No Small Bills Page 20

  “What?” It’s not easy carrying on a conversation when one of you’s on a low-slung spacebike and the other’s on a bouncing cybernetic beastie.

  “The store!” I hollered again. “How big was it?”

  “You saw it!” he finally replied.

  “That was all of it?”

  “Yes! Why?”

  I jerked my head back, almost taking out Mary’s eye. “He’s still going!”

  “What?”

  “He’s still going!” This was making me nuts. I hit the brakes, though I know better than to just slam then on, even on a hovering space-bike. I’ve been down that road before, thanks very much. One good thing the Grays did for me when they gave me this head—they took away all my old scars at the same time, including the road rash on my legs from pulling stupid bike stunts in the past. Not the way I’d recommend getting reconstructive surgery, but hey, I’ll take it.

  Ned’s kangaroo got another hop in before he realized what’d happened. Then he must have hit some controls because the thing executed a perfect bootlegger’s turn on its tail and bounced back to us before setting into a waiting crouch.

  “What’s going on?” he asked me in at a more conversational volume as he clambered down. Tall followed. Tansy just floated down, the little show-off.

  “Gwarmesh,” I explained, reluctantly climbing off the bike—reluctant because it meant detaching Mary from me. She’d seemed perfectly content to snuggle into my shoulder this whole time, and I was more than content to let her. This felt important, though. “He’s still destroying things.”

  The others all cocked their heads to listen. Weird that the one with no external ears had noticed it first. Must be because I don’t have to deal with the wind as much. But after a second they all nodded. You could still clearly hear the sounds of things breaking, even from this far away.

  “That store wasn’t that big,” I pointed out. “Which means he’s moved on to the rest of Proximi Garn.”

  “Wow.” Tansy shook her head. “He must have been really pissed.”

  “‘Really pissed’ doesn’t begin to cover it,” I told her. “I’ve seen plenty of guys really pissed—I take the subway to work. This is a rampage, pure and simple, like you see in the old monster movies. He’s pulling a Godzilla, a King Kong, a Mothra.” I scratched my bill. “And we need to stop him.”

  “We don’t have time,” Tall argued. “We’ve got to save the universe. We can worry about stopping him then, if he’s still at it.”

  Mary nodded. “The mission is our first priority,” she agreed, but slowly. “But something here does not feel right.” She shook her head. “This rage and destruction do seem abnormal.”

  I glanced at Ned. “Look, you were his cellmate. How much do you know about this guy?”

  “About what you know,” Ned replied. “He didn’t exactly open up and tell me his life story. He’s from 059-cubed—”

  Mary interrupted him, which wasn’t like her. “Where?”

  “O59-cubed.”

  She was already frowning. “I have never heard of such a place.”

  “Me neither,” Ned admitted, pushing his cap back to scratch his head, “but I just figured it was one of those little tiny places, like my own homeworld.”

  But Mary was shaking her head. “No. When the Grays modified me, they downloaded the entire galactic map into my cerebrum. I know every planet in the universe. Yet I have never heard of this O59-cubed.”

  “So maybe he was lying,” I suggested. “Maybe he was embarrassed about his real homeworld, like guys from Long Island claiming they’re New Yorkers when they travel. Or people from the U.S. saying they’re Canadians with really weird accents.”

  “Maybe,” Tall agreed, “but most people only hide something when they feel guilty.” I could see he had his lawman cap on again. “What else do we know about him?”

  “Not much.” Ned thought about it. “From O59-cubed, in prison for ‘mayhem,’ member of the ‘Feharb’lanek’—”

  “WHAT?!?” Tansy’s shout almost bowled the rest of us over. I hadn’t even known she could get that loud. Or that pale.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked her when I’d picked myself back up off the floor. “You’ve heard of them?”

  “Them?” She was literally shaking. “There’s no them! It’s not a race, it’s a thing! The Feh Har Bel Lanic.”

  “Oh. Oh no.” Now Ned was doing the ghost impersonation. “I didn’t—”

  Mary hadn’t said a thing, but she’d turned white as well. And I’ll be damned if her eyes weren’t tearing up.

