its cool, flawless surface. Dust caked his fingertips. “Man, what this place?”

Franchise checked his datasheet. “The blueprints don’t even show this room. I’m just guessing, but since I see only one vent in this room, it’s not an air-purification chamber like we’d thought.”

“So what’s the room insteads?”

“It’s not a recombinant DNA testing ground either, so don’t get any ideas.”

“Don’t worry nones. I never gets no ideas. This wall’s where I’s put my gene-splicings stuff. Hey, I gots an idea.”

“Don’t take this the wrong way but, right after this conversation, I’m having a lobotomy. You’re going to take that the wrong way, aren’t you?”

Power Plant spotted, ahead and to one side, a speck that winked like a distant star in the blanket of darkness. Ooh, shiny. He scurried forward. The light panel struggled to keep up. Franchise couldn’t. He smacked into a wall when the light panel left him behind.

That glint. Coulda been a leprechaun. But a stinky one. Ugh. Smelled like a snack for a vulture. This must have been that stench that laid a layer of pork funk over the station. Funky pork funk. Whah. And this thing exuded it as if it were high-society cologne.

Power Plant reached the source of the stench. A corpse sat on a chair a hundred million miles from any other object. Gray. Withered. Rotted. Long ago, the corpse had worn clothes as colorful as a clown’s, but now he dressed only in drab earth tones. He stared blankly from cavernous eye sockets. His skin felt so dry Power Plant sensed the desiccation in the air. He wore a construction hat as grimy as his skeletal fingers and work uniform. The construction hat bore a half-inch hole with splinters of plastic cracked off it. The skull had a beige frown accented by a gold tooth, that glint that had attracted Power Plant. Huh. This guy was a pirate?

“Hey, come looks at dis.” Power Plant motioned for Franchise to come forward out of the darkness, but who knew where that straggler had wandered?

Footsteps pinged closer in the barren room, and soon Franchise’s shadowy form showed color in the dim light of the panel above. “Yuck. Dead guy. You combine his DNA with a bull’s. I won’t let you string me into another one of your illegalities.”

“You can too make a ice-creams float with a peanuts-butter sammich.”

“What did you just hear me say?”

Power Plant wandered closer but kept a safe distance from the stench exuding off the dead guy’s cobwebbed armpits. “This guy’s name Constructo Guy number forty-nine.”

“I’m sure his parents named him something saner than Constructo Guy and probably numbered him lower than the high forties. Maybe somewhere around eight.”

“So checks his badge.” Power Plant couldn’t venture too close because—extra whah—this guy stank like pork. But, sure enough, he was from Constructo Company, as the lapel read. Worker number forty-nine. Power Plant’s crew, Destructo Company, now had evil archenemies. Wait, which was the evil crew?

“Isn’t Constructo Company the crew that built Station One?” Franchise asked.

“Man, I can’ts even ’members who builts me.”

“This leads me to another question.” Franchise’s face wrinkled. “Since this stench is obviously real, why could only you smell it outside this room?”

“Mebbe ’cause Kamikaze helps me widens my nostrils up. Or...or ’cause —”

Franchise put his palms up. “Please. No more. That last one scared me enough.”

“What you thinks Constructo Guy doin’ here?” Power Plant clapped his hand against the back of the chair so hard, the shriveled head bent back and...tore off in a dry crinkle. Ugh! It rolled a couple steps and rested on the floor.

Franchise covered his mouth and gagged. “Jeffy, don’t touch the dead guy. Please. As impossible as it sounds, he’s now more disgusting than before.”

Power Plant bent over to take a liberal whiff of the guy. He had to make sure this was indeed the source of the reek that had plagued everyone’s living quarters and his keen sense of holy-crock-that’s-disgusting. Yup. It was. And it really did smell like aged pork. Dead-person aged pork. “Whah again. You gotta sniff-whiff dis guy.”

Franchise hesitated for a moment. He shrugged and broke into a trot. “Okay, but you’re running out of courtesy sniffs.”

Chapter Fourteen: Smarter than a Shop Vac

Sixth Sense found the master communication room on the top floor of Station One’s communication tower. He had to ask the haunt control four times where to find this room and, each time, it had responded with a rejoinder that he hadn’t earned enough PutriPoints at Station One’s new Space Cow to unlock the pathfinder option. Sometimes haunt controls acted like jerks. Especially haunt controls under the control of corporate sponsors and any Space Cow endeavoring to make everyone as fatty as a custard pie.

He reached the l-door, but it didn’t vanish. Was it locked? He knocked. “Ace Spandex?” He’d have asked the haunt control to announce his arrival but didn’t want to swallow a pig’s head at Lord of Fried Carcass to unlock that option.

The shuffle of feet seeped through the door but, after a minute, Sixth Sense second-guessed himself. Maybe it was a sweeping machine or a datasheet that had scraped against something on its journey to the floor. Maybe he hadn’t heard anything at all. He stepped away—

The door vanished. Sixth Sense spun around to see the gap in the doorway, inches away from Ace Spandex. Ace looked different than on news broadcasts. Shinier? His scalp bore the luster of polished steel...if that made sense. And the scar above his left eyebrow looked a little scrunched. He chewed bubblegum noisily.

“Hello.” Ace Spandex’s eyes glazed as if, behind them, a vast supercomputer tumbled through zettabyte upon zettabyte of information. They twitched. Weird.

“Hi. Uhm. Okay. Wow.” Sixth Sense threw out his hand but realized it held his precious memory chip so he switched hands and, oops, he shouldn’t shake with the left—heh heh—and swapped his memory chip into his left hand and re-extended his right, which was buried under a shirtsleeve one size too big, for the shake and took a deep breath...exhale. He realized at that point his thoughts rambled like a drooling idiot’s.

Okay. Start over. “Hi, I’m Sixth Sense. I mean, Hagen Rupp. I...uh...” Another deep breath. He’d waited for this moment for three weeks, but he had to slow down. “I’m glad I finally have the chance to meet you.”

“Hi.” Ace Spandex took Sixth Sense’s hand and...yow...squeezed a crushing grip that made Sixth Sense’s jaw press shut. “Ooh, sorry. I miscalculated the pounds of pressure in that shake. Don’t worry. It’s not enough to break your knuckles, but you shouldn’t play tennis tomorrow. Unless you listen to the haunt control.” He jerked his chin at a wall that advertised Steel Pump’s new line of tennis elbows, hands, and throat-grunt implants.

“That’s okay.” Sixth Sense wrung his hand in the other as gently as he could without dropping his chip’s titanium alloy container. “Uhm...I’m sorry I just now caught up with you. When Legion hired me, you were still on vacation. Then the Bad Guys captured you and...I haven’t found you until now.” His volume slid from conversational to a whisper. “The haunt control said you haven’t entered your living quarters since you came back.”

“I spend my time here.” Ace Spandex threw a thumb at the master communication room, which he screened in the doorway. Was he hiding something? He shifted his body to block even more, his limbs producing a whir as though well-oiled cogs operated his muscles. “So what’s up?”

“Uhm. Okay. Wow. This is strange. I know. But I have a request.” Sixth Sense held out the memory chip that blinked as peacefully as a baby would sleep in a bassinet. “This memory chip holds...uhm...let’s just say it holds crucial information I need to access as soon as humanly possible. The only problem is it also contains a virus. If I access this information, the virus will corrupt it.”

“I see your problem.” Ace Spandex snatched up the container in a grip that looked equally computed and reckless. Between his teeth, he snapped an air bubble in his gum.

Sixth Sense choked on a gasp—oooHHHHhhh, be careful with the container—but withheld his gut reaction to steal back the chip that held his father’s memories. “I figured if anybody understood my problem, you would.”

“No, I mean, I see your problem.” Ace Spandex held the container’s transparent cover to his eye. He rotated the container in one hand to inspect all angles. Something behind him—or beneath his temple, Sixth Sense couldn’t tell—sounded like a fan on overdrive. Had he installed some kind of baffling upgrade? “This is one advanced virus. Well, technically it’s a worm.”

Sixth Sense flinched, glasses sliding down his nose. A downpour of memories-emotions-thoughts-interactions-stimulations racketed his mind, infecting him with that foggy feeling as if his headspace weren’t all his. It felt...unfamiliar. Even though he usually experienced this when, due to his telepathy, someone’s personality imposed itself on his, something was absent...as if he read the thoughts of a...of a machine? Nothing about Ace Spandex’s personality intruded on him. He couldn’t read Ace Spandex’s mind.

“You’re lucky you didn’t access this. Not only would the worm have destroyed your data, but this thing’s got an action logger installed. Whoever transmitted this worm onto your chip would have tracked you across the universe.

“Look, I don’t have the software installed in my head to clean this worm.” Either Ace Spandex had misspoken or he intended to plug that chip into a toilet. He twitched as if he had woken up in a crime scene. “Yikes. I mean, I need to borrow this to clean it.”

“Sure. Okay. Uhm, yeah. Fine.” Sixth Sense scratched his head and toed the floor. “But, whatever happens...please keep it away from any number twos.”

Ace Spandex smiled cleverly, which spoke not so much of egotism as it did of proven confidence. He snap-chewed his gum. “You got it, Hagen. I’ll have this cleaned up in a week, maybe ten days. Good to meet you. Stop by any time.” Ace Spandex blinked and...was that a blink? Sixth Sense’s brow knotted but...he swore an aperture had flashed behind Ace Spandex’s iris.

Ace Spandex retreated amid that sound of whirring cogs. The door rematerialized on his command: “Control, acknowledge. Lock closest door, and if you try to sell me something even vaguely related to a lock, I’ll reprogram the trash compactor to fall in love with you again. Remember she’s a messy kisser.”

Sixth Sense shook his head. Eye apertures. Mechanical handshakes. Whirring cogs. He needed more sleep. Or maybe Ace Spandex did. Sixth Sense couldn’t tell, but he was sure contact with Power Plant had rotted his mind.

Chapter Fifteen: Houston, We Have More Problems than We Can Count (Three)

Reef pounded his fist on the desk, rattling a handpad. “Where is he?” He checked the shield screen as if Pincushion were starring on a show and would take his cue to enter. No. And Zelinski’s flashing teleprompter chest didn’t help. “Pincushion Enter: Stage Left”? Not this time.

Pappas scooped up a nacho chip from the tray that hovered at waist level. The cheese snapped apart in greasy tendrils. “Your friend’s missing out on some great postbomb food.”

Reef shot forward in his chair. As if the destruction of a major support column, which heralded the collapse of the roof, wasn’t enough, he had to focus this IP degenerate’s attention. “Pappas, we’re still dealing with a meteor and a crackpot roaming around here with his subcrackpots.”

“Yeah, but this food.” Pappas noshed on the chip, spitting out the sounds of ravenous hunger. “It tastes like what mom would make if my mom were an industrial-sized nacho-synthesizing food processor.”

“Mine actually was,” Zelinski said.

Pappas pointed with enthusiasm and tongued his food aside. “I remember. Most of the time she crisped the nacho chips just right. The rest of the time she tried to enslave all of livingkind.”

“Can we get to business here?” Reef pounded the table again. “Yes, a Good Guy wants to get to business. A friend of ours is who knows where—”

“Zelinski’s mom could compute it out,” Pappas said.

