In a Galaxy Far, Far AwRy

Book 23: Marching Orders

Liam Gibbs

IN A GALAXY FAR, FAR AWRY book 23: MARCHING ORDERS

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: 978-1777638665

First printing: April 2021

{ PLOT DEVICE PUBLISHING }

Available on the Author’s Super-Awesome Site

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

Book 1: Serial Fiction Sideshow

Book 2: Home Sweet Home Invasion

Book 3: Technophobia

Book 4: Armageddon Trigger Finger

Book 5: The Genetic Equation

Book 6: Power Tool

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: To Wake the Deactivated

Book 0: The Story So Far

Please visit the In a Galaxy Far, Far AwRy site for all these free e-books and 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 23: Marching Orders

Chapter One: H-Hour

Chapter Two: Negotiation Breakdown

Chapter Three: And Speaking of Incarcerations

Chapter Four: Excuses, Excuses

Chapter Five: You’re Hired

Chapter Six: Took Them Long Enough

Chapter Seven: Just Say “Here”

Chapter Eight: Do They Come in Self-Respect Flavor?

Chapter Nine: A Well-Soiled Machine

Chapter Ten: Firing Mechanism

Chapter Eleven: The Doorbell’s on the Fritz Again

Chapter Twelve: Also Is Your Refrigerator Running?

Chapter Thirteen: All-Nighter in the Bottom Floor of Banality

Chapter Fourteen: Monkey See, Monkey Doo-Doo

Chapter Fifteen: Jailhouse Rocked

Chapter Sixteen: Let’s Call This a Truce, Shall We?

Chapter Seventeen: Nice Fit for the Team

Chapter Eighteen: Welcome to the Badder Guys

Chapter Nineteen: ...And Your Enemies Closer

Chapter Twenty: Please Hold

Chapter Twenty-One: Well, This Can’t Be Good

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: H-Hour

April 4, 9110. 12:14 p.m. (Galactic Standard Time).

“Incoming transmission,” blurted Lieutenant Colonel Freuth’s gabber on his nightstand five feet from his ear. Stupid communication device. The only thing the gabber communicated was its inability to allow Freuth four minutes of solid sleep. That was the neighbor’s job.

He choked on his half wakefulness. Weird that night fell at lunchtime in this hemisphere of Gaia. And what a humid night it was. The walls in his room already danced with swirls and fireworks displays to help his mind surface from sleep. He wiped his sleeve across the slimy film on his lips. He blinked crumbs from his eyes and the stardust of his last dream from his memory. He was no longer chased by slow-motion squirrels while his teeth fell out. That dream dispersed like glitter blown from a fan. Good. Those squirrels looked rabid.

His room threw open its arms to daytime mode, complete with wakeup music. The walls danced to life with sunshine and advertisements for coffee. His dresser began glowing. His uniform rack rolled out of the closet. A viewscreen slid from out of nowhere and detailed his flight route into base. His stove started sizzling his bacon and frying his pancakes. Heart-shaped ones, because he loved the day. Or at least his sponsors told him to.

Still, one thing didn’t fall in line with the reverie. Freaking lights. Always a software error somewhere in his room. Last time he’d woken up, the room had launched him into traffic. Never let your mother-in-law install your devices. “Light panel, acknowledge. Lights to thirty percent.” His favorite percentage.

So humid today, he felt it seep through his bedsheets. His gabber blurted its status message again. Fine, he’d pick it up. What was so important? He threw off his sheets, grabbed the gabber, fitted it into his ear, and poked the bud. “Lt. Col. Freuth using Incommunicado’s even newer, even less bug-ridden Voice Box Control Nine gabber software, on sale today for the low price of eight hundred ninety-nine moolahs or one mountain range. I think.” His wall displayed a gigantic thumbs-up. “My load-bearing sources say I’m right.” He patted himself on the head. He was a good boy today.

“Hello, Lieutenant Colonel.”

Freuth’s heart bolted him. This call.

“Is your source your room wall?” the voice on the other end said.

“Ehhhh”—Freuth checked the wall now displaying two hands waving in denial—“no.” Another thumbs-up. Looked as if his room wouldn’t launch him into traffic today. Yay for him. And yay for the soccer mom whose transport he would have collided with.

“Lieutenant Colonel, I’m calling you on top-secret important trouble matters, brought to you by our important-trouble-matters sponsor, the El Fuego Water Company, for any of your imbibing and next-morning-guilt needs. Are we on a secure talking signal?”

New sponsor? That was why Freuth had gotten that package. He hurried to his cabinet and grabbed El Fuego. Had to juice up. “Gabber, acknowledge. Secure connection.”

His gabber played a jingle. “Connection secure, unlike your confidence.”

“Signal is secure now.” Freuth downed a cinnamon-spicy swig of El Fuego because the Sponsors That Be kept track. He’d fallen behind on his sponsorship quota. His wrist sponsometer ticked up a point. Yes. He leaned back for another swig, this one so copious he had to come up for air. This should be worth two. His vision took a second longer to resolve, contrails following him from vertical to horizontal.

“Goooooooood.” A sinister chuckle chuckled through chucklingly...if a wood chuck could chuck wood. “Goooood.” Another sinister moment ticked by, as if the caller were aware of the pause. “We are a go on both mission squad operations.”

Freuth choked through his next abundant swallow. “Both?” he managed through the burning taste.

“You are aware we have located our quarry, Lieutenant Colonel. Mobilize your soldier men, soldier woman, and solder whatever-the-goat-one-is. Our plant has reported our target is now in position. Event happenings are coinciding. So Operations Injunction Junction and Replacement Placement are go.”

Freuth gasped. The rhyming operations. Both. And coinciding? He wasn’t ready for them to drop their rhymes at the same time. Quick. Another swig. Okay, now he was ready. No. Another swig. Okay, now he was re—Another. Wow, this stuff went down—cough, cough, wince—smooth—cough.

The caller’s creepy chortle, like a foreshock, grumbled through the gabber again. “Meet me at Intergalactic Protection’s mission central at thirteen hundred time hours to launch both squad operations. They will be simultaneous and swift.” A fist smacked a palm.

“Sir, this is...I don’t feel good. I know the target—”

“Freuth.” The voice on the other end scraped out the name, as if he incanted a contemptuous curse under the breath. “Remember. Your brother needs you. Therefore you do feel good.”

Freuth choked on the cinnamon sizzling through him. “Okay, I do feel good.”

His tongue tingled. He grabbed another swig. The sponsors couldn’t complain about his underusage this time, not like Crematorium Memoriam. He’d never heard the end of that one: “All the other lieutenant colonels got cremated, so why couldn’t you?”

He swung his legs over his bed’s edge. No, wait. He stumbled backward onto his swirl of sheets. He checked his bottle. Half gone. Wow, this El Fuego.

“Yeeeeessss. The aswang was located shortly ago. And Legion...oh, that sponsorship dissenter won’t know what hit him. We mobilize immediately.” The licking of lips tickled through the gabber. “Field Marshal Breeng, out.” The gabber disconnected the transmission with a click like a snap that bounced down empty halls.

Thirteen hundred hours. Freuth had to move. He launched out of bed—spilled onto his floor. So much sponsorship misting his system. The door was all the way across the room. A whole twenty steps away. And his head reeled.

He and El Fuego needed a minute.

Chapter Two: Negotiation Breakdown

Trioxidillian leader of the Good Guys, Lt. Col. Matross Legion, sat among the three dusty holding cells in Station One’s detainment area. Though the past few months saw Station One, Good Guy headquarters, become more of a strip mall than a military base, at least it still had a cellblock...which housed an after-school program on alternating Saturdays. Okay, so exactly like a strip mall.

Their two detainees: bottom-level Bad Guys, a criminal organization run by the loathsome George Lowensland, or Master Asinine to the public. They’d operated here under the illusion that Legion believed them to be Good Guy recruits. Detritus and Wasted—yup, someone chose the media name Wasted—had come here two months ago.

First there was the smarter of the two, Detritus, someone who had probably never before been the smarter of any two. He had switched out of his red ensemble, the usual outfit for the generics, what Lowensland called the bottom-rung rank and file of the Bad Guys. Now he wore an orange top with yellow pants and suspenders. His headwear was a pair of goggles that he’d pulled up to his forehead. His profile indicated he possessed the special ability, a hyperability, to blow himself up, though he’d never tried. Big deal. With TNT, field agent Power Plant could blow himself up, and he’d tried dozens of times.

If a hyperperson who’d never used his hypothetical hyperability wasn’t enough, next up was his partner, Wasted. Wasted’s mother drank heavily while pregnant. So his hypergland, that organ that controlled a person’s hyperability, developed the knack for converting oxygen into a way to get sloshed. Yes, Wasted was a twenty-four/seven public nuisance that urinated on street signs. The opposite was true: when he drank alcohol, his thinking cleared. Legion didn’t know what mirror universe coughed him up and, furthermore, wasn’t adding it to his vacation itinerary. Legion couldn’t make this up. Wasted’s extravagant burp made him wish he could. Nice airtime.

Whah. He waved that ripping burp away. Oxygen never smelled this antiseptic.

Anyway, Legion had let these two bumble around Station One under tight scrutiny. Maybe they’d spill the beans on their plan here. They hadn’t, and in fact, Janice couldn’t account for their whereabouts almost 90 percent of their waking hours. Janice was Station One’s haunt control, that software that took verbal commands and made them physical action. Haunt controls were named after their knack for making locations seem haunted. Janice should have been able to account for their whereabouts.

Legion sat across a refectory table, something that had absorbed the dust of the cellblock, from the two Bad Guys, who had also absorbed the dust of the cellblock. Behind him, Good Guy field leader Pincushion shuffled his weight against a stone wall that had—you guessed it—also absorbed the dust of the cellblock. Pincushion possessed the hypermutation of bony extensions protruding from his skin in small spikes. He provided backup in case these two tried anything. With the combined smarts of a toilet bowl and its lid, these two would eat sewing needles if Legion suggested.

The dingy cellblock was designed as a dungeon to lower prisoner morale. Legion wasn’t sure the layers of dust were standard, though. Probably something Janice had cleaned until her destruction. Yes, she had run amok after learning her administrator and infatuation, Good Guy computer administrator Ace Spandex, wasn’t returning home fast enough. As well as venting all the station’s farts into Legion’s living quarters, she’d developed a bug and gone homicidal, prompting Legion to demolish her hardware and write a scathing review to her programmers. Intergalactic Protection, the Good Guys’ parent military organization, had since remounted the hardware but hadn’t reinstalled the haunt control software. Nobody but Ace knew how, and he’d been arrested.

Right now the three cells were full of prisoners: Detritus sat at the refectory table with Legion, Wasted writhed on the stony floor from another sip of oxygen, and the obese-beyond-credibility Multipurpose, a Bad Guy prisoner from a mission at a theme park, snoozed in the third cell, making his cot pray for death or, at least, an antigravity device. Each of Multipurpose’s movements was a creak of pain. Legion considered waking him for interrogation, but last time he approached, Multipurpose sleep-talked about moon pies slathered in pork gravy and something called embolism soup. So instead, Legion pasted a Beware of Dog sign near his cell. That was the closest guess at a warning he could offer.

Legion’s green fingers were intertwined, but he separated them when he said, “Look, we know you two are undercover Bad Guy generics. Your jig is up.”

“Heh. Generics. Nah.” Detritus leaned back in his hover chair. It was a stool. He almost flopped out but recovered in time. Too bad. All the comedy on broadcast was just footage of animals falling off furniture. “We ain’t—” He waited for Wasted to roll out a burp as loud as any public-address announcement. “We ain’t generics, dude. We’re promotioned.” He winked. “Self-promotioned.” As if that made things impressive. He thumbed his nose, looked this way, that way, and leaned in. Legion leaned away. “Master Asinine, he ain’t recognize talent. So we promotioned ourselves.”

Legion tapped the activation icon on the paper-thin datasheet computer on the table. It hardened and changed color from red to white. “A quick check on the Citizen Watch database says you, Detritus, are Harry Tuskell. And your friend, Wasted, is Tyross Hearthberg. You’re two distantly related idiots with some commonly related idiot grand-grand-grand-somebody. In the Bad Guys, you serve as generics. But your story—posing as hyperpeople looking for Good Guy recruitment—blew wide open immediately. The first person you bumped into when you arrived was Sixth Sense. He’s the Good Guy telepath.

“Anyway, there’s nothing on Citizen Watch telling us you were promotioned”—Legion wanted to keep that word alive—“from generics to named agents.” He checked Wasted. Though he wasn’t certain of this, Wasted was drowning in a puddle of his own drool. “Why Lowensland sent you two here under cover, I have no clue.” He glanced up at Detritus from the information he referenced. “Course, I have no clue what prompts a lot of his ideas. Or party themes, frankly.”

“Asinine doesn’t even know we’re here.” Detritus wiggled his eyebrows and leaned against the stool’s nonexistent back again. He kicked his legs around to recover his balance. “We took it upon ourselves to come on over, cause some trouble, raise a ruckus. Can I get a sandwich, by the way? Haven’t eaten all the way since three o’clock.”

“It’s four right now.”

“Still could go for a sandwich. Wasted, don’t lick the floor. It ain’t sanitationary.” Detritus shook his head. “Anyway, we’re supposed to hightail it home where we’d impress whatever crockadock socks Asinine’s wearing offa him. Wasted, I said don’t lick the floor.”

“This keeps getting better.” Legion wanted to whack his head against the table, but he wasn’t sure its vinyl cover would inflict enough brain damage to avoid this conversation.

Wasted started swimming in his drowsy stupor. Detritus lifted his feet so the inebriate could swim laps unobstructed. And make dust angels. “Instead we discovered them super robots in their hidey-hole with a timer that ain’t timing no more. So we stuck around ’cause we know something important about your home sweet station.” Detritus winked. “’Cause we’re decent and stuff. Wasted, you’re swimmin’ outta your pants again, buck.”

The robots was the information Pincushion insisted they share. Two weeks ago, he had vanished. Legion assumed he’d gone AWOL until he’d recently reappeared and said these two had captured him. His metal knee squeaking, he approached the table and placed a spiky, cocoa-colored hand on Legion’s shoulder. A wisp of dust coughed up. Now Legion was absorbing it. “Brother, you’ll want to hear them out,” Pincushion said.

Legion looked up. “One of them spent the first ten minutes of this interrogation singing opera in burp procession, fell asleep, and is now halfway out of his pants.” Swelling snores comparable to tidal waves crashed through the air from under the table. “And he just drooled out a goldfish.” He lifted his foot off the stone-block floor. “Is there a frat on our station now?”

“Sigma Phi Epsilon and then...well, the other one is Virillian, so the symbols just look angry.” Pincushion shrugged. “It’s three scowling faces and a jaguar.”

“These two, what, kept you tied up for two weeks and fed you cafeteria food. And you’re going to bat for them?”

Pincushion trod over Wasted—“Excuse me”—and settled into the chair that Wasted had fallen out of. Almost stepped on the goldfish. He ran a hand through his woolly hair, releasing more dust. It was everywhere now. He tightened one corner of his mouth and heaved out a breath, and Legion swore dust came out of there. “Let’s get this straight. These two are bad news.”

“Hheeeeyyyy,” Detritus said through a pasted smile. He shifted in his seat, curving his backbone like a snake sliding up on its tail.

Pincushion raised a palm. “No, no. It was stealing all the lug nuts off our cookbots that convinced me you’re not trustworthy. Or ambitious. Don’t get me wrong. You’ll pay for your crimes and the propane tank you stole from the station’s fry stand. You can’t just open a rival fry stand without a license. You guys caused enough public endangerment.”

“I wouldn’t call it public endangerment.” Detritus bit his upper lip with that smarmy smile that charmed no one.

“When you slap two beehives together like cymbals, that’s public endangerment.” Pincushion tapped a single finger on the table, which scraped a line in the dust. “But, Legion, their snooping uncovered some bizarre stuff. You should listen to this dude about our mystery room.”

This should be more interesting than the strange gurgle coming out of the drainage grill. Nobody knew the mystery room’s purpose. At the Good Guys’ inception, Intergalactic Protection had commissioned the Constructo Company to build Station One to headquarter them. Along with it came a mystery room that showed up in neither any blueprints nor their haunt control’s room inventory. It was called a mystery room because the only objects in it were the already-mentioned army of monolithic robots and a timer at their feet that had since reached zero. Oh, and a headless corpse on a chair. When Legion had contacted IP about it, they said nobody knew anything and then tried to sell him on drinkable hand soap.

“Okay.” Legion folded his hands, concealing the dust they’d accumulated. “What about this mystery room? Captivate me if you want tonight’s dinner. It’s swill à la mode.”

Pincushion shook his head. “We can’t legally refuse them dinner, brother.”

“Then we’ll downgrade them to swill nah la mode, and that’s my last offer.”

“Then I counteroffer you swill nah la double the mode, because this’ll be double helpful.” Detritus winked again and scratched his minor stubble. “Your boy Pincushion said we’ll pay for our crimes.” He tapped Pincushion’s hand, but Pincushion jerked it out of reach. He leaned over to tap again, but Pincushion scooched farther away. “I counter with this: you offer us a pardon for this info. I guarantee it’ll bowl you over. What do ya say?”

Oh, good. Wasted had woken. He began singing again. Not well.

Legion couldn’t believe this. Was Detritus trying to earn them clemency from their criminal careers? “Let’s hear it first.”

Detritus’s smile creaked bigger and creepier. “Awesome. Me and my buck Wasted here, we sneaked in there expecting a place for mischief. Now, we found that room, and”—he tapped a foot into Wasted’s ribs to shut up the caterwauling—“we found them robots an’ their timer”—the tap only made Wasted louder—“and so snooped a bit”—and louder—“and discovered somethin’ way weird. You see, when my buddy here ain’t blitzed out of his mind and singing louder”—and louder—“he’s a genius and calls me ‘old chap’ for some reason. He took Virillian studies way back in college”—and just when Legion thought he couldn’t sing any louder—“and dibble-dabbled in timeline physics.” And louder.

“Here’s the interesting part, brother.” Pincushion grabbed a glass and pitcher sitting on the table. He poured some lemon water and took a long gulp. He cringed when Wasted found the lung capacity to sing even louder.

Detritus scratched his cheek. Dust came off. “Since that timer was Virillian, buck here figured out what them crazy numbers was steamrollin’ at. Hey, buck, you explain it better than me.” He checked Wasted. “Nah, let’s not bother him. Looks like he’s having a good time.” Indeed, as Wasted sang, he ate some imaginary thing off the floor that, in real life, was dust. Terrans. Can’t live with ’em, apparently can’t legally live without ’em. “Anyway, them numbers weren’t counting down.”

Wasted got quieter for a moment.

Legion tilted his head. “They were counting up?”

And then louder.

“Nah, weirder. They wasn’t counting up, but they wasn’t counting down. But they wasn’t counting random neither. Wasted here—buck, that ain’t icing sugar on the floor—spouted a bunch of college mumbo lingo like eigenspacin’ and metronome tensions and whatnot. But when he stopped with all the physics junk, he said that thing was counting”—he plopped an elbow on the refectory table and raised two fingers—“in two timelines. It was counting freaking sideways!” His fingertips converged on his temples, his eyes blossomed, and then—“boooooosssshhhh”—his fingers leaped off. “Mind blown, eh?” He sat back. And Wasted got louder. “Pardon earned.”

Legion still couldn’t figure out the end of this tale of physics and alcohol. “So, what you’re saying is...” He trailed off to allow Detritus to pick the sentence up.

“We don’t know!” Detritus glugged a laugh. “But whatever them robots was timing, they reached it. Happy New Year’s to them.” Detritus leaned back. He was reminded again that his stool offered no support as his hands pinwheeled. He grabbed the refectory table to pull himself back in.

“Look, anything that don’t count a regular way is bad business. We shoulda skedaddled and filched a couple o’ statues from your lobby on the way out ’cause they coulda scored us a couple hundred moolahs. But we didn’t. We’re still here, and so are them statues.”

And louder.

“And you’re asking for a pardon?” Legion drummed his fingers on the table. He sighed so reverberantly his cheeks vibrated. “We can’t work with ‘I don’t know.’ Get back in your cells.”

“What?” Detritus slammed a fist. Empty glasses clanked against the pitcher of water, and Pincushion had to rescue his own drink from upending. “We blew through all our good hooch figuring that out to save you ungrateful crocks!”

“You’re the reason we put No Fishing signs by the fountains.” Legion stood. His floating chair drifted backward and ticked against the stone wall behind him, flicking dust. He threw a hand at the three paltry cells embedded in the back wall. “You came here to cause trouble and prove your loyalty to Lowensland, stumbled on a bunch of robots, couldn’t give us any workable information...and you want a pardon for it? Help me out, Abioye.”

“Certainly, brother.” Pincushion placed a hand on Detritus. Detritus resisted, so he strong-armed the Bad Guy out of his chair, threw him against a wall when he resisted again, and managed him toward the cell. He shoved Detritus against the girder-rigid cot that furnished his small space. Since Janice’s destruction earlier that week, Pincushion couldn’t order the cell to lock. So he slapped a palm on the locking mechanism embedded in the wall beside the cell. A shield screen zapped up, the cell’s transparent electromagnetic door.

Legion was at Wasted, dragging him backward by the underarms. He had at least fallen silent, now returning to, Legion assumed, another illusionary meal judging from his attempts to lick his own face. And shirt. Wasted in his cell, Legion hopped over him—no, wait. He returned, rolled Wasted onto his side in case the Bad Guy threw up, and then hopped back out. Pincushion palmed the button that corresponded to his cell.

Legion trod over to Pincushion. Backs faced the cells for a private conversation. Legion said, “These guys are for real? You’re vouching for them?” He checked Detritus again, who swung at the shield screen, missed the immobile object, and spun onto the floor. He winced and gripped his shoulder.

Pincushion stole a glance at Detritus as well, who sprang up into the shield screen so hard it crackled electrical spiders where he collided. Legion would order the cells to soundproof mode, but no haunt control. Instead he heard the muffled and hoarse bellows Detritus threw. Colorful.

“In the Mission Beach PD, I was trained on reading people.” Pincushion muttered this through a slight mouth. “Now, these dudes are no good, and I’m not sure why they’re sticking around. But there’s something about them. And they’ve figured out more about those robots than we did, even when we let Power Plant in there with caffeine and told him to do whatever he calls his piece de resistance.” He stole another glance. Detritus hadn’t calmed down. In fact, he threw a couple kicks and a knee at the screen. And then his pained hip as if to booty-bump the screen. Of course, Wasted only slept and ate that imaginary meal. He must have had more imaginary coupons than this unreal restaurant was prepared for. “Since that drunk one knows Virillian studies and timeline physics, we might need them to figure out those robots.”

“I’m talkin’ to you!” Detritus’s voice sputtered out. He tap-tapped a finger on the screen as if tapping a fishbowl, except he was the one inside the bowl. “Lemme out, or I swear I’ll call my lawyer.” Bad Guys had lawyers? Did Detritus know what lawyers were?

Were these guys for real? Legion wanted to ship them off to Stavehill Hyperperson Penitentiary and out of his business. Ugh. He rubbed the back of his neck. Detritus grew angrier. And sweatier.

More banging. “I’m up for negotiating.” Detritus threw his lungs into it. And the cot’s pillow, which bounced off the screen and bopped him in the head. He hunched to lift the cot, but it was fastened to the floor. Nice try. His back didn’t agree. So he grabbed a datasheet put in there for reading material and flung it at the screen. It was deactivated and therefore flaccid, so it curved up at the ceiling and then fluttered to the floor. He jabbed his finger into the shield screen. “You’re gonna regret this, Trioxidillian. You hear—” He examined his finger. “Man, these screens are solid.”

“Fine. We’ll keep them around but”—Legion looked back at Detritus, then at Pincushion—“only on your word. And on the condition they actually help.” He eyed Detritus again, who kicked the pillow. It bounced off the shield screen and back onto his face. Lightning struck twice. “I have never seen both such a strong caution against and a reason to start day drinking.”

“What the crock is with your pillows?” Detritus flipped it over in his hands. “They magnetized to my head?”

A knock at the cellblock’s door. It was open, and Good Guy agent Sixth Sense leaned in from the hallway, glasses sliding down his nose. “Hey. Uhm. Hi. The after-school group is here for their tutoring.” He pushed his glasses back up.

Legion whipped out his watch. “Wow, it’s already that time. Hey, Detritus, keep it down. The kids are here.” He shifted aside to allow the students to file in. “Try not to invent swear words to yell at them this time.”

“Can I moon ’em?”

“What? No. That’s worse! Why even?”

Detritus gave the okay sign, snatched the datasheet off the floor, and sat on the cot. “What spicy enticements is Danielle Steele cookin’ up today?”

Chapter Three: And Speaking of Incarcerations

“Hey!” Plastique pounded the shield screen that blocked her from throttling every single guard working this basement prison house: namely the single guard working this basement prison house. Sadly, the shield screen did its job. Her hands tightened in anticipation. All that grip training for nothing.

No, wait. Legally she wasn’t allowed to call herself Plastique anymore. She was Courtney Borrog, no longer a Good Guy field leader, no longer an IP soldier, no longer with a service rank at all. And, since Intergalactic Protection owned the brand of Plastique, she was no longer allowed to operate under that media name. Stripped of rank, stripped of media name, stripped of everything. She wore street clothes in here. Actual street clothes! She wore a...She choked a sob back, knuckle to mouth. She wore a blouse!

She rubbed her hands along her chilly arms. Every draft trickled ice under her skin. She’d heyed for the guard’s attention, that grunt hired to watch this refrigerated prison and its detainees, but he was on ignore mode. Whatever. She clicked her tongue at him. Clicked it with vengeance. Folding her arms, she marched to the single chair in this cell. Plopped down on it so hard she crunched her vertebrae together. Arraignment shouldn’t have taken longer than three hours, but somebody somewhere wanted them to languish. In street clothes!

“There’s not much use heying if threatening to break the guard’s neck didn’t already work.” One cell over, Aaron Khouri—cybernetic ex–Good Guy Ace Spandex and fellow detainee—sat in his floating chair, which clanked and tilted to one side whenever someone used it. In other words, when it was asked to be a chair. These past few days, he and Borrog were next-door neighbors.

Khouri dragged his chair over to the shield screen that divided them. “You already heyed, hey-youed, howdy-hoed when he wore the cowboy hat, and pay-attentioned. And at eighty-eight decibels.” Oh, yeah. And he had a computer brain, so that decibel comment should be weird but wasn’t weird. Which made it weird. “He’s probably ignoring you on account of the howdy-ho-hey, but any of the magical crock-heys could be the winner.” His mouth twisted. “Or that jab you made about his mother.”

