Salvage Merc One: The Daedalus System (22 page)

Out of the darkness came the source of the clomping.

“Hello,” Mighty Minotaur Joe grumbled. “I look forward to killing us.”

“That’s so messed up,” I said. “You realize that, right? Totally messed up.”

It grinned in response. I gulped.

That’s when I started looking for the closest weapon.

Twenty-Three

I didn’t get more than a few steps before Mighty Minotaur Joe was on my ass. I dove for a stray sword, but he grabbed me mid-dive by the foot and threw me across the space. I hit the wall again, about as hard as before, almost in the exact same spot. That meant I landed in my own nose blood. It was sticky and gross and distracted me enough that I didn’t scramble out of the way before he closed the distance and picked me up.

He didn’t use the back of my neck like Alya did. Nope, he had to go for the bully move. You know, since he was a bull and all.

What? Bull, bully, it works.

He picked me up by the back of my pants, and I heard the material tear. I felt a slight breeze on my ass and knew he’d totally torn a hole in my britches. What a dick.

My civvies went halfway up my crack as he threw me again. I tumbled through the air and slammed into a half-broken statue of some god or other. No clue what god it might have been since it had no head, no arms, and the bottom half was still rough marble.

That, of course, reminded me of a joke I’d heard once which meant I was distracted again as Mighty Minotaur Joe clomped his bull butt over to where I lay in a heap of ouchy. I didn’t even have time to untangle my limbs before he was reaching for me again.

“Dude! Knock it off!” I yelled as he lifted me up by my shirt front. It tore, and I started to slip, so he bore down harder and got some Joe skin in his grip. More ouchy. “If you are me and I am you then why the fo are we fighting?”

I really wanted to cry. His fingers were doing a number on me. Hold the foing com. Fingers?

“No fair!” I yelled. “You have fingers and hands! I call shenanigans! I only got to have hooves!”

“I have evolved past you,” Mighty Minotaur Joe said. “You are a relic. Nothing but a fossil that still flaps its gums as if it has something useful to say.”

He pulled me in close so I could smell his rancid bull breath. It was not all spring meadows and alfalfa hay. It was more like morning halitosis after a night of beer binging and all you can eat Jesperian nachos. Not even tacos, but full on, piled high, toppings dripping off the edge of the plate nachos. You know what I’m talking about. We’ve all been there once or twice.

“You got a little black beans right there,” I said, pointing up at his mouth. “Top left incisor.”

I went for a quick flight once again. I wished I’d scanned my credit profile because I’d have been racking up the frequent thrown kilometers, for sure. I was missing out on some serious chit action.

The jokes left me as my head collided with another statue of some unknown god. Or goddess. Yeah, I caught a glimpse of marble boob. I’d hit a goddess statue at full speed and screamed as something in my right arm snapped.

There was an advantage of having the artifact in me. It allowed me to heal at a rate much faster than others. Much faster. But not in the time it took Mighty Minotaur Joe to close the distance on me. Nope. Arm was totally broken when he reached me, lifted me up again, and threw me at the massive iron door.

Now, I’m not a small man. I’m average height, average weight. So getting tossed like a skee ball on Ballway, that amusement park and game planet, was not in my wheelhouse. But, apparently the labyrinth had decided it was a skill set I needed to learn as much as possible. First Alya in her Naked Snake Lady form and then Mighty Minotaur Joe. I was being tossed from one place to another more than a Groshnel foster child.

I coughed up a couple teeth I almost swallowed and spat them out in a glob of blood and phlegm. My right arm was useless, so I didn’t bother to try to push myself up. I just slouched against the door, letting the cold iron seep into my battered body. It was soothing. Kind of like a taste of the grave I was close to being sent to.

I coughed some more, but no teeth showed themselves. The rest were still precariously attached to my gums.

“That all you got?” I asked. “Throw Joe this way, throw Joe that way. Where’s the finesse, man? Come on. I’m not a bruiser like that. I try to incorporate subtlety and the art of the smooth move.”

