Date Point 2 Years 8 Months 2 Weeks After Vancouver
Irbzrk Orbital Factory, Main Station
Cameron had spent a long time looking at the statue of that arsehole who’d turned being the galaxy’s most powerful being into little more than misery. He’d spent a long time studying that face, imagining how it would have felt to pulverise those features with a few good punches. It was stylised, of course – there wasn’t a human alive with that good of a body – but it was close enough for him to put together a solid mental picture that would serve him whenever the weight of being an unwanted being in an unfriendly universe got a little too heavy.
That had been his first notable encounter upon making the landing at Irbzrk, not even before he’d managed to find a place to stay. His second notable encounter was with the Vzk’tk passerby who, upon seeing a strange and hairy xeno staring at a statue, had sought to offer his own opinion on it.
That had been lucky; Cameron knew enough about the ridiculous giraffe xeno to know they were easily manipulated, close enough to humans for him to relate but dumb enough to make him wonder how they’d ever managed to reach the stars. If not for their cousin species he doubted they’d ever have made it, and if he was to find an Earth-analogy it was almost like if humans had brought neanderthals along for the ride.
Evolution out here was a joke.
One heartbreaking fabrication later, and the Vzk’tk had been easily tricked into taking him back to his home and introducing him to its family. He’d played the part right up until he stepped through that front door, but as soon as it had closed he hadn’t wasted any time getting to work.
“You know,” Cameron said to the Vzk’tk he’d named ‘Scruffles’, “it’s really amazing what even a Darwinian joke like you can remember when properly motivated.”
Cameron scraped the edge of the knife lightly down the flesh of the xeno’s youngest, a girl from what he’d gathered if that meant anything when it came to xenos. She keened in terror, relieving herself involuntarily in the process. That was disgusting, but xeno giraffe piss smelled just like beetroots, so at the very least he could think about sandwiches instead of the liquid pooling at his feet.
She didn’t struggle in his grip – not that it would have done any good against Cameron – and that was just another problem with xenos. The father and mother watched on in horror, but they didn’t do anything. They didn’t make any threats, they didn’t offer him anything to just make him stop.
It was maddening really.
“No begging,” Cameron mused aloud, emotionless monotone as usual. “That’s another thing wrong with you all. At least the Corti would try and cut a deal to survive. The Hunters would fight back. What you are is disappointing. Tell me what I want to know.”
“What… what do you want to know?” asked the Vzk’tk who Cameron had determined was most likely to be the wife, unless some seriously complicated family situation was going on. He decided to name her Xena.
“Good question, Xena,” he said, mirthful inside but remaining the picture of calm detachment without. That wasn’t voluntary, he was a broken man incapable of properly expressing his emotions, such as they were, and he’d been this way for as long as he could remember. It was a curse on Earth, where it had made him lonely, but out here it was a gift that gave him an edge. “I want to know about the Zhadersil.”
“The alien ship?” she asked, her eyes widening as Cameron cut deeper into the terrified child.
“The alien ship,” Cameron confirmed. “Or its crew at any rate. I’m told the man from the statue didn’t make it.”
“There were so many Hunter vessels out there,” she said, her words coming quickly as though that might stop him from cutting – it wouldn’t, but he allowed the knife to slow to give her that glimmer of hope. “There’s no way that anyone could have survived it.”
“How can you be so sure?” he asked. “He was awfully good at killing them, wasn’t he?”
“Nobody has heard anything from him since then,” Xena told him. “Not even his old crew.”
“His old crew…” Cameron said, feigning contemplation. “If only there was somebody who could introduce me to them. I might even forget about what I was currently doing in order to go and meet with them instead.”
He only had to look into their eyes to see that the xenos did not understand. The reports of their simple-mindedness were not exaggerated.
He sighed. “I’m saying that if you tell me how to find his crew, I’ll finish up here and go and meet them.”
“They come and go,” Scruffles said quickly, seizing upon the lifeline on offer. “But they always go and meet Krpp’lltt’stsk to trade in their stolen goods!”
“And this… Mister Cripple… is where?” Cameron pressed.
“He works down at the trading center!” Xena volunteered. “He’s the foreman there!”
“Foreman at the trading center,” Cameron repeated. “That will do nicely.”
He drove the knife into the small xeno’s body, repeating the process with piston-like efficiency until it was dead. Then he turned his attention to the adults.
“You…” Xena gasped, completely horrified, “you said you’d go! You said!”
“After I finish up,” he reminded her as he descended upon them.
Cameron White didn’t like leaving a job half-done.
He was a perfectionist that way.
Cavaras, Corti Directorate Core World
“So you’ve turned me into fucking Chewbacca meets the blue-man group,” Adrian said, inspecting his newly modified body for the first time since he’d awakened from the gene-grafting. His whole body was covered with blue hair, even the bits that weren’t supposed to be covered with thick tufts of the stuff, and only his palms and the soles of his feet were really free of it. “Mission accomplished, fuckhead.”