“—the Bad Guys have some deranged plan to flatten these four square blocks with a meteor, Burnout and I are dealing with a guy who’s gone from dachshund torpedoes to meteors as his weapon of choice, and you’re interested in pub food. If we don’t stop Asinine, by next month he could use satellite lasers to burn everyone’s nachos—”

“My mom’s nachos?”

“Zelinski’s mom’s nachos?”

“Now that nachos have your attention, we need to address an issue.” Reef waited for all eyes to lock on him. “Should we tell everyone outside about the meteor?”

“No.” Burnout put a hand to his chin. After heaving that two-headed bulk through a few hallways, he’d given up and left him rotting in the women’s bathroom under the broken and vomiting sanitary-accessories dispenser. “Mass panic? That would be the least of our worries. Someone out there would attempt a coup. We’d end up with more than a destroyed support column. I’ve seen those line dwellers when they amass. They could tear the campus walls apart.”

“So what options do we have left?” Reef asked.

“Our missile defense system on our outpost.” Clang glanced from Reef to Burnout. Her expression soured at even having to look at a Good Guy. “If missiles aren’t enough to destroy that meteor, they’ll definitely knock it out of its path.”

“But, to send a signal to your outpost, we need to take down that force field.” Reef sat forward on his squeaky chair and stared not at the monitors but through them. His thoughts whirled like dynamos, or maybe that was the whiskey he’d glugged up. Either way, whoa, they gave his stomach something to reconsider next time it dawdled on that liquor. Come on, already. Livers grew bored easily!

Burnout cracked one hand in the other. His heat flickered hotter by a few degrees. “Let me at that two-headed...uhm...pissing—Okay, I’m not Schizophrenic. It’s tough coming up with insults. Let’s just call him a delirious maniac and move on. But let me at him. I’ll find out how to bring that force field down in the time it takes him to come up with a new insult for me.”

Clang watched the ceiling. Reef approached, though he’d rather retreat from her. “Clang, what is it?” Clang’s eyes shifted to a shelf on the other side of the room. “Clang, tell us.”

“Fine.” Clang lifted her daze and planted a scowl on Reef. “This is classified knowledge. We’ve allowed local police to use our storage area for evidence lockup. It’s in the basement. There’s a force field skeleton key there from a botched squirrel-trading cartel. Article one-eight-nine dash four-four.”

The basement? If Reef remembered correctly, the administrative computer quarters hid down the hall from the basement access. Clang could deploy the missiles, and he could use that time to find out about this injunction violation, why IP would risk redoing the harm the Perseus War Hyperability Incident had caused.

Reef asked, “What? You weren’t about to tell us this?”

Clang crossed her arms and looked away. “It’s privileged information that involves material not to be tampered with.”

“But we’re going to die!”

“A risk I’d love to take.” She shot a smug jut of her lower jaw at Reef. “Good Guy, if you tell anybody about this information, I will make your life hell.” Her face looked like a demon’s. “Hell, Good Guy.”

Reef shrugged. “If it’s as hellish as your voice, I’d be in serious trouble.” And what about the planned Hyperability Injunction violation? “What else are you hiding?”

Clang didn’t answer, so Reef stepped away. “Burnout, with me. We’re headed for the basement.” And the admin computer quarters.

Burnout bounded toward the shield screen. Reef followed, and both tromped out with their mission weighing their hearts but the scent of nachos weighing Reef’s lungs. A pound of olives? Reef wolfed down another hushpuppy—this time chocolate berg and peanut brittle—to scour that flavor from his palate.

Pappas and Zelinski moved to follow, but Reef blocked the shield screen’s gap with an arm that shot across its frame. “You two stay put. Zelinski, you got half your DNA from someone bent on destroying all life and, less than three months ago, a tennis robot nailed me to a wall during a haunt control mishap. You’re not on my trust list. And you, Pappas? You just have cheese on your chin.”

Reef removed his arm. “Clang? Have that evidence declassified by the time Burnout and I reach the basement. We don’t need your haunt control calling us worm excrement anymore.”

“Worm excrement,” the haunt control said. It took requests?

Reef and Burnout piston-stepped through the hall without trading words. Burnout may have had his own reasons to hurry along, but Reef wanted to end this fiasco and investigate IP’s plans to violate the Hyperability Injunction. The trip to the basement was quick what with a yellow line guiding them despite its breaks to tell them, via calligraphy, what great psychedelic cocktails Master of the Plastered concocted (but only on holiday weekends).

They reached the basement. Reef said, “Control, acknowledge. Unlock closest door.”

The door, a portrait-oriented billboard for doors, oozed and whistled from reality—

A staff flew from the darkness of the basement staircase and cracked against Burnout’s face. Burnout’s feet swept out from underneath him. His head smacked the metal tiles, bounced, and lay still. He grunted, transported from alertness to a faraway place dictated only by waves of pain.

Reef skittered aside and steeled himself, pistol up. “Who threw that giant stick into my friend’s schnoz? Because I have a sponsored nasal spray for that.”

Amaranthia emerged. Reef should have suspected Master Asinine’s meanest and boy-craziest ninja. Actually, Multipurpose was mean and more than a little crazy. Reef would have to stretch to fit in the “boy” part.

“Oh, great. How did you even get in there?” Reef fortified his feet against the floor and squeezed his unarmed hand into a rock-solid fist. He stretched his neck one way and then the other, hearing a bony crinkle. “Now I have to wrestle the one person on Master Asinine’s payroll who still hasn’t passed geometry.”

“Hey, I totally know what a geometer is, you gitch?” Amaranthia said with that rising intonation that made most of her statements sound like questions. She stepped out of the basement in an elegant wine red dress that cascaded to her ankles, trimmed off by crimson lace at the hem and sleeves. One-inch spikes lined the spaghetti straps. Spikes. On a spaghetti-strap dress. Now fashion had seen it all.

She whipped a sword around in a figure eight. The sword caught a light panel but met no resistance and cleaved the panel in two. Both halves sputtered and crashed to the floor.

Reef patted himself down. Gun? At Station One. Whiskey flask? Nearly empty. Pizza pockets? He grabbed the five cellophane packages from a deep pocket. “Amaranthia, meet an overpriced patty filled with what’s in your head: six percent real meat.”

* * *

Pincushion rattled awake. What woke him could have been the insomnia that lingered at the fringes of his mind whenever he tried to sleep. It could have been the laser rope that wrenched his arms back into taut positions. But it was probably the punch that had clouted his nose and snapped his head against the concrete wall behind him.

“Ooh, ooh, crock, ooh,” someone’s harsh voice grunted in bursts. “These ninja shoulder muscles aren’t used to tenderizing meat without my hammer quarterstaff.”

Pincushion saw a white marshmallow eclipse the one light panel in the desk-crowded room. He sighed ruefully. Multipurpose.

Multipurpose was Master Asinine’s answer to ninja manpower, except Multipurpose had overeaten way past being an effective ninja. The spherical creature, pasty white, had rolls of fat dipping down over his leotard and several chins down his neck. Every movement was a snarl of pulled muscles and sounds of elastic rubbing together.

The one time Pincushion had finally managed sleep, Multipurpose’s wrathful hand-slam to the nose acted as his alarm clock. If that weren’t bad enough, the greasy splash of baba ghanoush over his face made him want to vomit all over the cold marble at his knees.

Multipurpose rubbed a shoulder but didn’t notice he’d just painted peanut butter over it. Yesterday’s meal he hadn’t yet bathed off? His slothful gait reminded Pincushion of a slug’s oily movements. Despite this ghastly sight, Pincushion had to remain alert. He wiggled his ear, which commanded the response regulator behind it to zap his brain. His sleepy feeling lifted as if cotton disappeared from his thoughts.

“So...Master Asinine left you in charge of me, brother.” Pincushion huffed at the paste on his face. He couldn’t clean it off, but a crumb rolled down and tumbled into his mouth. He retched dryly. In this case, the five-second rule probably referred to the timeframe between eating Multipurpose’s leftovers and when it gained life and devoured you from the inside.

Multipurpose slid a finger along a sai. He licked his lips and squinted mischievously. His teeth would have glinted in the light panel’s illumination, but their yellow had dulled. “Yup. You got me. Aren’t you an unlucky crock?”

“Like you wouldn’t believe.” Pincushion noticed the desk with slurping slime slathered across it on encumbered paper plates. Maybe he’d reserve “unlucky” for the bacteria fighting for living space on that spread. He gagged again. “Please...get that smorgasbord away. I can’t...” Nausea took over again. “I can’t fathom what’s in that cornbread, but it smells like nitrogen.”

“Why you...Insult me all you crocking want, but don’t you dare insult my culinary habits.”

“Then how can I insult you?”

“Crocking Terran.” Multipurpose lunged for another wallop across Pincushion’s face. He missed and fumbled into a low pipe that clobbered him on the head. “Crocking crockful of pipe!” He whacked the pipe, then clutched his shoulder. “Oooh. Why must my crocking ninja parts be so enormously awesome?”

Pincushion wanted to mention the table spread for the answer but figured Multipurpose would treat him to another audacious stride. At any rate, more attacks would bring that gooey blob closer, and his nitrogen breath hadn’t gotten any more spearmint fresh. If anything, whatever he’d ingested had finally given up and died. The aroma of brine seeped from Multipurpose’s mouth, and—urk—the billowing food blender burped.

Pincushion slipped in and out of consciousness, waking only to catch glimpses of Multipurpose—who had surprised him by standing back up—gorge himself on something green, something red, something greenish red, and then something the rainbow didn’t represent at all. Mud patty black? No. Pincushion refused to name the color of any food whose tentacles still squirmed.

“You know, brother...” Pincushion interrupted himself to quell a bubble of nausea floating up his windpipe. It tasted like bile, but it might have been a lingering wad of Momentum’s kelp cereal. “You know, there’s a meteor headed straight for this campus.”

“Yeah, I crocking know.” Multipurpose stuffed another surprise into his mouth and chewed it as if it were cud. It flattened as noisily as a deflating balloon. “We’re here to make sure you guys don’t stand a chance, crockery.”

“This doesn’t sound like it will end well for you, either. I mean, that meteor will flatten you into whatever you just crammed into your face.” Pincushion felt his metal knee joint catch on a bone. A needling zap shot up his leg. He wanted to snap his squeaky knee back into place, but his hands remained tied behind him.

With his tongue, Multipurpose shifted his mouthful around, which squealed. He tried to speak around it, but some of it got in the way and rained rubbery chunks across the floor. Some splattered against a spiral-grooved pillar. “It isn’t like that. We’re here only long enough to beat you crocks down and head home before that meteor mashes this area into pulp.” He chortled. His jellylike girth rippled, and his jellylike food spewed out.

“That’s the plan? Seriously? How do you expect to leave? There’s a force field around the campus. No one can escape it!” Pincushion didn’t know the Bad Guys’ plan—maybe they had a way out—but, if he counted on escaping, he needed to instill doubt.

“Heh. You’re a crocked idiot. If we’re stuck here, we’re safe. This campus can withstand meteors. Massive ones.”