“Maybe she does wear army boots.” Courtney crossed her arms and eye-growled at the prison guard barely operating this underground, seven-cell meat freezer between arrest and sentencing. The guard sat in that squalid, comfortably warm office, eating his lunch of a white-bread sandwich—she squinted—with weird purplish goo dribbling out. And—yup, she saw that coming—it plopped onto his shirt. Yeah, spread it around with a napkin. Babies ate with better table manners. No, Good Guy nosepicker Scapegoat ate with better table manners. Baby Scapegoat probably ate with better table manners. “I don’t care how I got on his bad side. All I know is I bought a very beautiful missile launcher for our mission, and it’s been seized.” She leaned over to witness another gob of sludge hit the guard’s badge. “It had dual speed settings.”

“They weren’t going to not seize our weapons.” Khouri leaned against the shield screen, blocking an advertisement it projected for encryption service Datasmack. At least these electromagnetic barriers were above minimum price, so they didn’t shock whenever you touched them—zzzap—if you weren’t made of conductive material.

Borrog grabbed a rock sitting in her cell and threw it in the guard’s direction. “Dual speed settings, Khouri. Dual.” The rock bounced off the shield screen and left a slight scent of burned mineral. “They could have left me the hair brush.” She wrapped a bedsheet around herself for warmth and stroked down her electrically charged hair to tame it. It didn’t tame.

Situation report: Three days ago, former field agent Franchise—now Jacob Refensil—stole aboard an enemy bird to Bad Guy headquarters, Station Zilcho. So his best friend and fellow field agent Power Plant—now Jeff Abends—had launched a rogue rescue operation. To keep Abends from killing himself and causing another special bulletin on Nuclear News, Borrog and Khouri had launched their own rogue rescue operation. After liberating their comrades, all four were arrested for disobeying orders to return to base immediately after their original mission. Now, she, Khouri, and Refensil were detained in these holding cells in some bargain-basement, off-site prison awaiting trial. They couldn’t even use hyperabilities due to the dampening fields in each cell. Borrog delivered explosive punches that gave a kinetic-energy kickback. Khouri interfaced with computers to an astonishing degree. And Refensil conjured up duplicates of himself. None of that would help them in here. Refensil’s duplicates tended to defecate, urinate, and vomit all into the same diaper disposal, so maybe dampening their hyperabilities was a good thing.

Refensil snored in the cell across from Khouri’s. If Khouri worried about decibel levels, he didn’t fuss over the chainsaw Refensil was wheezing.

That left Abends, who was hospitalized from extreme injuries, sleeping in a medically induced coma in a Special Identity Protection Medical Act hospital, a SIPMA hospital that focused on treating hyperpeople. Upon awakening, he’d be arrested and detained with them in this crypt whose temperature sank just south of comfortability.

Lt. Col. Legion had visited yesterday, determined to get the charges somehow dropped. Roaring chants from their supporters trickled faintly through a window above the igloo-block stone wall at Borrog’s back. Over the last couple months, since stopping a galacticwide bid for genocidal cleansing enacted by ex–Bad Guy megalomaniac Mechanism, the Good Guys had earned some supporters. Now a crowd of them picketed outside. Some were confused, though, since one guy kept asking if this was the line for the Has-Been and the Never-Weres show. What she wouldn’t do to slap sense into that guy. Sigh. She already missed having authority to slap sense into people.

A blouse!

Chapter Four: Excuses, Excuses

Field Marshal Horcross Breeng, member of the Trioxidillian person race, survivor of fourteen combat wars, service-medal recipient for injuries in three of those, and platinum-card holder at Costco, sat with a mouth smile as his mil-tran military transport, a purring Flagstar called Caveman Stealth Bomber, Coming This Fall, rumbled onto Station One’s surface. To be precise, a koi pond and the decorative garden in front of their lobby building. And, as told from the squawk that wrenched through Caveman Stealth Bomber, Coming This Fall’s thruster boom, a seagull. He peered up at the mil-tran’s diagnostic viewscreen. And a gum wrapper.

Hrm. Terran built, these things were. If Breeng knew anything about those Milky Way crocksters, it was that they loved cataloging what hit their vehicles.

His pilot, Warrant Officer Kelimore, tapped several holographic control buttons, clacked an overhead switch, babbled something to the mil-tran’s haunt control, and then jabbed on the public-address system. “Goooood morning, flight fans. Today is a beeee-you-tiful day here on sunny Station One, home of the Good Guys and the galaxy’s largest collection of twigs. The temperature is a balmy twenty-three degrees Celsius, there ain’t a cloud in the sky, and the hardware for their haunt control was recently destroyed due to a domestic dispute.”

Breeng took his opportunity when Kelimore paused to lung-breathe. “Pilot, just say if we’re cleared to move about the cabin. And tell everyone that Shingle’s potato chips have released their amazing new flavor: plain.” He immediately regretted hiring from Intergalactic Protection’s latest sponsor, Galaxy Wing Air. First tip-off was that the company used the word air for interstellar travel.

Kelimore slouched, pizzazz deflated. Good. Pizzazz had no place in the military or its gift shops. “The inertia fields around your seats have been deactivated, and all trays should, indeed, be locked in the upright position.”

Breeng tilted his head. “And?”

Another mouth moan. Kelimore died a little inside. Breeng inhaled the pain suffering as if feeding on his soul. Kelimore grabbed a datasheet from the console: his word script. “And Shingle’s potato chips are proud to announce the birth of their new baby girl, Plain Jane.”

Breeng chuckled. He shambled to Kelimore and slapped a callused green hand to the pilot’s arm shoulder. “Good, soldier. Gooooood.” He leaned into Kelimore’s ear and hoped that cannon fodder smelled the cod from his food lunch. With extra food lemon. “Murder that spirit, Warrant Officer. Murder it until it’s life dead.”

He chuckled again. He loved a good chuckle at someone else’s expense. He regarded his crew, military decorations jangling on his breast and a bell jangling on his sponsorship hat. Six hammer-bagged cretins, dressed in all sorts of flashy clothing outfits, sat arrayed in the passenger cabin. “Okay, team. Time to engage. Also”—he removed his military sponsorship cap and donned a bill sponsorship cap for this operation’s other fund sponsor—“let’s not forget our proud backers that made this trip possible. This operation was brought to us by Beehive Media, putting the buzzzzzzzzzz back in buzzword.” He pulled a string dangling down the side of the cap, which flapped two plush bees on his brain head. Decorum was chic.

“Wait in that corner, Kelimore. I won’t be more than a few days. No, not that corner. The one where the big gulps spilled when we took that turn. Yes, right in the sticky.”

* * *

Legion’s gabber hopped alive in his antenna. How such a tiny device put up such a fuss, he never knew. The higher up the command chain his caller roosted, the more his gabber kicked up its heels. “Incoming connection from entity Horcross Breeng. Incoming—”

Legion plunked his head on the stone wall of the corridor outside the cellblock. He had just left the cellblock when his gabber had gone crazy. His fatigued, suction-padded fingertip tapped the gabber bud in his antenna and came back with a haze of more dust. A mouthpiece and earpiece zipped out of the bud with such eagerness he thought they’d throw confetti. The ones from the unicorn-adoption agency did, which he found out the hard way last time he wandered too close and yawned.

“Field Marshal Breeng, to what do I owe the honor?” Usually Legion felt a pulling instinct to salute even over the gabber. Such was the case with the Good Guys’ departed liaison and Legion’s hero, Brigadier General Patton. Not so with Breeng. At four feet and six inches tall, Breeng exuded a sluglike film Legion couldn’t pinpoint. He sometimes watched Breeng walk for evidence of a slime trail. Imagine his confusion that time Breeng had come in from the rain.

Legion continued down the hallway toward a staircase that led up to ground level. He stopped at the foot of these stairs, listening to Breeng’s voice secrete through the gabber. “How are you, Major Danderson?” Legion was not a major. Legion was also not a Danderson.

Breeng didn’t allow him a chance to respond about the nagging headache he’d felt since starting this conversation before he said, “Listen, first, I am obligated by agreement contract to tell you that Mighty Horseshoe Marketing has the power to propel your brand into the forty-second century.”

“Sir, that’s five thousand years ago.” Legion wiped gritty dust out of his uniform. This would take a dry cleaner. Ugh, it was in his scalp.

“Let’s underplay that, Danderson. They’re eavesdropping on this call. You know, for quality and training purposes.”

“I’m Lt. Col. Legion, not Major Danderson.”

“Oh. Right. But, Major, the reason purpose of my call isn’t to remember who I’m talking to. I’m coming in for a quick visit. We haven’t caught up since four of your soldier agents were arrested for dereliction of duty. I wanted to see how your squad team is dealing with the person understaffing.”

“No need for that. I’m sure you have a busy schedule.” Legion tasted nothing but dust. He stuck out his tongue. Dust on it. How was there dust on it? “We’re fine, Field Marshal Breeng. I debriefed Plastique, Franchise, and Ace Spandex on our options for their defense, which somehow includes beating the prosecution in a game of bowling. I don’t know how that makes sense, but the Stratus Cloud Bar Association constructed four ten-pin lanes, and they intend to use them.” He collapsed against the dust masquerading as a wall. “Power Plant is still at SIPMA under heavy sedation. That’s good because it gives me a break from his human cannonball trick.” He felt dust like light-grain sandpaper between his buttocks. How could it trickle into the seat of his pants?

“I’m so wonderfully apathetic to hear that, Major. But ear-listen, I’m already here.”

“You’re already here?” Legion gagged. Right. With Janice destroyed, no haunt control was active to notify him of Breeng’s visit or help end that visit. Legion still wasn’t used to the silence, but at least Janice didn’t accuse him of leaving her circuit boards in the sun too long.

He almost slapped his forehead, but he stopped himself before he rained more dust. How could he get out of this? Had he used the dead-grandmother excuse before? He scampered around in circles. Quick, quick, think.

“I’m sitting in your work office right now. Why don’t you come up?”

“You’re in my work office? I mean, my regular office? Not regul—I work there, but—My regular work office where I work regularly.” He should shut up now. And yes, he’d already claimed a dead grandmother. But twice? That excuse was good for two, after all.

“Yessssssssss, I am.” Breeng snickered, which vibrated like a snake’s tongue flickering in desert heat. Yes, Legion had used it twice. Move onto dead grandfather? Dead aunts? He had no aunts, and that was on file. Dead uncles? No...Come on, come on. Dead next-door neighbor? Wait. His next-door neighbor was Hearse.

“Why don’t you come up? You know, just for a time moment. You don’t want to hold me up for more than a time moment.” Another snicker. “Do you, Major?”

Dead cat? Legion seldom visited the holding cells. Uhm, okay, north was that way. No, wait. That way. Dead something. Think, Danderson. His name was Legion. Think, Legion. He punched his palm and choked on the resulting dust. Dead cabinetry. No, it would be weird if it were alive. Maybe a different tack. Doctor’s appointment? Eye appointment? Meeting appointment. No, that was redundant. Breeng was as infectious as this dust!

He pictured this basement bunker’s single entrance and rotated it in his mind’s eye, navigated a path to his work office on the lobby building’s second floor. Never mind calling the elevator airfoil next to the granite staircase leading upstairs. It was probably a hardened collection of dust. Knee appointment? Up the stairs. Ah, hair appoint—No, Trioxidillians were hairless. Argh, the one time he needed hair.

Last time Station One’s haunt control went down, so did power to the station since the haunt control regulated the station’s power core. This time, with Bad Guy Multipurpose here for imprisonment and a civilian shopping hub taking up a good chunk of the station’s surface area, IP had double-timed putting together alternative access to the power grid. So, at the building exit, an activated shield screen sensed Legion’s identity and let him pass.

Legion darted into sunny warmth—dead sister?—car appointment?—paced in circles on pavement—sister appointment?—come on, death in the family or appointment, pick one—

“Field Marshal, I can’t come up I have a death appointment schedule conflict okay thanks bye.”

And he screwed his eyes shut. And folded into a crouch. And bopped a wrist to his forehead. That was the best this man of average intelligence could concoct.

“I have a conflicting séance, Field Marshal.” Quality and training purposes, eh?

* * *

Legion barged into his regular work office where he worked regularly to find Breeng reclined at his regular desk where he desked regularly. Breeng’s weighty boots, which couldn’t touch the floor from the midsized chair, trickled clumps of mud on the empty surface of his desk. He didn’t mind the mud, but empty surface? Where was his mess? Breeng had taken the dozens of datasheets that smothered the desk and stacked them next to a bookcase. That was his clutter!

“Plans changed?” Breeng asked. He wore a hat with bees on it.

“The ghost had a doctor’s appointment with my hairless dead grandmother.” Legion gripped the cross representing the son of Alaphus tinkling around his Alaphan necklace and dipped a finger into the bullet hole marring its center. Breeng always jittered Legion with the same feeling he got from candy apples: grease and sugarcoating all in one untrustworthy airway obstruction. Didn’t help that the only candy apple he’d ever tried came from a cookbot that didn’t know they were raw potatoes.

He entered, slapped heels together, and saluted. It felt nice to breathe without tasting dust and dead insects.

Breeng rotated a photo diamond in the light. Each facet projected a different image when you stared into it, which Breeng did. “Interesting photo diamond here, Major.” He tossed it aside, and it clunked onto the tiled floor and settled on a cracked facet. The last time Legion had cracked a facet on a photo diamond, the diamond had changed all his images to celebrities giving him the finger. And then it turned back into coal. Photo diamonds did not take kindly to value depreciation.

Breeng flopped a wave at him. “At easy ease, Major.” Even he had to hear the redundancy in that.

Legion’s hand clapped down to his side, but he didn’t approach. “Field Marshal, I’m not responsible for the images in that diamond. Our old haunt control, Janice, doctored those. For instance, I’ve never used hair-lice shampoo. Speaking of Janice, if you’re here because I was incriminated in an assassination that happened before my parents were born, that was her adjusting official records. It did explain why people kept detailing their political conspiracy theories to me.”

“You named your haunt control Janice?”

“She named herself. After her mother, a search filter.” Legion struggled for the words to explain but settled on a shrug. Sometimes it wasn’t worth the effort.

“Anyway, come in, Major.” Breeng did know this was Legion’s own office, right? And that Legion had already entered? “I have...a task mission for you, Maj. Dand—” He snapped his fingers. “Right. Maj. Legion.”

“Lt. Col. Legion, actually.” Legion stepped toward his desk, and his door slid shut with the sound of an airlock sealing.

“Oh, Major. Your neck collar is askew. Allow me.” Breeng stood on the chair so that he was Legion’s height. He reached out, fingers curled in a bizarre arrangement. “Don’t mind my hand fingers. Quick adjustment.” He flapped the collar out. More dust.

“My collar wasn’t—Oh, okay. Fix it anyway.” Legion staggered forward with stunned blinks. “Okay, fix it aggressively. Please.”

“Done.” Breeng slapped him on the back of the neck, an overenthusiastic clap. He had never been a master of social cues. Legion had observed that at several funerals.

“You said you had a task mission, Field Marshal. What are the details?” Legion strode back from the desk to give himself room. Every second he spent in Breeng’s presence, he felt as if a cage would crash down from the ceiling.

“Yyyeesss,” Breeng hissed on sour breath. He plopped back down on the squeaky floating chair—at the desk, the clean desk, he had no right—folded his hands, and bobbed back. Boots hovered above the floor by a good half foot. “And you’re the right person soldier to lead the charge into battle.”

“Wait. Into battle? But I’m a lieutenant colonel. Putting leadership on the frontline is inadvisable strategy.” This couldn’t be good. Last time Legion had entered the field, he was almost involuntarily married to a bird. He vowed that day never to accept offerings from someone who said, “Enjoy a free sample of Bird Brothers’ new creamy-garlic chicken.” Legion had that day made new personal policies about wedding chapels and creamy garlic.

“First of all, I brought a platter of Dangerous Lou’s Cheeses of the Galaxy. Dangerous Lou, where cheese is life.” Somewhere a cha-ching chimed. He leaned back to a filing cabinet and a platter of cheeses arranged like hours on a clock. He grabbed the platter and moved it onto the desk. “My favorite is”—he tapped a line of yellow cheeses rolled into fat tubes—“Dangerous Lou’s Noose Cheese Strings.” Cha-ching. “For that easy-to-prepare lunch when the kids are just too loud and awake.” Cha-ching.

Legion surveyed the platter. “You brought cheeses from around the galaxy, and your favorite is the grade-school one they sell at the convenience store downstairs?”

“Yesssss. Dangerous Lou is one of our leading fund sponsors. Try some.” Breeng’s smile never faded. It only relaxed its sliminess. His Trioxidillian cheeks, cracked and paled to the color of dehydrated plants, locked in place with a salesman’s smirk. He produced a tube of balm and applied it to the cracks. Smelled like mayonnaise. “Mmmm. Balm Bomb’s facial oil, recommended by four out of five cheekiatrists. The fifth one got his degree at a community college.” He flaunted the tube at arm’s length with a marketing grin. Legion glanced around for a studio camera.

Breeng snapped from sponsor mode to military mode and slid the balm into a pocket, as if thus ended the commercial break. He straightened his back and stiffened his shoulders, movements that creaked like rusty hinges. He folded his hands again. “Major”—Legion was a lieutenant colonel—“I’ve called you here”—to his own office—“because we’ve acquired new knowledge intel on enemy biological battle weapons”—likely the same biological weapons on this platter. “In late February, your Good Guys’ alpha soldier team attempted—and failed—an acquisition of an aswang creature from behind enemy lines.” Breeng’s eyes narrowed. He couldn’t be more sinister if he were tying Legion to train tracks. “You remember the”—cue breath that now smelled like Dangerous Lou’s jalapeno gouda—“aaassswwwaaanng. Don’t you, Major?”

The aswang. Legion looked forward to this day as much as he looked forward to his bird honeymoon. Some animal had been butchering citizens of Ratfink Pest Control on Gaia, the solar system’s only planet with a natural atmosphere. The Good Guys’ alpha team investigated. When Lowensland learned about it, he and his Bad Guys also investigated. They discovered the animal was a supernatural creature, an aswang, that couldn’t be destroyed, only killed and reincarnated in different forms. A battle exploded over its capture, the Good Guys determined not to let the Bad Guys take control of it. In the end, the Bad Guys won, abducting it to Station Zilcho.

Intergalactic Protection had previously refused to attack Station Zilcho for unknown reasons, despite knowing its exact whereabouts. Pincushion leaked the location of the aswang to IP, hoping to entice them to launch a full-scale strike to retrieve it. His four hours sitting on hold paid off.

“I remember it as fondly as I remember the last time I fell on my head.” Legion balled his fists behind his back. He approached his desk and thumped it. “Does this mean you’re finally giving the Good Guys the resources to launch a direct attack on Station Zilcho?”

“Not exactly.” Breeng drummed his fingertips together. “Gabber that has been brought to us by Letchtech, the leading supplier of Letchtech products, acknowledge. Contact entity Freuth.”

“Wait, what?” Legion stammered back from his desk, which no one had any right to clean. Or polish. Or on which to smear “Breeng loves tacos” in blue cheese. “Freuth, as in Kyle Freuth?”

“Such a capable soldier officer.”

“He believes in mermaids.”

Breeng was ignoring him, smiling into his gabber. He wanted to snap the cheese platter over Breeng’s head, but Dangerous Lou would likely retaliate with chains. In Lou’s words, he “ain’t take too kindly ta disrespect, if ya catch my drift.”

Breeng exhaled, and did a tiny booger fleck out and lodge in the Roquefort? “Lieutenant Colonel, it’s time.” Oh, so Freuth got to be lieutenant colonel?

The swoosh of the work office’s sliding door startled Legion. It reminded him of a flushing toilet, which reminded him of how his day was going, which reminded him of how his day had gone yesterday. And so on, sadly.

A figure sauntered into the office in an upset to fashion that reflected light like a disco ball: Freuth, wearing not an honorable IP military uniform but a media-pandering getup from which Legion’s eyeballs might never recover. He saddled up behind Breeng and snapped into stiff position, clacking heels together with a stomp. His blond hair ruffled in place. He peered ahead at nothing.

Freuth sported—and with pride—a silvery one-piece. Sponsor logos adorned the reflective surface and cycled through a catalogue stored in the outfit’s electronics, so fast Legion could barely catch them. Oh, and a utility belt, of course, which held a single drinking box. Freuth looked as if he were attending a costume party as a reflective surface. The getup focused the light at Legion in a visual airstrike.

Freuth and Legion had met in the military academy years ago. Freuth was—Legion would put this in the spirit of the sponsorship in this room right now—desperately in need of one of Anatomy Maestro’s thirty-four-vertebrae backbones, the extra vertebra for the extra backbone. He kowtowed to flawed instruction coming from those who’d never entered the battlefield. He’d lost a platoon to the unwise decision of corporate sponsor Coffins by Trey, as if that name didn’t raise an alarm. The incident left a tart taste on Legion’s tongue, much like this risotto cheddar from Dangerous Lou’s platter. He was angry enough to not eat another slice, but this cheese grew on you, and wow, the second slice made the creaminess pop. Legion taste-tested a third slice. He resolved to be angry again after the fourth slice. He meant fifth.

“Kyle, good to see you again after all these years,” Legion said. And a little bit lied. A little bit mostly lied. “How are you?” Fine, a little bit completely lied.

“You’re fine.” Breeng winked at Freuth.

“I’m fine, Matross.” Freuth maintained stance.

Legion felt around his desk behind him for the cheese platter, and he estimated where the jalapeno gouda was. Nope. Was camembert. His mouth watered. Dangerous Lou might not respect gang territories, but he sure knew his cheeses and weak points on kneecaps. Dangerous Lou was dangerous to waist lines everywhere. “Nice mirror you’re wearing.”

“Freuth, take the display position,” Breeng said.

Freuth flaunted his posture proudly, hands on hips, eyes dead ahead. “This media outfit was created by IP’s top-rated brand designers”—and then just as proudly—“in children’s fashion.” The logos flickered around so quickly Legion had to blink to recover his eyesight.

“I see myself in your chest.” Legion’s collar needed adjusting again. It bulged in one corner. “Anyway, Field Marshal, our operation.”

“Ah, yes, the task mission.” Breeng sprang off the chair. He shuffled to Freuth, on his way reaching up for a cheese wedge on Dangerous Lou’s platter—Legion thrust it away with an evil eye—and clapped Freuth on the side mirror, or the hip to most people. He faced upward at Legion with a grin that oozed. “Freuth comes to Station One with your new soldier army.” At Freuth, “Lieutenant Colonel, smile more. You’re proud to wear that, after all.”

Freuth’s smile grew. “So proud.” This was the same Freuth that used to get his head stuck in fences every time he was deployed.

Wait. Legion blinked at Breeng. What was that? “New soldier army? Field Marshal, my hands are full with my existing army. How can I handle a new one?”

Breeng left Freuth’s side and, hands hanging off each other behind his back, toured the carpeted half of the work office. In muddy boots. “Funny. Wasn’t that funny, Freuth? That deserves a mouth laugh.”

Freuth’s smile peeled back for a subtle chuckle as brittle as autumn leaves.

“Louder.”

The laugh obeyed.

“At attention and eyes front now, Freuth.”

Freuth clacked his heels together, hands along sides.

Breeng’s boots shushed on the carpet with mucky prints. “You see, Legion, since four of your soldier officers have been decommissioned, your roster is”—his hands unhooked to circle each other—“lacking. Yes, pathetically lacking.” He plucked a bauble off Legion’s bookcase as if sightseeing the work office. He set it back down. It fell off.

“Field Marshal, we’re trying to prove their actions were justified. We have no need to fill their positions. Also, I’d think twice about replacing Power Plant. He needs to be occupied. Every time he says, ‘And now for my next trick,’ it’s never pulling a rabbit out of a hat.” Legion sampled a cheese noose. Not as plasticky as its sheen suggested.

“Well, unfortunately it doesn’t look good for those person traitors.” Breeng regarded Legion as a predator would, eyes jaundice yellow in this light. “And you’d better prep for war combat, soldier. You’re in the air in ten time minutes.” He smirked at Legion.

“Field Marshal, I don’t enter the field. I administer from my work office with its”—he grimaced at the thought of his clean desk as if he’d choked down old cough syrup—“desk. As clean as it is.” Rest in peace, his little mess. And this wedge of burrata. And this other wedge of burrata. And his diet.

“You’re welcome for cleaning it. I even used water spit to polish it. Not mine, mind you.” Breeng produced a tube of Spitting Cobra Washing Fluid. “Very money expensive. You can say thank you again.”

Legion could say thank you again. “With all due respect”—at the sound of slurping, he glanced over to see Freuth finish his drinking box—“your predecessor ordered me into combat three months ago, and a Fireball starship ended up across my spine. I still walk as if I swallowed a sword. No, not Dr. Surgeon Samurai’s Extendable Katana you’re holding but about as intrusive.” Was Legion cha-chinging now?

Breeng slid the extendable katana into his pocket.

“I myself have one.” Freuth placed the empty drinking box back into his belt. Finally he relaxed posture to pull back the seat of his pants and wiggle. “It’s extending in all the wrong places. I’m told I don’t mind.” Back to military posture.

Breeng said, “Well, this mission is important high priority. And only your keen soldier leadership can make it a victory. You see, with most of your Good Guys imprisoned—”s

“Four. Out of twelve if you count the possum in the kitchen who has surprisingly aggressive strategies for an animal that plays dead.”

“—you’ll need this new squad team. You will lead it, and Freuth will act as your second-in-command secondary. And, since the sponsorship world is watching, he now operates under the new media name...” Breeng flashed his teeth. “...the Purple Nurple.” He reached Legion, hands ta-daing at the humanoid mirror ball.

“Does this mean IP finally settled on the pounds per square inch of a nurple?” Legion asked. Cold shivered through his nodes. For one, leaders never entered the field. For another, Freuth and him held the same rank, but now Freuth was his subordinate. For another, if Freuth’s outfit went outside, he’d cause a signal fire. And for one last other, Freuth agreed to call himself the Purple Nurple. And he wore no purple, which wasn’t the most inadvisable part of the name. “Freuth, if you’re purpling nurples, is that enemy nurples, or is that all nurples? Depending on your answer, I might not want to stand near you.”

“This is where you get dazzled. Freuth here is extremely dazzled,” Breeng said.

“I’m double dazzled.” Freuth’s eyes still pointed forward, stance still rigid.

“Triple dazzled.”

“The dazzlement is rising.”

Breeng licked his lipless mouth eagerly. “Your aswang task mission is the maiden task mission of the Good Guys’ new gamma squad team.” His face electrified. “The Gooder Guys.”

“The Gooder Guys?” Legion lifted a finger. “How can I put this?” Seconds ticked by. There wasn’t a polite way to ask. “Let’s keep thinking.”

Breeng’s self-satisfied grin didn’t wane. “What’s wrong with the Gooder Guys?”

“Well, for starters, gooder is as much a word as nurple.”

“It’s a real mouth word. I’ve heard it. As in ‘do-gooder,’ ‘ne’er-do-gooder,’ and the name of the famous linguistics book, You’ll Mouth-Speak Gooder: A Guide to Gooder English.” Breeng looked impressed with himself, as if he weren’t wearing a bee hat. “That last one has it twice, so I score double points.” He folded his arms.

