Alexander Outland: Space Pirate (26 page)

“Thanks, Audrey. I didn’t have quite enough pressure before. Good of you to cover that lack.”

“You’re most welcome, Captain.”

“Audrey? Remind Randolph to add in the comprehension of massive sarcasm to your programming.”

“Already in, Captain.”

It figured. “Randolph! I don’t know how, but you need to figure out how to get rid of Herion’s versions of killer remoras.”

“See, Nap? I told you this was just like
Mission Aqueesis: Depth Charge
.” He sounded so cheerful. I couldn’t wait to get out of here so I could kill him.

“Yeah? Well, whatever we need to do to survive this, do it.”

“You’ve got a universal communicator with you?”

“Yeah, it’s Lionside’s.”

“Good. Put it as close to a window as you can, but don’t touch it.”

Slinkie muttered something about featherbrained nincompoops, but she tossed the communicator onto the dashboard. “It’s there.”

“Good. Slinkie, are you shooting something at them?”

“Yes. What Nap thinks is a toy gun. I think it’s more useless than that.”

“It’s not. I want you to point it at the communicator and hold the trigger down.”

“What? Randolph, is there anything in your head besides feathers?”

“Just do it. Nap, Audrey’s going to send a sonic sequence through the communicator. The External Attack Eliminator will enhance the sound.”

“Should we plan on being deaf?”

“No. Subsonic, not super. Not to worry, Nap.”

“Oh, no, Randolph. I’m not worried at all.”

“That’s the spirit.” I heard him muttering. It sounded technical. I ignored it.

The only positive I had about the merderians was that they weren’t stopping us and really didn’t seem to be slowing us down. But our green dot was invisible now in the swarm of red dots, and it didn’t take genius to guess we had a lot less time than ten minutes to get out or drown in what I, personally, felt would be the worst thing to drown in in the history of the galaxy.

“There’s only one risk,” Lionside said quietly.

“Only one? Wow, we’re moving up in the risk world. What risk is that?”

“If the resonance is right, it could shatter the glass.”

I opened my mouth to tell Randolph not to push his proverbial button down, but I was too late. I felt, rather than heard, every part of the tankfloater start to vibrate. I heard, rather than felt, a terrifying thing—a loud, cracking sound.

“S
orry about that,” the Governor said. “My knuckles have been killing me all day. Finally got a good pop.”

“I’ll hurt him, Nap, you just keep getting us out of here.” Tanner sounded serious. I had to admit it—I liked the kid.

“I’ll assist young Not-Really-Almondinger if needed, Outland. Sir, may I request you not pop anything else until we’re out of this particular holding facility?”

The Governor and Lionside started arguing about who had the right to tell whom to shut up and not make unpleasant bodily sounds. At least they weren’t on bodily odors. I gave it no more than five minutes. Sadly, I gave us less than that.

Per the grid, we were closing in on the steps. Per the dots, we were still had the galaxy’s worst merderian infestation, though I could see many more of the dots breaking up and disappearing.

“Nap.” Slinkie’s voice was a whisper. “I think I smell something.”

“Pray it’s the Governor manifesting his rights as the ancient oldster to not only pop and lock, but belch and fart.”

“I heard that, Alexander.”

“Tell me I’m not exaggerating.”

“It’s not me.” The Governor sounded highly offended.

“It’s him,” Slinkie said, clearly relieved. “That’s how he always says
it when he’s cut one and wants to blame it on a dog we don’t have.”

The Governor protested and Slinkie was now involved in the conversation. She still had the gun perfectly aimed and her finger never relaxed on the trigger, even though she was turned halfway around in her seat. I felt the urge to survive grow stronger.

“Come on.” I said it under my breath. To the tank. It didn’t want to die, at least as much as I didn’t, I knew. And it was the one getting eaten. “Come on, big guy. You can do it. You can show them all.”

The merderians were coming off, but not fast enough. I had to stop acting like we were in a sea of excrement and instead act like we were in space. I was good in space, the best. There were space remoras—usually harmless, unless you flew through a herd of them, and then they could cause you real problems. There were only a few safe ways to get them off, all of which involved landing on a planet. But there were a couple very unsafe ways to get them off while you were moving.