“But the point of those bombs was to weaken the campus so the meteor would pulverize it. The force field won’t protect you. Not if it has a low yield. Besides, the radiation around here will skyrocket. You won’t be able to set foot outside for years. Do you seriously think Master Asinine has thought this through?”

Yes. That doubt. It melted into Multipurpose. The daft mound of wet sand sagged, his jowls dripped farther down, and he stopped chewing.

Pincushion smiled, his dark bronze skin darkening a shade. “I know. Hard to imagine Master Asinine’s plans aren’t ironclad clinchers. Still...do you even know if he thought of an escape plan?”

Multipurpose slumped, his legs bowing. Pincushion couldn’t tell if they buckled under the pressure of this half-baked plan or from the extra four hundred pounds evolution hadn’t prepared them to carry. The cud rolled out from between his lips. It squeaked and scurried off.

Chapter Sixteen: Off with His Head

“He must have been locked in this room and forgotten after the station was finished.” Franchise almost traced a finger along Constructo Guy’s cheek but second thoughts told him, “No. Gross. Don’t.” He tended to agree, but he’d watched Jeffy thread licorice through his nostrils, so his concept of foul was no longer fine-tuned for social convention.

Jeffy hopped against a wall and kicked, accidentally clipping Franchise in the chin. His siren wail was excessive, though. Franchise spilled backward and almost upended their new friend, the corpse that felt as dusty and flaky as a mummy. He should have known to tread carefully when Jeffy was airborne. Or awake. He rephrased that: he should stop knowing Jeffy.

“What was that all about?” Franchise rubbed his chin.

“Sorry. Was gonna says we shoulds funeral him. Ya know, like eulololograze him.” Jeffy landed.

“Eulograze?”

“No. Eulololograze.”

“Great. Another brain typo. I’m guessing you want to eulogize him...unless you want to let a cow eat grass off his head. We know nothing about him. What do you plan to say?”

“Likes mebbe he make a good deads guy. See?” Jeffy spread his arms at the construction cadaver. “He deads. And he a guy. Just make stuffs up.”

“He’s dead, and he’s a guy. You nailed it.” Franchise sat in a dark corner and hugged his knees in the tickling cold. “Uhh, okay, he was an avid connoisseur of succulent brains. And he owned an impressive collection of patio furniture.”

Jeffy bit his tongue. “You sucks at makings stuffs up.”

“At least I didn’t put the T-shirt on him that says, ‘Vote Jeffy for winner of Best Motions Picture, 8087.’” Franchise flapped a hand at the absurd shirt Jeffy had managed onto the poor corpse. He leaped up and tore off his own T-shirt. “Frankly, I’m sick of wearing it, too.”

“Well, how else am Star Wars Two gonna wins?”

“There’s already a Star Wars Two. It’s called Episode Five: Best Movie Ever. By the way—and you’d know this if you’d stop with the blunt force self-trauma—8087 was over a thousand years ago.” He raised an eyebrow. “And, no, you didn’t even come close.”

Jeffy smacked his forehead. “Ya sure’s?”

“Did you make yet another lousy revamp of a crappy has-been movie serial? Didn’t think so. So no, you didn’t produce Camel Factory Eighty-Seven. Ergo, you didn’t win.”

“Fine. Me and goods buddy Constructo Guy—”

“That’s not even close to his name. Probably.”

“—we’s wear the T-shirts. He my news best friend. Right, Constructo Guy?” Jeffy nodded with a lip curled at Franchise. He slapped Constructo Guy on the back of the chair and—

Oh, man! Franchise burst aside when Constructo Guy’s head lolled forward and ripped off in a gut-coiling snap and ttteeeaaarrr. It rolled into the darkness, hobbling over its nose. A sharp roll caved in the chin. A trail of crumbled skin like stale breadcrumbs traced its route across the mystery room.

A dry smack signaled the end of its roll. Of course, Jeffy wanted to find it. Franchise would think twice before letting his friend lure him into another cavalcade of craptastic misadventures. After the previous one that involved a dead body, Franchise had sworn off days like this. He hated Lady Luck, and Lady Luck hated him.

Something in the darkness whirred awake. Lights shot across the jet-black back wall as if the wall had shifted open to reveal a starry nightscape. Another whir...and a fan gushed on. Something tall and gigantic needed a lot of cold air. Maybe Franchise should offer Longshanks some ice water to appease it.

Then the beeps. Sharp beeps. Intrusive beeps...like...like a microwave oven timer. Beep, beep, beep. It matched rhythm with Franchise’s heartbeat.

Franchise was glued to the featureless darkness only meters away. “What’s that sound?” he asked from the corner of his mouth, the only thing he dared to move in case that gigantic thing wasn’t an admirer of ice water or people waking it up. Beep, beep, beep.

Jeffy waited a few beeps to respond. Franchise swore he heard crickets chirp outside even though the noxious pesticides the station dispatched killed anything that even thought of chewing on foliage. The pesticides also burned his eyes. The haunt control never forgot that time he picked an apple off a tree.

Jeffy finally said, “I dunnos what beepings. Prob’ly somethings what beeps.” Beep, beep, beep. “Yeah. I’s gonna go with thats.”

Chapter Seventeen: Assembly Line...Assembled

Mechanism had rearranged Brick’s laboratory to suit his own needs. He’d shoved aside the beakers and chemical mixers, which now lay shattered against walls, tables, and that science buffoon’s head. Brick would not mind. If he did, Mechanism would force him to not mind.

Mechanism had carefully evaluated the assembly line along the back wall. The assembly line had remained in working order, polished to a pristine shine. Mechanism had supplied it with new lubricant, of which the machine had run dry. He’d tested its gears, columns, and springs. He’d scrubbed its software of any viruses. He’d cleaned the lint trap of gunk from any thundermammals Master Asinine had wedged through this thing. That buffoon was a mastermind only at barnyard hoedowns.

Mechanism had fed the assembly line’s computer a set of precise instructions—as if “precise” properly conveyed the mastery with which he conducted his orchestra of technology. He’d mathematically calculated every contour on his magnificent creation. He’d fitted every shape for maximum aerodynamics. Every impact-resistant metal, every reinforced inch of plastic, every scrap and modicum of hardware. Everything...perfected to dramatic excellence. He’d had even attuned the Master Asinine stupidity filters to play “la-la-la” whenever that societal blight spoke. Only Mechanism fathomed greatness on such a grandiose scale.

He flipped the assembly line’s switch. He wished it were a clunking, ball-headed lever for the theatrics but, alas, practicality demanded subtlety.

The assembly line chugged on, slowly at first but, after gaining thrust, at a rapidity only Mechanism could calculate. The hinged arms and refining chambers clawed at raw metal, churned it, melted it, shaped it as a deft blacksmith would. From the assembly line’s output box spat—oh, yes, how divine, how delightfully divine—the weapons of mass destruction of which Mechanism had so long dreamed. Excellent. The machinations of his goal drew ever closer. Now...time for his suit’s enhancements.

Mechanism traipsed to that sentence-bloating muddle-head Brick and shot another dart into the base of his blocky skull. That should keep him asleep for the duration of this project.

Now, at least for a short while, the laboratory and everything in it belonged to Mechanism.

Chapter Eighteen: From Zero to Ultra Crocked in Ten Seconds

Asinine examined the destruction his funk hammer had wrought on this hallway. The foot of a support column had crumbled to rockin’ pieces and its upper half now swayed from the ceiling like a hip cat’s tail, because that was what a funk hammer did: funked. The ceiling had bowed and cracked, so the column leaned at an angle. Tiles had shattered into a maze of deranged lines that clawed out from the funk hammer’s epicenter. A hole now marred the floor and contained a bowl of filthy water. He sipped the water. Well, it wasn’t cola, but it tasted acidic enough to mangle his childhood memories. And now his high school prom had taken place in the middle of a slaughterhouse.

Inside a nearby bathroom, Schizophrenic lay against the wall, Lefty out cold, Righty trying to lick his own nose. Futile. The dozens of times Asinine had tried, he’d come back with goober-dipped taste buds.

But the support column was wiped. One out of three bombs had deployed. Not half bad. Technically, it was worse than half bad, but Asinine couldn’t calculate fractions. That meteor would still pulverize to dust this military stadium. No. Museum. Supermarket? Sure, he went with that. Military supermarket.

Now, time to gloat.

“Control, acknowledge. Let’s go with gloat mode.”

“Gloat mode running. Have at it.”

Heh. He loved his new gabber. It gabbered about his gloat mode. “Hey, hey, hey. How goes it, my John Q. Publics?”

* * *

Reef staggered back from Amaranthia’s swift kick. She’d missed, but he’d felt her shoe’s heel scrape his unshaven whiskers. What was worse was Master Asinine’s voice assaulted the hallway from the overhead speaker. Reef contemplated letting Amaranthia belt him across the face to black out Asinine’s public spectacle, but that would prove counterproductive in the long run. The short-term benefits tempted him, though.

The speaker shook in its bracket from the swagger in Asinine’s voice. “I hope you Q. Publics have no dinner plans tonight. You know why? Actually, let me tell you about my dinner plans first. They involve a gluten-free sweet potato casserole. And, while we’re on the subject, I learned how to operate an oven without destroying public property. I’m proud of myself. So are you.”

Reef noticed a dimness in the hall. The full-panel windows revealed a sunset light outside. No moon. And the time was only about four thirty. The sun should have blazed brightl—Oh, no. Reef saw it. A halo of light ringed a shadow that screened the sun. The meteor. It raced closer, the words “Give Peace a Chance” now legible on its face.

Reef dodged another kick. Amaranthia’s scythe-shaped heel cut the air.

“Anyway, enough small talk, because casseroles offer a nice segue into why you shouldn’t have dinner plans. Remember that meteor?”

The crowd’s babble from the nearby triage floor died. Wait, could they hear Asinine? Reef wanted to leap up at the speaker and yank it off. The triage room was soundproofed from only The Bad Guy Starship, and Asinine was on the ground. He’d blow the lid on the meteor! “Asinine, shut up, shut up, shut up.”

A kick rammed his solar plexus. His lungs heaved empty. His arms spiraled and his feet stuttered back. Who’d have expected such a petite foot to feel like a rhinoceros goring his tenders? Another kick cracked him in the skull, and despite hazy consciousness, he felt a third jolt him in the back. He slammed aside, spun over Burnout’s unconscious body, and face-planted onto the floor. A pizza pocket got flattened.

“How’s that for, like, the crock-kicking of a lifetime?” Amaranthia said in one of those odd times she matched a rising intonation with a question. If only she’d use that nail file properly instead of slashing Reef’s arm with it. Oh, wait. She was using it properly. Reef was too much of a bore for her to fight without grooming.

Asinine said, “Well, only one of my funk hammers, trademarked, destroyed a support column, but that’s still enough to rain down the pain. A pain rain—on you—because that meteor hurtling toward us will pulverize this station and everybody in it. Yes, that’s right. You have no dinner plans, all so I can destroy the Good Guys. Do me a favor and thank them for me. If you’ve got hollow-point projectiles, please double-thank them for me. Or triple-th—Whatever. Just make sure they’re sufficiently thanked. Father Lowensland, out.”

Amaranthia blew a generous bubble of pink gum that smelled stale. “I love this Fandaia dress? It’s so airy that I can totally slaughter you without, like, breaking a sweat?”

