The Sheriff of Yrnameer (18 page)

The point of contention was whether to push on or to rest. One, Yguba, had emerged as a leader of sorts over the past few days. He wanted to continue. Jaef Ugnbartn did not. They were the two with their guns out.

“I’m sick of your attitude,” said Jaef Ugnbartn. “You’re not the boss.”

“We’re six hours from the village. We keep going,” said Yguba.

“I said, I’m sick of your attitude,” said Jaef Ugnbartn. “You’re not—”

“All right, I heard you,” said Yguba. “You be the boss.”

He holstered his gun.

Jaef Ugnbartn seemed momentarily surprised, then holstered his own gun. “Okay,” he said, “here’s what we’re going to do.”

Yguba drew his gun again and shot him in the head.

Jaef Ugnbartn staggered backward, but didn’t fall.

“That’s not where my brains are,” he said mockingly. “You’re so stupid. They’re right here.”

Yguba shot him right there.

Then there were six Bad Men.

“All right,” said Yguba, blowing some smoke off the barrel. “Can we just go kill some villagers, please?”

Kenneth had unfolded out of bendspace not long after Cole docked the Benedict to the satellite. Kenneth hung back for a while, observing the stricken Success!Sat and monitoring the communication bands, until he overheard Cole and Nora discussing their plans.

“Okay,” Cole was saying, “we should make it to the control room in about twenty minutes. I figure the refueling will take about ten, and then we’ll head back.”

Kenneth considered his options. The most logical thing would be to lie in wait for the moment that the Benedict disconnected from the satellite, because that would mean Cole was back on board. Then he’d vaporize it. Or, he could puncture it with a few hundred armor-piercing shells. That would be good, too. No, vaporize it.

But where would the fun be in that?

A quick risk/benefit analysis—with
benefit
defined as the elimination of Cole + fun—yielded a plan that would involve docking at that secondary air lock over there, the one that looked undamaged, and then getting to Cole’s ship before Cole did. Of course, it was possible that Cole might somehow escape, and either way Kenneth would have to hurry so that he didn’t get pulled into the atmosphere with the falling satellite, but in the end the promise of seeing Cole’s dumbfounded expression won out over those potential dangers. And so Kenneth docked his ship at the only other functioning air lock on the ring and set off to find the Benedict.

It quickly became clear that something very strange was happening on the satellite. He witnessed several groups of humans attacking one another. Then some of the groups began trying to attack him.
One man, large for his species, ran at Kenneth with a fire ax and hit him with all his might, yielding nearly as much force as Kenneth would experience while receiving a deep-tissue massage on his home planet. Kenneth gathered the man up and crumpled him into a tidy little ball.

He was starting to get annoyed. He had a pretty good mental map of the satellite, being himself a devotee of
The Galaxy’s Largest Construction Projects
, but the route that he had projected was often blocked by malfunctioning doors.

He took yet another detour and was confronted by three especially obnoxious attackers. He braided them.

Another direction. He turned a corner and was set upon once again, this time by about two dozen men. He had just initiated a quickie weaving project with them when the nearby bulkhead door opened.

“Oh, hi, Cole!” said Kenneth.

“Shut the door, Peter!” screamed Cole.

Peter shut it, slamming it down right on one of Kenneth’s extended tentacles.

“Ow!” they could hear Kenneth say on the other side of the door.

“Cole, was that
Kenneth
?” said Bacchi in disbelief. “Cole? Cole?”

Cole was already several meters away, having done his own quick risk/benefit analysis and deciding he liked his odds with the insane cannibals better. Charging at them toward the door on the opposite end of the hall, he fired a burst from his gun in the air.

“Get out of my way!”

The cannibals barely noticed. The infighting had spread rapidly through their ranks, and at the moment most of them were too immersed in trying to remove the flesh from one another’s bones to pay Cole much heed.

“After him!” said Bacchi.

They followed in his wake, Bacchi firing randomly. Now the cannibals were starting to realize that their prey was making its escape. Cole clubbed and batted away hands that grasped at him, feeling his shirt tear away as someone grabbed it. A man leaped on his back and bit his shoulder.