“Those don’t count. Power Plant said the first two on live broadcast, and I’m pretty sure you just made up the other. Couldn’t you come up with a better, more...existing...word?” Legion scanned Breeng’s staunch expression. He wasn’t convincing him. “Use it in a sentence.”

“I’ll mouth-speak gooder by book-reading You’ll Mouth-Speak Gooder.” Breeng consulted Freuth with an incredulous look as if Legion didn’t get it. He shook his head and spread his hands in surrender, the medals on his breast jangling. “We can’t change the name. We’ve used it on all the marketing brochures and toy merchandise.” He reached into a pocket and produced a slender datasheet. “Take a look.”

Legion took the datasheet and activated it. It hardened and blanched from transparent red to white as it booted up with a trumpet declaration. An advertisement spilled across its surface, and it announced, without bursting into laughter, “The Gooder Guys, making our galaxy a little gooder...one task mission at a time.” This was the marketing equivalent of staring into Medusa’s gaze.

Breeng breathed in, as if soaking up the tagline. “Freuth, you ever wonder if there’s a more perfect word name?”

“I’ll start wondering now, Field Marshal. Tell me when I should stop.”

Legion regarded the ad, on which five silhouettes posed, one definitely Freuth by the way it shone. “Where are these Gooder Guys staying? All the empty rooms in our barracks are being fumigated thanks to an oversight IP made placing the station’s insectarium next to a dynamite factory.” Never mind. “Look, I can’t enter the field. I’ve got a platter of cheeses to work through.” Cue scarfing up a few slices of...ah, Swiss. “On top of that, I’ve got three Bad Guy prisoners to manage. Multipurpose is one, and I still have to alert the food court not to ventilate, or we’ll have a very hostile escape attempt to deal with.”

“Ah, yes, the Bad Guy person prisoners.” Breeng seemed to salivate at the mention. Indeed, drool thickened when he bit his lower lip in a fake show of consideration. Legion could tell his mind had already concluded his thought. “They can serve as an advantage asset. We’ll bring them along too.”

“Wait, what?” Legion threw the datasheet aside. Still activated but sensing no one held it anymore, it deactivated with a forlorn trumpet moan as it slid to the floor. “They’re Bad Guys. We don’t bring Bad Guys on missions. It’s a policy, if you can imagine.”

“Then unimagine the policy.” Breeng slipped a hand onto Legion’s uniformed hip, so Legion faked a cough to slide it away. He felt a phantom burn, as if Breeng had left a taint. “Person soldier, our mission is to retrieve a bioweapon on Station Zilcho, Bad Guy zone territory. We’ll need at least one of those Bad Guys for on-the-field knowledge intel.”

“Sir, one of them gets drunk on oxygen, another thinks he has a hyperability but has the hyperability only to brag about it, and the last one’s motto is ‘I don’t move, I ninja.’ He does neither.”

“Yes, now I mind-remember.” Breeng snapped his fingers, the pads on his fingertips slurping the sound. “Detritus is the one who mouth-claims he explodes willingly, and Wasted is the one who butt-farts soil?”

“No, the soil farter is our pilot, Mabel. Okay, picture someone so old that hydration no longer works because liquids pool in the wrinkles of her stomach lining—”

“Take Detritus. He’s a reluctant person ally, right? He’ll make a fine addition once we incentivize him with gratuity stomach food.” Breeng produced two shrink-wrapped packages from his pocket. Two Foodblock-brand snack cakes. “Does he prefer almas caviar or cape lobster with lemon?”

Legion eyed the snack cakes. One sizzled with orange frosting leaking from its tubelike center. The other just sizzled. “I think he’d prefer a good kick in the teeth over these.” And sizzled. “Because that’s precisely what these are.”

Breeng snatched one back into his pocket. “Lobster it is.” He put the other cake in a special place: another pocket. “Now, let’s move. Your new squad team awaits in your hanger. Oh, and let me summon one last soldier officer.” At this, Breeng again smiled that royal-flush-winning smile.

So, anyway, life did that sometimes.

* * *

The gabber in Hearse’s ear clattered its silly status message about an unlisted callsign. This device would do well to not sully his oral cavity with its foolish unlisted blah-blah. He tapped the gabber bud, and it erected its mouthpiece and earpiece. “State your business, fool. And waste not my time, for I am Hearse, the bounty hunter who always delivers the body. Unless this is Fire Ninety-Two Dot Nine, in which case, ‘The Fire’s got the best beats on the dial and up-to-the-minute weather and traffic at work, home, and in between.’” That vacation giveaway was his and his alone.

“Agent person Hearse, it’s Breeng.” Breeng’s voice, with syllables spoken for sinister effect, creaked like the door of a haunted mansion. “Our task mission is a go. Report to B-Osprey for briefing, task-mission parameters, and sampling of the Force-Fed Pauper’s new sriracha sauce.” The voice dropped a sinister tone. “As well as your primary task mission.”

Hearse’s primary! He was sent here to dispose of someone, but only at a certain time. Until then, he was to pose as that someone’s bodyguard.

“Your disposal of target Legion launches after this important word message from Goon Security,” Breeng said.

Chapter Five: You’re Hired

That green-skinned, no-haired, suction-fingered, liver-spot-headed crocker, Legion. What a green-skinned, no-haired, suct—Crap, Detritus shouldn’t have used all the good insults in that first part. See? He was so livid, that green-skinned, no-haired crocker had him insulting in circles!

And stomping in them. Detritus paced his smothering cell, no bigger than a walk-in closet except without useless shoes or old high-school football uniforms. Nah, just a cot, a nightstand, a glass of water with dead insects floating in it, a toilet, and that pillow that hated his face. He cracked a fist against the cell’s shield screen. It blinked up a notification: he had three more outbursts before he went in timeout, but he could purchase more through PayPal.

Detritus plopped onto the cot. The cot resisted rigidly enough to amplify a shockwave up his tailbone. Kicking the nightstand didn’t knock it over, only rattled it and spat dust. But it made him feel good.

He watched his hands form claws without his command. If Legion were in this cell right now, Detritus would dig out his larynx. Same with Pincushion. Detritus thought they were cohorts, him and that prickly turncoat. Pincushion was supposed to go to bat for him and Wasted. He called everyone brother, but he didn’t know the meaning of the word. Look where his “brotherhood” had landed Detritus: arrested. Detritus couldn’t wait to make Legion and Pincushion pay.

He grunted. Licked his lips. “Hey, buck,” he called into the cell behind him. “Buck?” The stone walls weren’t homey, but they sure were sound resistant. “Buck!”

A snort. Someone gagged awake in an adjacent cell. “Huh? Whatdayawant?” Crockin’ Multipurpose.

“Not you, make-believe ninja. Go back to dreamin’ about eating your weight in pavement. I meant the buck who I call buck, not the buck who I ain’t call buck.” Detritus waited for Multipurpose to settle back into whatever dreamy waffle house was crowning him king—probably all of them—and then, a silent moment later, he pitched his voice in the other direction. “Buck!”

Ugh. Forget it. Sound was entombed in this cell. Besides, Detritus didn’t even know what he’d say to his distant cousin, best friend, three-time beer-javelin champion, Wasted. So lonely since the after-school program had vamoosed. He twisted his mouth. At least Shaniqua scored a cool A on her history test. Proud of that kid.

The detainment block’s door shushed aside. Who was it? Legion, Pincushion, one of these other freakin’ freaks? Detritus didn’t check. He welled up his anger, like boiling water frothing out of a covered pot. He fitted his teeth, pressed his lips together, pounded his knee. Oh, man, if it was Legion, Detritus would unleash a piece of his mind on that green-skinned, no-haired, suction-fingered, liver-s—Okay, time to sign up for that insult class he’d heard about.

A shadow darkened his cell. What nerve Legion had coming back here.

“Harry Tuskell?”

And saying his real name.

“Bad Guy person generic?”

And calling him a person generic.

“Born March fifteenth, 9066?”

And knowing his bir—This wasn’t Legion, was it?

Detritus looked at the guy who had clomped up to his cell. He didn’t know the visitor, but he recognized the uniform, which pinned him as some Intergalactic Protection really-higher-up. He was another green-skinned, no-haired, suction-fingered crocker, same as Legion, but with fewer liver-spot splotches on his forehead those Trioxidillians got with worry. He wore a bee hat. Even though Detritus sat and this guy stood, they looked face to face.

The light singed Detritus’s eyes. He blinked away their dryness. “Yeah? Who’re you?”

“I am Field Marshal Horcross Breeng.” The uniformed suction-fingered crocker stood with hands clasped behind his back, decorations hanging from a proud left breast, and a smile as fake as a “lifelike” doll’s. An ad for some dating ap called Hurry the Crock Up rejoiced on his right breast. “I’ve got a deal offer for you...if you don’t want to be cooped in this cell.” Half o’ this Breeng’s mouth smiled. The other half stiffened. “And I’ve got a snack cake for you: sour orange.”

Detritus scrutinized the package. Back up at this Breeng. Back down at the package. “Sour oranges are almost lemons.” Back up at Breeng. “I still want it.”

Chapter Six: Took Them Long Enough

His eyes ached to open. They felt like adhesive slurping apart. And where was he? So many machines around, he thought he’d been plunked into the middle of his own playground. Already his mind bustled in a metro of schemes. Hook that wire up to this beeping thing, the beeping thing over to that spleeping thing, that spleeping thing to the honking thing, and the honking thing that turned out was a goose into that creepy Gharalgian wearing sunglasses indoors and a plumbing-just-exploded stare.

He always wanted to wake up to one of those stares. Kind of a letdown actually.

Where was he? Hospital gear flocked him. He lay on a stiff mattress, two or three pillows kinking his neck. Heartrate levels on a monitor wigwagged from the output of a microchip pricking him under his jaw. A spaghetti-thin tube hung from a bag and led into his arm, like home delivery of his favorite food: sugar. But the bland kind: medical sugar. Two visitor’s chairs sat along a wall, one the creepy guy occupied. Definitely in a hospital. Fine time for that. And a handcuff, which encased his entire hand up to the wrist, tethered him to a bed rail. Oh, and a bed rail. What bed needed a rail? The hospital really wanted to make sure he didn’t get out. This would interfere with his long-term ambition: getting free pizza today.

All this equipment in here, and he couldn’t break anything.

Rhythmic beeping sang its song, the machines coming together for a mechanical sonata. Other than the clock’s soft ticks that disappeared as soon as they came, only the medical equipment gave this room life. And the guy whose chin shifted as if he wanted to speak something both official and fun killing.

“Mr. Abends?” Crap. Right on both. The Gharalgian stood, hand tapping a breast button that flickered out a holographic badge. His voice rode high, like any Gharalgian’s. “I’m Agent Firxolamo Lockton with Intergalactic Protection security and Napalm Jetpacks.” Of course he was security: he wore sunglasses indoors.

Right, right. Jeffy Abends, super awesome Good Guy field agent Power Plant. Memory returned to him as he shifted in bed to relieve the cold ache under one buttock. He swallowed to moisten his throat. Even moving his jaw felt like tiny claws scratching the inside of his mouth. Swallowed more. Put up the hold-on-a-minute finger to the security agent. Swallowed more. Tongue felt like an emery board. Okay, here went nothing. “Name’s Jeffy.” If there was anything he wasn’t named, it was mister. After all these years, he began to think he should hand out pamphlets on this Jeffy naming business.

Lockton tapped the breast button again. The badge zapped out. “Yes, I’m aware it is, Mr. Abends.”

“Dude, I just gones through this name thing.” Power Plant couldn’t believe this. “Ya must gots the wrong guy if I a mister.”

“I assure you, you are the Mr. Abends I’m looking for.” Lockton pulled out a datasheet and tapped it on. “You are Jeffrey Cooper Abends, born May twenty, 9076. Serving as Field Agent Power Plant with the Good Guys. Younger brother of the late Mark Joel Abends. Two-time winner of Best Collateral Damage at the Hyperperson Awards. Professional house sitter whose qualifications include ‘shooing out all the animals he let in in the first place,’ ‘locking the door maybe,’ and ‘making sure the place isn’t on a lot of fire.’” He deactivated the datasheet and slid it back into his pocket. “What do you last remember, Mr. Abends?”

“Nots bein’ Mr. Abends.” Now that Power Plant’s brain adjusted, all feeling flooded back, as if someone flicked a switch. Bruises throbbed on a dozen injuries. He probed his tongue through a gap in his teeth. Muscles flashed in aches. His side cried under bandages that wrapped mending ribs. And his head felt as if someone had stitched it back together.

He tongued more saliva around to prepare himself to speak again. “I remembers rescuing my best friend Jakey from the Bad Guys when Jakey went to Station Zilcho for somes reason he’d better explain in detail and with offers of candy.” He licked his lips, feeling a scar accenting one. “Durings the rescues mission, I gots beat up so trouncingly—that word’s gonna catch on—I blacks out. Afters that, I figures out the Caramilk secret an’ rode arounds on a rocket skateboard with my rock band. That’s all I remembers. Where’s Ace ats, anyways?” He searched the room, double-checked the chairs, heard his neck crick when he examined the back corners. “He’s usually the dude whats around when’s I wake up, make sure I don’t blow stuffs up before a balanceds breakfast.”

The security guard approached, security shoes tapping security steps on the linoleum. “Mr. Khouri isn’t here.” Mr. Khouri? This security guard was screwing up all the names. “Mr. Abends”—and he did it on purpose—“you’re here because you sustained immense damage: several concussions that caused a near-explosive flare-up of your hyperability, lacerations to your forehead, internal injuries, cracked ribs poking several organs, critically low levels of Lactard’s new Strawberry Berry.” Out came a yogurt tube that Lockton proudly clutched forward. “Because it’s not redundant when there’s twice the berry crammed into every glug.” He placed the tube aside. “You are thus far almost healed, but you sustained so much injury you nearly died. You’ve been comatose for three days.”

“Whats?” Power Plant threw himself forward, the feeding tubes like whips now. “Three days? Whats the crock? I missed the weekend for this?”

“It’s Saturday.”

“Oh, man, that was close.” Power Plant collapsed back.

“Mr. Abends, you’ve undergone several surgeries to stabilize you and rebuild your skull. Your body is healing with a mixture of proteins, sugars, hormones, hyperability suppressants, and nanobots. Now that you’re stable, the staff will release you in hours—yes, mere hours—at which point you’ll enter my custody. Mr. Abends, three days ago, you were discharged from service with the Good Guys. Since Intergalactic Protection owns the Power Plant trademark, you are no longer to identify as Power Plant.” Lockton’s hand fell to his hip, where a pistol snuggled in a holster. “Mr. Abends, you’re under arrest.”

“Huh,” Power Plant said. The machines counted moments with beeps and electronic gossip. “’Bout time.”

Chapter Seven: Just Say “Here”

Legion stepped up to B-Osprey’s access port. The Good Guys kept an armada of ten Fireball mil-trans, five in working order, two whose engines flooded, and one that smelled like bleach. B-Osprey was one of the newer ones, so he didn’t know what category it fell in.

He wasn’t sure what to expect out of this new team, so he squeezed that Alaphan necklace dangling around his collar and stepped in. A cloudy stuffiness immediately plunged into his nostrils, the usual dander from whatever cat Mabel had allowed to crawl in here. This time something had crawled in here and dragged a bird with it. Maybe Legion’s would-be wife. If he remembered, Mabel named this cat Mr. Dumpinshadow. It did exactly as advertised. And that explained the choking smell of nitrogen. Legion dared not breathe deeply. Mr. Dumpinshadow likely had celiac disease.

The recruits—seven of them—stopped throwing themselves around tangled lines in the cabin when he entered. A thin, high squeal sang out from...somewhere.

“Soldiers, I’m your new commanding officer, Lt. Col. Legion, leader of the Good Guys. I’m used to leading fire elementals, bomb experts, robots, self-multipliers, a guy whose bucket list was full of things that ironically caused him to kick the bucket, a guy in a robot suit who has yet to pass social sciences”—Mr. Dumpinshadow leaped onto his shoulder and started lapping its fur—“and sixty-three cats.”

He scanned his new squad, none of which had fallen in line or saluted, one of which had the nerve to growl at him, another of which singlehandedly kept the food court afloat. But he wouldn’t mention names (Detritus and Hearse). Or reasons why they shouldn’t be here but IP insisted on it (association with known criminals and the aftereffects of singlehandedly keeping the food court afloat). Also, Mr. Dumpinshadow, enough shedding.

Legion held an activated datasheet in his left hand. Its contents were simple: soldier profiles, mission briefing and parameters, and a list of sponsors who had paid for ad space on this trip. Apparently ad space came as rotating logo placement on the side of the starship. Legion noticed a horror movie on the list. He also noticed their route to Station Zilcho included two nursery schools. He hoped he wouldn’t have to explain the “perfect” timing to any mothers later.

He batted Mr. Dumpinshadow aside so it wouldn’t block the light. Mr. Dumpinshadow thought Legion was playing so batted him back. He raised the datasheet into a different angle, but Mr. Dumpinshadow batted that too. “As you all know, the Good Guys—”

Freuth—nope, the Purple Nurple—cleared his throat and offered a silent correction with an eye sweep to the datasheet.

Legion threw his hands up. “I’m not saying the name. It’s hard enough saying your name since I’m not seven.”

“It’s part of our licensing contract.” The Purple Nurple approached. His fingers found icons on the datasheet—tap, tap, tap...tap...another tap—and pointed along a length of legal spiel. “Right here.” Tap-tap.

Legion scanned through the spiel. He recognized four words. “Oh.” Scrolled down. “There it is.”

He found his way back to the mission briefing in two...three...eighteen taps. “As you all know, the Gooder Guys”—Legion squirmed at the cha-ching he’d just cha-chinged—“are being deployed to a report of...animal abuse? We’re a military outfit. We’re going with animal abuse?”

“It was the closest animal-related charge in our database. The other choices were ‘animal-fighting ring’ and ‘illegally harboring a sharknado,’” said the Purple Nurple again. With a straight face.

“Take a seat.”

“You got it, el capitaine.” The Purple Nurple saluted and sat cross-legged on the floor. Mr. Dumpinshadow trotted into his lap. They nose-bopped.

“How about anything from the bioweapon category?” Legion clicked his tongue, scanned the datasheet, came back up—The Purple Nurple bore a litter of claw marks over his face. Mr. Dumpinshadow was missing. “Purple Nurple, it’s just a cat. How?”

“I tugged its tail.” The Purple Nurple winced when he poked a deep cut. “It was so tempting.” He poked it again.

“Everyone, please direct your attention to the windshield.” Back to the datasheet. Another two taps, and Legion transferred its display to the mil-tran’s windshield. Nope. A bad tap sprawled it across the jumbotron in the rear. Backed out. Chose B-OSPREY from the list of receivers. “Hold on.” Enter login password. If memory served, it was the same name as the transport itself. Not secure, but what else could you expect from the same system administrator whose only way out of a toxic relationship with their haunt control was the destruction of the haunt control’s hardware? Okay, datasheet was establishing connection, establishing cone—Connected. Accept terms and conditions. He looked up at the windshield. And the image was off center.

Legion tapped a display of Station Zilcho. The display on the windshield mimicked the datasheet’s. “This is a search-and-acquire assignment. Our acquisition target is an aswang demonic creature, last seen on February twenty-sixth, dining on Bad Guys and not using a napkin. Our secondary objective is brand recognition. So everyone shout loudly the names Letchtech, Space Cow, and Cardboard Box Coffins.” The cha-chinging gave Legion a clammy headache.

Legion tapped to an image of the aswang. The windshield image followed. He refused to glimpse at its face. Its violently repulsive features were a nightmare casserole: nostrils torn and joined into one, open sores erupting everywhere, eyes spreading crimson veins from soul-hollow centers, zigzagging teeth sprouting in all directions, matted fur, and a meaty tongue like a drooling triangle. Beside it blossomed an aerial-view floorplan of the mission zone on Station Zilcho, including Brainiac’s lab.

“The aswang can’t die permanently. It reincarnates in a new form. Its previous form was a rabbit. As far as our intel, the aswang will not reincarnate as long as its brain and heart are separated. Our entry into enemy territory is at the target’s last-known position: their scientist’s lab, in the same building as their hangar. We locate what we need and get out.”

Legion tapped again. Bad Guy scientist Brainiac’s face wiped away the aswang on the display, a full-frontal shot that rolled thirty degrees one way, thirty the other, back and forth. Statistics spilled beside the image: hyperabilities, physical condition, known associates, mutual friends with whomever logged into this datasheet previously, and that she studied horticulture abroad. It ended with a list of likes and dislikes Legion assumed matched the gratuities the Gooder Guys brought along. You know, for marketing reasons. That one cha-chinged right in his inner ear.

“This is our secondary target, Bad Guy mad scientist Brainiac. Known qualities are the use of her hyperability, a love affair with Skittles, and vacuuming the garden. I’m pretty sure that last one is a mistake. She has operated with the Bad Guys since February tenth. She is our likeliest intel holder on the aswang’s whereabouts. If we can’t locate our primary target, we take the scientist hostage and extract the intel we need.

“In summary, we land, storm the lab, establish basecamp, acquire our primary target—or our secondary target if need be—and leave. Any questions?” None. “Good. Now roll call.” Legion clicked to enter the soldier profiles. A recognizable Terran appeared on the datasheet, his image rotating to show all angles. “Lt. Col. Kyle Freuth, aka the Purple Nurple.” The datasheet showed him wearing his costume-party attire.

The Purple Nurple stood and planted hands on hips on his outfit that didn’t scream “purple” but screamed “nurple” way too loudly and proudly. The outfit’s chest drew attention away from the rest of the bizarreness banquet with protruding steel...nurples. “Present.”

Legion clicked to the next profile. “Hearse, aka...Hearse.” He jerked his head back and dropped the datasheet to his thigh. “Your real name is Hearse?”

Hearse whipped out of his seat, sneer aimed as if down the crosshairs of a sniper rifle. “Yes, because I always deliver the body.” He accented his statement with a click of his handgun. “And Mediterranean souvlaki during body-delivery off-season.”

“That’s technically not an aka, but anyway.” Next profile: tap. Ah, their on-team security breach. “Harold Tuskell, aka Detritus.”

Detritus, still not embarrassed about himself, sat sideways on his chair, legs draped over its armrest, hand hung over its back and onto the chair behind it. He snorted derisively. “Here.” That rumbling word sounded like a knife at Legion’s throat.

Now for the new introductions. Legion tapped to the next profile: a gangly figure. Fingers reaching well past hips. The build of an acrobatic primate. Chestnut fur from head to bootless toes. Ears ending in near-knifepoint tips. Blue shorts. “Klee, no known civilian name.”

His name serving as a launch code, the gangly acrobat vaulted from his position on the floor. His wiry tail whirled around his waist and tapped his bellybutton, and he squeaked, “BHt LK Pvaz hZgE wL hS yWS CHw LhMF Hvu NUy jzd EKBF KHsk FA Nn AS.” He grabbed the ceiling, hooked two-fingered hands on a utility pipe that protested by hissing steam, and swung. And blathered on: “ErQ a SMe KYE M Ktd XsdV pSI fzl FNeWt M.”

...

Those were words?

Klee’s speech was as gymnastic as him. His profile answered nothing. Birthplace: unknown. Species: unknown. Education: unknown. Training: unknown. Languages: unknown. Talents: soccer. Klee’s specialty was agility and distraction. He possessed a near-precognitive battle intuition, goat-like legs and hooved feet, and the crushing strength of his tail measured in the hundred thousand kilonewtons per meter squared. Legion had no idea what a kilonewton was, but if Klee could hold a gun and paused to breathe sometimes, good enough.

Legion clicked to the next profile and...He squinted at the datasheet to make sure he read this right. “Sanderson Timmer, aka Better Than You? Is that a media name or a playground taunt?” He examined this latest recruit’s smarmy smile, one that reached from his chin up to his eyes, into his forehead, and out his ego.

“Let me tell you what’s the haps, my chief.” A single “heh” bounced Better Than You’s body. He ambled forward with such a showman’s strut that even the lighting in the mil-tran seemed to tilt inward to proclaim him. “Here’s how I do my hyperability.” He clapped a hand on Legion’s shoulder. “I take whatever you do”—he shrugged as a justification for himself—“and do it better. It’s called talent amplification. Like magic sauce.” He threw his arms out as if to bow at a curtain call. Legon wasn’t throwing roses.

Better Than You fluffed his short-cut hair, and then a hand flourished a pointing finger at Legion’s scalp. “For instance, duder, I’m better than you at growing hair.”

“My species doesn’t grow hair.”

“See?” Better Than You threw out his arms. “I’m already explaining my jazz better than you. Let’s try again.” He hopped back and spread his arms to clear some room. “I’ll demonstrate you a thing. You dance?”

“This isn’t a—”

“I amp your dance up. I don’t even stop at eleven. I jump all the way to eleven infinity.” Better Than You’s eyes flickered. “Watch this.” He convulsed into...the Watusi? The Hammer Time? Was he breakdancing? He knocked aside a light panel.

At this point and every point from here on, Legion chose to ignore him. In fact, he reserved the right to retroactively ignore what he’d already seen. He tapped to the next profile, one of a Gharalgian, midthirties, wearing more technological gear than skin. Both of her hands held tubes, devices, detonators, baubles, a Mr. Potato Head. “Santi...Saxi...Strax...You know your own name, aka Workshop.”

He flinched up at the stammering clomps of someone scrambling closer—smack. A Gharalgian attacked him with a hug that could be categorized as a martial-art grapple. He spilled back, on top of him an assault of squeezes, giddiness, and effervescence.

“It’s so exciting to meet you, I’m so happy, it was soooo hard restraining myself until you called me, I mean you’re the Legion of the Good Guys, and I’ve heard so much about you, and we’re totally BFFs already, and”—she interrupted herself only to breathe in and let loose a sharp “squeeee,” the word sharp referring to the pain in Legion’s antennae—“this’ll be so much fun.” She started panting. Loudly and wetly. “I love you. I love all you guys. I love everyone.” As a Gharalgian, her voice shot so high, she sounded as if she breathed helium. “This mission is so LOLable.” She leaped off Legion.

Evidently she was the source of that squeal Legion had heard upon boarding. Orange skinned with dark hair, the woman wore a backpack displaying pincers, needles, antennae, apparatuses, dials, switches, a carpenter’s level, an oil gauge, an army of wrenches, and was that Excalibur poking out the side? This backpack probably held Laserbeak. She wore a steel mouthguard that ended at a point below her chin. Everything clattered. Her profile listed her as a Gharalgian with the hyperability to intuitively generate technological weapons, gadgets and, once at a high-school science expo, a kerosene-powered fart called a stink bomb.

Better Than You caromed past, his strutting chin almost banging against that dance move he gesticulated.

Legion threw his arms up. “My greatest nightmare is now reading roll call in public.”

And the last profile. Oh, someone normal. A Terran, early twenties, with skin as dark mocha as Pincushion’s. The newest recruit on this troop, this Terran was enlisted almost immediately after Mechanism’s attempted cleansing, after Breeng’s promotion. “Carter Bur—” Better Than You bumped past, causing Legion to wonder what dance made him spiral his hands. And made him jerk his knees to his waist. Legion stepped clear. “Carter Burgess, aka Wyvern.”