Reef staggered onto all fours and wiped a sleeve along the blood coursing from his nose. “Totally awesome.” Though he tried to control his arms, they shivered from exhaustion, and, frankly, he’d eaten one too many gratuity caffeine pies.

“Ewww, total ew?” Amaranthia jumped back, wearing a look of revulsion. “Blood, blood, blood, ewwwwww?”

Angry shouts thundered from around a corner. Reef dripped blood from several places, one of them over his vision, but he looked left at a crimson-tinged mob that barreled into the hallway. They came equipped: pitchforks, torches, and those effigy dolls armed the lynch tide where G took up the hateful vanguard.

G thrust his pitchfork high. “Two Good Guys are right there, man. I mean ‘men.’”

The mob rushed closer. They still surged several yards away, but Reef had to act quickly. He pulled out a pizza pocket and placed it between two fingers. He sliced the air and flung the pizza pocket, which curved left and missed Amaranthia by a meter or, really, a car length or two. Or three.

Reef coughed out more blood. “I need to get through that door.” He pointed at the darkened space behind Amaranthia. “One way or another, I will. I don’t care if I have to rip you in half.”

Amaranthia seemed to forget the blood. Another kick shot across Reef’s face, and that nail file stabbed his side. Hot pain lit him. Fine. Amaranthia held grudges against empty promises and unfulfilling banter. Her attacks still felt better than anything inflicted on him in Power Plant’s version of tag.

The mob rushed at Reef. Reef spun and clutched another pizza pocket at them. “Stay back, or suffer a face full of venomous green peppers, lethal tomatoes, and whatever other rotten ingredients At Your Own Risk Foodstuffs wedged in here. And don’t take that threat lightly. This is”—he checked the package—“Mediterranean Manslaughter.” The people in the raucous mob didn’t press their luck. They and their pitchforks remained out of throwing distance, though their twitchy arms revealed their intention to not give up so easily.

The hot pulses in Reef’s body felt as if he’d visited a blind acupuncturist, also like Power Plant’s version of tag. Indeed, Amaranthia’s nail file still jutted from between two ribs. With a grunt, he squeezed a bloody hand around the nail file and winced, winced, sipped air through his teeth, winced, yanked it out.

“Ew, more blood?” Amaranthia flashed back a step. “Ew ew ew ew? Is there, like, any chance you could totally, like, wash up right now?”

“I’d totally take a shower, but you’d, like, kill me in it.” Reef dropped the nail file. It was a good weapon, and the rough emery served as a nice reminder of all the reasons Reef should have entered into accounting...or at least anything that didn’t involve Kamikaze’s Wednesday Monkey Punch Day. But he had three pizza pockets left, and they came packed with more flavor than any weapon at Amaranthia’s disposal. Aside from the fruit lozenge she whipped at Reef’s eye. Ouch. Sticky.

Burnout stirred on the floor. Luckily, Reef and his pizza pockets stood between the fiery Good Guy and the mob. Amaranthia stood over Burnout and, with one spike on her cardinal open-toe shoe, she kicked him back to sleep like an ex-girlfriend fulfilling a revenge dream. “Too bad? I hate beating on total hotness? Debbie’s so gonna have to totally, like, hear about this hunk? Drool fest.” She took an image still of Burnout by double-tapping her gabber bud.

She pouted, her expression soft only for a heartbeat before she adopted the rancor she’d worn when she’d treated Reef like a voodoo doll. Her long, carmine-colored hair flowed behind a shoulder. “Now, totally back to you, you captain gitch?”

“Yeah.” Reef winced. “Totally back to beating the snot out of the captain of gitch.” He dropped a pizza pocket. It smacked onto the floor, sizzled, and spat out a stream of pizza sauce and a pepperoni slice that looked too green for comfort. Huh. He must have pressed the self-microwave button on the wrapper.

“The Bad Guys are flattening us with a meteor, and it’s all your fault, man.” G burst forward with the mob’s frontrunners. He thrust a bulky boot into Reef’s stomach.

Reef recovered and spun at them. He kicked some of the mob back, flailed a kick at others, held high a pizza pocket as an expired food grenade. “I’m warning you.” He threw the pizza pocket at the floor. It gushed tomato sauce, rancid vegetables, and steam out a seam in the crust. The crowd recoiled a step. Reef retrieved the last pizza pocket from his jacket to replace his spent weapon.

Amaranthia unsheathed a long katana and spun it deftly. A glint of light sparkled up its blade and down the other end. Her devilish smile unsettled Reef’s stomach more than that green pepperoni slice, which had turned blue since pouring onto the floor. What were those food scientists injecting these things with?

Amaranthia curled back and flipped onto her palms. Her legs came up and—thud—a heel clipped Reef’s chin. A thick trail of blood drenched his neck. Amaranthia landed on her feet, her bloody heel print on the floor. She didn’t notice the blood.

Reef flopped onto his knees and spilled forward in an uncontrolled roll. His face smeared the floor with the blood from his chin, his cheek, his nose, who knew where. Pick one, because Reef could no longer keep track.

“Man, you were totally as challenging as, like, a midterm?” Amaranthia rolled her eyes and spat out a piece of gum in the shape of a gnarled mold of teeth. Reef managed onto his elbows and knees, so she trotted over and planted a stiletto heel between two of his vertebrae as though to pry them apart. She flattened Reef onto the floor again. His nose crunched against a tile and dripped a dotted line of blood that smeared when his cheek mashed over it. If she’d give him half a second, he’d write haiku in blood.

He still clutched one pizza pocket. He jabbed the self-microwave button with his ring finger. Now he had to wait one minute before the pizza was hot and fresh. And ooey-gooey good, according to test groups aged nine to twelve. He looked up to make sure the mob kept its distance. Though pain grumbled through him, forcing him to clench his eyes shut, he felt Amaranthia’s nasty sword prick the nape of his neck. Her sinister look judged him as if he wore taped-together glasses and a misaligned pocket protector. Maybe he could defeat her with a simple Shakespeare question.

The pizza pocket’s wrapper dinged. Yeah, it ooed. And it gooed. It wasn’t anywhere near the realm of good, but Reef considered his weapon primed. He unwrapped it. Rolled onto his back. Palmed the pizza pocket. Slapped it against Amaranthia’s leg. Crumpled up the cellophane wrapper. Launched it at a recycler. He still had that college wrist shot.

But the pizza pocket, it...it barely sizzled. Its pepperoni and aquamarine mushrooms...they dropped to the floor. All that remained splashed across Amaranthia’s leg was a splotch of pizza sauce that you could count as such only because it contained the required amount of salt.

Nevertheless, Amaranthia stepped back. Horror spread her mouth in a silent gasp, as if a scream seeped through her mind but couldn’t tunnel out her throat. Her eyes as big as grapes, she recoiled from the splatter that marred her dress. “No? No? No? No?”

Reef clawed onto all fours. “I don’t know how to answer that. In fact, I’m not sure you’re asking a question.”

“What did you do?” She dropped to her knees. “This was totally my best dress? My mom is gonna be totally pissed? She’s totally not gonna let me go to Tammie Saska’s way awesome shindig? I’m totally grounded for, like, ever? And I got a C in math?”

Her cheeks quivered. “I loved this dress. It was a Gavindale. It had spaghetti straps...a two-foot laced skirt...shatterproof lining.” Her questioning intonation had evaded her, swallowed by her sudden shock. She curled into a ball. Her sword clattered to the floor, and she stared into nothing, into everything, into eternity, with eyes as blank as her SAT scores. She hugged her knees and shivered, and so did her voice. “So cold. So, so cold.”

Whoa. Lightheaded. Reef crawled up along the wall, leaving red handprints. The basement stood ahead, its doorway a vacant void. He approached, risking a crouch only to retrieve Amaranthia’s sword. Too heavy for him to lift in his current state. He left it behind. Besides, the hilt was pink. And decorated with craft glitter. And bejeweled. And, Reef wasn’t sure, but did it play a ringtone whenever it swished through the air?

No time to hightail it to the computer quarters. With Reef’s last pizza pocket spent, that mob was closing in. Fine. Discovering the plans behind the injunction violation would wait. So would Reef’s bathroom break. He grabbed Burnout, hoisted him into his arms before the mob reached them—ugh, head rush—and heaved him to the basement, through the door. “Control, acknowledge. Lock door.”

The door appeared. Fists, feet, knees, and weapons slammed against it. Each beat echoed down the wind-whistling stairs, but G’s voice raged overtop the cacophony: “Good Guy, show yourself! Everybody’s going to die because of you, man!”

In his exhaustion, Reef pounded down the stairs as if hammering nails into the plastiwood boards with his shoes. Each step plinked out a piano tune, and by the time he reached the foot of the darkened staircase, he’d stomped out the jingle for Captain Molasses’s Country Berry Juice Blend: “La la, smash it down your face hole, crock yeah.”

A chill scurried through his body. He swallowed a build-up of phlegm and placed Burnout against a wall. “Control, acknowledge. Lights to normal capacity.”

“You pissing maggot hive, you’re even lucky your mama gave you eyes to see. I should clamp your face shut. Unfortunately, I don’t have face clamps...or hands. And there are too many legal issues involved.” A triangle arrangement of light panels burst on. Reef threw a hand over his face until he adjusted to the sudden spurt of illumination that harassed his vision.

Everything looked gray or dirty. The walls and the floor were mottled concrete. An advertisement adorned the walls every few feet, but otherwise everything in eyeshot was without character. Light panels hung at a head-knocking height every four or five yards. A hallway spilled out to his left, another to his right. A third stretched ahead.

What had Clang said? The skeleton key was in storage. “Control, acknowledge. Indicate route to the storage area.”

“You’re a useless waste of time, you know that, dog? You need me to hold your hand, too? On the way, why not try Reflux Action’s new lickin’-the-floor tonic. Follow the jade line.” A line painted itself along the basement. Farther down the blunt-colored hall, the line bent left. Reef shrugged and tottered along the path. He didn’t realize it coming down the stairs, but he dragged his right foot as if his leg had taken five. Maybe it had. His brain should have, too, but it rarely knew what was good for it.

A few painful lurches and a Crème-de-la-crème’s Cream of the Cream Cake later, Reef found himself in the storage area. He knew a few files about the Hyperability Injunction he should have “lost,” but some bureaucrats had taken care of that already.

The door was locked. He bumped against it out of a lightheaded lack of coordination. Its one dirt-smeared window revealed only a robot manning a desk. Behind the desk, nothing but a wall and a five-by-seven-foot viewscreen.

“Control, acknowledge. Unlock closest door.”

The door faded, but Reef chose to cover his ears to muffle its Sergeant Abuse potshots at his masculinity. He caught the end of the rant, though: in the haunt control’s day, unlocked doors didn’t exist. People had to pulverize their shoulders into splinters to break through as much as a young girl’s heart. For sanity’s sake, Reef would assume the heart was a metaphor for something.

The desk robot electrified into abrupt wakefulness. It smiled and offered a handshake. “How may I be of service, maggot?” Great. Even the hired help talked down to him...and, considering its demeanor, spoke more than a little contradictory.

Reef approached the desk. “I need your most recently declassified evidence article. The number...uhm...it’s in case number one-eight-nine.”