“Ow
!” said Cole, spinning around to dislodge him. The man
tumbled off and climbed to his feet, to find Cole pointing the gun at him.

He was young, perhaps in his late twenties. Cole noted that he was wearing a very nice tie, except it was knotted around his forehead. Other than that he was naked.

“Don’t shoot me!” begged the man, cowering back. Cole lowered the gun. “Oh, thank you, thank you!” said the man gratefully. Then he hurled himself at Cole again. Cole smashed him in the face with his gun, and down he went.

“C’mon!” said Bacchi, passing Cole. Cole caught up with him as they reached the other door. Behind them, the cannibals were starting to sort out their priorities and regroup. Peter was still in their midst, and several of them had clambered atop him.

“You know, that’s not a good idea,” Cole could hear him saying. “You’re going to damage your teeth if you keep biting me.”

“Peter!” said Cole. “Stop playing around and get over here!”

Peter shook himself like a dog, scattering the men—”Sorry! Sorry!”—then scuttled over to the doorway.

“Hurry!” said Cole. “Open this thing!”

Peter came scuttling along and did his trick with the probe. The door slid open.

“All right, let’s
ayyiaaaaa
!” said Cole.

“What are you
ayiaaaa
!” said Bacchi, responding like Cole did to the sight of several hundred ravenous businessmen on the other side of the door.

Kenneth was very vexed.

His tentacle hurt a lot and he was finding it difficult to free it from under the heavy door. That’s when the bolus of men came around the corner, a dense wall of them moving through the corridor, giving the impression of hundreds more pushing them forward inexorably from behind.

“Get him!” someone shouted, and those in the front decided to do just that.

Kenneth sighed, and placed the majority of his tentacles on the bulkhead.

“I’m getting too close to tertiary molting for this,” he muttered in his rich voice, and proceeded to tear the door from its moorings.

˙  ˙  ˙

Cole and the others were sprinting toward a side exit, dodging overturned tables and chairs and hungry assailants. Suddenly the hundred men in the ballroom seemed almost inconsequential, at least compared to the number pouring into the space from the doorway that Peter had just opened.

Cole had done too much running over the past hour. His legs were leaden and painful. Bacchi and Peter and Fred quickly outpaced him, and he found himself alone, surrounded by a dozen would-be diners.

“Bacchi! Help! Come back!” shouted Cole, but his voice was lost amid the screaming and giggling and barnyard noises echoing in the chamber, mixed with random bursts of automatic-weapons fire.

They were closing in, a miasma of grabbing hands and bloodshot eyes and gnashing teeth. “Get back! Get back!” screamed Cole. He swung the gun around, but a hand tore it from his grasp. He punched one man and kicked another in the groin and tried to dart forward, but tripped over an unseen chair and went sprawling on the floor.

As he fell there was a wrenching, rending groan from somewhere to his right as Kenneth ripped the door out of the wall. The bastards were all around Cole now, ringing him, looming, fingers outstretched. He tried to get to his feet but slipped again, which is what saved his life.

As he stumbled forward there was a
whoosh
, and a shadow skimmed over his head two inches above his skull. An instant later came a thudding crash, the impact hard enough that the vibration bounced him off the floor. Cole scrabbled to his feet. The men nearest him were gone, mowed down like grass by the twisted wreckage of the door, which Kenneth had flung into the room like a discus.

“Cole!” shouted Bacchi, beckoning to him from the side exit. “Come on!”

“Cole
!” shouted Kenneth from the jagged remains of the other doorway.

Cole took off running, following the path cleared by the door-turned-missile. As he neared Bacchi his eyes somehow fell upon a small monitor panel on the wall.
WARNING
, it was flashing,
600-PERSON CAPACITY EXCEEDED
.

Kenneth moved into the ballroom, sweeping men out of his way even as those behind him continued to attack. As he stepped into the chamber it was as if a cork had been pulled from the corridor, and scores upon scores of men flooded through the wounded entranceway to meet their compatriots pouring in through the other side.