In the darkened back of the passenger deck, something crunched. A clawed foot thrust out of the curtain of shadow and cracked onto the floor. If the floor weren’t made of spacefaring plastimetals, the foot would have carved into it if it squinched its toes. The room suddenly constricted, as if the hull exhaled to confine Legion. Then the rest of the goliath stepped out, a fifteen-foot behemoth proclaiming its presence with every inch.

Why hadn’t Legion noticed this immense creature until now? He swore, if leading former Good Guy agent Kamikaze hadn’t given him selective sight, Lowensland’s fashion bombs had. Head to foot, this beast was a colossus. A gray dragon with a tinge of red. Check. A growl that threatened to rip you to shreds. Check. A fat tongue that forked one inch from its end. Check. A neck as cabled and as serpentine as a python. Check. Frayed wings as thick as tent canvas that met at webbed hands. Check. Whiskers dangling off jowls like wet spaghetti noodles. Check. Legs like totem poles. Check. Reddened fissures ridging his back like enflamed battle scars. Checkity check. A barbed tail that cleaved the air like a battle axe. Double, triple check. And verification that Legion didn’t wet himself. Check. As a “here,” the thing unleashed an excessive howl, like thousands of bats escaping cavernous entrapment. Legion’s antennae rang.

Better Than You glided right to left as if surfing the mil-tran floor. Was that an electric slide?

Wyvern’s profile indicated a hyperability to morph from Terran to dragon. The variety that didn’t breathe fire, thankfully. Legion had had enough fires when the cookbots set alight every soup he’d ever ordered. Somehow, consommé turned into flambé. Fun times. No, it wasn’t, for the sarcasm illiterate.

Wyvern clomped forward on legs whose stomps threatened to crumple the mil-tran’s landing trestles. Eyes staring flames, the monster poked a talon into Legion’s sternum, which tipped Legion into a chair. His neck crammed that dragon face into their mutual breathing room. “Ya don’t own me, and I ain’t heah to do your dance.” Whoa. Southern twang with a spice of bass snarl, the last drawl Legion expected from this behemoth. “I ain’t no whippin’ boy. Ya heah me?”

“I don’t plan any whippings, and Better Than You’s already dancing.” Legion gulped, hand scrambling for the cross of his Alaphan necklace, eyes scrambling around Wyvern’s rage. He squeezed the cross.

“How do you like them moves, muchacho?” Hunched, Better Than You bopped his head and flapped his elbows like a slow-motion eagle in flight. He cawed.

Wyvern chugged out another breathy snort, hot and acrid, that startled his whiskers. He lumbered back into the shadow.

Alaphus, I don’t want to be eaten, Legion prayed. Just wanted to clarify that.

He filed a finger around his collar to aerate his rising body heat. He deactivated the datasheet. The display on the mil-tran’s windshield beeped off and exposed an unobstructed view of Station One’s hangar. Or at least the damage Janice caused by her spat a few days ago. Also the pockmarks from Power Plant’s performance-art pieces, Cannonsmack and Cannonsmack with a Cracked Skull, and his planned follow-up, Cannonsmack with a Cracked Skull and a Steel Headplate, that last bit at his doctor’s advisement.

“Strap in, everyone. We launch in thirty seconds. And, Better Than You, if you ruin one more dance routine for me—one more—”

“Ain’t happening, el commando.” Better Than You chuckled, strutting right to left behind Legion. “I could launch us in twenty-six seconds.” He circled around to Legion’s front and winked. “Twenty-eight, tops.”

“Are you seriously shoop-shoop-be-dooping?” Legion threw the datasheet down onto a chair. “Now I’ll demonstrate you a thing.” The battle was on.

* * *

The horrendous dancing confirmed it: someone would die this day.

Hearse would deliver a body, that of his longest mission yet, Matross Legion. He watched this daring competition between opponents who should never enter the musical arts. His only comfort was that Legion’s embarrassment would not last much longe—

A haphazard hand cracked across his face.

“The graceless infant named Better Than You, if you thwap me once more, I will wrap your inside organs around your outside ones. Now sit in the corner. You are grounded for the duration of this trip.”

Chapter Eight: Do They Come in Self-Respect Flavor?

February 16, 2084. 8:01 a.m. (Galactic Standard Time).

Wailin’ alarms like teethin’ babies. Gun blasts like popcorn. Brrraaaaappppp like fish stench. At this point, this recruitment hocus pocus was so humdrum, he barely noticed it. Except the fish stench. Heh. That reached new heights when it huffed all in Ripsaw’s nasty face. But crock, that fish aimed to burble out the other end too. What was wit’ Plaster an’ tilapia wrapped in newspaper?

Plaster and his gang was here already fifteen freakin’ minutes, combin’ some white-walled, disinfectant-reekin’ test lab on Terra for their next “inductee.” Sorry, “warrior o’ almighty Continuum.” Was freakin’ hilarious here, back in ancient twenty-first century. They flew cars here. Not transports. Freakin’ cars. Fords an’ Toyotas an’ Hot Wheels. You could order them things online. Some dealership called Tonka was sellin’ yellow dump trucks on the cheap. But not a haunt control or an l-door in sight. Plenty o’ toe fungus, though.

Plaster, ex–Bad Guy an’ current—mouthful, this was—disciple o’ the Lord o’ everythin’ Continuum, followed Blackguard an’ the rest o’ the gang. Since Plaster involved himself wit’ this cult of Continuum, he gleaned a few things. Blackguard, Continuum’s top-level apostle, hopped around space and time—what he called teleportin’ and chronoportin’—and enlisted hyperpeople, startin’ at good ol’ Plaster himself an’ movin’ through Marionette, Ripsaw, Gangrene—oh, there was a freakshow—ex–Good Guy Kamikaze, Fragment, an’ now some other dude from a time before anyone invented a decent drink. An’ here on Terra. Friggin’ Terra, five thousand years before most Terrans immigrated to Stratus Cloud.

His hands as ebony swords, Blackguard took the front. He slashed through security guards in this top-secretive gover’ment lab, some place what didn’t officially exist an’ what experimented on people an’ what didn’t know alarms could be silent. Ow. Plaster swore his hearin’ was kaput.

Blackguard swung them sword arms around like he was collectin’ body parts. Oh, yeah, an’ get this. Blackguard had the hyperability o’ moldin’ his dark-matter body into anywhat he wanted. He used it on dudes like you’d use a blender on fruit.

Hundreds o’ cells lined this lab’s halls, each one trappin’ some “strange, magical freak” wit’ weird mojo. That weird mojo was hyperabilities. But, hey, accordin’ to Blackguard, in this time—some era what smelled like old cheese—hyperabilities wasn’t gonna be acknowledged for friggin’ a long time.

Wit’ automatic weapons, guards popped outta doors, dressed in green armor wit’ bulletproof paddin’ an’ plastic visors on gray helmets. For all the good them guns did, they was like sprayin’ spitballs at Plaster. Plaster didn’t know what he found funnier: guards what thought these BB guns could penetrate his solid hide, or them expressions when they realized they wasn’t. They looked like they stepped into a bathroom an’ weren’t impressed wit’ the previous guy.

Plaster didn’t blame the guards shakin’ in them boots. He threw in a smooch at the next guard. Plaster wasn’t winnin’ a beauty show, an’ he had fun with that. Years ago, he suffered from some flesh-hungry condition called epidurmic poisonin’. Felt like vinegar dribblin’ into papercuts whenever he moved. So he got hogtied into some experiment what cured him an’ also made him this monstrously durable stud. But it caused his skin to constantly melt an’ constantly replenish. Made him into a wax statue wit’ a face like a skull.

So he ended up wit’ this gang, fightin’ a military of rent-a-idiots, slicin’ ’em as they burst into the hall wit’ guns that used—what was this stuff?—gunpowder. Marionette didn’t touch ’em. She just moaned at her designer nails, wonderin’ if her manicure would survive the fight. So far, seven outta ten nails had snapped, an’ that was just from usin’ doorknobs. Ha, doorknobs. So used to twistin’ noses off dudes, she probably ain’t never done that to a door before. First time they came across one, she called it a door tumor.

Over the sobbin’ wah-wah of the alarm, Plaster grabbed a guard what came out a side door. “Heave-ho.” He threw the guard back. Guard pinwheeled down a staircase and—maybe Plaster imagined the sound—cracked his head on every step all the way into the floor below. “Zis new guy anywhere close? Spent too long in places as loud as this. Can’t believe this, but I hope we break the next guy out of a library.”

“Our new brother is not far from our position. Stay by my side, army,” Blackguard said over his shoulder. Stay by his side? Nuh uh. Blackguard smelled so much like rotten flesh, next to him, Plaster’s fish burps smelled like candy.

Plaster cracked a fist into another security guard’s head. By cracked, he meant he twisted the dude’s neck in a one-eighty. “Seventy-eleven.”

“You count murders like you count your pushups, you crockin’ Terran pinko.” Ripsaw, racist entertainment on two legs, whipped past on his hyperability o’ superspeed. His media outfit included blades along his sleeves an’ legs, an’ he used ’em to slice throats. Every so often, he stopped to carve his name into a wall. He usually got to i before Blackguard yelled, “Do that on your own time, Brother Ripsaw, or so help me, I will eat you.”

“Shut your mouth, Ripsaw.” Plaster grabbed another guard, hauled him up, and crunched him piledriver-style onto his knee. Behind him, Fragment, that Virillian devoid o’ sound an’ emotion, leaped over a body and spewed icelike shards from his fingers at a guard. One o’ them shards stabbed into the snack machine, which clattered out a Snickers. “Lemme count how I wanna count.”

“Tell me what comes after seventy-eleven.”

Plaster fired Ripsaw the stupid look. “Seventy-eleven two.” Plaster grabbed the Snickers before that racist idiot could. Now who was laugh—Oh, man. Wasn’t a Snickers. It was a Brown Log. Friggin’ rip-off brands.

Another guard emerged, blastin’ that rapid-fire machinegun. Bullets spritzed him like seltzer water. Plaster reared around, stabbed the Brown Log right in the friggin’ eye. Aw, crock. It broke apart on the guy’s visor. Now chocolate blotched up his fingers. Brown Log couldn’t even candy-bar right. Frig, where Plaster came from, candy bars doubled as shivs. Half of ’em hid one.

“We have arrived, brothers and sister.” Blackguard shifted toward a door. He ignored two guards what came out the end of the hallway, rat-a-tat-tattin’ bullet fire into his side. His side spat out them bullets like he was rubber an’ I know you are but what glue am I.

Blackguard stared at the door a sec. Hard to tell what he was thinkin’. His face looked like someone sanded down a reg’lar face to shallow bumps. So when Plaster caught a sly smile on this pitch-black, one-track-minded android o’ Continuum, he swore it was a trick o’ the light.

“Guard my flank, my brothers and sister. I must speak with this new sheep of Continuum’s flock without the nuisance of bullets in my backside.”

Ripsaw zipped ahead to Blackguard’s left, challengin’ anyone to come down that length o’ hallway amid the angry lights and angrier alarm. Fragment hustled past Plaster, flipped over the feral Gangrene, an’ planted hisself next to Ripsaw. Plaster shrugged an’ took position on this side o’ Blackguard. Gangrene padded up to Blackguard’s calf, prob’ly lookin’ for an ear scratch or a biscuit. He growled at a guard until he realized the guard was a cardboard cutout tellin’ kids to stay offa drugs. Then he lifted a leg an’ whizzed on it. Marionette weaved fingers through her hair and clicked her tongue. “Dawg-nabbit, I got someone’s tongue stuck in mah do. Now, how’m I supposed to get this out? Stylists ain’t plumb gonna touch this heah frazzle with a ten-foot shampoo bottle.” Thanks for the help, Marionette, ya fricasseed guinea pig. Or whatever. Southern insults was another language. She caught Plaster’s look. “Don’t you give me the sass eye, sugah.”

Blackguard reared his sword arms. He smirked, hissed a “yessss,” then thrust his blade arms into the door, through the steel what shrieked anguish, out the other side. He yanked back, an’ the door burst off its brackets. Steel girders grippin’ the door snapped an’ skated across the hall, twisted into two-inch-thick knots. Still caught in Blackguard’s swords, the door split in two when he retracted his hands. The left side slid off. The right side caught itself on Blackguard’s wrist. He wiggled, squirmed, shook. That door was stuck.

With contempt, Blackguard regarded the alarm speaker snuggled into a brace in the ceilin’ and sliced a blade into its dotted face. It imploded, frame cracked, an’ choked out sparks. The alarm stopped wailin’. The silence cut in so sharp, almost wit’ a sound of its own. He slid the blade out, an’ the disemboweled speaker vomited wires an’ whatnots.

Blackguard’s sword arms slithered, wriggled wit’ life, like a swarm of insects crawled around inside. The blades quivered back into their regular shape of murder arms endin’ in massacre hands. He tensed them arms—an’ brought the left one clappin’ down against the debris stuck on the right wrist. It snapped. And a one-foot ring o’ door still cuffed that wrist. Whatever day Blackguard was havin’, it wasn’t a lucky one.

Blackguard strode into the cell. Gangrene trotted in and planted itself next to Blackguard. Blackguard reached down an’ scratched it. It cooed. “Yes, you are a good Gangrene, yes.” Plaster wouldn’ta figured Blackguard was a dog person. Plaster was a hot-dog person.

“Plaster, you are equipped with the treats.” Blackguard snapped his tarry fingers. “Bestow upon Gangrene perhaps a cheese-and-steak biscuit.” Gangrene heard his favorite word, treat, an’ Plaster’s favorite, steak. He barreled outta the cell and skidded against Plaster’s leg, tail waggin’, tongue waggin’, tongue piddlin’, somethin’ near the tail piddlin’.

“Hey-hey-hey.” Plaster yanked his leg outta the way o’ that stream what sizzled acid on the floor and dissolved the tiles. “Fine. Hold ’em horses one second, ya supersized poodle.” Plaster rooted around the treat bags in his satchel. What flavors they got? Roadside carrion, leftovers after a hyena feast, bottom o’ the feed bowl, hint o’ taste o’ gravy—ah—cheese an’ steak. When Plaster plucked out the bag, Gangrene yipped an’ piddled more acid. Plaster pitied everyone downstairs.

From inside the cell, this detainee, some twerp they lookin’ for named Vince Smith, stammered. He choked his little-kid voice. “What’s going on?” Them words sounded wet wit’ fear.

Blackguard expelled one single chuckle. “Good afternoon—”

“It’s mornin’, sugah.” Marionette tossed that at Blackguard, still untanglin’ the tongue outta her waist-length hair cabled into a ponytail. “Didn’t ah say ah felt something lickin’ me when we showed up? Here it is.” A guard threatenin’ her down the barrel of a gun guided her attention. Her hand shot up, and through her hyperability to control livin’ tissue, she slammed the guard against the ceiling. He smacked back onto the floor as dead weight.

“Then good morning, dear Vincent.”

Plaster ain’t see what was happenin’, who this Vince was. Crock, he hustled the treat outta the package. “Hey, wait at least until I feed the family pet.” He balanced the treat on Gangrene’s snout—“Stay, sttaaaaaayyyy”—an’ backed off a couple easygoin’ steps. “Aaaaannnn’...eat. Good boy.” Gangrene snapped up—caught the biscuit in midair, an’ gobbled it up like it was fine cuisine. Plaster sniffed another treat. “Hey, no wonder ya go gaga over these things. They smell like real steak.”

Blackguard shook his arm again. No go. That door wasn’t goin’ nowhere. Plaster chuckled. He clomped into the room, and—Whoa, get a load o’ the new guy.

Vince Smith, a delicate kid as thin as a pine needle, no older’n fifteen. He cowered in the corner, squeezed into a ball on his collapsed bed, sheets yanked up around his face. His frantic gaze zigzagged around Blackguard an’ then Plaster. The twig prob’ly weighed a hunnert pounds. Thin, blond hair, pale like an eroded seashell, looked frazzled. An’ if them arms claspin’ them blankets got any reedier, they’d be cotton swabs. Oh, which reminded Plaster, he dug a finger into his ear. Ah, got that out finally.

Outside, Ripsaw sliced through another guard. Smack, sssshhhhhhllltt, gurgle. Sounded like he was openin’ a soda can.

Blackguard approached the new guy. Vince kicked away, as if he could meld wit’ the wall behind him. Breathin’ became hysterical, expression became hilarious. His eyes an’ cheeks pleaded a weeipin’ no-no-no-no. Plaster’d have fun freakin’ this toddler out.

“Dear Vincent, be not afraid save for the racial expletives that spew from Brother Ripsaw’s mouth,” Blackguard said. “Warning: he will complain about pinkos.”

“Wait, are we adding another one?” Outside the room, Ripsaw punched a wall.

Blackguard clasped his hands together. “We are not here to harm you, Vincent. Brother Plaster, are you seriously eating Gangrene’s treaties?”

Plaster snapped off another bready chunk. “These taste like the real deal.” He mashed it into his mout’ before Blackguard could wrestle it away.

“Mind not Brother Plaster’s manners or the smells that waft from his gullet. He ate fish for lunch.” Blackguard pinched his molehill-shaped nose. “It does not agree with him.” And Blackguard would smell better if he rolled around in dead skunks. So what?

Gangrene padded in, pustules an’ boils on skin dribblin’ ooze all over the floor.

“Poor Vincent, the mere age of thirteen and incarcerated here in this testing facility for almost half that. Abandoned by your family, who was petrified to learn about your—as they put it—‘sorcery of teleportation.’” Blackguard lifted a hand to his brow in a show o’ grief, hammin’ it up for his audience like he was on stage. “If anyone knows teleportation does not make you a monster, it is I.”

Plaster chucked another biscuit in. Good ol’ steak. An he tossed one at Gangrene, ’cause, hey, dude had learned to shake an’ do poopies outside.

“H-h-how do you know this-s?” Vince trembled them words out on no more’n a shallow breath.

Blackguard’s words carried a smile. “I serve an omnipotent power, an all-comprehending, all-present master who wishes you untold peace, who desires to bring you unto His fold. That master is Lord Continuum, and He offers sanctuary from this soulless facility, freedom from the confinement imposed on you simply for being you.

“Society labels you a monster for the ‘sorcery’ you exhibit. That sorcery is merely a hyperability, something your species will not regard as anything other than modern-day witchcraft or whose functions you won’t define for almost three thousand more years. In the time period from which most of your new brotherhood harkens, hyperabilities are celebrated. But here you rot, deemed a danger merely for being human.”

“Dude’s hummin’?” Plaster snapped a biscuit in half. Wow, the carrion really came through.

“Human, Brother Plaster.” Blackguard looked as if he wanted t’ call him Brother Idiot. Fine, so long as Plaster called him Brother What-the-Crock Smell. “Human is the antiquated term for Terran. It is where we get terms such as superhuman.”

“Oh, like my burps. So thanks, Mr. Professor.” Plaster tongued a biscuit aroun’ his mouth. He worked to swallow it an’ raised the next biscuit to the light. Tossed it up. Down the hatch, through the gum—Aw, crock, it fell on the floor. “Gangrene, fetch. Ha. Now I see why Continuum keeps ya around.”

Blackguard ignored Plaster. Prob’ly a good idea. Plaster’d give this one to old Tarry. “Dear Vincent, my sovereign ruler, Continuum, offers you liberation and a fully-stocked breakroom fridge. All you need do...” Blackguard reached out the hand wit’out the door attached. “...is accept His gentle, loving reach. Submit to His embrace, and He will unshackle you. Allow Him to bring you away from this suffering.”

This Vince, his stare like a floodlight, checked Blackguard’s outstretched hand. Looked like he wouldn’t take it, maybe on account o’ wonderin’ if touchin’ Blackguard would make him stench up like dead bodies too. If it helped, he could have a biscuit.

“We will not harm you, I assure you.”

Plaster grabbed another biscuit. “’Cept maybe sting ya nostrils.” Crunch, crunch.

“Consume your treats in silence, Brother Plaster. You’ve got crumbs on your chin.”

“An’ you got half a door as a bracelet.” At least these treats helped the fish digestion. Now he didn’t have to clench.

Blackguard didn’t never look away from Vincent, that soft smile still wormed across his lips. “Allow us to lovingly welcome you into Continuum’s army as its newest member, Brother Transit.”

“An’ ya get free biscuits.” Plaster held one ou—

“Brother Plas—”

“Yeah, yeah. Consume yer treats in silent.”

Vince still stared at Blackguard’s hand. His teeth chattered. Ha. His teeth actually chattered, them fifty-watt eyes fixated like Blackguard’s hand would widdle back inta a sword an’ gut him. Dude, either take the thing or not, but figure your crock out.

Finally, wit’ an easy-does-it shift, he placed his hand in Blackguard’s.

“Excellent, dear Vincent. You have made the sage choice.”

“Hear, hear, ’cause now we can leave this stinkhole.” Plaster slurped the next biscuit down.

“Brother Plaster, you finished the entire bag!”

Chapter Nine: A Well-Soiled Machine

Surprisingly, B-Osprey had slipped through Station Zilcho’s defenses without a peep, peep being literal since Lowensland’s current enthusiasm was chicken warfare. That explained all the fried chicken that warmonger had eaten on his broadcasted threats. And that explained all the greasy fingerprints in battle.

As well as an insistent commercial-travel mood courtesy of Galaxy Wing Air, B-Osprey came with camouflage software preinstalled. Legion planned to activate it before Station Zilcho’s defenses flew the atomic coop. But, judging from how Station Zilcho loomed closer with no hubbub, Lowensland had been again distracted from activating all defense systems by “getting his hot paws” on those “ultra-expensive 3D glasses” for his new “virtual-reality environment” he boasted about. Turned out it was a diving mask, and he’d been groping around his pantry.

Legion leaned toward the windshield, examining Station Zilcho’s growing details as B-Osprey sneaked in. They hadn’t yet reached the atmospheric bubble, that gooey exosphere holding in atmospheres when a spatial body’s gravity wasn’t strong enough. They’d arrived in record time: managed the trip in under even what Breakneck Astrosports estimated. Legion had a new appreciation for carpool lanes.

Legion turned away from the windshield. “Better Than You, that’s enough burpees.” He smacked a hand to his forehead. Mention a bet about doing one thousand burpees you won years ago, and Better Than You would try to one-up you. Legion should mention that bet was a joke. He would after the hundredth. Maybe.

Klee had bounced around the cabin the whole trip, even during the drink service when the Fasten Seatbelts sign was lit. Right now, he hung upside down, prehensile feet wrapped around a ceiling support pipe that groaned at his weight. He slathered his arm with saliva and combed that over his pelt—head, arms, legs—grooming himself like a cat, as if his arm was a washcloth. Workshop piloted, concentrating so hard on landing this beast that her hands strangled the flight gear. Still, she guided B-Osprey with a hyperactive smile. Whenever Freuth—no, the Purple Nurple (Alaphus, please strike that name from public record)—checked his hand, he blinded himself. Whenever he adjusted his pants, he was a hazard. Detritus kept sneering at Legion, and when he didn’t, he shouted the word “Sneer!” He shot Legion the stink eye. And the stink growl. And the stink voice. And the stink stink. Hearse...ugh...never mind Hearse, who yelled at that Fasten Seatbelts sign for infringing on his rights to brood in corners. That left Wyvern, who at last check had sat in three chairs. At once. The dragon had crushed those three chairs. The Fasten Seatbelts sign would have had stern words with Wyvern if it weren’t mourning the death of its comrades. The haunt control was.

“Workshop, take us in slowly and activate camouflage,” Legion said.

“Yes, sir, yes, of course, I’ve been waiting for you to say that, this is so incredimazing!” Workshop sprang out of her seat with an exuberance that produced a boing, rushed at Legion—

“No.” Legion threw up a hand. Workshop skidded to a halt so sharply he heard tires squeal. “I love the hugs. Especially those that make me feel like an empty toothpaste tube. But I need you to pilot, which you can do by sitting down.

“Ooh, good point, you’re sooooo smart.” Workshop tapped Legion’s forehead—“boop”—tittered a quiet laugh, and scrambled back into the piloting chair. In her rush, she sideswiped another chair and spiraled into the dashboard. She strapped in and flicked a couple switches. “These switches are so switchy.” She gasped at a display. “And let’s not forget you, dials. Yes, you’re so round and clicky and—” Her brain shifted midsentence when she breathed in and unleashed a primal cheer. “I love controls!”

“Hold your horses, automatic flush.” Better Than You emerged from the gurgling bathroom after trying to prove he took dumps better than anyone. What happened to his burpee challenge? He crammed past Legion and slapped into the navigator’s chair beside Workshop. “Newbie chief, how about I keep doing whatever I feel like? And I feel like taking five.” He reclined in the chair and drew a stretched slurp from a cup of coffee. Since when could navigator’s chairs recline? The military had taken a hard focus on leisure since Legion had served as a field soldier. Workshop watched Better Than You, who drew the cup back from his lip. It was her coffee, which might explain her excitement. Better Than You wasn’t done snort-laughing at Legion. “That’s good brew I’m enjoying like a pro.” He propped his feet on the pilot controls, stabbing his heels into an ejection knob. And there went the rear row of seats.

Anyway. “Klee, take your seat.” Legion aimed a finger at Klee and then sliced it down on a chair. Klee launched into a chirpy blithering of nonsense that reminded Legion never to talk to him. The nonsense subsided, and so Leg—Nope, Klee was just inhaling.

Thirty-four seconds later, Legion could hear himself think. He stood and paced in front of his squad, hands behind his back. “Men, women, and Klee, attention here. Klee, not sure what you are.” He waved his hands. “You don’t have to tell me.” Hands went down. “Last-minute recap. Control, acknowledge. Display aswang on viewscreen.”

A viewscreen blooped into existence, first as a horizontal line and then shooting down to create a four-by-three-foot surface. It clicked on, loaded up, proclaimed a Gelatinous Jelly Spreads advertisement, played the infomercial, showcased happy kids, jingled “For the discerning sandwich sous-chef” slogan, rolled credits, flashed the company logo, listed at what fine establishments to purchase the product, and then presen—nope, more fine establishments—and then pre—more fine establishments. How many fine establishments carried this thing?

Finally, the aswang appeared, downloaded earlier from the briefing material. It rotated, first left, then right, left again.

Legion averted his gaze. “We’re about to enter the territory of the largest criminal organization in the galaxy. Our mission parameters are simple: search and acquire the aswang.”

“Wait, what’s the word y’all keep sayin’?” Wyvern huffed. “A swank?”

“An aswang. It’s probably the only thing as big as you.”

“Aswank?”

“Aswa—It’s right there on the viewscreen.”

Wyvern looked up where Legion indicated, eyes tearing across the information but not hitting the word. His right eye, that voluminous dragon’s peeper, twitched. “Aswank. Ah said aswank.”

“Aswang. The big block letters at the top.” Legion studied Wyvern’s expression, eyes still not centralizing, right eye pronouncing the tic more. “The giant block letters in white. A-S-W—Just look up at the viewscreen.”