I put the ’floater into a spin, as fast as it could manage. I was impressed—it was faster than I’d figured. We were spinning on our axis like an older but still on-stage ballerina. Sadly, what I’d forgotten was that there was no GravCreate on the ’floater like we had on the
Sixty-Nine
.

Passengers and other things started to flip around, including the universal communicator. Everyone was yelling at me, but I watched the grid—we were losing merderians a lot faster this way and making forward motion at the same time. The tank liked to spin wildly as it flew. Who would’ve guessed?

Happily, nothing that was flipping was hitting me. Slinkie had herself braced, one foot holding the communicator against the windshield, still shooting the toy gun accurately, knee on the seat, other hand on the roof. I couldn’t wait to live through this and get her somewhere even semi-private.

“Hang on.”

“Doing my feathered best, Nap,” she snapped. I didn’t share that I’d been talking to the tank again. I was many things, but moronic
wasn’t one of them.

The spinning was helping with more than merderian removal. We were truly speeding up, almost like we were drilling through the crap instead of trying to swim in it. “Lionside, what’re we going to hit after the stairs?”

“I’m going to hit you, Outland. But other than that, the doors down here are rarely if ever locked. No one in their right mind wants to come down into the space sewage holding facility.”

“Right, so I’ll assume they’re locked, bolted and reinforced, just for us.” I knew how our luck worked. “Anything else that’s almost never activated?”

“Only the lasers.”

Lionside shared this as we crested the crap. The grid shifted and went very rectangular. The windshield wipers were the hardest working in the solar system at least, so I could just see the stairs in front of us as we spun around. I decided to make my life a little less disgusting.

I held the ’floater in the air, just above the shallows of Lake Disgusting and the stairway to heaven, and kept it spinning. Crap and merderians flew off and hit all the available surfaces. Did this until we had no more red dots on us. Then I slowed the spin, engaged the all-terrain mechanism, and set the tank down. We started up the stairs. It was bumpy and uncomfortable, and the whining from my crew was unreal, but we were no longer submerged and being chewed to bits.

“So, Lionside. These lasers, what do they do?”

“They prevent juvenile delinquency.”

“Come again?”

“They keep the kids out of here,” Tanner supplied. He sounded like he was doing better. Either that, or he was too jumbled up to be sick. Or already had been. I chose not to look behind me. “You know, youthful pranks.”

“On Zyzzx, there is no kid you can find youthful or prankster enough to come to the sewage holding facility to steal crap, no
matter how much they hate someone or how big the dare is.” I knew this for solid fact. If I’d refused to do it, no one on Zyzzx would do it. Not that I’d held any kind of leadership role there. I’d been desperate to prove myself when I was a kid—according to my Great-Aunt Clara,
the
most desperate in the history of the galaxy—and I’d turned down all the sewage facility dares like I was the king of the universe.

“We’re different on Herion,” Lionside supplied.

“Yeah, I’ve picked that up. So, what do these lasers do? Damage-wise, I mean?”

“They aren’t deadly. They give an electroshock, mostly. They work as a deterrent, not a final solution.”

“Electroshock?” Randolph’s voice crackled on the universal communicator. Slinkie had rearranged herself back to sitting normally, put the toy gun away, and had the communicator in hand.

“Yeah, Randolph, that’s what Bryant said.”

“That’s a problem,” Randolph shouted. “Nap, you need to engage—”

I didn’t get to hear what I needed to engage. Because Randolph was interrupted by the lasers hitting us. Lasers sending out an electromagnetic charge, hitting a big, wet, metal object.

Metal is a conductor. A good conductor. And we didn’t have enough crap on the tank to defuse the electromagnetic charges hitting us.

The universal communicator shorted out first. But we weren’t fried, so that was a good thing. The shots weren’t enough to kill, after all, just enough to hurt. But there were a lot of them, and the tank was big enough to take more than one hit at a time, meaning we could easily get hit with enough juice to turn us into crap encrusted snacks on a stick. “Governor! Randolph wanted us to engage something. What would it be?”