Kenneth held some of his eyeballs above the fray, tracking Cole as he made his run toward the side exit. “Cole!” he shouted again, and changed his direction to intercept him. But now more men were climbing on him, pulling at him from all sides, trying to bite him. Someone fired a gun at him point-blank, and Kenneth cursed and picked him up and threw him across the ballroom at Cole. It was a perfect shot, right on target—but a millisecond too late. Cole dove through the door, which slammed shut just before the human projectile bounced off it, leaving a rusty skid mark.

In the ballroom, humans engulfed and swarmed over Kenneth like ants over a wounded beetle.

“Cole! Four minutes!” Nora’s tense voice, over the transmitter.

Cole, panting as he ran, forced out a breathless “Coming!”

He tripped and fell again. Fred and Peter stopped and came back to help him up. Bacchi kept running.

“Would you like me to carry you?” said Peter. “I can support twelve tons. Do you weigh more than twelve tons?”

Bacchi heard a thumping noise approaching from behind, and then Peter’s blocky form galloped past him, Cole and Fred sitting on top.

“Hey!” said Bacchi, trying to catch up. “What about me?!”

“No room!” said Cole.

They reached an intersection and Peter turned left. Fred shouted something.

“Peter, hold on,” said Cole. Peter stopped. “Are you sure it’s this way?”

“Quite sure,” said Peter.

“Positive?”

“Absolutely!”

Fred said something else.

“Okay,” said Cole. “Let’s go the opposite direction.”

“Two minutes!” said Nora.

“Co-o-o-mi-i-ng!” said Cole, bouncing atop Peter.

They arrived at the docking station in time to hear the voice of the Benedict’s flight computer echoing up the open air-lock passageway. “Warning: entering planetary atmosphere in one minute, thirty seconds.”

Cole leaped off Peter. “Go,” he said to Fred, “down the hatch.”

Fred lowered himself through the hatch and disappeared down the ladder.

“Hey
!” Cole heard Nora yell, followed by a scuffle, followed by Fred squealing and yelling something in Grey. “Please assist in removal of vicious angry she-pig-creature!” said the AT.

“Nora!” Cole yelled down the hatch. “It’s okay! He’s with us!”

Nora stuck her head into view.

“Well, hurry up!”

Cole turned to Bacchi. He was pointing his gun at Peter.

“Cole?” said Peter.

“He can’t come with us,” said Bacchi. “You know it. He’s gone conscious.”

“Bacchi …”

“Cole, you know what I’m saying. We let this thing on board, and he’ll be trying to run the galaxy in a week. It’s too risky.”

Cole looked at Peter. Several video inputs looked back at him.

“Cole, you know I’m right,” said Bacchi.

“Please,” said Peter. “Please don’t leave me here. I don’t want to die.”

“Cole …”

“Yes,” said Cole to Bacchi, “you’re right.”

Cole had never seen a robot look crestfallen before. It was an unsettling feat, made more so by the fact that Peter didn’t have any features designed to mimic facial expressions. He somehow just exuded complete resignation.

“That’s all right,” said Peter. “I understand.”

He turned and began slowly walking away.

“Oh, farg it all,” said Cole, “get on board!”

“Yayyy
!” Peter said, and jumped in the air, clapping his appendages together. Then he scrambled down the hatch.

“That was dumb, Cole,” said Bacchi. Then he noticed the wound on Cole’s shoulder. “What happened to you?”

“One of those bastards bit me,” said Cole.

Bacchi instantly had the Firestick 25 up again, this time pointing at Cole’s head. “I can’t let you on board,” said Bacchi. “It’s too risky. You’re one of them now.”

“Bacchi—”

“Head or chest? I’ll make it clean.”

“Bacchi, I don’t have an implant! You don’t catch it from a bite! That’s a different video game!”

“Oh,” said Bacchi, lowering the gun. “Right.”

“Entering planetary atmosphere in fifty seconds.”