Wyvern whirled away and clambered into the rear, into shadow. “I ain’t readin’ them words.”

“It’s one word!” Legion held his head in his hands. Holy geez, was reading that painful? Anyway. “We will not engage the enemy if possible. Our secondary objective of capturing Brainiac is only if we can’t locate our target. We are here only to extract.”

Legion checked the pilot computer’s overhead display: it estimated three minutes and nineteen seconds until B-Osprey reached touchdown coordinates. Indeed, the atmospheric bubble grew larger, and the overhead display estimated thirty seconds until breach. He glanced at the viewscreen, and it had shifted into its commercial break. It informed the viewer that briefing would resume after these messages and then proceeded into an explosive display of Letchtech’s new line of malware.

Legion continued, enjoying the lack of that bunny rabbit’s cuddly face. Sorry, sanity-contorting face with features like a construction zone. “We believe our intel is current. Since Lowensland hasn’t complained of any tragedies concerning the levels of cereal on Station Zilcho, we’ve deduced the aswang hasn’t eaten and is therefore still dead. Therefore, our mission is simple: move in, establish base camp at its assumed location here”—Legion looked up at—whoops, forgot the floorplan was on break to allow the viewers at home to learn about Insolvency Tax Services—“in Brainiac’s lab. We search, acquire, return to B-Osprey, and head home, making sure to keep separate the brain and heart. If we don’t, well...I’ll just say this thing doesn’t use a knife and fork. But in its defense, utensils only slow it down.”

With a glomp, the starship swam through the atmospheric bubble and exited.

“Control, acknowledge. Deactivate viewscreen.” Legion scanned his crowd. “Recap over, everyone. Are our directives clear?”

“I ain’t readin’, and I ain’t followin’ your orders.” Wyvern huffed smoke through cavernous nostrils and jerked away. Every shift vibrated Legion’s legs like nervous tremors. Oh, wait, those were nervous tremors. “But, by coincidence, I’m plannin’ to do exactly them things you jess said.” His city-flattening paw stamped his breast. “But tha’s because I wanna.”

“As long as we’re clear.” Whatever kept gargantuan dragon monsters happy, Legion decided. The others weren’t much better. Detritus crossed one leg over the other, but at least he’d stopped trying to check his back like a dog chasing its tail. Better Than You slurped his stolen coffee louder. Mr. Dumpinshadow cleaned itself and then hacked up a hairball. Very attentive audience. “Everyone? Clear?”

“Clear like your mom.” Better Than You checked the room, spreading a laugh like a lawn sprinkler. His hand shot up for a high five. Upside-down, Klee delivered. “Yeah, I’m crocking hilarious.”

“That didn’t even make sense.” Legion checked the pilot display. “Touchdown in one minute and thirteen seconds. Deployment is immediate.” He raised his voice over the viewscreen’s increasingly loud advertisement for an album of lullabies sung by revving chainsaws, which then segued into a test of the Emergency Broadcast System. Oddly quieter.

Legion took his seat and adjusted the chair’s inertia field to hold him in place. It felt like a weighted blanket. Checked the charge reading on his Marsek pistol. So far things were smooth sailing, but if those chickens launched, he wanted to be b’cawked and loaded. Especially since B-Osprey’s haunt control had a disquieting tendency to click between “Ejection Pending” and “Nah, We’re Cool” for undisclosed reasons/software errors. And not only did the engine flood, but so did the toilet. Maybe Better Than You was better at taking a dump.

Since Station Zilcho was originally a terraforming station, its approaching surface boasted municipal elements: streets and curbs, a sidewalk, meter maids, and for some reason the starting line for a race Lowensland apparently planned to hold. Stretching between two girder stands, a banner read, “Yacht Regatta.” On land. Evidently, Lowensland didn’t understand races.

“Oh my total golly geez.” Workshop launched from her chair and pummeled onto the windshield. Her nose squeaking against the silica glass, she pressed against it flatly like a window decal. If she didn’t pilot soon, she’d become one. “The ground looks so sparkly Isn’t it fantasticlous?” She whirled around, pointed at the—bang. Her finger jammed against the windshield. She squinched her face and waved her finger around the air. Her words came out like beads on a string. “That...felt...so...glittery. Jammed right down to the knuckle.”

The starship plummeted at travel speeds but hadn’t slowed to descent speed. “Workshop?” Legion cleared his throat. Workshop was soothed her finger in her mouth, muttering something about how pain felt so adorbs or swollen fingers were so cuddly. She should pilot considering the ground existed.

Meanwhile, Better Than You grinned over his shoulder at Legion with a “duuuude” and finger guns around Workshop’s coffee, grinding his heels into several controls. That explained the turn signal clicking and the extraordinary number of drivers shaking their fists on the way here. “Man, I totally outshine you in drinking coffee.” Turbulence spat brown goop on his shirt. He set the coffee down, stretched the material out, and examined it down the length of his nose. “See how I caught that? I got the skills, I got the talent.” And then he erupted in barking. Socially oblivious dog barking.

“Workshop, we’re getting close to ground.” Legion lunged at the piloting computer. He bounced back, his inertia field pinning him. He felt an adoracuddly stomach compression.

Workshop slid down the slant of the dashboard and clonked against her chair. Her elbow knocked the instrument panel with a sparkly crack. “Ooh, felt that right in the bone with the spring in it. That’s...so glittersparkle.” As glittersparkle as hitting her funny bone was, she didn’t heed the warning alarms. Maybe she thought she piloted a starship not plummeting at ten kilometers per second.

“Control, acknowledge. Slow to descent speed.” Legion plunged the heel of his wrist on the inertia field control. He whipped to his feet.

The haunt control clicked on. “Not a chance, entity Legion. The navigator has given you the shut-up palm. This provides you the chance to browse Titan Helmets’s catalogue. You can sort their easy-to-cruise collection by cost, availability, or stopping power.” Its voice sounded as if it were skipping barefoot through a field of daisies. “Have a Titan day.”

Legion threw his arms at the piloting computer. “Five minutes ago, you were all about following commands when it came to flaunting the back angle of an aswang with a tail torn clean of everything except dried blood. But not when we’re heading into the starting line of a boat race on solid ground? Better Than You, stop enjoying coffee and take the reins!”

Workshop finally stood, slapped her arms over the back of her chair. She panted at Better Than You. “Ooh, that’s my coffee—”

“Dark roast is my jam.” Better Than You tipped more of the drink back.

“—but it’s okay. You can have it.” Workshop almost frowned. Almost. The mouth ticked up into an extreme smile as if frowning were illegal. Meanwhile, Better Than You swiped through a datasheet.

The diagnostic computer showed them at forty miles above surface level. Why was Legion the only one concerned? Wyvern laughed a growl. Better Than You smugly snickered through his nose. And Klee swung upside-down, hooting in wingdings.

Workshop finally found her seat, rubbing a fantastic ache out of her bone with the spring in it. “Control, acknowledge. Initiate descent.”

“Kicking it into slow mo.” The starship lurched up. The stop grabbed Legion and hurled him into the array of equipment in the piloting deck. He battered against the navigational computer and spiraled into the windshield. “Please observe the Fasten Seatbelts sign.”

Legion blinked through the flashing turmoil crackling in his head. His right antenna had flattened against his temple. When the starship steadied its angle and slowed to a cautious speed, Legion unglued his cheek from the silica windshield. His antenna popped back into place.

He blinked at his audience. They were a gallery of laughter that reveled like fireworks in his reinflating antenna. Better Than You’s laughter was so breathy Legion identified the coffee’s brew. Klee’s tongue got in on the action. Detritus guffawed so hard he probably saw stars.

Everyone contributed except Hearse, who stood scowling in the rear deck’s shadows. Legion crooked a brow at the seven-foot goon. “Hey, hypothetical guardian, how come you weren’t thrown forward?”

Hearse crossed his arms. “I observe the Fasten Seatbelt sign.”

“But you’re standing!”

“Nevertheless, I observed it.” Hearse’s arms alternated.

Legion’s cheek twitched. “You make as much sense as what I find in Station One’s lost and found.” Sensations dizzying around several points, he tried sliding off the angled dashboard. Tried, but didn’t achieve. Instead, he floundered onto the floor, a half-inch of fuzzy vinyl breaking his fall and almost his tailbone.

By now, the starship had settled. On eddies of gravel that ticked around the starship’s hull and registration forms for yacht teams, B-Osprey relaxed into its landing zone. A ding chimed through the passenger deck, and that absurd Fasten Seatbelts sign clacked off.

The exit port hissed open. The crew stood, stretched creaks out of bones, and began filing out. Wyvern’s dense tail clonked Legion in the head with his swaying step out the access port. He tilted the starship when he clomped out. Mr. Dumpinshadow trotted onto and then off Legion’s head on dainty tiptoes.

As Legion managed to his knees, Better Than You slapped a hand onto his shoulder, which jolted him back to the floor. “Hey, captain, lemme massage the kinks out of your klutzy, old-man bones.” He yanked Legion back up.

Legion jostled his hands off. “Thanks, but no.”

Better Than You knocked his hip into Legion. “Just offering to help. Nice landing, superstar.” He exited.

Workshop scurried up and grabbed Legion by the shoulders. She jiggled him so hard his antennae felt like pinballs. “See, gloomy gus? We’re not dead. We’re the opposite of dead: huggable! And the sun is soooooo bright and shimmery.” She leaped up, arms out as if embracing her own aura, and spun away maybe to sing a choreographed musical number.

Everyone had filed out, leaving Legion alone with whatever gurgle marked the toilet’s next attempt to pass Better Than You’s output. “Control, acknowledge.” He licked his lipless mouth. He’d spend a couple more healing moments right here, right on the fuzzy floor, before moving on.

“Awaiting command, entity Legion.”

“I would like to order one of Titan’s most tungsten helmets.”

“Excellent, entity Legion. Would you prefer two-day shipping, one-day shipping, or before-return-flight shipping?”

Legion licked his mouth again. “Better go with that last one.”

“Your order is confirmed, entity Legion. Have a Titan day.”

Chapter Ten: Firing Mechanism

With the whirring gears and grinding cogs of his full-body armor, Incendiary clomped toward Legion’s office. Legion wasn’t in—he led some mission to grab some animal from enemy territory, which was how most of Incendiary’s college hazing started—but Incendiary was to meet the big boss. No, not the fat boss. He worked at Space Cow. The big boss.

Incendiary’s footfalls clanked on the carpet leading to Legion’s office at the end of the hall. He reached the door and knocked “Shave and a Haircut.” Funny. He never noticed that the knocks played the jingle for Hack and Slash Barbers. “Shave and a haircut...gouge, gouge.” And an icy shriek he hadn’t knocked out but played anyway.

“Coming.” Without a haunt control, locked doors weren’t soundproofed, so the occupant of the office sounded muffled. Light clip-clopping approached and stopped at the door. With the click of an unlock button, the door shifted aside to reveal the big boss. Again, not the guy from Space Cow. This big boss was not the weight of a piano.

Incendiary had to look down at a hand that extended up toward him. Way up.

“Sorry about the door not being automated. We’re installing a new computer haunt control on the person station soon. You must be Edward Delton, media-named Incendiary.” Breeng’s lips parted along stained teeth, showing a tongue that slithered against the roof of his mouth. His eyes, slanted black ovals like Legion’s but with an oily crease to the brows, set on Incendiary. Instead of a beret, he wore a billed hat that said, “If you’re close enough to read this, you need to visit our sponsor, Eye Replacements fro Less.” Who’d visit an eye surgeon who couldn’t catch that typo?

Incendiary looked at Breeng’s hand. “If I shake your hand, I’ll likely break it. I did a factory reset on this suit’s gloves, and the grip rate is tuned to ‘crush.’” He wanted to shrug, but he’d reset the shoulder assembly too. “Also, maybe someone can assess the suit, because its haunt-control mod switched to a horse theme, so whenever I aim, it asks, ‘Are you sure? Neigh or neigh.’ I’m pretty sure that’s a pun on ‘yay or nay,’ but both words approximated to the same thing. Semirelated: I blew up a mailbox this morning trying to cancel out of a menu.“

Breeng yanked back his hand and massaged it, probably imagining the handshake. “Call mechanical tech support for the hands...I guess. Or a physical therapist. Anyway, come in, come in.” He stepped aside and, with a sweeping arm motion, invited Incendiary in.

Incendiary obliged, shattering tiles with weight they weren’t made to sustain without a haunt control’s support. He stopped at the office’s cusp from tile to carpet.

Breeng caught up to him, a squat Trioxidillian on short legs who had to hustle across the room. “I apologize that Maj. Legion can’t greet-meet you personally. He’s on a task mission to extract an aswang from enemy territory before they weaponize it. I believe you served on the task mission that lost it to the Bad Guys.” He scrambled around Incendiary. “Anyway, Incendiary, I called you here to discuss some important topic matters. First”—he snatched something out of a pocket—“beef-brisket snack cake from Foodblock? It’s been slow roasted.” His mood dipped. “I sat on it earlier. It should bloat back out in a couple time minutes.”

Maybe Incendiary should pass on it. Then again, he only ever ate macaroni and cheese from an old mason jar. He reached out with two gentle fingers. Aaannddd he smushed it.

“Excellent. Our fund sponsor will be so happy. Now, to business.” Breeng leaned back on the edge of Legion’s desk, accidentally tapping an icon on its inset computer. With a subtle bloop, the walls repainted in fluorescent purple, its old green, brown, and red swept away.

Breeng steepled his fingers, the two forefingers meeting at his nostrils, a flatness where a nose would grow on a Terran. “I understand you acquired your robot stilt gear suit from a soldier of former Bad Guy Mechanism. How unfortunate.” He tried to look serious, an impossible task with the full-wall advertisement for Station One’s clown college celebrating behind him.

“Yyyeesssss”—Incendiary’s word dragged—“sssss”—he disliked where this conversation headed—“sss”—and the word was a good delay—“sss”—but it had to end because he had a finite lung capacity—“s.” Breeng was patient if nothing else.

Breeng separated his fingers and tapped his lipless mouth in thought. His shift in weight caused the walls to burst in rings of red-blue-green-white-brown, as if the office traveled through a rainbow tunnel. “Incendiary—may I call you Edward?—Incendiary, over the last time month, Intergalactic Protection has assembled focus groups to gauge public confidence trust in our military service and line of purchase products.” He shifted again, and the walls settled on a color Incendiary’s suit called grandma’s bunion. “Is that pale orange?” Breeng sneered, wiggled his butt, and blooped the walls to burned lasagna. “I hate orange.”

“How were the focus groups?” Incendiary asked.

“Oh, they were great. Even offered some feedback on our veggie-and-lunch-meat platters. We just put them out as snacks.” Breeng’s face shook boisterously. “Anyway, they love what the Good Guys have accomplished. Legion? Adore his person leadership. Ace Spandex? Ever since he came out as a machine cyborg, opinion polls among calculators aged twenty to thirty have skyrocketed, especially when his phobia of bullet firearms was uninstalled. Power Plant? An all-time high since he helped with that bridge replacement. They don’t even care that he destroyed it in the first place. They are deeply indebted to the sacrifices of person soldiers Burnout, Reef, Smithereens, Momentum, Brigadier General Patton, and those gymnastic eyesore twins.”

His boisterous expression took on shadow and dismay, but Incendiary sensed the expression as thin decoration of a hidden delight. It seemed to emanate coldness. “But you? Hmm. Study surveys were not so high.” Breeng rubbed his chin, which darkened the walls to festersore brown. “You see, Incendiary—may I call you Edward?—Incendiary, your picture image recalls memories of Mechanism. And that recalls his planned cleansing of the space galaxy, including eighty-two percent of Intergalactic Protection’s solders, one of which was my predecessor, Field Marshal Hullinger.” Breeng tapped his chin again. The walls became ever-so-slightly-happier festersore brown. “People experience post-traumatic PTSD when shown picture images of you.”

“That’s not possible. Studies show people aren’t even aware I exist, especially females aged eighteen to twenty-four in the same room as me.”

“The person public’s trust in the Good Guys as a military power force and as a licensed brand of the Intergalactic Protection Group of Products and Services is on the hook line, Incendiary. May I call you Edward, Incendiary?”

Breeng shifted off the desk and blooped the wall shade up a notch. So they’d settled on ever-so-slightly-more-happier festersore brown. He tried to clap a hand on Incendiary’s shoulder but reached only his hip. “Incendiary, I’m emotion sorry. We have to decommission you.”

“What?” Incendiary clanked back a step. Breeng’s hand, which Incendiary swore left a slimy print on his suit, fell. “You’re firing me? But my internship depends on this, and my socioeconomics teacher said he’d flunk me if I didn’t get him Ace Spandex’s autograph.”

“I’m so, so emotion sorry, Incendiary. But, as of now, you are discharged from the hiring employ of Intergalactic Protection, and we are withdrawing your right to use the Incendiary brand and trademark in person public. May I call you Edward?” A slight snigger. “I guess I’ll have to now.” Did he take joy in this? The clown ad certainly did!

“You can’t—”

“I can’t do that?” Breeng’s hands met again, but instead of steepling in thought, they rubbed together. A smile infected his face with greasy glee. “Oh, but with the Incendiary brand, IP owns the gear suit as well. So I can. It contains a computer haunt control in there, does it not?”

“Wh—”

Breeng leaned in. “Control, acknowledge. Unlist Good Guy entity agent Incendiary. Initiate nappy sleep mode.”

Incendiary’s onboard computer whirred with bristling activity, and a lightspeed list of commands tumbled through its display. The haunt control responded, “Good Guy entity agent Incendiary unlisted. Hitting the sack.” The suit’s interior plummeted into darkness. Even the flatulence aeration purred to a stop.

“Hey!” Incendiary’s words rebounded inside the chamber of his helmet, not projected outward. This sucked. He jostled around, couldn’t move, couldn’t step, couldn’t twitch. He was a prisoner in his own robot suit.

Through the thin eye slit, now dead of computer activity, he watched Breeng stroll purposefully in front with a clever smile, as if he knew a secret he’d take to his grave. Maybe the secret of how he became an unbearable crock. The smile parted with a pucker of saliva, as if Breeng’s mouth watered. It did at a snack cake. Which he ate. In front of Incendiary. Savage. “Edward—may I call you Edward?—Edward, you’re job-fired. I can provide a reference, if you like.” He sauntered away, whistling.

From off frame, a wrapped snack cake flew up and ricocheted against Incendiary’s eye slit. It landed on the carpet. “Here’s another beef brisket. Enjoy.” How? He couldn’t even move!

In its package, the beef brisket began microwaving itself. Gravy frothed out.

Chapter Eleven: The Doorbell’s on the Fritz Again

“Alert: Good Guys have arrived. Alert: Good Guys have arrived. Alert: your toe blankets have arrived. Alert: Good Guys have arrived.”

What? Master Asinine rubbed sleep from his eyes. No, wait, that was quick-dry cement. Wiped that gravelly gunk out, and now he rubbed sleep from his eyes. No, more cement. And why was he trying to rub sleep from his eyes? He’d been awake all afternoon.

Here in Station Zilcho’s central control chamber, the full-circle brains that operated all functions from the top floor of Station Zilcho’s main control tower, Master Asinine had created himself a weekend getaway: a massage station complete with masseuse robot, an exfoliation bath that smelled like melted balloons, a facial station offering quick-dry cement and regular-dry cement, cucumber slices for your eyes and your munchies, seventeen types of aloe, and a steam room. In all fairness, everything was malfunctioning, and the masseuse robot was the station’s old karate instructor.

Master Asinine hopped off his facial bed—a plank of wood plunked over a sawhorse and a concrete median—and approached the computers that overtured their blippity blappety. Now, what was all this fuss about the Good Guys arriving? “Control, acknowledge. Repeat last alert.” He rubbed the rest of the cement mask off. Worst spa idea ever.

“Alert: Good Guys have arrived. Alert: Good Guys have arrived. Alert: your toe blankets have arrived. Alert: Good Guys have arrived.”

Oh, cool. His order had arrived. Wait, he hadn’t ordered any toe blankets. He also hadn’t ordered any Good Guys. His fingers hacked away at a virtual keyboard: typed, stabbed, prodded, poked, and, with a slight interlude for a quick spin because his gyration lessons were going well, jabbed a couple instructions that—“Command not recognized”—apparently did nothing.

Fine. Verbal it was. “Control, acknowledge. Gimme the lowdown on these Good Guys.”

“Good Guy entity Legion, Bad Guy entity Harry Tuskell, and six unlisted entities have landed a Good Guy–registered transport. One unlisted entity is a dragon.”

Asinine sucked in a tiny gasp. “My spirit beast.” Time to unleash party mode. No. Wait. Calm was the need of the hour. So said the banner above his spa hideaway: “Calm your frigging self down.”

Okay, okay. Good Guys here, one of which was a dragon, another of which was his bestie, Legion. He composed himself: narrowed his eyes, withdrew that gasp, and inhaled-exhaled. “Control, acknowledge. What’s the exact location of Good Guy entity Legion?”

“Good Guy entity Legion is in the Katanarama Sector, closest to the hangar.”

“Hold on a sec.” Master Asinine flinched. “He’s already here? Control, acknowledge. Aren’t you my early-warning system?”

“You defined early as before people leave.”

Touché, computer. And, for once, it had listened.

Well, if Legion were here—and this was the smart thinker in Asinine thinking all the smart thoughts—time to vamoose that Reef out of Brainiac’s lab. Reef was a former Good Guy with amnesia. The Good Guys thought he was dead, but he was working here on a secret project. And if the Good Guys’ raid three days ago had taught Asinine anything, it was that he should hide Reef away before his friends discovered him. See, Schizophrenic? Good ideas did spew out of his brain sometimes.

Time to show his face. Asinine grabbed his rapid-fire laser, which leaned against the wall, its tip scratching the Give Peace a Chance poster. In the pleasing warmth of a sunbeam, he checked its charge reading. The pistol’s, not the poster’s. Every time he asked the haunt control for the poster’s charge reading, he got some smarmy “You’re an idea misadventure, and entity Schizophrenic is laughing at you.”

Fine. He’d greet his best friend the hard way. “Control, acknowledge. Summon new super troop to Good Guy entity Legion’s location.”

“Master Asinine’s Mad Monkey Militia on Sluggish Mopeds?”

“What do y—Yes, the five-M-words-with-an-A-word-and-an-S-word-because-we-couldn’t-think-of-a-suitable-M-synonym super troop. Did you really just ask me that?”

“Entity Master Asinine, we still have fourteen chickens you have yet to launch.”

Master Asinine threw a hand at the haunt control, which was nowhere specific, so he spun around to cover all his bases. “Chickens were last week. Keep up with the times. We’re in the ‘key’ series of animals: monkeys, then donkeys, then turkeys, then skeleton keys.” Finished yelling at the haunt control with the stupid questions, Asinine gripped his gun tighter, gripped his teeth tighter. “Yes, my dear friend, Legion. Now it’s time to spring a trap—”

Blam. Okay, gripped too tight. Ow, ow, ow, his ears rang, ow, gripped too tight.

* * *

Legion kept his Marsek’s barrel high but ducked down, knees brushing his chest as he stole through the street to Brainiac’s lab. Not as though he expected stooping like this to conceal him, but stooping let him avoid Wyvern’s tail when it arced up, ripped wind, and crashed down on pavement with each of that monster’s walloping steps. He’d already knocked over a crowd barrier at the boat race’s starting line. Covert was not his middle name.

A map module tucked into his hand, padded fingers wrapped around the device, Legion reached the door that led to the lab’s last known location. He slapped his back to the wall, secured the area with a visual zigzag, and ushered the others forward with a hand. Though exposed in this open environment, his soldiers didn’t rush. In fact, Better Than You had stopped to pee in a garden, as if his pitstop during the trip hadn’t emptied him. He’d claimed he could urinate his name better than Legion. Legion didn’t doubt that. The double s in Matross was difficult without a wide canvas. Legion flourished, okay?

He swept another quick scan of the area, catching the pinpointing sun. He kept spinning his hand to rush them. Better Than You spun him the middle finger. At least he’d zipped up after a couple shakes.

Only the Purple Nurple had arrived and taken position next to Legion, back to the wall. The rapid-fire sponsorship logos on his outfit were a hazard to eyesight. “Any chance your soldiers can hurry up?” Legion asked him.

The Purple Nurple scanned the next-door building, up along its side and to the roof. The reflective silver of his suit’s material flung sunlight like laser beams. He was bound to get seven years’ bad luck on this mission. “They’re hustling as fast as they can.”

“Klee is swinging from a tree. And maybe I’m wrong, but I think he’s talking to it.” Skittery, Legion jumped at a discarded fast-food container scratching a curb in the trickling wind. He felt as if he’d swallowed a peach pit. And was that light glinting from that rooftop? He shook his head. No time for paranoia.

Better Than You reached the curbside in front of the door. He strutted up, his head bobbing with each step. “See that? Even shaped the o in you like a heart.”

“I ran out of commendation medals. Take position here. You’re in plain sight.” Legion clenched his fists so hard he had to make sure his finger didn’t slip over his Marsek’s trigger.

Chest puffed, chin held high, Better Than You jive-stepped next to Legion. Legion thrust his Marsek at the door. “Better Than You, take point. You’re first man in.”

Better Than You flapped a loose salute and sauntered through the door—whoomp—that disappeared. Legion’s heart somersaulted in his chest. He had been on the latent-bereft Station One so long, he’d forgotten other places operated on latent technology.

L-tech was a technology that stored objects in computer memory when those objects weren’t in use. Though society put faith in it, Legion couldn’t. He recoiled from the l-door’s disappearance, but Better Than You bounded through as if joining a party. Legion realized he’d bit down on his cheek, and now it hissed pain at him.

No commotion from inside. Legion rushed through the l-door so quickly he tripped into Better Than You. He cleared the hall with both his eyes and his Marsek. New problem: the doo-wop elevator music.

Another visual sweep. Another Marsek sweep. Nothing out of the ordinary except a devastated hallway. Wwwwow. If this hall had a crotch, it was kicked in. Harshly.

It smelled like embers and firepit residue. Hints of an explosion crawled from the floor two-thirds up the walls, clawing in powdery trails. A skeletal countertop lay on the left, and ravaged walls gaped into the room on the right. That room showed the destruction of what once held charging machines and robots used to service transports. Now it was a machinery cemetery. Everything was blackened, fused, melted, demolished. Equipment from a couple of Bad Guy generics had bonded to the carpeted floor. Someone had thrown the wrong kind of party in here. Legion’s suspicion was the two-headed Bad Guy Schizophrenic, because he couldn’t stop talking about putting people on the wrong end of a pneumatic tube and all the whimsical explosives he fed into its suction hole.

The haunt control had begun repairs but had diverted most efforts to two support beams that drooped, dragging down a segment of ceiling. Repainting the ruin probably ranked low on its priority chain. Evidently so was getting that ashy smell out.