“Hit the anti-attack shield!” The Governor, Tanner, and Lionside all shouted this at the same time.

“Where is it?” Slinkie and I shouted that one out together. I’d worry about the unison thing if we all survived.

Lionside lunged through and slammed one of the many buttons down. The Hulkinator model had more buttons than a petticoat on a virgin, as my Great-Aunt Clara used to say. Still hadn’t found anyone who knew what she meant by that, not even the Governor. I took it to mean a lot of buttons. The tank started to hum.

“Ah, Governor? Why is our vehicle singing without words?”

“Hulkinator models use harmonic frequency to disable many
forms of attack.” The Governor sounded like he’d not only read the manual but memorized it.

“I can’t wait to leave this planet.”

“I’m beginning to share your sentiments, Outland. Miss Slinkie, if you’ll please give me my communicator? I’d like to repair it.”

“You can do electronics repair?” I asked as Slinkie tossed the communicator to Lionside and he started fiddling with it.

“No. However, we’re trained in how to repair vital equipment in case of enemy attack. Most enemies try to knock out communications first, Outland.”

I pondered this as we rolled up the stairs, humming a happy tune. The pirate armada had certainly done that as their first step. But it wasn’t what I went for when attacking someone. I tried to knock out their guns, their navigation, their hyper-drives—things that could prevent them hurting me or following me, not the things that would prevent them calling for help.

“The pirates are under some form of military control, whether it’s a former military guy who’s gone bad or they’re functioning like a military unit or even are an existing military unit.”

“I’d have to agree, Alexander.” The Governor sounded like he was pondering, too. “Major, once we’re able, and preferably before we’re spaceborne, could you please run a check for any military units that have gone AWOL in the last year or so?”

“Will do, sir.”

We hummed along, literally, as we went up the stairs, laser bolts now bouncing harmlessly off our tuneful hull.

“Nap, are you humming along with the ’floater?” Slinkie sounded like she was trying not to laugh.

“Maybe.” I was trying to keep the tank’s spirits up. We still had doors to bash through, a space wash to find, and untold military, dogs and donkeys to get through.

“You are such a fried egg sometimes.” She didn’t make this sound pathetic, so I decided not to worry. I’d fry her eggs as soon as we were alone, while serving her the Outland Surprise all the ladies
loved the galaxy over. “Nap, what are you smirking about?”

“Ummm… breakfast.”

“Right. Think we can break through doors without falling apart? From what I can manage to see, it looks like the merderians did some damage to the front.”

“Like everything else on this stop, we’ll find out the hard way.” We crested the stairs. The doors were about a hundred feet ahead of us. Closed, of course. I took all the other reinforcements possible for granted. “Any way to fire a weapon without having to get out or open a window?”

Lionside relayed that question into the apparently fixed communicator. Randolph replied, voice no longer crackling. “So glad you’re all okay.” We’d been submerged in more space excrement than the human mind could conceive of, gotten through the Steel Fan of Death, been attacked by killer crap eaters, but Randolph had only been worried about the electromagnetic lasers used to slap naughty Herion kids on the hand. I added this to my list of things to show Randolph wasn’t a normal person by any stretch of anyone’s imagination. The list was the size of any popular religious text by now, and growing every hour we were on Herion. Audrey was a companion book in her own right.

“For the moment, and I mean that literally. We have to break through doors. Assume they’re steel reinforced and loaded with all the special trimmings. We have weapons and explosives with us, but no one’s willing to get out of the ’floater, and rolling down the windows isn’t an option. Whaddaya got for me?”

“Captain, now that you are no longer submerged, I am able to mark on your location.”

“Super, Audrey. What does that do for us?”

“I can see the doors blocking your exit.”

“Super duper. So can I. What of it?”

“I can relay a command from the
Sixty-Nine
to the facility in order to override Herion security and open the doors for you.”

“Really? You can do that?”

“Randolph only programmed me to lie to people who were not part of our crew, Captain.”