  Tall and I looked at each other. “Okay, for the stupid humans in the crowd,” I griped, “would someone please explain what that means? We already knew he was a Feharb’lanek, so why is it suddenly such a big deal?”

  Mary recovered enough to answer first. “Not a Feharb’lanek,” she corrected softly. “Feh Har Bel Lanic.” She pronounced each word slowly so I could hear the difference.

  “Okay, so we mangled the name a bit. What’s the big deal? Is the ACLU about to come after us for being un-PC?”

  “Feh Har Bel Lanic is not a race,” Mary explained. “It is a—thing. An entity. The name means, literally, ‘that which scourges existence away.’ It is in the ancient tongue of the Hem’tar Noth, a race that once ruled the universe. Until they created or found or unleashed the Feh Har Bel Lanic—no one is certain which.” She actually gulped a little. “Because it destroyed them so utterly only mentions of them among other races remain.”

  I shook my head, trying to process all this. “So you’re saying Gwarmesh—the big furball with the snaggletooth grin, the one who’s been palling around with us for the past year—is actually some kind of ancient galactic scourge? That destroys whole civilizations?” Mary, Ned, and Tansy all nodded. “And we let him loose?” More nods. “Oy vey. What was he doing in prison in the first place?”

  “Nobody knows how the Feh Har Bel Lanic thinks,” Ned told me. “Or even if it does—until now I don’t know anyone who’s even claimed to see it and survive, much less talk to it and share meals with it. There are whole planetary schools devoted to the question of whether it’s even a real object or just some kind of metaphor for sudden spontaneous collapse of a star-spanning civilization.” He saw my look and shrugged. “Some schools will do anything to specialize.”

  “Oh, my!” Mary suddenly exclaimed. I swear, she curses like a character from a Pollyanna movie. “Gwarmesh!”

  “Yeah, that’s who we’re talking about,” I agreed, but she shushed me with a wave of her hand. Damn, that woman has way too much power over me. It’d be scary if I didn’t like it so much.

  “No, the place,” she explained. “The Gewar Mesh. It is a loose amalgamation of city-states spread across the Horseshoe Nebula. An old and highly respected civilization, though one that like many has a warlike history before setting weaponry aside in favor of the arts.”

  “Big fighter-types that got all sappy and became hippy painters instead,” Ned translated for me. I nodded my thanks.

  Mary had her new communicator out and was tapping it frantically. “They do not respond!” she cried.

  “Who?”

  “The Gewar Mesh! There is no answer!”

  “What, from the entire civilization? Did they take a universal lunch hour?” Then I realized what she was saying. “You mean—”

  She nodded. “I am afraid so.”

  “He killed an entire civilization?”

  “Again,” Tall pointed out.

  “Again?”

  “Apparently so.” She sighed and returned the communicator to her pocket. “We thought he was telling us his name, but he was merely boasting about his most recent act of destruction.”

  “Which still doesn’t explain why he was in prison,” I said. “Though maybe he has to recharge between slaughters, or rest between meals, or whatever.” I glanced back the way we’d come. “But now we’ve let him loose on Proximi Garn, and who knows where else. We’ve got to stop him
.”

  This time Mary nodded. “You are correct. If allowed to continue unchecked, the Feh Har Bel Lanic could easily lay waste to the entire Galactic Core, killing every being within it. His is the more immediate threat.”

  “Right.” I turned and hopped back on my bike. “Let’s go.”

  “Let’s go?” Tall was shaking his head. “And how exactly do you expect to stop him, talk him to death?”

  “Do you think that’d work?”

  “NO!” I could tell he wanted to hit me, then. I’ve seen that expression way too many times before. Mainly on ex-girlfriends. And bosses. And grocery store clerks. And those people who call asking for donations—you can hear it in their voices. But anyway.

  “Okay, bright guy, what’s your idea, then?”

  That had him stumped. Which, honestly, wasn’t the response I’d been hoping for. Because, for all his many, many, MANY faults, Tall was a federal agent. He’d been trained for this stuff. Well, maybe not for the “you’ve let an ancient galactic scourge loose on an unsuspecting town, and you have nothing to stop him but a handful of recently escaped convicts, a cool space-bike, and a mechanical kangeroo” scenario exactly, but close enough. And if he couldn’t figure something out, I had no idea who could.