“There is nothing subtle about you,” Mighty Minotaur Joe said as he clomped on over to me once again. Clomp and throw, clomp and throw. The guy needed some new tricks. “It is why you are here to face this quest and die failing at the trials. Others merely meet their ends at the claws of poor Alya. You get to die at my hands.”

“My hands,” I said.

“What?” he asked.

“Die at my hands since you are me and I am you and we are we,” I said. “Right? That’s what this is all about? The labyrinth gets to prove to the artifact that I’m nothing but a bullheaded brute that clomps his way across the galaxy, leaving a wake of broken chaos behind me. Talk about not being subtle. This metaphor is pretty sad, really.”

“You know not of what you speak,” Mighty Minotaur Joe said.

“I know not?” I laughed and spat blood. It splattered on Mighty Minotaur Joe’s left hoof. “Oopsy, got a little smudge on ya there. Here, let me wipe it off.”

I struck fast.

My left arm still worked, and I proved it by slicing through Mighty Minotaur Joe’s left ankle, severing his hoof with one swipe. The dumbass was so busy thinking he had me that he wasn’t paying attention to what I was doing behind my back. I’d landed on a handy dandy sword. Literally. The blade had stuck me in the back right below my left kidney. That was gonna hurt later.

But I had ignored the white hot pain and slid the blade from my person. While he mocked me, I just waited to make my move. Easy enough to do when you spit a hunk of blood mucous onto a guy’s hoof. He looked down at the glob instead of paying attention to the sword I brought out to play.

I would never have fallen for that move. I’ve been in way too many bar fights, plus I was a Marine, so you learn not to look where others want you to look otherwise you end up with a face full of gump poop, surrounded by a whole bunch of spaceheads that think that kind of thing is just hee-larious. Which, of course, it is. Who can deny that a face-full of gump poop isn’t high comedy?

Mighty Minotaur Joe stumbled back, his arms pinwheeling as he tried to stay upright with only one hoof. That wasn’t happening. Minotaurs are big. Really big. And heavy. Top heavy, to be exact. I would know.

He stumbled, pinwheeled, stumbled, pinwheeled, then went falling back on his bull ass. There was a loud crunch as he pulverized a skeleton with his backside. He roared and yanked a tibia from his butt cheek, tossing it to the side without a glance as he focused on the stump where his left hoof had been only seconds before.

I struggled to my feet, using the grooves and hardware in the door to get my ass up off the floor. I looked around in a hurry, but there were no other weapons within reach. Not that I had the strength to handle one. My arm was limp and useless, my body felt like I’d been tossed into an asteroid belt, and my mind was beyond exhausted. I was lucky to have made it as far as I had.

“You took my hoof,” Mighty Minotaur Joe stated, as if I’d merely snagged the last butterfly shrimp from the appetizer platter. “You took my hoof.”

“It happens,” I said and shrugged. See? I could shrug under any situation even with a broken arm. “I didn’t want to, man, but you left me no choice. I tried to reason with you.”

“You took my hoof,” Mighty Minotaur Joe repeated. His chest hitched, and I was slightly stunned to see his eyes well with tears.

“Dude, you aren’t gonna cry, are you?” I asked. “I mean, that would be more than a little bit of a letdown. Seeing you go from zero to baby in three seconds? Dude, you’ve got a reputation to uphold.”

I eased myself away from the iron door, waited for my legs to give out, and when they didn’t, I took a cautious step forward.

Mighty Minotaur Joe totally started to cry.

“I was supposed to win,” he said. “The labyrinth said I was supposed to win. It promised me! It promised, Eight Million Gods dammit! It promised!”

His tears were huge, just like him, and they made loud plopping noises as they splattered onto the dirty, nasty, bloody floor. He wiped at his face with his hands, but it did no good. The guy was in full on breakdown mode. He was sobbing and snotting and just a total mess. It was sad.

I’m not saying I was sad because of it. I was feeling pretty damn good since I wasn’t ripped apart and a trillion little Joe pieces at that moment. Broken, yes, but not dead. Score one for Joe. The real Joe, not Mighty Minotaur Joe. Screw that crybaby guy.

The iron door shuddered and clanged as something collided with it. It startled the crud out of me, and I tried to spin around to see what was going on. But that was way too coordinated a motion for my body to handle, so I ended up toppling back down to the floor.