“Article one-eight-nine dash four-four.” The robot smiled again, waved, and moved with fluidity. Reef had grown accustomed to whatever Power Plant built after his visits to several Magical Munitions rummage sales. This robot, built with Letchtech’s most advanced technology, carried itself like liquidity in humanoid form. It pivoted on a wheeled pedestal and watched the churning wall behind it fold in the middle.

The wait was unnecessary. After only seconds, a message washed over the large viewscreen: “Article one-eight-nine dash four-four missing.”

“Did you cook a circuit? Clang declassified the article. So”—Reef rapped his knuckles on the desk—“how about it?” He formulated a smile that looked as fake as a Halloween mask.

Motors whirred behind the back wall and a cubby door opened. Out popped an electronic shock-and-key box that rolled over its corner onto the desk. Reef’s heart skipped like a jazz beat on a floor tom. The box sounded eerily empty.

“Check for yourself, weasel.” The robot curtsied and indicated the box. Was this thing simultaneously insulting him and challenging him to a dance-off?

Reef launched himself at the box. The initial shock faded—if ever a buzz felt better than whiskey, having his insides zapped wasn’t it—and he cupped the smoke ribbons that waved from his fingertips. He tore open the box and...and...nothing.

“Civilian Clang declassified the article nine minutes and four seconds ago. It was last accessed four minutes and thirty-three seconds ago.” The robot bowed. It spoke as if it wanted to give the finger but wasn’t programmed to. Instead, a tickertape message blipped across its eyes: “You’re a filthy chum bucket. This message brought to you by Grillick’s Mayonnaise, taste we’re by law allowing you to enjoy.” The robot still nodded politely.

“What?” Reef grabbed the robot’s neck and gripped, tried to pry his thumbs into its throat, squeezed the throat tightly to strangle it, but it was a robot so...yeah...Reef felt like a complete idiot. “Who accessed this evidence?”

“Ex-Corporal George Lowensland.” The robot’s plastic lips shaped themselves into a friendly smile.

“Asinine? Asinine has control of the skeleton key?” Reef slapped the box away, which bounced off the cubby door and bonked the robot’s head. With a shock, the robot collapsed.

Reef gripped the lip on the desk and kicked, kicked, slammed his head against th—He collapsed.

* * *

“Behold...this thing.” Master Asinine held an object in front of a light panel. Glints of prismatic color waltzed across its curves. “Man, this field key is shiny.”

“Sir, you’re holding a water bottle,” Lieutenant IQ 23 said. He still stood in The Bad Guy Starship’s cockpit, but through the viewscreen connection Asinine had opened, he observed his leader’s exuberance with that you’re-holding-a-water-bottle crap of his.

“Right.” Asinine pocketed the water bottle, grabbed the skeleton key, and held it to the light. “I meant this thing. That other thing can suck this thing’s tailpipe.” He caressed the skeleton key’s handle. “This thing has a tailpipe, right?”

Outside, he stood in front of the force field he had erected around IP. Trees swayed in a wind that circulated around the campus. Tinged in a stale green glow, warm sunlight shone through the humming field, though the looming meteor eclipsed most of it. Birds in nearby nests chirped, and a couple even smacked into the force field’s dome. Heh. Funny. He loved when birds smacked into things.

“Incoming connection from entity Calorie Black Hole,” Asinine’s gabber said. Oh, great. What did Multipurpose want now? If this was another request for a net of horse shanks, Asinine would shank those horses up the wrong end. Wrong end for whom? Well, if Multipurpose still leaked toxic gases, any end was wrong for Asinine.

“Accept incoming connection.” Asinine wanted to strangle himself, his gabber launching its earpiece and mouthpiece. “Hey-heeeyyyy, garbage disposal. Before you ask, I don’t have any horses.”

“Forget my eating preferences, you crocking head case. You know what? This ‘plan’ of yours—I use that word as if it means something to you—is for crock. That force field is going to crocking kill us. When that meteor hits, it’ll mash us into toothpaste exactly like the rest of these casualties of your crocking thought process.”

“Nonsense, Multipurpose. Non...of...sense. I wasn’t about to turn these guys into toothpaste. Their bones couldn’t whiten my smile. Besides, this force field? I have the skeleton key.” He waved the key between two fingers in the sun-blocked slivers of light. How beautiful, how—Ow. It twinkled the scant sunlight into his eye. “I’m about to bring this force field down, so if you want to find out what animal we’re pulverizing for dinner tonight, be topside in two minutes. Once we’re through this field, I’ll put up another one and scram out of here. For your reference, topside is the side of you that doesn’t cast an enormous shadow.” A bird pooped on his shoulder. He wiped the white junk off. Nice try, but the statues were on the other side of the campus.

“I know which side is top. And the reason I crocking cast a shadow is because I’m a ninja. I slink around in shadow.”

“Rrrrigggghhhht. Back in reality, we can talk about all your sides until I puke, but that won’t change the fact that your ride leaves in two minutes.”

A field’s key was tuned to its field’s specific frequency, but this was a skeleton key. It worked on any field. All Asinine had to do was touch the key to the field and both would cancel each other from existence. He did that, but nothing happened. “So you might want to waddle on out unless you like public transportation. It doesn’t like you, by the way.” He poked the force field again, but still nothing.

“As long as that crocking key works. I refuse to move unnecessarily.”

“It’s a skeleton key. It’ll jingle-jangle its bones at the force field until it spooks away said field. Of course the key works.” He scraped the key along the force field. “Why won’t the key work?”

“Three-way call request from entity Schizophrenic,” his gabber said.

Schizophrenic encroached on the gabber connection. “What a surprise. Master Moonshine’s plan came up aces on the failure test.” Nice time for him to wake up.

“Hey, I’m twice the moonshine you’ll ever be!” Asinine slashed the key across the field. “Work, please, pretty please, key, work.”

Multipurpose’s breathing progressed from asthmatic tugs at his tired lungs to flash-frozen silence. “You’re crocking with me, aren’t you?”

“You know me. I don’t anything with anybody.” He stabbed the key against the force field, but the force field refused to dissipate. Maybe this was a vampire key. Vampire keys and skeleton keys looked similar. He checked it. No inch-long fangs. “This key isn’t doing anybody any good, and, by that, I mean we’ll all die.”

Multipurpose grumbled. “Oh, crock. I knew I should have stayed home.”

“Our pantry doesn’t have the fortitude for another of your sick days. And, man, this key is as useful as your diet.”

“That’s it. As long as my supreme ninja figure can negotiate those crocking stairs, I’m boarding our starship. If I’m going to die, I’ll die eating my favorite reptile.”

“You’re going to leave me to rot in this basement?” another voice said.

“Multipurpose, do you have a captive? You do! You were seriously holding out on me. Come on, man. We made a captive pact.” Master Asinine walloped a lamppost. Well, wallop wasn’t the right word. Whatever you said when you punched something that broke your knuckles, that was what he’d done. “I was totally shopping for one myself, but they ran out at the captive store. They also don’t have a captive store.”

“Well, my dinner plans went all to crock now, so if you want this guy, he’s all yours. I’m out of here. Do me a crocking favor and stargaze. Get under the falling ones. I’ll be on The Bad Guy Starship. Control, acknowledge. Cut crocking connection.”

“I’m out, too,” Schizophrenic said. “Control, acknowledge. Cut connection.”

Asinine attempted the key once more. He whipped it at the force field, but it plinked harmlessly onto yellowed grass. Now, how was he supposed to get out of this place? “You know, I always wondered what it felt like to doom yourself,” he said. “So-so, I guess.”

“Sir, might I suggest we use the panic button now?” Lieutenant IQ 23 asked.

“Lieutenant, this is no time to celebrate!”

Chapter Nineteen: Where Everybody Knows Your Name

“Makin’ your way somewheres—brraap—today.” Reef laughed at his own singin’ voice. Still the karaoke clincher. Yeah. He’d have chosen an Irish sea chantey but...crock...who knew what those St. Paddy’s Day beer-swillers were talkin’ about? “Man, I hate doin’ things what take everythin’ I got.”

He slurped up another chug o’ whiskey. Wiped his mouth on a sleeve. Burped an’ leaned back on his chair. He lost balance—whoa-oa—but regained it an’ so...an’ so...an’ sooooo...What was he talkin’ about? Oh, yeah. An’ so he put all the chair legs on th’ floor. All four...no, eight...no, four chair legs. His stomach sloshed. Uhhhh, man.

Reef had found—brap—a tiny room along the tangled hallways o’ the basement. The room contained only a desk, this one chair, an’ that freakin’ awesome plaster cast o’ the founder of IP, Gargola Gurglesmith. As if the name—burp—as if the name didn’t describe him ’nuff, Gurglesmith’s potbelly was...Reef didn’t know...uh...maybe 80 percent o’ his body weight. He hiccupped. Yeah. Wow. That man...that awesome titan...Reef loved him, man, ’cause he was...well, Reef didn’t know why. But he loved him.

Th’ door shushed away—ssh, keep it down—an’ Burnout stomped in. So he’d woken up. Reef smiled. “Hey, hey, Mark. Marko. Markus. Markaroon. Y’ like whisk—whoa, almost tipped over, heh.” He plunged forward an’ spilled over the desk when he offered Burnout his flask. “Whoa.” He swigged again. Most got in. Some got in his shirt. Didn’t matter. He hiccupped again an’ the computer inside the desktop beeped at him. Heh. Man, it was funny. Sounded like...like...like...his ex-wife nannerin’ at him. He picked himself up and gave it the stink eye. And who was it callin’ a irresponsible jerk? Why, Reef oughta...Wham. He flopped over the desktop again, squishin’ a gratuity brownie soufflé in his pocket. Ex-wife always naggin’ at him, takin’ the kids away so’s he never sees ’em again.

“What the piss are you doing?” Burnout asked. “Control, acknowledge. Lights to normal capacity.”

Th’ lights spat venom at Reef’s vision. He shielded his eyes but ended up mashin’ an arm over his nose. “Keep it down. You’re too loud. Gotta keep it down.” Hic. His flask slipped outta his hand and whiskey glugged out the spout. He saved it but splashed some when he righted it. Clumsy. “C’mere, man. I...I love you. Ya know that?”

“Are you serious? A meteor is about to flatten us, and you’re drinking this pollutant?” Burnout pounded the desktop an’ caused another blip. “People are relying on us. On you.”

Reef couldn’t drag himself off the computer. He looked up at Burnout. “Who the p—bbrraappp.” Tried again. “Who the piss cares? The...the...the force field ain’t comin’ down, the bomb blew up a support what-do-ya-call-it—hic—it’s my fault we’re in this mess, we’re trapped in this basement ’cause o’ that mob upstairs, we never found nothin’ ’bout that...uh...injunction thing, I ain’t never gon’ be th’ leader Legion was, an’ my stomach feels like laundry detergent.” He lifted the flask, but it clunked back down against the noisy desktop. “So here’s t’ us.” He fit the spout over his mouth—no, wait, his cheek, so he shifted it—and doused the fire in his brain. Most o’ the whiskey doused the desktop. He’d lick it up after he belched out a tabletop rendition o’ “Cleaned Up and Sobered Down.” As long as he could stand on the desk. He hooked a heel onto it and—he upended onto the floor. “Nice ceilin’.”