  “I have an idea,” Tansy announced. Which just goes to show, you never can tell.

  “Great!” I turned to her. “Let’s hear it!”

  So she told us.

  “That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard!” Tall announced immediately.

  Which pretty much decided me. “I like it!” I told her. “Let’s give it a whirl!”

  Tall glared at me. “You’re just saying that to piss me off!”

  “Got a better idea, big guy?” I shot back.

  “No,” he had to admit. “But that doesn’t make hers any less stupid!”

  “Well, it’s the best plan we’ve got so far, and we’re running out of time.”

  “He’s right,” Ned agreed. “Once the Feh Har Bel Lanic finishes tearing Proximi Garn apart, he’ll seek out another target. Which means we’ll have to hunt him down. We need to deal with him now, while we still know where he is.”

  I’d already straddled my bike again, and Mary had hopped on behind me. I was starting to love this bike. “Ready?” I asked her.

  “Ready,” she answered, wrapping her arms around me and pressing her head into my shoulder. Yep, really loving this bike.

  “Then let’s go stop a scourge!” I hit the gas, or whatever this thing has in its place, and we roared off down the road, racing right back to the town we’d just left behind. Ned and his spring-footed galactic automaton were right behind us.

  I had no idea what we were going to do once we got there. Because, honestly? Tansy’s plan sucked. But it really was the only one we had. And we could always improvise. Hell, thinking ahead hadn’t exactly worked out too well for me so far in life. Might as well try thinking on the fly instead. It couldn’t really be any worse.

  Could it?

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Thinking Like a Fly

  “Well.” I braked to a stop, fishtailing a little, and stared. “Well.” I couldn’t think of much else to say.

  There’d been a town here less than two hours ago. Not a big town, at least not by Earth standards—I still found it weird that it’d been considered a “major population center” in galactic terms—but a town nonetheless.

  Now?

  Not so much.

  Oh, there were still a few walls here and there, or at least a few supports and the odd corner. You could just about make out where the road had been if you squinted.

  And had x-ray vision. To peer through all the wreckage.

  Because there were building pieces everywhere. I’d seen videos of tornadoes—even went tornado-chasing once back in college, though fortunately we’d gotten drunk and lost and then more drunk and more lost and the closest we’d wound up getting to a tornado was sitting at some ancient drive-in movie theater in the middle of Iowa watching Twister and laughing our butts off. I knew what a tornado could do. This? This looked like Proximi Garn had been hit by a tornado, but one that’d been working out beforehand and had come in with a plan, a map, and some laser-guided missiles. A hardcore military ops tornado. With teeth.

  “Right,” Tall shouted as Ned’s hopper came to a stop beside us. “Still think this’s a good idea?”

  No, I admitted to myself. But I wasn’t going to give him that satisfaction. “Still don’t have an alternative?” I shouted back. The glare was all the reply I needed. “Then yes, we go ahead with Tansy’s plan. Come on.” I put the bike in Standby mode and climbed off—I didn’t want to risk it getting damaged as well. Mary was right behind me, and Ned and Tall and Tansy joined us. We all stared at what was left of the town together.

  “We’d better hurry,” I pointed out. “I can’t imagine there’s much left here for him to tear apart.”

  We picked our way through the debris, trying carefully not to look at anything that might be organic. I had no idea how many people Proximi Garn had had, but I didn’t see anyone running away or cowering in a corner so it was a good bet the current population count was hovering around zero. And I desperately shoved away the mental reminder that this was all our fault. I’d deal with that later. If we survived.

  The good news, such as it was, was that I could hear tearing sounds up ahead. So Gwarmesh—I still thought of him that way, partially because we’d called him that for almost a year but mainly because it was easier to remember and quicker to say than the Feh Har Bel Lanic, which sounded way too close to Herbal Tonic for my tastes—was still here.

  Great.

  “Hey, Gwarmesh!” I called out when I’d gotten about halfway down the main street. “You here, big guy? I’m pretty sure you’ve made your point by now.”