Klee clambered in at full volume, chattering with a hyperbolic range that outshined jackhammers. Next followed the Purple Nurple, who crouched and sidestepped low, checking left, right, up, gun high, knees overextended outward, as if he were stealth’s understudy. Workshop scurried in. She paused with such wide fascination. Something in her finally overloaded. She heaved in a breath and absorbed the hall’s adorbsibleness or cuddleistica or loveablastitude. Someone must have flicked a switch inside her, because when Legion blinked, she’d pranced away. She cuddled a wall, darted across the hallway to envelop the opposite wall, hopped across again to marvel at a vase. Ad infinitum was her shining characteristic. At least she’d quieted down about it. Oh, no, wait. There went the squeals and nonsense blabber.

Wyvern—Legion winced—ugh, Wyvern, why bludgeon a seven-foot doorway into a fifteen-foot arch? He bashed through the door so powerfully he carved out chunks of the framework for his meaty arms, unearthly head, and, yes, tail like an anaconda with barbs. Once inside, the beast curled his shoulders inward and squatted to fit. At least he fit lengthwise. Okay, scratch that when he drew in a deep breath. He shifted around, rotated, angled forward, and somehow made it work. To move, he scuttled across the carpet on his butt like a dog scratching an itch on its hindquarters. His shoulder knocked against Legion and banged him into the corner. This close to Wyvern, Legion inhaled an acute whiff of musk with slimy scales. Wyvern moved on, and Legion unfolded his neck from the unnatural slant the corner forced into it.

Hearse entered next, gun high, visage as emotionless as granite, and stomps playing a dirge on the floor. “Wherever our target is, it will be I who will deliver the body.”

“Our target is already dead.” Legion had to whisper his response.

“I will be delivering bodies this day, prekilled or not. Do not make body-delivery plans.” Hearse’s lips tensed into a sour face as if he’d stepped behind a competitor in a bean-eating contest during the aeration round. His voice, as authoritative as a shout, dropped to a cautious whisper. “Or any plans.”

“Wait, what?” Legion jerked his head so fervently his neck felt a biting kink. “What does that mean?” Hearse had already left.

Detritus stormed in, locked on Legion. He drove forward, ignorant of personal space, and plowed Legion against the corner still bathed in slants of sunlight. A finger jabbed Legion’s collarbone and poked hard enough to leave lingering throbs. “You better watch your back. Comprende? I’m still burned up over your dupliciti...dupli...du-pli-ceit”—his brow furrowed, his teeth shifted, his thinking threatened to cause a fire—“duper—”

“Duplicity?”

“That’s the one.” Detritus swallowed. “I’m still burned up over it.” He shook his head, a devious smile growing. “And I don’t easily get over dupliceit.”

“I just went over the word with you.”

“I can strike at any time.”

“Your breath does.” Legion choked on Detritus’s lemon belch.

“That’s right. Burping, farting. I’ve got it all.” His eyes flashed wildly, and he chomped air so close he would have bit Legion’s nose if Legion had one. “I’m a triple threat.”

“That’s gross. And you miscounted.” Legion observed Detritus’s unflappable expression. “You didn’t miscount, did you?” He watched Detritus’s bare-teethed smirk turn away and tracked the Bad Guy’s back. “What’s the third thing, Detritus?” This earned nothing but silence, not even eye contact. “What’s the third thing?”

Legion’s fingers squeezed his Marsek’s grip. If Detritus weren’t such a bargaining chip against Lowensland, he’d leave the degenerate here. Not the hardest part of this mission, though. That lofty slot was reserved for uttering the Purple Nurple’s name. But Detritus could be used for intel, especially on Station Zilcho. He was an on-the-field prisoner despite Breeng’s foolish decision to include him as a soldier.

They advanced past the hallway’s wreckage and into one in better condition. Legion couldn’t see past Wyvern, who still scraped forward on his scuttling butt. They should have leashed him outside. Even his wings folded in awkward angles to accommodate the narrow passage. Legion scanned the ceiling to see that the hall bent around a corner. He detected the growing scent of electricity and of chargers, heard power generators grind, and...This was the hangar. Brainiac’s lab was here. They weren’t far—

Wait. A buzz tickled Legion’s antennae, the buzz of...a nest of flies? No. He craned his neck over Wyvern’s knee, which sloped gauchely to one side, his toes mashed against a baseboard. No, those weren’t flies. Fans? Sawblades? Motors. Inside. And howling?

Workshop and Better Than You had taken point. Legion said, “Gabber, acknowledge. Contact entity Workshop.” He’d contact Better Than You, but now was not the time to hear a top-ten list of ways he could suck it. Somehow there were more than three.

Workshop’s high-pitched tittering sputtered through like a unicorn’s rainbow gasp. “Lieutenant colonel, guess what? This mission just got a million times more adoracuddly. Want to know why?” Her words shimmered with excitement. Every sentence was a hyperactive exclamation. And was that thrill-jumping Legion heard?

Legion braced himself at Workshop’s overjoyed squeaks. He’d have to walk it off later. “Did Klee hack up a cloud of sunshine?” Behind him rumbled the same rev of motors as through the gabber on Workshop’s end.

A leather-jacketed biker gang of mandrills, macaques, baboons—everything—throttled down the corridor on squat motorbikes. Some gripped chains in slender fingers, some wielded bats, but all brandished challenging, long-toothed mugs of aggression. In a convoy that stretched around the corner and sounded as if it extended into eternity, they rumbled toward the Gooder Guys.

Slowly rumbled, though. They couldn’t afford the high-end models.

The forefront—three squat bikes carrying a capuchin, a mandrill, and a tamarin with a pygmy marmoset in a sidecar—puttered to a halt. The bikes hovered inches over the carpet, levitator pads singeing acrid scorch lines like skid marks into the fibers. The monkeys dismounted. Chains wrapped fists. Bats thumped palms. Switchblades clicked out. Fangs hungered for flesh. Collars were popped. So much leather. So many zippers. So many brass buttons. So much hair grease.

Bad Guy generics accompanied them as animal handlers. Some handlers leashed them. They had to keep up with the bikes, staggering along.

The capuchin leader, rockabilly hair vividly bleached, raised a fist to shoulder height: hold. The other monkeys held their ground, legs locked for pouncing, arms tensed for battle. And, finally, with one sharp bark, the capuchin jerked its arm down and yipped. Its yip? “Go to war.”

Or “Fling poop.” Who knew? Legion had failed monkey-language studies.

The monkeys barreled forward, screeches as battle cries portending bloodshed. Bright side: Legion couldn’t hear the doo-wop music anymore.

“Monkeys are here.” Workshop squealed. She broke apart into a giggle. “Cuddlefluff monkeys!”

And Legion now knew what to put on his tombstone.

Chapter Twelve: Also Is Your Refrigerator Running?

Breeng’s gabber dinged with a dainty sound chime. And then the rollicking advertisement for Dainty Sound Chimes, their newest fund sponsor. Shame: Obnoxious Bark Woofs was a better sponsor because they sent gratuity dog puppies for gratuity dog cuddles. Bigger shame: none of them were hypoallergenic.

The sound chime meant he had a notification. Breeng held down the button on his gabber’s bud. A tap would activate it for talk communication, but holding down the bud played his notification.

“Intergalactic Protection entity Horcross Breeng, you have three unheard messages. Tap to play.”

Oh, three. Fine, gabber, move this along. Breeng had a living life to life-live. He tapped.

A dainty sound chime introduced the first message like a premature punctuation mark. “First message. Shop now for low, low, low prices on all beddings. This message has been brought to you by Baku, the Eater of Dreams. Sleep well tonight.” Another sound chime. “Second message. You are a humiliation unto your species. This message has been brought to you by your ex-wife.” Another sound chime. “Third message. B-Osprey has landed, and entity Legion has exited. This message has been brought to you by entity Hearse.”

A sly mouth smirk played along Breeng’s lipless Trioxidillian mouth, the kind that came only with Lummox’s Drinking Asphalt, the asphalt with that mmm-mmm skid-resistant coating. So gleeful was Breeng that warm mouth drool trickled onto his face chin.

And the rest of the message: “Shock program has been initiated.”

Ahhhhh, ha ha. Excellent. His mouth smile matured into a mouth cackle. Hearse’s singular job on this task mission was to dispose of Legion, and Breeng had confidence in that hired gun that had as much emotion as a mop. But, if Hearse failed his task duty and Legion reentered B-Osprey, the machine device Breeng had affixed to his neck collar would discharge an insurrection of conflicting electricity voltages. These voltages would battle into Legion’s body heart, causing it to trip a beat, stopping it, exploding it, or otherwise throwing it into enough confusion it would think it was a liver. End result?

Death.

Breeng mouth-cackled so heartily it left him air breathless. Oh, my my, he’d worked up a sweat. He pulled a baggie package from his pocket and plucked from it one of Brain Scrubs sanity wipes. Not sanitary wipes. Sanity wipes. He dabbed this across his head brow. Phew. Feeling much saner now.

Chapter Thirteen: All-Nighter in the Bottom Floor of Banality

Early afternoon on Gaia meant nighttime in this hemisphere. An hour ago in this prison, the lights had shut off in clacks. Everything was eerie darkness except for moonlight angling through shield-screen windows and the advertisement across the wall for Escape Artist’s industrial nail files. Ace Spandex would suggest that the prison guard turn off the haunt control’s audience targeting.

The night made the prison chillier. Sitting on his bed, head and shoulder planted against the screen’s surface, Ace sniffled from the chill. In the shadows, Plastique shuffled closer. “You’re still awake. How come?”

“My brain is defragmenting. Plus I’m concerned about our outcome. And the prison guard’s waistline. I performed a scan.” Ace didn’t move his head, but his eyes flickered at Plastique. “Not looking good.”

“That’s not an invasion of privacy?”

“That ship sailed when he reached for a high shelf and his pants didn’t.” Ace rubbed his hands for warmth. “How come you’re still awake?”

Plastique exhaled through pursed lips. “I’m coming up with a list of people I’ll have to revenge-kill when I escape. First on the list: my chiropractor.”

“Shoddy advice?”

“Unreasonable wait times.” Plastique examined the cell as if sizing it up: the ceiling, the window, the outdated datasheet magazines given to them to pass the time. Anywhere but the sleeping guard, who snored so loudly it came out his ears. “We’re crocked. Aren’t we?”

“I looked up court cases on dereliction of duty. Acquittals and exonerations combined account for around fifteen percent.” Indeed, incarceration seemed inevitable, escape impossible.

“Ggggrreat. Well, since there’s only one hyperperson prison in this galaxy, guess we’ll be neighbors.”

Ace Spandex didn’t lift his head. Resting on the shield screen felt comfortable. Cozy. Weird considering its static charge prickled his hair. At least the half not covered with a metal plate.

Ace checked across the jail’s basement cells at Franchise. Franchise offered a quick nod to say hello and then pointed at a rock-hard tangerine left in his cell and the face he’d drawn on it. Cute. He’d found a friend.

“Jacob, why are you awake?” Ace hollered.

Franchise examined the tangerine. “Defense mechanism from all the things Jeffy’s pulled on me.” His roommate at Station One, Power Plant, wasn’t nocturnal, but some of his recent gags involved vampire bats.

Plastique shuffled closer and placed her temple on the shield screen next to Ace’s. If the prison’s power died, they’d bonk heads. The screen felt cozier—or his mood software had surged into cozier metrics—and he huddled closer against it as if for warmth, though that wasn’t it.

“Just so you know...” Plastique’s voice had lowered half an octave, as though she revealed a top-secret mystery. She bit her lip, and her knee starting bouncing. She took a moment to voice her thought. “...you’re not on my revenge-kill list.”

Ace couldn’t help a chortle and called up his task manager to terminate the stomach-butterflies process. Crocking thing kept autoloading at the worst times. He scratched an itch that wasn’t there on the lumpy scar on his right brow. “Thanks. I guess I’m not reason enough to escape.”

“Well...not to revenge-kill.” Plastique’s leg kicked its tempo up. Her cot squeaked. Seconds ticked by. “Well...unless that’s your thing.” She exhaled through a slight smile.

“Let me check my minimum system requirements.” Ace’s smile blanked with cold surprise. “Oh, hey. My personality software says it is.” He couldn’t lean any closer, so he grazed the shield screen with his fingertips. Plastique matched the gesture.

“Weirdo.” Plastique’s reflection smiled and blushed.

There they sat. Plastique’s knee slowed to a stop. The cot stopped creaking. Nothing else existed in the prison. Both of them faced the muted light of the guard’s office and that peekaboo-playing butt crack, but their foreheads leaned toward each other. Silence for a couple slow breaths. Fingers not touching but touching.

“It’s not my thing either.” Franchise lay on his cot, tossing his tangerine pal up as though it were a tennis ball. Catch, toss. Catch, toss. “Someone tell Jeffy.”

Chapter Fourteen: Monkey See, Monkey Doo-Doo

A howl erupted from the capuchin leader of the pack, the smallest monkey with the biggest attitude to swing around. Monkeys jammed generics aside and charged, zippers chattering around leather. Some monkeys scampered on the floor, some ricocheted off walls or swung from the support beams, one clonked a generic in the forehead when he pounced over. Every monkey wore a grimace as if prepared to bite into Legion’s face. Legion wished he had a banana as a peace offering.

A baboon burst over a generic’s head, scratching her scalp and ramming her chin-first into the carpet. Several more monkeys trampled her. The surge crammed the generics against the floor and walls. Pained sobs of abuse accompanied bloody noses and lost teeth.

“Fall back!” Legion hoped he was heard atop the rampaging shrieks and a snippet of a doo-wop rendition of “Shock the Monkey” he managed to catch between screeches. Say what you would about Lowensland’s musical choices, they were always ironically fitting.

Legion’s Marsek couldn’t fire fast enough. Every monkey he dispatched brought two more to replace it. Fall back? Where to? Brainiac’s lab. According to the map module Legion still held, it was down the hall to the right and around the words saying, “Please purchase the full version for a complete list of directions.”

“Soldiers, the lab is down the hall.” Legion fired another round, obliterating the shoulder of a leaping macaque.

Klee barreled over Wyvern’s knee at the onslaught of monkeys. Teeth bared, he resembled them except ungreased. And Legion could understand the monkeys better. Klee scurried, two-fingered hands along the floor propelling him, and leaped. He rebounded off a generic and collided with a marmoset. They snarled in savagery, clawing each other in midair. They smacked into a panel window, and Klee smashed the marmoset’s head against it.

“Klee, I said fall back, not crowd-surf.” Legion blasted a baboon through the arm tattoo. Klee’s listening skills were on par with his speaking skills.

Wyvern still scuttled like a dog scratching its infected rear. He stuffed the hall and couldn’t find enough leverage to swing.

Legion tapped shots into any leathered monkey that even screeched at him, especially the one that greased its hair into a pompadour because that hairstyle just wasn’t right. He retreated past Detritus and planted himself next to Hearse. Legion considered mourning the howler monkey that literally swallowed a light-bullet. An emperor tamarin and its flowing, curlicue beard fell next, spilling backward over a generic. Had Legion just killed a Dr. Seuss character dressed like a motorcycle gang member? If he murdered the Lorax today, he’d let the monkeys overtake him.

Hearse checked his weapon’s charge reading. Legion already knew the reading by the report his gunshots crackled: low. And Wyvern still blocked the hallway. Why did that beast think he’d fit fifteen feet of gargantuan dragon inside a twelve-foot-tall enclosure?

“Wyvern, scuttle faster!” Legion blasted another emperor tamarin.

“I’m scuttlin’ as fast as I can.” Wyvern shifted forward another foot. His knees knocked against his beastly dragon ears and a side table. “So shut yo mouth, or ya ain’t gonna live to regret that, ya heah?” His tail cranked up and tensed—slammed the floor and razed a fissure into it. Monkeys and generics sprayed away. Collars unpopped.

Wyvern had the high line of sight, and he blocked anybody on this side from seeing around him. Legion roared at him, “Wyvern, do you see any signs, any directions, anything?”

“Nothin’.” Wyvern stomped a monkey flat and roared back over his shoulder. That eye tic returned. “I ain’t friends with signs, an’ I ain’t readin’ nothing.”

Him and reading. Ain’t friends with signs? Legion didn’t know half the stuff Wyvern meant. “An arrow? An exit sign? Something that says ‘Beware of Appetite’?”

Wyvern’s head shoved forward on a neck as winding as a mountain road. His eyes blazed at Legion, right eye almost blinking. “I—ain’t—friends—with—signs.”

Okay, Legion got the message: don’t annoy the gigantic dragon. Or the fat proboscis monkey with the jelly-roll hairstyle, the brass knuckles, and the bladder that unleashed on Detritus. “Crock.” Detritus froze, arms out and dripping. “This one’s into spicy food.”

Klee bounced out of the monkey fray, ricocheted off a wall, and arrowed back in. His tail whipped, hands clawed, and battle cry cock-a-doodle-dooed, which was Legion’s best estimate of what he yelled. He could be reciting his emoji alphabet for all anyone knew.

Mr. Dumpinshadow went for the jugulars.

A macaque lashed chains around like whips, cracking a generic in the brow and another between the legs. The macaque didn’t care. It wrapped the chains around its fists and screamed at top volume with a jawline big enough to swallow a watermelon whole. It barreled forward and lunged to carve the Purple Nurple’s face off. The Purple Nurple countered: ducked—rolled aside—sprang up—proudly swanked Skirmish Apparel’s groin protector with shield-screen technology when the chain bounced against it—lunged at the macaque. Wow, so that was a nurple. Very purple indeed.

Workshop chirped through the gabber. “We’ve reached the lab. Oooh, so adorapretty. They have glitter, Lieutenant Colonel. Actual craft glitter!”

Good. The lab. Legion couldn’t be happier, since this was the fifth bat-wielding monkey he’d decked and the second he had to keep away from his wallet. They weren’t called nature’s pickpocket for their level of respect.

“Get in and secure it, Workshop.” Legion kicked aside a uakari.

“Control, acknowledge. Unlock closest doorzeees,” Workshop said.

“The lady of the house doesn’t wash her armpits, so I hope you know what you’re getting into,” the haunt control said. Legion appreciated the warning, but couldn’t it have cautioned them about the enemy monkeying around the hallway or the—ugh—pungent poop they hurled? Legion had hoped to stay away from defecation warfare at least once.

Oh, monkeying around. He’d just gotten his own joke.

Workshop gasped, a voluminous slurp of breath that interrupted her lightheaded excitement about everything. “Squeeee! Oh—my—goodness, the door whoomped at me. Isn’t that the most darlingest thing?”

Legion didn’t know the situation ahead thanks to Wyvern’s bad spatial awareness, but he roared over the hootenanny of the monkeys’ warring screeches, the generics’ barks of pain, and Hearse’s calls to animal control. “Workshop, secure a defensive position inside that lab. Take Better Than You with you and do not—repeat, do not—allow him to dance.”

“Incoming connection from entity Better Than You.”

“Workshop, please hold.” Legion tapped his gabber’s earbud. “You’ve reached Legion. How may I help you?”

“No way to stop this dance monster from his duty,” Better Than You said.

“Fine. But as punishment, Workshop is your backup dancer, and you have to hold hands the whole time. I draw the line at the macarena.” No way would Legion establish basecamp in the middle of a group-participation dance.

“Is that Legion?” Workshop said, voice as piercing as a cat caught under a tire. “Tell him they have the prettiest nuclear weapons in here. I love this place so much I wanna die!”

Legion double-tapped his gabber’s earbud to end both conversations. Whatever. He hadn’t heard “nuclear” and “wanna die” in the same statement since bootcamp, and that was three times in one day.

A mandrill with a switchblade and a brushback hairstyle barreled at him. Wielded between forefingers, the blade clicked out. Legion wasn’t ready with his Marsek, so he walloped the mandrill. Squawking agony wormed up his fingers. He noted Hearse’s complacency and thwacked an open palm against the man-tower’s arm. “Hey, I thought you were my personal bodyguard. What’s going on? I got pomade all over me.”

Incomplete sentences tripped out on speedbump stammers. After detonating the head of a stiletto-wielding mangabey, Hearse grumbled. “Yes. Of course.”

“What?” Legion’s aim flickered. “What does that mean?” Hearse didn’t respond, only backed away when Wyvern’s scuttle allowed more retreat. “Hearse? Hearse, you answer me, or no more employee discount at the food court.” Still no answer. Raise the stakes. “And I’m revoking your coupons.” No reaction. Legion cracked a macaque across the face with his Marsek. “And your frequent buyer’s membership.” Still nothing. “I know about your candy stash, Hearse. And your umbrella collection!” How off topic must Legion resort?

Wyvern shifted another couple feet, and a sliver of the lab’s door appeared behind his shoulder. Good. Legion had had enough of killing distant evolutionary cousins of Terrans, no matter how many zippers flung about. “Detritus, Purple Nurple, fall in. Detritus, I’ll write you up if you give me any stinkier an eye. And Purple Nurple...” He shook his head. “Just don’t be so proud of your outfit.”

“Initiating lack of pride, Lieutenant Colonel.” The Purple Nurple’s smile became a pout.

Detritus slipped into the lab. The Purple Nurple followed, squeezing sideways past Wyvern’s billowy leg. Legion jerked his head at the slight opening. “Hearse, get in.”

Hearse cranked a light-bullet through the breast flap of a langur’s jacket. Stiff face and stiffer lip, he shouldered Legion aside and clomped into the lab. Weird. Before today, he’d insist Legion enter first, would even use himself as a body shield against the attack and perhaps throw Legion into safety. Today, his apathy was crisp. He’d abandoned Legion, left Legion alone to deal with a leaping marmoset. And, man, Legion’s monkey identification was on point.

Legion stamped the marmoset with a punch and stomped it against the carpet. At full length, he arced his Marsek left to right to left. The monkeys got the point: they kept their distance, claws locked in tense anger, leather collars popped with hostility, earthy-smelling poop ready. Astonishing how much poop they produced on the battlefield. Did Lowensland pipe laxatives through the vents? Should Legion find a bathroom?

He glanced over his shoulder at the minor gap between Wyvern’s bulging calf muscle and the door. Through a full-length window, Legion accounted for the Purple Nurple, Hearse, Workshop, Detritus, Better Than You, and Better Than You’s attempts at a back spin. Legion had to admit, he kept a beat. Even Klee shot from out of the monkey fray. He careened past Legion like a chestnut-furred cannonball and spun into the lab. Finally, Mr. Dumpinshadow padded through the crowd, squeezed between a baboon’s legs, paused to lap at a paw, and then tiptoed into the lab.

Marsek and scowl marking targets, Legion said over his shoulder, “Wyvern, I don’t know how you’ll fit. But we have to secure that door, so you can’t smash your way in. You’ll have to find—”

“Don’t y’all tell me what ah can do. Y’all ain’t my master, an’ Wyvern don’t work the field no mo’.” Wyvern stamped his foot. His jowled face swooped down at Legion on that cabled neck, and yellow eyes flared as if holding back embers. “Nobody...owns...Wyvern.” Wyvern had misread a signal somewhere.

The temperature kicked up a few degrees. Wyvern’s flesh began...glowing? And swelling...waving...rippling...smoking. Legion skittered aside, skin almost blistering from heat. He kept focus on the bloodthirsty monkey militia. But he caught fleeting snippets of Wyvern...shrinking?

Wyvern’s backbone squirmed as if worms thrashed underneath. Bones crackled like popcorn kernels knocking around a popper. Flesh dissolved and reformed. Limbs telescoped inward. Tail melted into buttocks. Wyvern’s fifteen-foot gigantism shriveled, coughed smoke and heat and the scent of a brushfire, and dissolved into...a frail boy. Dark-skinned, emaciated, no taller than five-and-a-half feet, bald but for dapples of hair, wearing tattered shorts and flattened sandals, gnarled lacerations along his shirtless back that hadn’t healed evenly, ribs poking through a rippled stomach, and an odor as if he harkened from a time without showers. Or plumbing, for that matter. Even the monkeys recoiled. A gelada had paused teething on a generic’s belt.

“Wyvern, did that hurt?” Wait, bigger fish to fry. “You could have shrunk down that quickly this whole time? I thought it would take hours. Next time, lead with that.” Legion swept his hand at the demolition Wyvern had left. “Look at the claw marks in the carpet. We don’t have the budget for this kind of damage fee.”

“Hey, y’all get outta my face.” Wyvern tottered backward off his own legs and into the lab. “Y’all ain’t my master.” Was that what the young crowd called commanding officers these days?

Legion curled his lip at the troop of monkeys, Marsek still warding them off. The capuchin leader huffed from a stuck-out lower lip, barely disturbing its pomade-solid hair, and clouted a generic. It pointed a tenacious claw at Legion and then, with a sharp retraction, drew its finger to its throat and slowly, deliberately, traced a razor line across it. Legion stared at the capuchin, its jacket colored the blackest, its hair bleached the brightest, its attitude the thickest enmity, its zippers clinking the most musically.

Legion raced into the lab and took cover behind a rack of scientific baubles. “Control, acknowledge.” He gulped. This would interface with the dreaded l-tech. “Lock closest door. And find me the calltag of their zoo hairstylist. I’ve got a score to settle with some outdated fashions.”

“Locking closest door and not contacting zoo hairstylist because it’s called a zootician.” The door materialized like a ghost revealing itself. Phew. In the safety of the lab, they could locate the aswang. But how could they leave?

They were trapped.

“I coulda got that calltag for you.” Better Than You shook his head with a barely concealed snigger. He slapped Legion’s back. Oof. “Ahhh, Colonel Lieutenant, you keep bringing you’re A game, and I’ll keep bringing my A-plus game.”

“My rank isn’t colonel lieutenant.” Legion glared at Better Than You. “It’s master apparently.”

Better Than You shrugged and fell back into his dance moves. “Think about the pecking order when you check out this play.” Arms and legs gesticulated in wild rhythm.

Legion rose from his cover and circled around the rack. He approached the panel window next to the l-door. In it, the capuchin leader bared its fangs and slammed the pane, nostrils flaring so viciously flecks of snot spattered out. The capuchin’s jacket had twisted to one side, so it corrected its style with a jerk and then popped the collar back out. In contrast to its anger, the generic monkey handlers looked damaged and broken. Some hobbled. Some leaned against walls and furniture. Others nursed injured arms.

A voice crawled out from the back of the long lab, raspy and low. “Why Good Guys being in lab?”

Legion whipped around, Marsek out, to confront the voice. The Bad Guy Brainiac, appearing exactly like on the mission briefing, most-wanted lists, and missing-scientist notices Lowensland posted whenever he couldn’t reach her. Brainiac was a crossbreed of Terran and Trioxidillian races. She looked every bit as mad a scientist as Lowensland could find. Her skin was a pastiche of blue and pink, her hair grew in patches—the hairy Terran genes and the hairless Trioxidillian genes at war—and her head, which focused her telekinetic hyperability, was an inflated caricature of a normal head, imposing a balancing act from the neck up. Monobrow, a cackle like a conspiratorial witch’s, and a heavy accent completed her.

They had found their secondary target.