“Fine. Obliterate yourself in whiskey. Wallow in your vices when people need you most.” Burnout slammed a foot into the desk. “Me? I’m going to find a way through that thick lynch mob upstairs and back home to my brother.”

“Pff. No one’s gettin’ out tha’ force thingy. Legion coulda found a way, but you’re stuck with me.” He spiraled a finger at hisself. “An’ I ain’t no Legion.”

“Cram it. Now, as diplomatically as possible, I need to beat my way through that mob. If you want to stop living under Legion’s shadow, you know where to find me.” He lashed a foot at the doorframe and studied Reef with a disgusted flicker in his eye. “And lighten up on the freebies. You’re getting a gut.” He and his hazy twin stormed away, each step a thunderclap inside Reef’s brain.

A gut? Reef pinched his stomach. N’ way. Those...hic...those freebies were low gut, weren’t they? Mebbe not. Mebbe that was why he had to replace his belt.

He managed...after a few attemp’s...to sit up. Ugh. His stomach slopped around some more. People relied on him. He ’membered when his family had, before they left him. He checked the flask. He ’membered when the Good Guys had. Huh. People relyin’ on him. Needin’ him. What a time to fail ’em. Stupid flask. Stupid alcoho...alco...al...co...ho...co...Stupid whiskey.

But get through the force field? Good luck, sucka. Noooo way. Then again, that field was el cheapo. Maybe...mmmaaaaybbbeee...an EMP? Huh. Maybe.

Crock. He stuffed the flask into a pocket. People needed—ooh, stood too fast—hurrrrkkkk.

Chapter Twenty: If Something Made Sense for a Change

Franchise edged forward in baby steps. His trepidation was powerful enough to grab his neck and choke any courage out of him. The light panel hazarded farther into the room, closer to a pinprick light that blinked in tune with the foreboding beeps and the stupidity alarm wailing in his head. How often would he ignore that alarm before he stopped nearly losing a limb due to Power Plant’s antics with electric tools?

Oh, his crock. Oh—his—crock. The light panel revealed an assortment of gigantic automaton sentries on the other side of the room. Bipedal. F-feet as huge as pedestals. Legs and a-arms as thick as cannons. Backs as solid as spacecraft carriers. At least thirty feet tall. And the worst part? A huge box at their gargantuan feet showed a timer, its red digits spinning out of control toward an ambiguous zero hour. The beeping signified a countdown. And, moreover, the digits looked Virillian. Who knew what they meant?

Power Plant, of course, wanted to drive a robot. “Lesse what’s speeds I gets to?” He hurled himself at the canopy helmet of the middle sentry and howled a high-pitched squeal that bounced around the room and made anything siren-mouthed Car Alarm said sound like a lullaby. “We’s can use these bad boys to plays hopscotch on houses!”

Franchise felt an encroachment of icy dread. He slunk back a step. “I h-have an idea. We leave. No, wait. There’s more. Hang on. ” He raised a finger. “Okay, there it is. We leave and never come back. Seriously. This is heavy stuff. These things...they’re an army of b-battle droids. And they’re sitting in a secret lair in the center of our station. And that one over there? I mean, it might be the darkness, but...I think it puckered its lips at me.”

Like a gorilla beating its chest, Power Plant hammered his palms on the canopy of his robot piggyback ride.

Franchise retreated another step. “And that timer? Don’t know w-what it’s counting down, but my instinct says it doesn’t coincide with anyone’s birthday. Well, maybe Kamikaze’s. Could be a bomb. We should call Smith. We need a bomb expert.”

“I’s a bombs expert.”

“Not that kind of bomb expert.”

“Buttons back here. Mebbe one of ’em’s the up-up-’n’-outta-the-way button.” Power Plant went from hammering to trying to pry open the canopy. The canopy didn’t give. He raked his clawed hands across the back of that mammoth robot’s head. Then he poked something. Franchise wished he wouldn’t. Poke, poke, stop it, stop it, Franchise wished Power Plant wouldn’t try to activate its play program because he didn’t want to teach it pat-a-cake—

A dancing beam shot out of the sentry’s forehead from a projector below its brow. It dazzled the room like a floodlight. The blinking at the robots’ feet stopped. Huh? Franchise twisted around and checked the opposite wall where the door stood closed. Oh geez, oh geez, the robot was doing something, oh geez.

A viewscreen unfolded inches from the wall. That viewscreen showed another wall devoid of features aside from an empty chair identical to the one in this room. Franchise’s eyes drifted from the projection to Constructo Guy, who sat headless on that chair. The viewscreen showed a date: December 14, 9108.

Franchise forgot his fear when a man entered the movie of the projection. The room was so quiet that the man’s every step sounded amplified. On his breast pocket read CONSTRUCTO WORKER 49. Oh, and he had a mustache. Nice ’stache, Mr. Constructo. Bring that handlebar look back.

“Oh, cool,” Power Plant said from his high perch. “Constructo Guy gots a twins brudda. With a bald spot, too. Wish I hads a brudda.” Then who was Burnout? “Not so big on the bald spot.”

Sweat coated Constructo Guy’s forehead, cheeks, and nose. It dripped into his eyes that searched around frantically. He wiped his nose. “They d-don’t know I’m doing this. The rest of the workers. Oh, before I start, I’m forced to tell you about Splashvile’s new tar juice, or-r the carnivorous worms in my lower cortex will be released.

“Anyway, something t-terrible is happening. I have to warn IP or the Good Guys. I didn’t know I g-got into this, but...someone doesn’t exactly have the best intentions for this station. It’s...” Constructo Guy removed his construction helmet, dabbed his forehead with a sleeve, and replaced the helmet.

From off camera, a salvo of bangs barked as if someone were smashing down a door. Constructo Guy flinched off the chair, preparing to dart off, his eyes widened with fright...but he seated himself again. An uproar of noise—the door blew apart—voices: “Stop him! Don’t let him say a word!”—blam. Constructo Guy’s head snapped back, an arc of blood bursting from his forehead and one spitting out behind his skull. A light-bullet had excavated the left part of his head.

The footage ended. With the guy who initiated the recording dead, the robot saw no need to continue the snuff film. The room plunged back into secretive darkness. Franchise dropped to the floor, incapable of supporting himself. Holy gadzooks.

All Franchise could do was stare. He couldn’t even ingest what he’d seen. He could only stare. That was all. Holy crock, was that ever all.

Power Plant capered in a happy dance atop the robot’s canopy. “That was cool! Ya thinks that’s can wins Best Motions Picture, 8087? I’s voting for it.”

Chapter Twenty-One: Mob Lack-of-Mentality

Reef heaved himself up the basement stairs and met Burnout at the door. His thoughts still felt like a lake after an oil spill, and his head still pulsed, but he coordinated both feet. One foot after the other, right? Not as easy as it sounded when he took into account this was his third attempt to climb the stairs.

“Good of you to show up.” Burnout didn’t turn from the door that throbbed with each barraging fist and foot. “How’d you sober up?”

“Unhappy Hour sobriety pill. There’s a little mental suicide in all of us.” Reef noted Burnout’s questioning gawk and cleared his throat. “You know. Ttthhhheeerrrreee’sss a llllitttllle—Forget it. I took two of them. Downed them with a shot of whiskey. Hey, the fountains here pour out rust. What would you drink?”

“Before that contaminant? My own bile. Your own bile. Multipurpose’s own—”

“I get the idea.”

Burnout’s eyes narrowed. He stepped away from the deluged door. “So how can we get past that force field to launch the missiles?”

Reef rubbed the back of his neck. “The only way I know is by using an EMP. Clang said the Bad Guys’ force field is cheap, so it might not resist a good electrical sucker punch. Listen, the admin’s computer quarters are down the hallway. I’ll head there and see if I can break into the backdoor of IP’s system. Get the lowdown on this injunction violation and access the missile defenses. Meanwhile, find an EMP and take care of that force field.”

“Good plan. Just as good as one of Legion’s.” Burnout returned to the door and rubbed his palm over it. The door felt as if it grew hotter, but that might have been the fire clawing at its bottom. Some torch bearers needed parental supervision. “You ready?”

Reef sucked in a lungful of air. “Yeah. Ready. That was a lie.”

Burnout squeezed his fingers as if gripping a bat. His fingertips blazed into a fire that crawled up his forearms, his elbows, climbed to his shoulders, all the way showing his skeleton underneath. Reef had to step back. If alcohol were flammable enough, his next burp would land them in serious trouble.

“Control, acknowledge. Unlock closest door,” Burnout said.

The haunt control seemed all too pleased to shove them to their deaths. In its most celebratory voice, it said, “It’s about time you freak clowns grew a pair. Get into the action! Also, as per your contracts, I registered you for the organ-donor program.” The door faded to reveal a pitchfork-brandishing G at the head of the mob. Two effigy dolls flanked him: Reef and Burnout lookalikes. Lifelike, right down to the scowl in the Burnout doll’s creased forehead. The knife someone had plunged into the Reef doll’s neck didn’t sit well with Reef.

The hallway looked twilight dark except for the flames from the mob’s torches. No sun shone through the windows due to the meteor blocking the sun. The only reason Reef could see was the light panel off to the side that kept its distance. Everything smelled like burned wood.

“Stay back!” Burnout slapped a hand away. “That means get away from my wallet, too.” He whisked his arm in an arc to draw a line of searing flame in front of them. The flame flapped at the mob, whose frontrunners withdrew a step, all but one guy who decided the best use of his time was to light a stick of dynamite and prance down the hall, whistling. The locals could deal with him.

Burnout stomped forward, and the mob gasped back a step. Even G, though he grabbed the effigy Reef and yanked the knife from its neck. He bit a chunk out of its ear and spat the powder through the line of flame. Bloodthirsty or just teething?

Bits of papier-mâché flaked off G’s canines. “Stay back, man. You got us into this mess, and if the only way that fashion reject will let us go is if you’re dead, that’s how it’s got to—Hrrk.” He scraped his tongue on a sleeve. “Excuse me, man. Got a bit of mâché in there. Tastes like the cafeteria’s angel food cake.”

Reef’s hand flinched up. “That reminds me. Don’t eat the cafeteria’s angel food cake.” This mob was trying to kill him, but he offered free advice. He was a decent guy, really.

Burnout’s flames still lapped at the mob, but he was fixated on the meteor outside the window. As visible as a harvest moon in the false night sky, the meteor burned ever closer, no more than mere kilometers above the planet’s atmosphere. “This isn’t good.”

“Time to scram.” Reef broke away from Burnout and raced to the double doors at the end of the hall. “Burnout, let’s go.”

Burnout sidestepped, swelling the flame at his command. His red irises watched the mob that shrank back with each fiery roar, and he stepped across a puddle of dried pizza sauce where Reef had downed Amaranthia with a well-placed sponsorship perk. Where was that airheaded ninja with a penchant for smelly forty-moolahs-an-ounce vanilla perfume? Apparently she’d recovered from her fashion funk, discovered the wonders of dry cleaning, and hightailed back to The Bad Guy Starship.

The crowd crashed forward like backbreaking tidal waves frothing at Reef and Burnout. A pitchfork soared at them but cleared their heads by a hair’s breadth.