Right in reach of Mighty Minotaur Joe.

He grabbed me by my hair and pulled me through his leg blood so I was face to snout with him.

“Fo,” I said.

“Fo?” he asked. “Is that really the last word you want to say before I kill you?”

“Seems fitting,” I said.

“You are pitiful and deserve this death,” he said as his other hand found my throat and started to squeeze.

That was it. I was done. No talking my way out of it since there was no talking. My throat was one centimeter from collapsing. Then it was all over.

Now, I have seen decapitations in my time. More than I’d like to count or admit, but that decapitation was the absolute foing best ever. Mighty Minotaur Joe’s head went flying from his neck and shoulders, his horns flipping around into the geysering blood so that they left trails of red droplets in the head’s wake as it tumbled through the air across the entryway to land on top of one of the headless god statues.

Goddess statue. Totally marble boobs there, but with the addition of a blood-soaked bull head on top. It was not erotic in anyway. Don’t even go there. I didn’t. No way, Jose.

The iron door shuddered again, and I was torn between turning to look at that or stare at the blood-covered Alya that was swaying over the corpse of Mighty Minotaur Joe.

“I thought you couldn’t help,” I said.

“I thought so too,” she said, dropping the gore-slicked sword she’d used to redecorate Mighty Minotaur Joe’s body with. “I didn’t think I could bring myself to interfere, but as I watched you get your ass handed to you, I realized it was harder to stay out of it than to jump in.”

“Well, thanks for the jumping,” I said. “I appreciate it. Now, help me up so I can find your soul and complete my salvage. I got a job to do, and it doesn’t sound like I have much time to do it in.”

The iron door shuddered even harder, and it was obvious that whatever wanted in was going to get inside very, very soon.

“Joe, there is no soul to find,” Alya said. “When I became this, the labyrinth ate my soul, just as it eats all souls that try to traverse it and fail. I was consumed a long time ago. The artifact knew this and tricked you. It is what it does. The labyrinth and the artifact. They have worked together since creation. You must leave and save yourself. I will stay and fend off whatever is coming through the door.”

She held up her hands to show me her sharpened claws and bared her teeth. It was some scary crud to behold, but I could see that her heart wasn’t in it. It could be a cute little nuft coming through that door, and she’d fend it off for exactly zero seconds.

“No,” I insisted. “You’re wrong. I asked what I was supposed to salvage, and it was your soul. The artifact allowed me to find this place, so I know it’s here.”

“The artifact is lying, Joe,” she replied. “I’ve tried to tell you that.”

“Nope,” I said. “I don’t buy it. My gut is saying that is total terpigcrud. There is more going on than simple deception and lies.”

The door shuddered more and began to buckle at the hinges. It became obvious that whatever was on the other side wasn’t the biggest threat. Getting crushed by a falling iron door that was bigger than a spaceship was the real danger.

“Come on,” I said and got up. I swayed as much as she did, but managed to hobble my ass over to her. “We need to get away from that. Show me the way into the hallucination part of the labyrinth again, and we’ll start this party over. This time, I’m getting your soul and finishing my salvage. No more Joe time, it’s all about Alya Horne from here on out.”

“Joe, it is hopeless,” she said.

“Blah blah blahbitty blah,” I mocked. “Hopeless my ass. Come on, we have to move.”

She acted like she wanted to argue more, but I smacked her on her snake body and that seemed to tick her off enough that she slithered backwards and out of the way of the falling door. I hurried alongside her as the hinges finally gave and the door collapsed inward.

The headless body of Mighty Minotaur Joe was not out of the way, though, so when the top of the door landed squarely on it, a massive sploosh of blood and guts totally sprayed out from under it and coated me and Alya.

I bent over and puked my guts out. I was so busy puking that I didn’t notice what came in through the massive door.

“Step away from my partner!” Mgurn yelled from the ship’s external loudspeakers. “I have all weapons trained on you, evil Naked Snake Lady thing! I will turn you into atoms if you do not step away! Or slither away! Whatever you do! Get away from Joe!”