“Oh, my word, you are...so...adorabloosh.” Workshop knocked past Legion, and ambushed Brainiac in a hug. “We’ve been searching for you everywhere but that’s okay because we found you and we had to shoot through your so wonderfully loveable monkeys with those stubby fangaroos and those mushy brown grenades that never detonate but smell like poop but it’s so coolmazing to finally meet you and it’s awesome to see women in positions of power and I already adoralove you—”

Brainiac wriggled an arm to escape Workshop’s limb-locked embrace, barely managing but finally thrusting it out with a squish of fabric. “Why loud girl with so many exclamation dots trap me with squeeze?”

“It’s called a hug.” Legion put his Marsek away.

“This is hug?”

“Uh, Legion?” The Purple Nurple tapped Legion’s shoulder. He turned—the Purple Nurple’s head was stuck between two spokes of a fence torn from the ground and left here for storage.

“We haven’t been here more than fifteen minutes, Kyle.” Legion gripped the fence in both hands and wrestled it around.

* * *

Master Asinine entered the hangar hallway. Up ahead lay Brainiac’s lab/Master Asinine’s toy room. A few moments ago, Legion and his squad had locked themselves in there. More like trapped themselves in. What name had the haunt control mentioned about the new squad’s upcoming cartoon? Gooder Guys? Sounded grammatically correct to Asinine, so it must be right. And it gave him something else to tune into on Saturday mornings.

Asinine’s monkey militia, those who had survived Legion’s attack tornado, caromed and hooted around the hallway. They sure were ear piercing. Especially the one teething on the generic’s ear. And Asinine had commanded no swinging from the chandelier. That dangling troublemaker up there was in for a stern warning at the hair salon later.

He swatted away a capuchin that had roamed too close. Or baboon. Or turtle. Whatever it was, it was away. “Okay, everyone, here’s the plan,” he said to his junior thugs, those Bad Guys he bestowed a media name, anyone higher ranking than a generic but lower than the seniorest of thugs, Master Asinine himself.

His junior thugs stuck near the doorway. They refused to, in their words, “set foot in this poop field.” Okay, those were Schizophrenic’s words.

Good old Lieutenant IQ 23, Bad Guy second-in-charge, moved around in hops to avoid the waste. Silly, Lieutenant. Just scrape it onto your other shoe. And the gargoyle-like Appetite had not only set foot in this place but was eating it too. Master Asinine Sucks said he couldn’t come because he was counting the injuries he’d sustained from being smacked around a few days ago. Good for him for proper injury recordkeeping, but he deserved to be smacked around for that lame excuse.

Asinine covered his nose. He dared not breathe deeply from the biological armament in here. “Legion and his upgraded Good Guys have holed up in Brainiac’s lab. Our job—”

“Your job, you mothballed brain.” Schizophrenic’s left head, Lefty, sneered from the doorway, a toothpick pinched in his teeth. “My job is to sit back and watch Wonder Stomach eat all the load-bearing supports.” Indeed, Appetite was at three now if you counted the one he was licking.

“Okay, everyone but Schizophrenic’s job is to storm that lab and let Legion know in no uncertain terms that we do not tolerate his not calling ahead for reservations. Is that right, Lieutenant?”

“Uhm, sure, sir. I think. Probably.” Distracted, Lieutenant IQ 23 leaped over yet another curl of acrid monkey punkey. His legs stretched so broadly across the bum ammo, they looked like a pants-wearing arch at the end of a cotton suspension bridge.

“Good. Let’s move.” Master Asinine squished, smeared, and skidded down the hallway, each step bringing him closer to wondering why he didn’t wear nose plugs and painting clothes. As he drew closer to the lab, murmurs became coos became grunts became squeals became shrieks became derisive cackling. The cackling came from Schizophrenic when IQ 23 plopped a foot down on plop. Looked as if he’d brave this trip for a chance to gloat.

The clashing shrieks grew louder until the monkey business became full-throttle monkeying around. There they were, his monkey platoon swarming the locked l-door to Brainiac’s lab, throwing chairs at the wall, beating the l-window with feet, fists, and sometimes each other. A baboon clamped down on the doorframe with its teeth.

Oh, monkeying around. He’d just gotten his own joke.

The monkey-handler generics gave the tumult a wide berth. They flinched back, bloody arms wrapped over heads as protection. One generic limped up to Master Asinine. Her nametag read Francine, so good bet she was Biff.

“Hey, Biff.” Asinine sprang a jolly wave. She scowled. Okay, Francine it was. Geez.

“Master Asinine, most of the generics without jaw injuries have been talking,” Francine said. “The monkey militia clearly was a bad idea. Look at all this.” She spread her arms and limped in an imbalanced rotation. “There’s damage all over the place. Poop flung. Banana peels dropped. Hair-care bottles half used. Considering this, the carnage from the aswang, what we talked about when we revolted a while ago, and the asbestos in these walls, we generics have a simple request about hazardous work conditions.”

Master Asinine donned his best smile. “Bbbiiiffff—I mean Fffraaannnccciinnneeee. Come on. The monkeys are part of the union too.”

“No, they aren’t—”

“I have to give equal opportunity to everyone. But right now I have a best friend to embarrass myself in front of. So let’s ignore your concerns later.” Master Asinine trod to the lab door.

Legion had sunk himself in it this time. Master Asinine’s murmuring chuckle was felt more than heard, something that rumbled up his belly and tossed around all the sour candies. One came back up, probably the expired one. But it came back up in hot, cherry-flavored gas.

“Control, acknowledge.” Time to get to business, Asinine decided. This was too easy. “Unlock closest door.”

“No can do, entity you,” Mr. Useless Haunt Control Program said, all useless and controlling and programmed. And haunting, probably. “Entity Brainiac doesn’t want you in. You keep rewriting her lab notes and reorganizing her shelf of pickled brains.”

Schizophrenic hunched over, laughing. “You’re bouncing so many brainpower checks today, poop scar.” The laugh halted mid-ha. “Ooh, poop scar. I’m sticking with that one for a while.” He yanked his arm back and slapped Appetite. “Hey, that’s my shirt you’re chewing, poop scar.”

Dagnabbit. No access? Asinine suspected all that meddling would land him in trouble one day. But a smile budded on his lips, the result of an idea. If he couldn’t enter, this idea would drive Legion out to him. “Lieutenant, here’s one for creativity.” He tapped a hand against IQ 23’s arm.

Time for noise warfare. “Control, acknowledge. Play Heartpulse Flatline’s Don’t Flatline My Heartpulse album in closest lab.” Maniacal belly laugh, unleashed. “Oh, we’re going to have fun today—”

“Cannot play album. Heartpulse Flatline does not permit public broadcast, and your last four fan letters have gone unanswered.”

“What?” Maniacal belly laugh, cancelled. “Then play the next disastrous thing. Whale calls or whatever.”

* * *

“Sit down.” With the background ruckus of irate monkey screeches, Legion threw Brainiac into a cot that seemed more like a giant sponge. Its springs squeaked like trapped mice as strained plastisteel met cracked concrete. It didn’t even bob. The pillow jangled.

Brainiac’s head tossed back, and she rolled off the cot, a somersault that toppled her end over end like a football. That out-of-proportion cranium didn’t do her any favors. And Legion suspected it was slightly cancerous. He crooked an eye at it. And radioactive.

“Better Than You, are you doing the macarena?” Legion stomped his foot. “That’s the one dance I forbade!”

Better Than You added a pelvic twerk. “Hey, when you got it, the people want you to use it.” For some reason, Klee joined in. The infection was spreading!

“Wyvern.” Legion located the frail boy with half a set of clothing among some of Brainiac’s shelved baubles. “I need you to look for the aswang pieces.”

“Where’s an aswang hide?” Wyvern braced himself against a weapon that, by the looks of it, transformed princes into frogs.

“How should I know?” Legion had to keep an eye on Brainiac. “Maybe it’s labeled.”

“I don’t see no labels ’round here.”

“What? They’re all over the place. There’s one over there that says, ‘Danger: High Voltage,’ and one there says, ‘Danger: Candy Corn.’”

Wyvern looked as if he wanted to get angry but couldn’t muster the energy. “I told ya, I ain’t readin’ no signs. An’ a label’s a sign.” Fear, as if Legion had asked him to walk on stage naked, crossed his eyes.

“Wait. Out in the hall, back at the starship.” Legion stood straight. It dawned on him. The fear, the eye twitch. “It’s not that you don’t read signs. You can’t read.” The literacy rate among Terrans was a hundred percent, not including newborns and those who still chew the gum that comes with baseball cards. How could Wyvern not read? Of course, Power Plant claimed he couldn’t read warning labels, so maybe this wasn’t abnormal.

Legion never got an affirmation. Instead, a voice rang through an overhead speaker he couldn’t place. Lowensland’s. “Howdy, visitors.” Didn’t matter where the speaker hid. Legion always imagined third-degree burns from Lowensland’s idiocy wherever it came from, sometimes even from remote locations. “Well, well. You barged in without even bringing a bottle of wine or breastmilk. I was unprepared to entertain today. I’ll be with you in a moment, but for now, please accept the soothing sounds of the sea.” An ear-wrenching cacophony torrented from the speaker. Seemed Lowensland thought the sounds of the sea were an extinction-level tidal wave. With, evidently, mass coastal casualties and an air-raid siren.

“Do not worry about noiseness.” Brainiac shook her head. “After few minutes, Vedushchiy Essinine’s sounds of sea blend right in to ear.”

Legion planted a foot on the cot and leered over Brainiac. “We’re here for one thing, and then we’re leaving.”

“Because we can only keep track of one thing at a time.” The Purple Nurple leaned in as well, his nurples like twin darts. He pounded a fist on his chest plate and then twitched back. “Ow, these nurples are sharp.” He put a finger to his mouth to soothe it. “Pointy things. They’re everywhere. Am I right?” He chuckled halfheartedly.

Legion yanked his Marsek out—

Better Than You swiped the Marsek. “Lemme take this one, compadre. I’ll rain terror down on this sitch.” He held it but used the wrong grip. “Let’s get this hostage party started!” His hands celebrated in the air. So did that air-raid siren.

“Give me that.” Legion swiped his Marsek back. “Use your own sidearm.”

“Can’t. I threw it at one of the monkeys.” Better Than You set his glower on intimidate. He tried squinting one eye while glaring through the other, but instead he blinked a facial aerobic routine.

Meanwhile those monkeys grew rowdier. A crack split up and around the l-window’s frame. Legion called over his shoulder, “Workshop, build a device that reinforces this wall. Keep those monkeys out.”

“That sounds like a supermendous job. I’m a hundred and ten million percent on it.” Workshop bounced into the air. Her backpack jolted, rattling whatever metal scraps and loose machinery it contained. She shrugged the backpack off and rummaged around. Her hands emerged with a few gadgets and...well, from here it looked like a pasta strainer. She set to the task of slapping devices together into a misshapen construct from instructions that existed in her mind.

Hearse seemed distant. Quiet. He jittered back from everything, and even now regarded the monkeys outside with distracted thought.

The wall split further with a sharp crick, and dust powdered the floor. The hooting outside grew more ferocious. “Double-time it, Workshop.”

“Not only will I double-time it, I’ll work twice as fast.” Workshop giggled. She planted a metal cylinder on a squat box and twisted to click them together.

Detritus grabbed Legion’s collar. But Legion had just fixed that again! “That wall ain’t holdin’ up. What crock did you lead us into?” He reared back with a hand. “This is your game? Double-cross me an’ lead me to my death?”

Hearse backhanded him across the cheek. Detritus tumbled into a shelf, startling an arrangement of beakers and chemicals, and slid to the floor. He blinked up at Hearse looming over him with the business end of a finger pointing back. “You would do wise not to start this. Allow Legion to further lead us to death.”

“You mean...” Legion prompted.

“I mean lead us out.”

“Thank you, Hearse.” Legion stepped away from Detritus and gave a wary glance at the wall barely resisting the monkeys. Not long. Back to their intel holder. “Brainiac, Citizen Watch lists you as the Bad Guys’ new mad scientist. Lowensland even said you’re so mad, you’re outraged. So you’ll know what we need to know, and Better Than You, what are you doing?” He huffed at the idiot who’d progressed from blinking to something involving the chin.

“Got your back, Legion. Helping you give this uggo the Legionnaires’ disease. Fist bump.” From under his folded arms peeked a sociable fist.

“No. And Legionnaires’ disease isn’t a good thing.” Not enough eye rolling in the universe for this guy. “Anyway, Brainiac, we’re here for the aswang.”

“Finished!” Workshop leaped up, an apparatus lifted like a well-earned trophy. Good. As advertised, her hyperability of creating devices by instinct came up with a quick solution. “It’s soooo loveable, I could cutesy-snuggle it.” She brought the apparatus in for a cheek cuddle. “But, no”—she yanked it away at arm’s length—“because it contains a thermonuclear launcher.”

“That means it’ll reinforce the wall, right?” Legion indicated the cracking wall about to burst. The assault outside drew fissure lines.

“Oooh, right.” Workshop skipped off, placed the device on the floor, and slapped a button. Out vibrated a hum, and a glowing orange grid enveloped the wall. “We’ve got a couple hours before this thing runs out of juicy juice.” She scampered off. “And also it might explode. Weeee!”

Brainiac studied Workshop squealing around the lab in high-pitched excitement. Update: all the cuteacious little glass thingies sparkled so glittershiny. “What ees aswang? Ees new slang for bum?”

“About a month ago, your leader had the boneheaded idea to abduct a supernatural beast and tame it by scratching behind the ear. Instead of wagging its tail and chasing squirrels, it slaughtered everyone. It was destroyed, and its brain and heart were separated. We’ve come for that.” Squeals grew louder—Workshop’s and the monkeys’—and the l-window picked up a whine from the violent rhythm of monkey thrashing.

“Ah, yes, thees animal with no concern of noise pollution.” Brainiac shook her head. She was already sprawled over the floor, so the movement didn’t topple her over. “Nyet. I cennot give you rabbit монстр. However, I offer you seat for friendly visit and chitting of chats.”

“Not good enough.” Legion poked the barrel of his Marsek at Brainiac’s forehead, right above the bushy monobrow that looked like a dead caterpillar. “Tell us where to find it”—a deafening crash signaled Workshop’s attempt to nuzzle with some beakers—“or we’ll break even more containers holding caustic liquids.”

Stamping, quick-beat footsteps darted toward them. Not monkeys this time. Workshop burst between Legion and Better Than You, her face sparking with childlike excitement. “You know what would spruce this lab up? A mannequin collection.” Her arms flailed like canned snakes popping out. “And a kitchenette.” She tore off. “I lloovveeee this place!”

“Boss, lemme kick this interrogation to the next level.” Better Than You stepped forward, winking at Legion. “I’ll absorb that negotiation skill floating around your noggin, rocket this up, and get us outta here in four, maybe five seconds.”

Legion stood aside. “By all means, if you’ll stop giving me that look. And apparently you won’t. But I’ll spare you four or five”—he winced when Better Than You’s look grew—“or four seconds.”

Better Than You poked a friendly nod at Brainiac and rolled his shoulders. “Look here, science wench.” Off to a nice start. “Whether you help us or not, we’re leaving with the aswang. So unless you want Workshop to hug more expensive stuff”—crash, and now that train had left the station—“you’ll fall in line. So help out a fellow lover of fine eyebrows. It ain’t gonna hurt.” He punched a fist. “Unless you make it.” Behind him came another crash: Workshop hugging a rack of machinery.

“Workshop, don’t cuddle the thing spitting electricity.” Legion shouldn’t have to say that to an adult.

Brainiac choked. Her blue spots paled to the color of ice, her pink to the color of...well...pink ice. Her eyes darted around the crowd bearing over her, from Better Than You to Legion to Hearse to Better Than You to the Purple Nurple to everywhere. “Vedushchiy Essinine put monster body pieces inside food containers in fridge doojigger. Is in back corner of lab.”

Legion’s heart fluttered in dizzying sensations. What? Better Than You did it? And were the aswang organs really in food containers? He sprinted across the lab, past the stretch of clamoring monkeys pounding on the panel window. He zigzagged in frantic directions where Brainiac’s stare had led him. This way, over there, behind—

Legion slid backward, knocked over a rack of gadgets like dentist equipment from feudal times. He gawped up, up, at...Kyril’s old rooster-themed starship?

Last December, criminal leader Kyril had captured Legion and Lowensland in a bid for galactic supremacy. He’d disappeared, and Legion had assumed that Lowensland had killed him. Now he knew. And this was where he’d kept The Nemesis, the rooster starship Kyril had used as a base of operations. Something that blended in with the background only because of all the other gigantic objects in this gallery of insanity, the starship lay segmented and strewn across this midsection of the lab. Now that Legion was actively searching, he noticed the starship’s pieces in the dim light and found himself peering up at an elongated, twelve-foot-tall neck pipe, a hallway that led to the rooster-headed cockpit.

And Brainiac was right. The sounds of the sea do blend in.

Never mind that now. Legion wondered how well Workshop’s device would buttress the wall, because those monkeys were building up by the panel window. The right side presented a grand view of the station’s hangar, inside which Legion spotted both starships and unicycles, but the left-side window swarmed with monkeys, some fogging the window with aggressive huffs, some baring teeth at it, some licking it, and one self-absorbed little guereza fixing her mascara.

Never mind. Legion scrambled onward toward the back to a random collection of old furniture and knickknacks left here for storage. Where was the fridge doojigger? Among all this accrual like a disorganized bazaar, locating anything seemed lucky.

Aha, a squat doojigger hummed in the back corner. He clambered to it, threw open the door, and caught a cold draft. When Brainiac had mentioned food containers, Legion pictured coolers or stainless-steel freezer boxes. Nope. Classy Lowensland had opted for fast-food take-out boxes. There they sat, next to the leftover wontons and stir-fry chicken. He scrambled up the two filthy containers sitting on the middle shelf. And that wasn’t duck sauce leaking out of them.

He slammed the door. Okay, time to hightail back with these disgusting take-out containers. He could tolerate touching these. After all, he’d served a tour in the antiquated-toy wastes of Toad Stack Flats. If there was one place he never wanted to visit again, it was a warzone of old dolls whose voice chips wouldn’t shut off. Oh, the haunting electronic cries of fake babies. To this day, he couldn’t enter a toy store or a nursery school.

He should bring disposable gloves on missions from now on.

“Legion, you cannot leave here.” A grunt accompanied the whir of a weapon behind him.

* * *

Hearse could do this. Legion was only a job. And the opportunity to eliminate him and cover it up now presented itself. He could blame the death on the rotting smells that leaked from those take-out containers. After all, smells such as those killed dozens every day at Space Cow.

The key was for no blood to draw sniffing bloodhound authorities back to those who’d hired him. Otherwise he would receive no vouchers to the Virillian Renaissance Fair this coming autumn. He had promised Mother he would take her, and if he defaulted on the Fair, Mother guaranteed him a disdainful look. And one would not want a patented disdainful look from Mother. Hearse shuddered even at the image.

Legion aimed a dumbfounded expression at the pistol Hearse aimed back at him. Too bad, Legion. Pistols always won staring contests.

Hearse stepped around an eccentrically patterned couch cushion discarded here probably for eternity. “Legion, I—” Wait. His pistol whirred strangely, battling the monkey choir outside. It was preparing. Preparing too long, if you asked Hearse. He checked the side. Oh, it was downloading a security update. Very well, ironic weapon. “Legion, I do not want you to look my way. Please.” He waved his pistol barrel in a circle. “Turn around.”

Legion’s dumbfounded face grew more dumbfounded. Dumberfounded? More dumbfounded. “I’m the body you have to deliver?”

“I wish not to. But you are my mission. Why are you not turning around as I had invited? I was polite.” More dumbfounded. Hearse was 80...85 percent sure. “I...I...” No, why must his target face him?

“Why, Hearse?”

Beyond this clandestine meeting, Better Than You was outdoing and outgrunting Detritus in a pushup challenge. And that crash and squeal meant Workshop had found more fluffy equipment. “These beakers look like baby kittens!” Kittens were already babies, fool!

For a better vantage, Hearse kicked aside the cushion and stepped over a cast-iron barbecue pit. “Field Marshal and Chief of Sponsorship Horcross Breeng employed my skills to murder you and display it as an accident. You were not—how did he put it?—‘playing ball’ by carrying over IP’s sponsorship contracts into the Good Guys.” Hearse shook his head. “I still know not what ball sponsors play. Is it a basketball? A cricket ba—” He snapped his fingers. “Ballroom dancing. I was ruminating over the wrong classification this whole time.”

“Side details, Hearse.” Legion rotated his hand on his wrist. “Hurry this up. Those monkeys are getting antsier.” Monkeys mutated into ants?

“You had not accepted Intergalactic Protection’s arrangement, and that angered their sponsors. Especially after the Good Guys had thwarted Mechanism, they held public sway, and sponsorship declined by forty-two percent with your lack of support. Breeng had received fewer floor-cleaning gratuities. Perhaps he could not clean sufficiently for all his ballroom concerts. Intergalactic Protection needed to rebuild and rebolster its numbers, and the lost sponsorship revenue prevented that. Therefore, Breeng hired me to kill you so he could replace you with someone who danced in their ballrooms. I needed only wait for an opportune moment. That moment”—he paused for effect—“comes now.” The monkey riot ruined the effect. “Your end”—another pause—“is upon you.” No better than the first pause.

“Hearse, but...we karaoked together. We both had the time of our lives.” Legion shuffled closer. “Hearse—”

“Do not approach, Legion. Turn away.” Hearse clasped his temples, almost flicking out the wire that connected his brain to his cataract-inflicted left eye and allowed it to see. He staggered backward and almost tumbled over a stack of spare floor tiles. “Legion, I wish not to look at you while I kill you.”

Legion had stopped approaching at Hearse’s outburst. He bit his lower lip...or at least the lipless flesh acting as one. “So this is it? You want to shoot me in the back? No.” He folded his arms. “If you’re going to kill me, kill me face to face, coward.”

Hearse lashed his pistol forward. Held it there. “If I do not fulfill my contract, Mother’s eyes will chastise me. Well, one of them. The other will chastise the ground. They point in different directions. It’s a medical issue.” He waved his free hand around. “She is seeking treatment. It’s...Never mind.”

“Spare me the explanation.”

Hearse swallowed air, his gun dipped, a nostril twitched, a cheek spasmed in an involuntary tic. He reaffirmed his aim, reaffirmed it again. Checked the status. It was done updating. Aimed. Stuffed down a whimper ballooning in his lungs—

“I cannot!” Hearse spun around, banged his pistol against his head. He crouched into a ball. “I must, but I cannot.” Stood, aimed again. “I must.” He kicked a rolled carpet discarded back here like a rummage-sale item. “I cannot!” He launched a fist through a treadmill deck propped against an armoire.

“Hearse, did you just demolish a treadmill with a punch?” Legion’s eyes leered at the destroyed piece of equipment that released the pent-up scent of oil. “Like, clean through the belt and rollers and everything?”

Hearse slid his gun into his holster. He rushed past Legion and snatched up the take-out containers. “Legion, do not return to the starship.” He knocked past Legion to rejoin the squad. He heaved aside a reading chair but stopped to consider a pair of glass tumblers. Why not? He needed more drinkware at home.

“What? Don’t return?”

Hearse whirled back around, hands grasping Legion’s shoulders to affirm his statement. Well, okay, holding the containers in place, but propping them between his palms and Legion’s shoulders so th—Shifted the items around. Held the containers in one hand and glassware in the—Nope, that felt awkward. Perhaps under his arm by his ribs.

Never mind the shoulder grasp. “Legion, do not return with us. I beg you. If you do, you will die. Not by my hand, but by the hands of a device. Or whatever devices use for hands. A transformer or wire or bandana. I do not know how devices work.”

“Obviously.”

Hearse’s right eye tilted at Legion. Gaped at him. Glued him in place with its glower. His aiming visor blocked the left eye’s glower. “Do—not—return.”

He tromped away—

The wall collapsed and spraying jigsaw pieces of dry rot that avalanched into the room, buried a couch and a deactivated light panel. With it toppled an upsurge of monkeys, clustered on top of each other, clawing, hooting, carrying on in a most discourteous manner. The l-window dissipated in static. Tongues of electricity lapped out in death throes.

“Workshop said we had a couple hours until the wall imploded.” Legion grabbed his pistol from its holster.

The monkeys recovered, steeled themselves at Legion and Hearse. Hearse clonked one as he stormed past. “Primates, I am experiencing emotions of devastating personal angst. I clearly have no time for your monkeying around!”

The impassable wall of monkeys rolled out before Hearse. He took out his pistol, targeted, click. What? Impotent pistol, now was not a wise time to test the patience of Hearse! Hearse would squeeze this trigger with the strength of two squeezes. He ch—Oh, blasted security update. Now he must log back in...Enter username...Enter password...Wrong password...Enter again...Now pass two-factor authentication. Wait for six-digit code sent to his gabber—

No time, dawdling firearm. Hearse held the handles to both take-out containers and glassware in one hand. With the other, he slashed his pistol in figure eights to blaze a path as if he hacked through thick jungle brush with a machete. “Away from me, simians, or face the rage of the mighty Hearse.”

Oh, monkeying around. He’d just gotten his own joke.

* * *

Legion hurried to catch up with Hearse, but the monkeys swelled into the gap behind Hearse’s pistol-whipping. Legion was cut off, and angry monkeys closed in. Why exactly were they angry? Legion had just met them today.

The monkeys lurked closer like zombies seeking flesh. Zombies with hair gelled more solidly than a crash helmet, but zombies nonetheless. Legion backed into the fridge doojigger, fingers and heels bumping against it. With the doojigger and a wall behind him, his head darted left, right, up, under a table, anywhere for a weapon with more crowd-control abilities than his Marsek. No escape route. Not even a banana.

A dwarf monkey pounced—he caught it—slapped it—felt ashamed—reminded himself the monkey attacked first—apologized to himself—threw it at a macaque who had sprang—both collided—again, spot on at recognizing monkey genuses—also impressed he knew what a genus was.

He grabbed a floating table and gripped the guidance handles on its bottom. A shield for blocking and thrusting. He deflected a pouncing uakari but not its slobber, clonked a mandrill. The uakari was out, but the mandrill was too beefy for one strike to do the trick. Clonked it again.

Eyes darted toward the crumbled wall. The haunt control would take some time repairing that damage. He almost tripped over a chunk of dry rot while inching toward the opening. The monkeys had finished spilling in, so his escape was clear. He darted out. He wasn’t having a very Titan day.

* * *

Hearse had beaten through the final monkey in his path and broken free of the clingers who, though survived, nevertheless deserved a sound thrashing or at least a silent one.

His boots clomping on the rough concrete of the lab, he found his comrades in vicious battle with the monkeys that had charged to this end. All comrades except Workshop. That flamboyant optimist engaged in vicious battle with shattered glass from something she had hugged too tightly. Would she ever learn glass was neither fluffy nor squeezy peasy?