Reef and Burnout sprinted down the hall, ahead of the mob that tripped over each other and their torches, which Reef identified as Up in Awesomeness’s new kerosene-scented lynching products. Ooh, he needed to get in on those gratuities.

Burnout took flight and roasted the air with a trail of flame and settled to the ground at the door and spun a hand at Reef—hurry up, hurry up—and slapped a palm onto the door. “Control, acknowledge. Unlock closest door.”

“Heh. You maggots think escape is that easy?” the haunt control said. “You ain’t got clearance, and this door ain’t opening. You just entered the hard mode of life, and I’m only gonna make it harder. Now drop and give me twenty thousand.”

“What? Twenty thousand?” Reef reached the door and recoiled from the howling mob. “There’s no time for that. At most three...four if I’m in the zone.” He kicked the door and splashed Burnout with sweat. In seconds, he’d splash him with blood if those aggressors aimed their pitchforks properly.

But the door vanished. What? How—Pappas and Zelinski yanked them through.

“If mama taught me anything, it’s how to get moving and how to calculate the surface area of her extra-crunchy diode-and-microchip pie.” Pappas targeted his pistol at the crowd. “So move. And there’s spare pie around the corner.”

Reef wanted to thank them, but Burnout hurried him forward. “Let’s go. Now. You get to the computer quarters. I’ll get to the EMP. Gabber me when you arrive. And no more whiskey. Do you understand?” He drilled his eyes at Reef.

“Yeah. No problem.” Reef broke away from Burnout’s projectile stare. But he turned back. “And, Burnout, remember you’re talking to a superior officer. Even if I don’t act like it sometimes.”

Burnout nodded. “Control, acknowledge. Display route to EMP device.” He blasted down the hallway over a yellow line that sped off and snapped left at a turn.

“You think you’re good enough for even an RMP? Waddle on back to fat camp, weasel,” the haunt control said. What was odd wasn’t its audacity but its willingness to direct Burnout in the direction of any weapon he asked for. Reef wanted to test it out on a fusion bomb, but he had no time to play with trillions of lives right now.

Reef scampered down the hall—crashed through a door marked “Computers and Mad Funk Quarters”—huge windows in the back—muggy air—green walls—aisles of computers—haunt control listener nestled into the ceiling. Okay, the secret-agent-plans computer, secret-agent-plans computer. Okay, okay. C’mon. Offense, personnel and equipment, station settings...spider-monkey requisition? No, he didn’t want to touch that.

Okay, one glance wouldn’t hurt—oh, yes, it hurt. Yes, it most definitely hurt. He shielded his head with his arms and wished to forget every last detail. Oh, crock, did it ever hurt.

Reef skidded to a halt at the computer. Here. Secret agent plans. They’d taken away the computer’s name, but at least they’d given it a number.

Reef didn’t know its voice controls—opened a holographic keyboard—switched it off Virillian since all the keys resembled angry gorilla scowls—English, yes!—tapped the screen on the Galactic Injunction Violations directory. Too obvious for a high-profile war crime. The directory opened up. Good. Nobody had thought an interloper would sneak in here. But...droves and droves of information, files listing data three or four screens long. He choked on the welling saliva of alarm that prickled his throat—he’d never find anything in here!

Calm down. Calm down. He had to save this data. On what, though? Reef couldn’t transmit it to Station One. The computers were under security too high to allow him to transmit their data. Uhm...he padded his pockets. Uh...uh...uh...wait. He tore open a pocket and scrounged around inside for...yes! His gratuity memory chip, Memory Mega Massacre’s new data-death-by-the-dozen exbibyte chip. He jabbed the dark-gray square into the slot on the side of the computer and copy-saved the data onto it and shut the computer off and left no evidence of his presence. Excellent. The chip brightened from gray to amber, showing how much its memory had filled.

Through a window, he saw the sunlight dim even more. Longer shadows encroached on the parking lot. The meteor loomed closer.

A gabber call beeped at him. Burnout. Reef tapped his earbud, and the mouthpiece slashed across his field of vision. The earpiece rushed around his skull to his other ear. “Burnout, you’re at the EMP?”

“I’m here. The haunt control fed me some line about ordering me free cereal from Flesh-Eating Tapewormery if I wanted to inflict some real damage, but I declined. Seven or eight times. Persistent. Are you set?”

“Yes, I’m...” He suspended his sentence as if his words hung in his head but didn’t transmit to voice. The EMP would erase everything here. The data on these computers, the answer to the injunction violation, why IP wanted to rip open wounds caused by the Perseus War Hyperability Incident. He looked at the memory chip. All erased.

But people relied on him. He wouldn’t fail them. He glanced at the window, at the meteor casting as big a shadow as Legion’s. “Do it.”

The computers buzzed, sundered the air with high-tech screeches of death. Monitors blanked with fuzzy static, then darkness. Viewscreen upon viewscreen shrank from existence. Even the door at the end of the computer quarters foamed into individual molecules that jiggled and faded.

And the memory chip had returned to its gray shade.

Computers lit with renewed life. The backups already revived them. The data—including any information about the injunction violation and that spider-monkey thing—wouldn’t be up for days. But the command set would already work. And the force field’s awful green tint had disappeared. Time to act.

“Control, acknowledge. Access off-planet missile control. Destroy closest meteor.”

“It makes my skin program crawl to take orders from you, you gutter snake. And if you’re searching for inner peace, look no further than Whack-to-Sleep Peen Hammers. Available at your local demented hardware store.” Ahh. The acerbic-voiced haunt control mod, already back in action. Some things never changed. And some things never stopped advertising products on the far side of public safety.

Reef crammed himself up to the window and saw something light the darkened sky. Two tactical missiles sped closer, their exhaust spelling out Choke Cola’s promise to consumers: “We vow to donate half the purchase price of each missile toward peacekeeping operations in several war-torn societies. Happy bargain hunting, shoppers.” The missile wrote this in blue and white swirls that leaked from the twin two-liter missile cases. Reef didn’t care, because he was a root beer man. Minus the root.

One missile sputtered...sparked...jostled. What? Why? Was it malfunctioning? Reef slammed his palm on the window, over a foggy cloud of red and yellow. Someone had thrown a gratuity hamburger with all its gratuity fixin’s against the window.

The sputtering missile nicked the functional one and both clapped apart in divergent paths. One missile jackknifed the meteor, which burst apart...but left a large chunk intact. No! Reef watched the bad missile—bad missile, bad, bad missile, no cookie—peel apart to only a crappy internal unit that shed wires, diodes, circuit boards, and chemicals out its rear. Reef vowed never to buy a Choke Cola product. Not even Sputter with its burst of lime.

The whir of the resurrected l-door breached the room. Burnout rushed in and bounded to the window. “What happened? Are we safe yet? What’s with the skywriting?”

“No.” Reef collapsed back. “The missile malfunctioned. Probably too much caffeine-free merchandise.”

“What?” Burnout slammed the window with his palms. “It malfunctioned? A missile malfunctioned? A peacekeeping missile malfunctioned? Why are we using peacekeeping missiles?”

“The same reason we buy lack-of-insurance insurance. I...don’t know.” Reef sighed. “I don’t care anymore.” He spilled against the outline of an l-chair. It assembled underneath him, including the complementary massage pad he languidly grabbed and tossed aside. He had a rule about company freebies: don’t touch the backside. Some parts were off limits.

“You’re giving up?” Burnout clomped toward him. “Just like that?”

Reef buried his face in his hands. “Mark, what else can we do?”

Burnout steeled himself, kicked aside a trash ionizer, kicked a desk. “I told you I’ll find a way back to my brother. And I meant it.”

* * *

The force field had vaporized moments ago. Asinine watched a few errant electrical currents crackle away, but the force field was kaput. Good. No way would Asinine stick around for that meteor to punch him in the gut and everywhere else, too. Time to round up the gang, get on that starship, and banzai out of this place.

His gabber connection with IQ 23 was still open. “Lieutenant, I need a pick-up. This meteor suddenly doesn’t sound like a party down here. To think I threw together my Hot Dog, Here Comes a Killer Meteor and Now You’re Dead brownie pie for this. Cinnamon swirls and everything! I know, right?”

* * *

Burnout tapped his gabber. Its earpiece and mouthpiece activated and slithered around his head. He had no time to race toward the Flagstar, but he could contact it. “Control, acknowledge. Contact starship F-Stratotanker. Yeah, I know the engine floods. Just do it.”

“Seeking connection, seek—Connection attained.” A click: connection open.

Reef stood and marched to Burnout. “Mark, Flagstars don’t have much weaponry. And, unless you plan to fly at that meteor at forty thousand miles an hour—I left my gratuity pills for that at home—we’ve got no escape. Wait, did you get those pills, too?”

Burnout covered his mouthpiece. “You remember when you ordered me to put Scapegoat in the detainment deck?”

“Yeah, I remember. So wh—Ohhhh. Let me guess.”

“Yup. And he programmed your radio presets to easy-listening stations.”

Reef crossed his arms. “As long as he didn’t readjust my chair. I set it just right.”

“Scapegoat?” Burnout began pacing. “Come on, buddy, come on!”

“Master, missed you did I,” Scapegoat’s voice greased over the connection.

“Oh, thank everything.” Burnout loosened so much he almost fell to his knees. He brought a knuckle to his mouth. “Yeah, yeah, I missed you, too, buddy. But...hey, you know that pilot’s computer Reef wanted you to never even breathe on? Yeah. Plot a course to the meteor that’s raging at you from about six hundred miles above your head. And, do me a favor.” He stabbed a sidelong glance at Reef. “Cough on the computer. Lick it if the moment hits you.

“And, once you plot that course, get out of that starship.”

Scapegoat responded with something. Burnout might have grasped a few words, maybe not. It didn’t matter at this point, since one of the words he said was “understand.” Or maybe Scapegoat was standing under something. What mattered most was him getting that starship airborne and forgetting the wall advertisement of Crock Transport’s new line of starships.

Beeps sang in the gabber: Scapegoat plucked out a few commands over the pilot’s computer. The starship roared upward, angled its nose as if examining the meteor, charged forward. “Plotted course did I, master, yes yes. Four until seconds fifty impact.”

“Never mind those numbers that may or may not be accurate. Most important right now, buddy—listen carefully—I need you to hurry to the side of the starship. Near the wing assembly, you’ll find an escape pod. Recently installed thanks to our new contracts. As if an escape pod doesn’t come standard. Anyway, get into the pod, strap yourself into a safety seat, and hit the red plunger on the sidearm. Got it?”

“Back strap in myself—”

“Just this once, you don’t have to befuddle a sentence. And skip the master bit, too. Buddy? Scapegoat, are you listening?”

“Master, yes yes, listening I buddy am. Pod step step escape get to. Inside str—”

In the sky, a spark of flame—exploded into a flash the size of the computer quarters. The explosion cleaved the starship into metal plates and plastic shielding in an eruption of shrapnel that tore everything within its kilometer-radial grasp. A misshapen plank of metal that once was a wing flap careened against the window and popped a crack across the pane that the haunt control quickly sealed with an l-tech sizzle. The meteor itself chunked apart into rocky crumbs, now harmless space debris.