  No reply, but I wasn’t really expecting any. I kept going, though. And finally reached the last building in Proximi Garn, both geographically and by virtue of being the last structure still standing. Though not for long, if the figure in front of it had anything to say on the subject.

  “Gwarmesh? Hey, buddy!”

  He turned and looked at me then, and I’d have backed up if it wouldn’t have meant falling on my butt. First off, he was even bigger now than he’d been before—probably close to ten feet high, and at least eight wide. His fur had changed, too. It was lit now, like he was glowing from within and each hair was a fiberoptic cable. His eyes were alight too, though they looked more like the pictures I’d seen of hot lava, red and white and yellow swirled together in a super-hot liquid. And his fangs? I’d thought his teeth were messed up before! Now they shot out at all angles, a good foot or more, like he’d taken a bunch of boar tusks and just shoved them in there any which way.

  He still had that cute little pink nose, though.

  “I think it’s enough, don’t you?” I suggested quietly. I didn’t really expect him to stop—scourge of the galaxy and all that—but figured it was worth a try.

  He threw a roof at me.

  A roof! Okay, I’m exaggerating—it wasn’t a whole roof. But only because it fell apart a bit when he plucked it off the building and hurled it toward me. As it was, a section a good ten feet square still zoomed toward me like a makeshift Frisbee. Where’s a golden retriever the size of Lake Michigan when you need one? Instead I threw myself down and it passed over my head—judging from the crash a minute later it went at least another hundred feet before it dipped enough to collide with the ground or the building fragments jutting up here and there.

  Okay, back to Plan B. Or Plan A, really—talking had been Plan B. Though it wasn’t really much of a plan, so perhaps it was more like Odd Notion B. Though then wouldn’t it be Odd Notion A, since that was different from a plan and so Plan A didn’t count?

  Whatever.

  “Go get ’im, Tansy!” I shouted as I picked myself back up. She shot past me, wings a-blur, and hurled herself at the giant berserk furball.

&
nbsp; Yep, that was Plan A. Sending a tiny winged faerie against King Kong from Outer Space.

  But give us some credit. She didn’t tackle him with her hands.

  Instead I saw her nose twitch, and the air shimmer, and a gleaming metal band as thick as my waist appeared and wrapped itself around Gwarmesh, pinning his arms to his side. “Yes!” I shouted. Ned and Tall cheered as well. Even Mary let out a little celebratory yip as Tansy smiled and blushed and took a little mid-air bow.

  Only Gwarmesh didn’t seem pleased. Can’t imagine why.

  He growled at all of us, and most of all at Tansy. You could see he was trying to burst free but he didn’t have the leverage. His fists were pounding against his sides, though. And—I blinked. Then I looked again.

  “Uh, guys?” I asked. “Is it me, or are his sides . . . rippling?”

  We all stared. “Oh, fark!” Ned muttered. “He’s using kinetic waves!”

  “Kinetic what?”

  “Waves. He’s building and storing kinetic energy to make himself bigger and stronger.” Ned had the same look I’d seen whenever the IT guys tried to debug my computer at work after I’d been downloading porn—half fascinated and half horrified. “That must be how he’s done so much damage,” he whispered. “He’s a kinetic waveform! Anything that hits him only makes him stronger, and he amplifies the impact and spits it back out a hundredfold! If an armada tried shooting him, he’d have enough force to wipe out a star system!”

  “So what you’re saying is”—as we watched Gwarmesh grew several inches taller and wider, and the band around him strained, stretched, and finally snapped—“we’re screwed.”

  Ned looked at me. “Pretty much, yeah.”

  “Right.” Gwarmesh was free again, and we clearly had his full attention as he snarled, bellowed something loud and angry and harsh, and began lumbering toward us. “New plan—everybody run!”

  You know those old Scooby Doo cartoons? How in every single one of them, there’s a point where the monster o’ the week is chasing Scooby and Shaggy and they’re going “Yoinks!” and running like idiots, pausing frequently to dress up in silly costumes in order to confuse the bloodthirsty beastie that’s always right behind them?