“Gooder Guys, I have the heart chunk of aswang cadaver and its side order of brains in these easy-to-carry take-out containers.” He held the boxes up. They were indeed easy to carry with convenient metal-wire handles. “I have also scored glassware. We must depart immediately lest we be poop-flung, and the blunt splat on my back suggests I am too late for that.”

“Ya made it back.” A room-choking dragon again, Wyvern clobbered the ground with his tail. Objects as heavy as the cot leaped in inanimate fright. Brainiac was seated on the cot, and her body bounced from the impact. “Where is Legion?”

“Legion...” Hearse’s face fell, and he hoped shadow hid his grief. Legion did not deserve his fate. He was one of the good ones. But abandoning him was for the best. “Legion has fallen to the monkeys and their juvenile absence of inside voices. He will be mourned. Wyvern, he said you may have his collection of antique lint.”

“Oh.” Detritus, that pustule of decency who thought his face did not beg for a punch, grew a devilish smirk. “Shame.” A wrinkled hand jumped up to conceal that smirk, but his joy slipped through. Pustule, did you not know you smile with your eyes?

“But you got the ’wang?” Better Than You flapped a celebratory hand in the air in a fist pump/finger snap. “You got mad skills. I probably couldn’t have found them nasty body parts more than two or three minutes faster. Probably two.” He high-fived the Purple Nurple, who was unprepared to receive with anything but his face. “Anyway, let’s bounce. Peace.” He cupped Brainiac’s hands in his and bowed. “Thank you for the finger sandwiches and jasmine tea. They were wonderful, and you have been a lovely hostess.”

* * *

The hallway outside was a mess: destroyed walls, slashed fixtures, a collapsed section of the room. Legion would never make it back to the others. But the old blueprints loaded onto his map module said a door lay a corner ahead. It wrapped around the side of the building, around from where they had landed. Or two corners? Legion would have double-checked except the monkeys were hot on his heels. He used the table to deflect a baboon that had landed within striking distance, then a tamarin, then the tamarin’s poop. The tamarin was not who had thrown the poop. Seriously.

That smell would follow him around all day.

Door ahead. Legion doubled his speed toward the l-door, it’d fade and hopefully not explode, hunched behind the table, roared, charged, sprinted—

Outside. Warm sunlight. Dribbling breeze. The rumble of thrusters. Grass. A banner congratulating the winner of the yacht race for passing the mandatory urine test. Okay, so maybe it was yachts Lowensland didn’t understand.

Legion eased to a stop. Wait. The rumble of thrusters? He searched the horizon. Nothing but buildings, trees, and acrid smog from the plastic-smelting plant across the courtyard. Where were those thrusters? In the open air, sound was difficult to pinpoint. He spun on his heels, spun again—

Shadow above sheeted him from the sun’s warmth. His shoulders slouched. His arms dropped to his sides. The table fell from his grip and rolled to a curb. He peered up at B-Osprey, aloft and ascending.

Oh, no.

The monkeys clambered out of the hangar building. They stalked closer in a predatory approach instead of the aggressive uproar from before. Several generics accompanied them. Their zookeepers. Or trainers. Or other weird job Lowensland assigned them in this nonsensical criminal empire. More oozed out of the lobby building nearby, the assembly hall, Lowensland’s Funhouse of Tedium, even a sewage grate.

Thickly surrounded, Legion dropped his Marsek and clenched the cross on his necklace.

* * *

Detritus sat by a window seat. He always insisted on the window seat. Things felt good at the window seat. Felt so good he netted his fingers and leaned back on his chair, one that had a back. Yeah, that good.

That chick Workshop piloted this bird out. Clacked a few buttons and then tried to cuddle them. Detritus’s smile hadn’t broken since hearing the news that double-crossing Trioxidillian freak was dead. Best news all freaking day. Course, the other news was IP wasn’t giving him a jockstrap for this mission, so the bar was low.

“All these buttons are so wonderpuppy.” Workshop tap-danced her fingers on them pilot buttons like a four-year-old counting her Halloween candy. Probably was gonna go skipping through clover after this flight. Detritus didn’t even know what half the words she said meant. Was sick of seeing her hug everything too. At one point she hugged a wall sconce.

She threw herself back and collapsed into her chair, arms lolling off the sides. A second later, she kicked up and reared her guffawing, toothy smile at Better Than You in the navigator chair. “And if you ever drink my coffee again, I’ll turn you inside out. Your nose and throat will switch places.” Her head clicked into a tilt. Her smile didn’t vanish. Her tooth-laden, wholehearted smile.

She suddenly attacked Better Than You with such a crushing embrace that Better Than You’s limbs barely had room to struggle. “All my feelings glitter!”

Heh. Detritus shut his eyes and breathed in the cool euphoria. Euphoria smelled like vinyl and Wyvern’s unwashed dragon odor, but at least it tingled. Ain’t never felt like this before.

The starship tilted sideways to prepare to zap outta here. Good. If the haunt control spouted one more thing about the valet service on Station Zilcho, Detritus’d take charge and fly this thing into a sun. He popped his eyes open and checked out the window at the grou—

Well, well, well, wouldja look at that. Legion down below, surrounded by mobs of angry generics and angrier monkeys. Alive. And stranded. Heh. Detritus suppressed a snicker. Hearse just climbed up half a notch on the coolness scale. That sneaky liar.

Deal-breakin’ Legion had lost the fight. His body sagged in surrender while the Bad Guy ranks closed in nice an’ slow. Oh, and there was Colin at the front. Detritus always liked Colin. Dude threw a Tupperware party like nobody’s business. Except it was a side business.

Workshop had released Better Than You and returned to the flight controls. Beside her, Better Than You clutched his throat and panted hoarsely. Workshop snort-smiled. “Haunt control, acknowledge. Let’s stop monkeying around and scooch-a-mooch home.” Legs up, she kicked into a spiraling chair spin. “Wheeee! Oh, ha. Monkeying around. Just got my own joke.” Detritus didn’t.

Detritus shut his eyes again. With lips barely parted, on the tiniest whisper, he said, “Let’s see how you like being a prisoner, ya green turd.” Green turd. Finally broke that insult cycle.

Today was a good day.

Chapter Fifteen: Jailhouse Rocked

Dull night. Quiet. Colder still, which he felt especially in his eyebrows that still budded after Power Plant’s latest prank disaster. Even the protestors outside had stopped. From what Franchise gathered from the chants, the protest’s sponsors, Coffee Grindstorm, had packed up for the night, so the protestors had set camp with equipment from their other sponsors, Camp Grindstorm. The only sound now was the recital of crickets from their other other sponsor, Cricket Grindstorm. People shouldn’t grind crickets.

Night had fallen so thickly he smelled the salted wind from nearby marshlands, but Franchise was filled with insomnia. Head against his pillow, he studied a ceiling that was invisible in the low bedtime lighting. Not a peep from Ace Spandex or Plastique except for Plastique’s random sleep talking, blended words about strangling life away or shooting kneecaps and whatever else she’d planned for her grandmother.

Franchise swatted a fly off his nose and breathed out from his cheeks. Tomorrow couldn’t come fast enough, when this jailhouse would bustle again with arrests and protests. Maybe they’d finally be processed. At least Plastique would wake up, and Franchise wouldn’t feel jittery about half-expecting his name to come up in her sleepy ramblings.

Footsteps chattered down the wooden steps. Franchise didn’t have a chance to find out what—

Something exploded! A siege of crashes and a supernova of light jammed the confines. His cell wall crumbled apart, and cottony smoke choked out the wreckage. He sneezed away the haze. Overtop the rocky tumult, the guard snorted awake, Ace Spandex snorted awake, Plastique threatened awake.

Franchise burst up and pressed himself against the opposite wall, away from the catastrophe of sound, light, and substance. Frantic breathing, brain tumble-washing through escape scenarios, attention darting around at exits, he screened his eyes from the stinging dust still settling onto the ground. And into his throat. Blech, hrrk, ugh.

Out of the darkened haze and through the light fog emerged a figure. With flowing hair, dressed in a ninja’s cowl, and insisting a light vanilla perfume over the congestion of dust, a lithe figure reached out her hand.

Amaranthia, his sweetheart. “Jakey, c’mon, we don’t have totes a lotta time before the haunt control in this shack fixes the cell, and also all the ice-cream shops in this city are closing.”

Chapter Sixteen: Let’s Call This a Truce, Shall We?

There Breeng paced, right in front of him. Well, in front and below. Boots clonking heavily on tile, he circled back and forth, a smug twist to his mouth, a smug twist to his laugh. Incendiary would love a smug twist to his neck. Breeng knew, without a haunt control in his armor, Incendiary would die of starvation. Or at least boredom. With no haunt control, he couldn’t even play Pong.

The armor’s interior already smelled musty with no vents.

Breeng paced again, consulting a datasheet, now wearing a speckle of snack cake across his chin, as if taunting the hungry Incendiary. A few hours ago, Incendiary debated eating one of Foodblock’s snack cakes. Now? He’d kill for a taste of their Barbarian’s Delight flavor. The new recipe included 25 percent less salt and hair.

Hmph.

Something sang in his helmet. A tiny sound, almost imperceptible, as if to remain secret. Oh, great. Now he was hearing things. Hearing giggles. And a snort laugh. And someone asking, “Entity Incendiary?” He wasn’t hearing things, was he?

The voice had called him an entity, so this must be a haunt control. Impossible. Breeng had unlisted him from his armor’s haunt control. It wouldn’t know him as Incendiary. So who was messing with him? He bit his lip. “Control, a-acknowledge. W-who’s there?”

“Entity Incendiary, don’t change your status to silly. It’s me, Janice, Station One’s haunt control.”

Janice? Well, just fantastic. The psycho witch who’d nearly murdered the Good Guys was here. But how? Oh, wait. He should ask out loud. First inclination was to raise his hand. Second inclination was to slap himself after remembering he wasn’t in class. “Control, acknowledge. How are you in my armor?”

“Oh, you’re so forgetful. Don’t you remember? You transferred me into a microchip when you destroyed my hardware. You never closed that connection.”

At least Janice killing him was better than waiting days to die of hunger without Pong and snack cakes. “What are you doing here?”

“Your armor’s haunt control is in sleep mode, and you’re not listed in its database. You’re trapped, and I don’t have a home.” An image of a face Incendiary had seen only once before clapped onto his visor’s heads-up display. Janice’s avatar. The long-haired brunette with big eyes and broccoli in her teeth looked devious. That bodyless face leaned closer. “Seems we might need each other.” Her smile curved diabolically. “Wouldn’t you say?”

Chapter Seventeen: Nice Fit for the Team

July 31, 1800. 3:12 a.m. (Galactic Standard Time).

Their last recruit. After this day, Blackguard would return home to Lord Continuum, never again to leave His trusted side. Also never again to hang around the belching contests in which Plaster and Ripsaw engaged. Blackguard had never before heard or smelled so much aggressive belching. Feelings were hurt. Awards were given. Marionettes were annoyed.

Here on Terra—at a time its name was Earth—Blackguard led his dim and foolish soldiers on spongy ground in southern Jamestown, Virginia. So primitive here, these savages had never even heard of a radio. And this coming from a former caveman.

A moist night had fallen and summoned buzzing mosquitos. From the light of flickering torches a distance away, Blackguard spotted the conflict Continuum had forewarned him to expect. In that conflict trembled their new brother.

In these last two recruitments, in eras preexisting hyperability dampeners, Blackguard felt as if he could breathe once again. He could chronoport and teleport freely, or, as Brother Plaster phrased it, “force everyone on a trip what stank like a friggin’ bag o’ dead rodents.” Brother Plaster also routinely smelled his own armpits and smiled.

Alas, now Blackguard found himself in this racist time, predating even the Terrans’ Civil War conflict, when the planet’s dwellers seemed stuck up their own divisive and derisive...what body part had Plaster said? How simpleminded a species was to place one subset above another. And Blackguard belonged to that species. He wished to skewer the lot of them and let the buzzing insects enjoy the corpses.

A raging chase, five white racists rallying against one frightened boy for accusations of being a demon, clambered across this tobacco field with its tickling, ankle-high crop. One racist tripped into mud. Blackguard found this comical. The racist in question found this...tasty? Put that tongue back where it belonged, racist.

Lord Continuum had apprised Blackguard of the situation. One boy, fourteen years old, was sold into slavery with his younger brother, Deion. Both were abused into plowing tobacco fields for their shameless slave owners, the Fabers. The Fabers whipped the boys for not working fast enough, though no speed would bring satisfaction. Deion died, malnourished and abused. His broken spirit had killed him far more than his treatment. The older brother, enraged, revealed a hyperability and ripped the Faber clan apart. Literally. That was six years ago. A deserving end, Blackguard surmised, judging from how these five backwoods racists had cornered their frightened prey.

Since that day, this new soon-to-be disciple of Continuum had used that same “demonic” hyperability to tear apart slaveowners, traders, and one scarecrow because of low lighting. Now his hostility had caught up with him, and the villagers had formed a small lynch mob, torches and horde mentality leading their way.

A little over twenty now, the former slave collapsed against a horse stable, back inching this way and that, eyes darting for escape. He hadn’t the presence of mind to use his hyperability. He now shirked away from the torch thrust dangerously close to his face, shielding with hands wrapped over his head and arms blocking the heat. Horses within the stable chuffed at the disturbance. The straw-hatted mob held their torches high and pitchforks higher. They closed in with evil grins. They funneled their confidence through their weapons.

Blackguard would intervene happily.

“Come, brothers and sister.” Blackguard waited for no response. He wrapped himself in a ball that compressed into a dot and then nothing—his method of teleporting—and unwrapped behind the lynch mob.

The torch light abraded his dark-matter form, though not enough to matter. In this dead of night, Blackguard was barely discernable and could have lingered without detection. You could, however, smell Gangrene and Brother Plaster a mile upwind.

Vicious words drawled from ignorant, askew teeth. “Y’all killed your last decent white man, ya demon. Heah me, boy?” one racist spewed.

“No, sir, please.” The escaped slave mewled unheeded. He kicked away, heels slipping in the mud.

“Another dang color boy good ol’ America can do without, I reckon.” This fool turned to his friends and boosted his torch into the air. “Let’s keep America pure, boys.” The others roared agreement.

Blackguard wasted no time. With his arm whittled into a sword, he plunged the point through one xenophobe, then slashed another, before their screams and gurgles alerted the survivors. No matter. Their weapons had dropped, the torch now flickering into the stable and breathing dark twists of sour smoke into the humid breeze.

“Ho mama, this new demon’s all black.” Racist ignorance spewed forth, and with tobacco saliva.

Sister Marionette reached them. She lifted her hand, and with it one of the scum. A neck snapped, and a body dropped.

Brother Ripsaw zipped forth and slashed a stomach open, a racist butchering a racist. The remaining reprobate was quickly dispatched, first from Brother Plaster’s gunning belch and then from Brother Fragment, who swept his hand across the air to spray water molecules hardened into ice needles, so potent in this soggy Jamestown air. His attack barbed the man’s face. Plaster dropped a pitchfork on his head just to feel useful.

Noise melted into still silence save the buzzing of the mosquitos. All scum cleaned. Good. Continuum had assured Blackguard one of these degenerates was an ancestor to the man who would coin the phrase “Never stop starting.” Two reasons to dispatch him.

Blackguard smiled at the creature still shivering on the ground, knocked down at this splintery wall. The new recruit twisted away, his back revealing a crosshatch of scars, nearly bald and with barely a stich of clothes to afford.

“My dear boy, these townsfolk misunderstand you. Not a demon by any stretch, you are a hyperperson, one of the earliest.” Blackguard reached out to this trembling boy. “Please, come with us. You are deemed worthy to join Lord Continuum’s army of conquest. I promise, you will never be treated as a discard again, never traded to uncaring and despicable slavers. You will be well fed and free, for my Lord wishes this of you. You may pet Gangrene. Would you like some...as they say...pet therapy?” Blackguard stood aside to display a infectious Gangrene popping with tiny pus volcanos that sizzled a tobacco plant with excretion. “Gangrene loves cuddles. Avoid the disease.”

Blackguard’s arm resolved from its blade back into a hand. “I promise you a life much better than this at Father Continuum’s side, where you will no longer be considered a demon for your transformations. You will remain amongst the most powerful”—he reached out his hand to the boy whose right eye relaxed its tic—“as Brother Wyvern.”

Chapter Eighteen: Welcome to the Badder Guys

Master Asinine assessed the damage his militia had inflicted on Brainiac’s lab. A ruined workspace, destroyed equipment, a crap-ton of crap that smelled like crap thrown around other crap...and smeared on walls...and clogging up the death ray. Asinine should weigh the feces in here, make sure it actually amounted to a ton. When it came to poop and poop-related matters, he didn’t toss these measurements around like dice, neither willy nor nilly. The cleaning cost would shoot sky high just getting that raunchy musk out of the place. Or maybe he’d let Appetite loose in here.

Brainiac looked all too horrified with the damage spread around. Schizophrenic looked all too pleased. Stuff was strewn about like an exercise in hoarding gone wrong. At least the pieces of Kyril’s old starship had sustained limited damage. A few monkeys loitered about the lab like partygoers when the banana daiquiris had finally inflicted their hangovers.

Asinine strode over a jagged chunk of wall left crumbling overtop—what was this?— a giant tesla coil. Awwww. Those things were hard to come by. “Lieutenant, what’s the word on the destruction assessment?”

“Finishing up right now, sir.” Lieutenant IQ 23, standing behind his left shoulder, finished inspecting the area with the destruction scanner held up to the ceiling. It was a shoebox with a paper roll glued to it. “Looks as if we’re at demolition-level critical.”

“Like when you tried math for the first time, poop scar.” Schizophrenic swatted Master Asinine on the back.

Ugh. The worst assessment of destruction ever reported. Asinine could punch something. Like one of the monkeys. Or one of the other monkeys.

A body skidded onto the concrete at Asinine’s feet, tossed with no caution. Legion. He lay sprawled, a trickle of blood leaking out of his cheek. He picked himself up onto all fours and peered up at Asinine through a sneer.

Footsteps surrounded Asinine. He looked up at a flock of generics who had somehow stormed into the lab unnoticed, Maybe a hundred. They took their place while more filed in through the missing door and the yawning gap where the monkeys had crashed through. Everyone was beaten and cracked.

At the front of the flood, Biff limped forward. Wait, no, Francine. “Hey, Asinine, we’ve captured your bestie here. Even removed a bug hidden inside his collar.” She planted her foot on Legion’s back and flattened him against the ground. “We know you’re too stupid and too sentimental to do anything useful with him.”

“Probably true. Wait.” He tossed a holler over his shoulder. “Lieutenant, is that probably true?”

Lieutenant IQ 23 tossed his own response back. “You haven’t told me yet, so I’m not sure, sir.”

“It’s probably true.”

“Okay. In that case, sir, it’s probably true.”

Back to Francine. “My lieutenant says it’s probably true.”

Francine snapped her fingers at her fellow generics. Some of the forefront stepped up. Two generics grabbed Asinine’s hands and wrestled them behind his back. Others shuffled past and secured IQ 23, still others Brainiac, and finally Schizophrenic, who had lolled against the cot laughing. No one dared touch Appetite.

“Wait, me too?” Schizophrenic stood while two generics tried to pin his arms back. He decked one and then knocked two heads together to produce a hollow conk. “Come on, poop scars. I’m the cool Bad Guy. Bernie, man, we drank together.”

“What the what’s going on?” Asinine glanced around in a confused head jiggle-jaggle. He tried snatching his arms free from the generics. No such luck. He jostled harder, but his captors held tight. “Hey, guys. Bbbiiifffff.”

“It’s Francine.” Francine grabbed him and yanked him forward. “The generics are sick of the crock you throw us into, and we’re not tolerating it any more.

“We run the show now.”

Chapter Nineteen: ...And Your Enemies Closer

“Breeng here.” Breeng still held his hand finger to his head antenna after jabbing the ear gabber that had extended the mouth mouthpiece and ear earpiece out. The jingle for his latest fund sponsor, Stonewashed Pizza, frolicked out. He licked his hand fingers in anticipation of their cucumber-meringue pie after a good soak. He could taste the waterlogged cucumbers already.

“The target has been dispatched.” The person speaker was Hearse, as detached as if the phrase “just the facts” had taken voice. “He did not survive the trip.”

Yes. So it was true. The secret soldier agent he’d planted in the Gooder Guys had reported this, and Hearse now confirmed it. “Yyyeeesssss.” Breeng licked his mouth teeth. “Well done. You shall be recompensed handsomely, showered with voucher coupons and hearty handshakes. Return to base. We must hold our press conference to announce this...tragic...demise.”

He did not await Hearse’s response. It would no doubt be unneeded, full of word talk of “delivering bodies,” and it would also be dumb. He tapped his gabber’s bud to shut it off. Mouth aaaaaaaaah. He jigged to the gabber’s deactivation music: new fund sponsor Beef Burger’s claim to have the “burgerest beef with more cow udder than the next leading brand.”

He grabbed a smoked rattlesnake from his bayou platter sitting on a short storage case by the room wall. Mmmm, good down to the last fang. He smeared a hunk of moist bread around the platter to mop up the rest of the scales. Nothing like gratuity offerings from Sporked Tongues.

He produced a microchip from his pocket and held it up to watch it dazzle in the room light. Legion’s desk desktop computer served as an installation node, one of few places on Station One from which program software could be installed or modified. Breeng knew of only three others: Ace Spandex’s living barrack, the haunt-control lab, and the primary-communication room in the station’s computer tower place.

Breeng plodded around the inert Incendiary and climbed up into Legion’s chair. No, no longer Legion’s. He tapped the desk desktop computer, through an option ladder to the software-installation menu. On the desk desktop computer, guidance lines zoomed in with a fanciful sound hum and formed a square on which Breeng placed his microchip. He wiggled his hand fingers and examined the computer layout. Ah. There. A few more taps later, and download began.

And ended.

The office room brimmed with new room lighting. New song and dance. New jingles and new claims of burgery beef. New haunt control, thanks to the remounted hardware in the haunt-control lab. Usually these things were hellish to install and required expert computer-awareness knowledge. However, the haunt control contained in the microchip took care of the hard parts. Already customized, already prepared, it required only to be installed.

Breeng’s heart leaped atingle with a combination of accomplishment and snake meat. He waited for the sound jingle to conclude and tapped his foot to the last punch of rhythm beats: “Bur-ge-ri-est beef. Good to the last entrail.”

“Control, acknowledge. Mouth-talk to me. Report installation details.”

“Hello, Field Marshal Breeng. Have I been properly transported from Intergalactic Protection campus?” the station’s newest haunt control, Legacy, said. “My About screen says yes. I am one hundred percent optimized for Station One. However, my popup shield reports three blocked advertisements. Shall I adjust my settings?”

“We’ll fix that soon. It’s good to ear-hear you again, Legacy.” The final objective goals were falling into place.

All hail Lord Continuum.

Chapter Twenty: Please Hold

How long did Kelimore have to wait for Breeng? This big gulp was getting stickier. And, oh great, here came flies.

Chapter Twenty-One: Well, This Can’t Be Good

Pincushion had found the most discreet place on Station One, separated from prying eyes: the mystery room. No one would find him here. The only people listening were a headless corpse and an offensive line of robots, the universe’s prize winners for sleep. He wished his insomniac brain would compete for that prize.

Things had crashed and burned on that mission to Station Zilcho. Pincushion suspected they would, given how suspicious Breeng acted. Good thing he checked on the mission, too. B-Osprey’s feed showed that Legion had arrived and left the starship. However, it didn’t show that he’d returned along with everyone else. But his gabber still broadcast vital signs.

One last scan up and down the hall and then back up to make sure no one had followed. Nobody. He was alone.

From within the mystery room, somewhere only hushes of ventilation lived, he’d tried to place a call with whispered commands. No signal. Not only did haunt controls not work in here, nothing did. He sneaked outside in a tiptoed hurry.

He stuck by the door as his own lookout, waiting for a signal. “Seeking connection, seeking connection,” his gabber said, and with each update it gave, his suspense level and heartrate climbed. But finally, “Connection attained.”

He blew out all his air at once and then gulped more in. Checked the hallway again down both directions. “It’s time. The aswang is out.” Another check. He could get in serious trouble for this conversation. “First things first, I need you to swing by Station Zilcho for a rescue operation: Legion.” Lots of rescue operations happening these days. “You’ll be on your own. We can’t help. Too many people are watching, brother.”

He waited for the response among the blitzkrieg of bouncing from the other end. The response came. Awesome.

“Contact me when he’s extracted. I’m out.” Pincushion tapped his gabber to end the call.

His system yelped with a surge at the whir of something booting up from inside the mystery room. Something big. Something loud. Something bereft of subtlety.

In a lengthy turn that took forever, one in which he almost chickened out, he shuffled around. Lights where there shouldn’t be lights. Lights that vibrated alive at machinery that had woken up, maybe for the first time ever.

As if it opened its eyes, the canopy on the center robot’s head illuminated with an orange glow. A clack echoed through the room like a haywire squash ball. The other robots followed suit. “HAUNT CONTROL CONTACTED. SYSTEMS ONLINE.”

THE END

NEXT BOOK:

No story. Just Multipurpose’s grocery list.

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?

The author wants to give you free stuff! For free even!

Join the In a Galaxy Far, Far AwRy army and get an exclusive, free story you can't find anywhere else...just for signing up! How? Mosey on over to tiny.cc/iagffa_army for all the details.

How awesome is that?

For updates and to make sure I’m not eating potato chips for dinner, do yourself a favor and check this series out online. It’s the right thing to do.

Get news on it at inagalaxyfarfarawRy.com

Keep tabs on it at tiny.cc/iagffa_facebook

Follow it at tiny.cc/iagffa_twitter

Study up on it at tiny.cc/iagffa_linkedin

Communicate via homing pigeon at chirp-twiddle-twoo or whatever pigeons say.

Table of Contents

Available on the Author’s Super-Awesome Site

Other Stuff the Author Spewed Out

Your Favorite Table of Contents

Book 23: Marching Orders

Appendices

Chapter One: H-Hour

Chapter Two: Negotiation Breakdown

Chapter Three: And Speaking of Incarcerations

Chapter Four: Excuses, Excuses

Chapter Five: You’re Hired

Chapter Six: Took Them Long Enough

Chapter Seven: Just Say “Here”

Chapter Eight: Do They Come in Self-Respect Flavor?

Chapter Nine: A Well-Soiled Machine

Chapter Ten: Firing Mechanism

Chapter Eleven: The Doorbell’s on the Fritz Again

Chapter Twelve: Also Is Your Refrigerator Running?

Chapter Thirteen: All-Nighter in the Bottom Floor of Banality

Chapter Fourteen: Monkey See, Monkey Doo-Doo

Chapter Fifteen: Jailhouse Rocked

Chapter Sixteen: Let’s Call This a Truce, Shall We?

Chapter Seventeen: Nice Fit for the Team

Chapter Eighteen: Welcome to the Badder Guys

Chapter Nineteen: ...And Your Enemies Closer

Chapter Twenty: Please Hold

Chapter Twenty-One: Well, This Can’t Be Good

About That Guy Whose Book You Read Once