“No no no no no no no no, Scapegoat, NO!” Burnout thrust his arms forward—flames gushed from his fingertips—vaporized the window—he dived out—sped across the parking lot on a wave of heated air—dodged a downpour of shrapnel, a windshield, a nose cone, an assembly of seats that crunched through a tree on a lot median.

And a single escape pod popped out behind the foreground chaos of fire and auto parts. Its negative momentum generators warbled and gently...softly...lowered the pod onto the asphalt of the parking lot. And a pigeon. Nailed that thing like a hammer. Good. Burnout hated their coy yet blank stares.

Burnout’s feet hit the ground—skidded out from a loss of control over speed. He spilled onto the escape pod—grabbed the door’s latch. “Control, acknowledge. Unlock latch.”

“Latch unlocked. Next time, try Ginger Barney Mechanic’s Grease and Tonic for that great industrial-lubed taste—”

“Shut up, control.”

“Shutting up would be easier with the help of Letchtech’s new Shut Up Professional Edition for the inflated price of an arm and a leg. Act this week, and we’ll forego the leg.” Whatever. A haunt control that didn’t call him a rat, a turd, or a festering weasel of ineptitude was a welcomed change even if it pushed useless software patches for twice the retail cost: an arm from the elbow down.

Burnout yanked the latch—“This won’t open, no good, no good, be alive in there”—yanked again. The latch clicked and released, door popped ajar, hissed with depressurized air, Burnout tore it open, swung it aside, launched himself in, Scapegoat sat at the back, Burnout unlatched the safety seat’s harness, it clicked off and zipped into the seat and he jabbed the inertia button and caught Scapegoat who spilled forward and Scapegoat opened his eyes...

...and Burnout choked with relief. He practically sobbed. Scapegoat smiled. “I good did, master, yes yes,” he said. Or maybe that was a question.

Burnout breathed for the first time in at least forty-five seconds. He gulped in delicious oxygen. “You did fine.”

Reef clambered into the escape pod—“Is he okay? He’s okay? Phew. He’s okay”—and reached a vinyl-padded side bench. He traced his fingers along its surface and examined the well-lit area. With a twinkling smile, he noted a viewscreen on one side. “Hey, nice freebie. I have got to get me one of these for the office next time your brother cleans.”

He smiled at Scapegoat. “Scapegoat, nice job. You saved hundreds of thousands of lives.” He put a hand on Scapegoat’s shoulder, but he removed it and wiped the encrusted snot onto the pod’s wall.

Scapegoat jolted to life. “Lives of saved thousands of hundreds did I, yes yes.”

“Either way you multiply it.” Reef looked at Burnout. “Now, if he can block a meteor, you think we could hook him up to a leash to sniff out Pincushion?”

Chapter Twenty-Two: Transfer of Ownership

Back at Station One. Back in Legion’s office. Reef entered and dropped onto Legion’s mottled couch, which didn’t sit against the wall anymore but now lay crooked in a corner. It almost blocked the door. What was strange was that Power Plant and Franchise had overturned half the couch so one half lay upside down. Reef would have to ask how they’d managed that since this thing wasn’t a sectional. And, ugh, maybe Power Plant was onto something because, crock, could he ever smell bitter pork wafting from the vent now.

After taking two hours to locate and free Pincushion, then enduring the long ride home in a loaner starship, Reef found leaving the couch difficult. But he managed. He rolled off—uncomfortable what with his chest resting on exposed springs—and trudged toward the desk. Huh. That nameplate on the storage cabinet. It still bore Legion’s name across its computerized surface. Reef scratched his head. He had helped deflect that meteor today, had led the charge to foil the Bad Guys’ plans...he’d even exhausted most of his gratuity supply. So maybe Burnout was right. Reef deserved his name somewhere in this office. Somewhere. Legion could reprogram the nameplate later.

Maybe Reef should stop living under Legion’s shadow. He shrugged. Maybe it was time he forged his own shadow. He pressed a button on the nameplate’s side and rubbed his thumbprint over the sensor. The nameplate erased Legion’s name and replaced it with—oh, piss—Devon Holbrek. Nobody at IP had changed his name in the database. He searched the office for witnesses, stuffing the nameplate into a cabinet drawer. He couldn’t reveal that name. Not yet.

He slammed shut the drawer...and his flask clanked against a pocket zipper. He fished out the flask and examined it in the light, sneered at this...this odious object. It was still half full. This stuff almost killed everybody today, made Reef lose sight of his responsibility.

Pissing contaminant. It had owned him for far too long. He launched the flask, and it cracked against a wall and banked into the trash ionizer. Good riddance.

“Since you’ve thrown away your only source of happiness,” the haunt control said, “why not pick up Counterfeit Contentment’s Happy Juice? Now with a hint of hard lemonade and morphine.”

“Control, acknowledge. Erase all alcohol-related ads. And if you play an ad about erasing ads, I’ll set you up on another blind date with a kitchen appliance.” Reef glared at the speaker and considered grabbing the ionizer to hammer that speaker into its component parts. He marched to the office door. He needed sleep and, for once, sleep that wasn’t alcohol induced. Dry days: one and counting.

“Oh, and control acknowledge. Make yourself useful, and fix my couch.”

Chapter Twenty-Three: Fruition

His meteor plan had failed. No matter, however. He had other plans. And his upcoming conquest would taste all the more delectable.

Mechanism wore his improved armor. From his stage, his...political dais...he overlooked his babbling assemblage of Numbers below, his expendable enforcers. Yes. Oh, heh heh, yes. Time drew nigh. His Numbers, with their contradictory naming system but sans their cumbersome cloaks, milled around each other, all 482 of them that meant no more to Mechanism than a means to an end. What drudges of society. They had yet to realize their coded names were letters, not numbers. Spreadsheet error? Idiocy error was more like it.

Luzimoss, Mechanism’s unwilling Number A, stood beside him, shackled in hyperstasis cuffs in case backstabbing crossed his hyperability-impeded thoughts. He kept his distance with a sneer and tensed arms. Mechanism’s subservient little robot, Appliance, buzzed on his right, deflecting light into his eyes. He wished he had spray-painted that floating canned-snake drone a muddy purple. Laser blasts to the retinas were less infuriating.

“My subordinates.” Mechanism’s voice spread across this auditorium.

The Numbers stopped lollygagging, and their babbling diminished to shushes, then silence. They stared up at Mechanism with the blank stares of cattle. They were barely smarter than cattle. Especially that Number CS. He had bought that watch almost three months ago, and its backlight still fascinated him. Whatever kept simple minds entertained. Maybe someone should purchase him a paddleball.

Mechanism licked his lips. He tasted victory. It tasted like honey. Mind you, that dreadful honey marmalade Master Asinine spread on anything from omelets to wet sand, but it was honey nonetheless. “I, your Lord Alpha, have foretold you of the transformation of this galaxy, and that moment has come. Enslavement is at hand. By this time tomorrow, we will effect the destruction of the Bad Guys and that accursed Master Asinine. We will cleanse this galaxy of all inferiors.” Mechanism had talked the extremist Numbers into changing their goal of saving the galaxy by way of destruction to saving it by way of cleansing. Either way, he would cure the galaxy of what the Numbers reviled. Most of the populace would soon die. And the Numbers were so easy to direct.

A roar of cheers, a salute of air-clouting fists, and a party of high fives clamored from the audience. Murderous celebration conquered the standing-room-only crowd. Mechanism stepped back to brace himself as if the energized fools would rush the dais and stampede him. He had witnessed their mayhem at the diner last week when the waitress announced the specials, so he would not put it past them.

The celebration died. Someone raised a hand. Number EE said, “Excuse me, uh, Lord Alpha, sir. You mentioned we’d effect the destruction...uh...whatever-whatever-whatever. You use too many words. Something about destruction tomorrow, anyway. But tomorrow won’t work. Our matching cufflinks won’t arrive for another seven to nine business days.”

Mechanism grumbled. What folly. “Fine. Even though our suits use no cufflinks, we will effect the destruction of the Bad Guys, that accursed Master Asinine, et cetera, et cetera, all of that in seven to nine business days. Perhaps ten, allowing for delivery to clear customs.” High fashion was important in galactic conquest.

“Works for me,” Number EE said. Mutters of agreement accompanied.

“Good.” The smile that had faded smeared across Mechanism’s lips once again. He surveyed the Numbers, now clad in their new suits of armor, adaptations of Mechanism’s old armor. Old, yet devastating. “Oh, yes, excellent. Prepare to fulfill the vision of the great mentor, Frederick Snogsbottom. Prepare to wrest control of this galaxy for our own, my Mechaknights.”

Their cheers thrust forth once again. Ten days until Mechannihilation.

THE END

NEXT BOOK:

More blatant disregard for the English language! Your funny bone will fracture!

About That Guy Whose Book You Read Once

Liam Gibbs knew he was destined to write at age four, when he authored a breathtaking account of a cow who ate grass. The bovine saga failed to catch the public’s eye but earned the budding author parental acclaim. Since those early times, he’s gone on to write the novella Not So Superpowered and humorous articles for various magazines.

A twenty-year veteran of the brutal world of hand-to-hand comic book fandom, Gibbs cut his teenage teeth on titles such as Spider-Man, X-Men, New Warriors, and other Marvel comics.

Gibbs graduated college with a degree in professional writing, which included classes on fiction writing and story structure. He lives on the balmy shores of Ottawa, Canada, where he relaxes by watching staggeringly awful horror and science fiction movies. A health and fitness nut, he shoots lasers from his eyes, uses the word exclusive incorrectly, and once wrestled an exclusive brontosaurus. True story.

That one time I was deep in thought and—Hey, is that ketchup on the ceiling?

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Table of Contents

- The Story So Far...

- Available on the Author’s Super-Awesome Site

- Other Stuff the Author Spewed Out

- Your Favorite Table of Contents

- Book 11: Oh, Crock, Here Comes a Meteor!

- Appendices

- Chapter One: Oh, Crock, Here It Comes!

- Chapter Two: Sell Out with a Capital Currency Sign

- Chapter Three: Getting Out of the House

- Chapter Four: But a C Plus in Lifestyles

- Chapter Five: Reeling, Writhing, and Arithmetic

- Chapter Six: Don’t Ask about Rule Number Twelve

- Chapter Seven: Clipped
- Chapter Eight: Loathe at First Sight
- Chapter Nine: If Only You Can Find It
- Chapter Ten: Organize and Rise
- Chapter Eleven: Like a Fox
- Chapter Twelve: Your New Good-Morning Alarm
- Chapter Thirteen: A Grin without a Cat
- Chapter Fourteen: Smarter than a Shop Vac

- Chapter Fifteen: Houston, We Have More Problems than We Can Count (Three)

- Chapter Sixteen: Off with His Head

- Chapter Seventeen: Assembly Line...Assembled

- Chapter Eighteen: From Zero to Ultra Crocked in Ten Seconds

- Chapter Nineteen: Where Everybody Knows Your Name

- Chapter Twenty: If Something Made Sense for a Change

- Chapter Twenty-One: Mob Lack-of-Mentality
- Chapter Twenty-Two: Transfer of Ownership
- Chapter Twenty-Three: Fruition
- About That Guy Whose Book You Read Once