“I don’t know what a Chewbacca is,” replied his Corti doctor, who had preferred to simply go by ‘Doc’ rather than provide his name. “Or a ‘blue-man’. You do look sufficiently non-human, however.”
“I certainly can’t argue that,” Adrian agreed disdainfully. He didn’t recognise himself in the mirror, that was true, and he doubted anyone else would pick him as human either. “Whose idea was the blue?”
“Councilor Hrbrd advised us that your species found the colour particularly calming,” Doc replied. “The rest was pure inspiration.”
“It’s calming on a fucking feature wall,” Adrian complained. “Don’t think so much of it when it’s growing in tufts all over my body.”
He paused, a thought coming to mind. A horrible thought.
“How am I supposed to take a shit and not get it all over my beautiful navy blue butt fuzz?” he asked, staring down at the Corti doctor with hard eyes.
Doc snorted. “Carefully.”
“That isn’t helpful,” Adrian replied. Everyday activities were about to get a lot more difficult as he adjusted to being covered with hair instead of clothing, although he had at least insisted that a pair of shorts were not optional. “You can reverse this, right?”
“I’ve already told you we can,” Doc said patiently. “Although it’s possible that you may come to love it.”
“Snowball’s chance in hell, mate,” Adrian said flatly. “But I think this will stop anyone from pegging me as a human unless they’re super fucking thorough.”
“So I take it you’re ready to meet your handler?” Doc asked. “If so, I shall inform the Councilor and have you brought to her.”
“Her?” Adrian asked. For some reason that had surprised him; he wasn’t sure why, it wasn’t as though he’d been short on female aliens since the abductions, but recently it had just been males and he’d gotten used to thinking that way. “What species is she, then? Corti? Giraffe?”
“She’s human,” Doc replied, and smirked a little at the surprise showing through on Adrian’s hairy face.
“A human?” he asked. “What’s her name? Is… she good looking?”
“Her name is Margarita,” Doc said, “and she’s beautiful.”
+++++
Irbzrk Orbital Factory, Main Station
“That really is amazing,” Trycrur said, staring up at the statue. “They really managed to capture his smile.”
“It’s the muscles that really give me the chills,” Chir added, “so lifelike you can just imagine him crushing a Hunter to death in each arm.”
“He’s taller than I remember,” Trycrur continued. “I didn’t think they made humans that big.”
“Growth spurt,” Chir decided with mock finality. “He must have been eating well.”
“Thank you for all of that,” Jen said dryly. They had decided to come out to Irbzrk in order to investigate the astronomical event that Zripob had told them about, and Trycrur and Chir had decided that no trip to the station would be complete without a visit to the ‘statue’. Especially not without forcing Jen to tag along.
Still, she thought, at least when she looked up at the statue it only hurt a little bit. She was moving on, which was a good thing since the object of her affections was most likely dead, but she’d decided she’d never manage true closure until she’d come out here and discovered what had actually become of him. It had only taken a couple weeks of increasing boredom in the palace and the excuse of a cargo drop off to get her out here.
She was getting stares, though, and she knew that it was because she was a human. The fear of the Hunters was still fresh in the minds of these people, and even though they’d built a statue to commemorate the sacrifice of one they weren’t prepared to tolerate a living one for any longer than they had to. Not that they’d force her to leave like so many other communities had reportedly done to their stray humans – they were bound by the Dominion not to, and in any case they were far too afraid of her as both human and pirate queen to try it – but they wouldn’t be going out of their way to make her feel welcome.
“What do you think if he was still here to see it?” Chir asked in genuine wonder.
“They got the nose wrong,” Jen replied too quickly. She didn’t think they’d noticed, though, since even by now they hadn’t managed to fully clue into human behaviours. When she slipped up she’d found it was best to press on immediately and pretend that nothing happened. “Adrian had his nose broken at some point, it should be a little bit crooked.”
Maybe not quite that over him after all. Damn.
“How long are we going to be stuck here, anyway?” she asked, changing the topic. “Zripob only said he’d heard about the radiation burst here, not that the event was close by.”
“It was close by,” Chir replied. “That is why we believe it may have had something to do with the Zhadersil.”
“Zripob was going to see what Krpp’lltt’stsk had to say about it,” Trycrur added. “Then we’ll go and see what we can find before swinging back to Cimbrean.”
“Isn’t Crippled-steak just a foreman?” Jen asked. “I thought he only worked with us because it earned him such a lot of money.”
They didn’t bother to correct her pronunciation of the foreman’s name, both of them being long since familiar with the human habit of completely mangling any names it encountered. Chir had volunteered that his species consistently pronounced the name of their resident human as ‘Shoo’, which Jen had informed him was at once a command to leave and an article of footwear. Chir had been so horrified at this that she’d had to stop laughing and assure him that she was sure this ‘Shoo’ couldn’t possibly mind.
“He has contacts amongst the traders,” Chir told her. “And his hands in many pots. The information over the news networks was limited, which is unusual for anything that may pose a hazard to vessels, so that in itself was strange enough. I am sure he will know more.”
“I imagine he’ll be wanting payment for this as well?” Jen asked, although she already knew the answer would be yes. Some things were the same whether you were on Earth or out conquering the universe, and greed was one of them. That particular deadly sin appeared to be universal.
“Zripob is cunning,” Chir said, giving the Chehnasho mercenary a rare compliment, although Jen was sure the fact that the frog-alien wasn’t here was a compelling reason for him to be honest. “He will not waste our money.”
“Not that we have anything to do with it all,” Trycrur said thoughtfully, “since we’re getting paid by the Dominion as well as for all the stuff we’re selling here. It’s going to take a lot of trips to sell what we’ve got.”
“You’ll have noticed that our activities have resulted in a bustling marketplace?” Chir asked her. “What we take from the Alliance goes to the people here, or passes from here to the traders who take it out across the Dominion. Everyone benefits, except for the Alliance.”
“How long until they make statues of us, then?” Jen joked.
“Do you think they’d actually do that?” Trycrur asked. “I mean, I wouldn’t need a big one-“
“I believe Jen was joking,” Chir interrupted helpfully, “although a giant statue showing off my good side is not something I would say no to. Just imagine how impressed the females would be then!”
“Not going to imagine that,” Jen said immediately. “You can-“
She was interrupted by the buzz of a communicator set to silent. Jen had been amused to discover that they had vibration features on space phones no matter where you were in the galaxy. “It’s Zripob,” she said after taking a glance at it.
“This is Jen,” she said as it connected. “Go ahead, Zripob.”
“Jen,” the frog man croaked over the communicator. “I’ve just found Krpp’lltt’stsk.”
“What did he say about the astronomical event?” she asked. “Was it-“
“He’s dead, Jen,” Zripob interrupted. “Cut into pieces and piled carefully in his back room.”
Jen stopped, not knowing what to say. “Zripob,” she finally said, “I-“
“There’s something written here,” he continued. “It’s in your language, I think. I recognise the characters. Get down here now, the police want you to interpret for them.”
She didn’t have anything else to say, but left it to him to disconnect. Then she lowered the device slowly and turned to look at the others.
“Zripob found something,” she said weakly.
“Was it Adrian?” Chir asked instinctively, probably interpreting her attitude as something that related to the male human.
“I hope not,” Jen said, “because otherwise this is a really messed up love-letter.”
Cavaras, Corti Directorate Core World
Either Doc had about the most fucked up sense of human beauty that Adrian had ever encountered, or he’d been playing some sort of joke on Adrian. He was, admittedly, in no position to judge on looks right now, but Margarita was not what he’d have called ‘beautiful’.
Old, certainly. Wrinkled, definitely. Dwarf was another word that would also fit. That last one had been the part that had surprised him most; it had been so long since any human contact at all that it was a shock to be reminded of the sheer varied nature of humankind.
“You’re not what I expected,” he’d told her once he’d gotten control of his rebellious voice.
“You are one to talk! What did you let them do to you?” she asked him in such thickly accented Spanish he was surprised the translators had been up to the job. “You look like a bag of wigs made babies with a bucket of blue paint.”
“They wanted me to avoid being recognised as a human,” he said, fully aware that he looked ridiculous and now utterly embarrassed by the fact that another human was here to appreciate the fact.
“Then they have been extremely successful,” Margarita replied judgmentally. “When I look at you I think ‘wig’, or ‘shaggy dog’.”
“Exactly the sort of effect they were attempting to go for, I think,” Adrian agreed. “So I’m told that you’re supposed to be my ‘Handler’?”
“I got the short straw,” she told him. “Nobody wanted to do the job since we got wind that you were the one responsible for the Great Hunt.”
“That’s common knowledge?” he asked, feeling all kinds of uncomfortable.
“In the right circles,” she said. “Honestly, when I look at you now I wonder ‘how is this possible?'”
“I was lucky,” he admitted.
“If you call that luck, I’d hate to see you on a bad day,” she replied. “But you didn’t come here to listen to me tell you how disappointing you are, did you?”
“I really didn’t,” he said flatly.
“Well, today we’ll be outfitting you for your tools,” she said, “and then we’ll be introducing you to the others. There’s plenty of work, too, so don’t feel like you have to hold back.”
“What kind of ‘tools’?” he asked suspiciously. There wasn’t much out here that he trusted to actually work for him.
“The kind you’ll be using,” Margarita replied bluntly. “When you work for me you’ll be doing the job right. That way I won’t need to worry about you attracting the entire Hunter fleet to my planet. Understand?”
Adrian told her that understood, and Margarita began the process of showing him the tools of the trade. There were a few guns, kinetic pulse guns for the most part, but also a bulkier weapon she claimed had been her idea. From her description it was intended to fire balls of plasma contained by a kinetic field that dissipated a short range after leaving the weapon, which could be helpful for whoever was holding it, and completely terrifying for anyone else nearby.
Apart from the weaponry, it was tools, and a lot of them resembled spy gadgets from Earth. Again, that had been Margarita’s influence, and she happily proclaimed that prior to her own abduction she had enjoyed the James Bond films and all other spy movies.
He could have figured that out from the watch that fired lasers, but this one wasn’t going to be cutting through steel bars. Blinding people, on the other hand…
“You really won’t be needing most of this,” she said unnecessarily, he’d already realised that he wouldn’t have the first idea what to do with most of it. “Think of this as my tool-shop, and when you need a tool for a job, you come here and get the right one. If I don’t have what you need, then we’ll work something out.”
+++++
Jennifer Delaney. Mid-twenties, space-babe pirate queen, currently attending a murder scene that she’d describe as somewhere between ‘chilling’ and ‘most foul.’
It also failed to provide quite as much contrast between itself and the memories of Adrian that she would have liked, but while she could imagine Adrian taking apart aliens with brutal savagery – a whimsical imagining that caused a stir in parts of her best left unstirred – she could not imagine him doing so with the kind of cold precision that this had required. The alien had been murdered in a cold-blooded way, and while Adrian was many things she couldn’t picture him as a murderer.
At least not a murderer who also wrote poetry, in the blood of his victims, on the wall. That was a special kind of fucked up.
“What does it say?” Trycrur murmured quietly. They’d only been let in to the scene because Zripob had convinced the police that Jen could read the strange alien language. As indeed she could, even if it was written in poorly spelled English.
“There once was a fine lad from south London, got asked to take care of a problem. He’ll meet the piratey whore, in the five-twelve corridor, or there’s going to be more xeno hunting,” she read. “It doesn’t even really rhyme properly… and who’s he calling a ‘piratey whore’!?”
“He’s going to kill more people?” Chir asked, having arrived in time to listened in. “The police are going to go crazy if this is a human.”
“Fucking English,” Jen complained again, more loudly this time. “Fucking men! What is it about me that I only meet psychos out here?”
“Five-twelve corridor isn’t that far away,” Trycrur said. “Should we let the police know?”
“And what?” Jen asked. “Let them handle it? God help us, but this bloke is even more disturbed than Adrian ever was. Do you think he couldn’t take the locals apart if he wanted to?”
“Then what do you want me to tell the police?” Chir asked. “We can’t just go fighting in their streets. We’d never be welcome here again.”
“Tell them to get some anti-tank weapons ready,” Jen said, “no nerve-jam grenades, since I’ll be out there as well and I don’t feel like getting a bigger headache than English has already given me.”
“You want to take care of him yourself?” Trycrur asked. “Are you sure that’s wise?”
“I’m not going to fight fairly,” Jen replied. There was really no way she wanted to fight at all, but it was clear enough that if she didn’t then English would be killing more people to punish her. That didn’t mean she was going to go in with anything less than everything she had, however. “Tell them we’ll be going armed, tell them to do the same. We’ll go to the ship and kit up.”
“Somehow this feels like the most dangerous thing we’ve ever done,” Chir mused. “Including all those times with the Hunters.”
Jen sighed. “There’s every chance you could be right.”
+++++
Cameron White had gone unnoticed in the crowd that had assembled outside of the foreman’s office, allowing himself to be turned away by the police who had come onto the scene. It was unbelievable to him that in a society with this technology, there weren’t cameras everywhere. In space there was no surveillance state, and that was very helpful to a man in his profession.
Mister Cripple had been quick to tell him all about the crew of the Zhadersil. He’d told him how he dealt with the frog-man or the reccoon-guy, but that their enterprise was effectively led by the human female named ‘Jen’.
Cameron White was feeling better than he had about what was coming. At first he’d written the poem to draw Jen out to get a look at her. It wasn’t wise to underestimate a human, even a female human, and the fact that she was running a pirating operation had made him cautious.
Know thy enemy. Wise words from somebody who knew what they were on about.
What he had oberved, however, had been a pretty young redhead who didn’t look like she’d be much of a threat to anyone, aside from those weakling xenos. Appearances could be deceiving, of course, but in this case she’d have to be completely at odds with how she looked to even pose him half a problem. The work inside had visibly disturbed her, and that had about done it for any prospect of her secretly being a hardened criminal. This was a girl playing at piracy, not someone he had to be wary of.
That would make the next part very easy indeed. So easy that it might even be possible to make a fun game of it.
And Cameron White had always liked fun games.