Carltopia, Outer Cluster
In its own way, Carltopia was beautiful. It wasn’t the workmanship – that was terrible – and it wasn’t the people – they were awful to a man – but there was just that… je ne sais quoi – that certain something – that had kept King Carl here for the past nine years.
Perhaps it was simply being King, but he liked to think that it was something more; something impossible to define that made Carltopia what it was: a place for all to come.
Unless, of course, you were the sort of person who liked to upset the apple-cart. The sort of person who turned up in a re-worked Hunter ship and swaggered about, making a name for himself before he’d even been there for a single day.
That sort of person was not welcome in Carltopia, or at least they weren’t welcome to Carl, which when you thought about it amounted to the same thing.
That was why he had sent that particular individual to the Captain of the Guard, Master Snorlax, an alien who bore an uncanny resemblance to the Pokemon of the same name. Snorlax knew what to do with troublemakers, and it was a policy that had kept the peace for the nine years of Carl’s benevolent rule. There were dangers in an old mining asteroid, and these often resulted in unfortunate, and unforeseeable deaths. The chance of a big rock, for example, falling on a soldier grew remarkably high if they were on Snorlax’s list.
King Carl slurped the remainder of the meat stew from his bowl, and used his shirt to clean the mess away from his face. He recalled a day, long ago, when he had actually had some manners, but the aliens hadn’t seemed to care about them and Carl had long since given up as a result. He’d have a replacement shirt provided to him – as monarch he needed to at least appear to be clean – and go and see how Snorlax was getting along; Carl wanted this tragedy to happen sooner rather than later.
Maybe before his next meal.
+++++
Guard Captain Irgid – better known as Snorlax to King Carl – barked an order out, and the men followed it. They were obedient, willing, and too afraid of him and King Carl to do any different. He was the second most powerful man in Carltopia, and considering that a human was first and foremost that was some achievement.
He could tell the men to fight each other to the death and they’d do it, and he knew this because he’d done it as part of what King Carl had called ‘Operation Darwin’, an effort to ensure only the strongest survive. That particular effort had put smart men into combat with strong men, and for the most part the strong men had won. According to King Carl it had been an unmitigated success, but Irgid doubted that that had really been the case.
Still, there was no arguing with the King.
“Captain,” called Dargen, a man who may as well be King Carl’s pet messenger. Not for the first time he brought a new ‘recruit’ to be brought on board and summarily put an end to as quickly as possible, but this time Irgid recognised the face.
Five Skulls Zripob.
“Void take me…” he breathed as they approached. That was definitely the Chehnasho who had led his company to victory upon the still-burning Dominion Battleship, the Vadra-Turl, the man who had dispirited the enemy crew by decapitating the five senior members of the command deck and parading the severed heads before him as he had forced them to submit. What was a man like that doing in a shit hole like this? He was a hero – or monster, depending on which side you were on – and that kind of person didn’t usually turn up in a place like this by accident.
Life could be funny sometimes, except of course if Dargen was the one bringing Zripob then that meant it wasn’t any kind of funny at all.
Another thing that Irgid did not find particularly amusing was the fact that he was twice the size of the Chehnasho, had served in five tours, and yet right now he felt like pissing himself with fear.
He swallowed and tried not to stare. “Dargen…” he said, as congenially as he could manage. “Who’ve you brought to me here?”
“This is Zripob,” Dargen replied, too cheery for a man who thought he was bringing an unwary man to his death. “He arrived in a Hunter ship of all things, if you’d believe it.”
Irgid would believe it. If Dargen had told him that the Chehnasho had got here under sheer force of will he would have believed it. “You don’t say?” he said, and forced his eyes to the Chehnasho, and his mouth to speak words he knew he would regret. “He doesn’t look like much.”
“The King wants him assigned to a special project,” Dargen informed him. “So assess him and get him in uniform as soon as possible.”
Assess Five Skulls Zripob? Terrifying? Capable? Mass-murderer? Those would begin to cover it, but of course Irgid would have to go through the motions.
What in the void was he doing here?! Irgid wondered, and experienced the unsettling premonition that he was about to die. Five Skulls was staring at him with too much intensity for anything else to be the case.
“Very well,” he said, keeping the terror from his voice. “We’ll start with the basics.”
“No we won’t,” Five Skulls Zripob replied flatly. “Because it seems to me that you know who I am.”
+++++
Dargen wasn’t really sure what was going on, but as soon as he had brought the Chehnasho to Captain Snorlax things had started to get confusing. Snorlax was so dependable, so powerful, so dangerous that you could expect him to do whatever he wanted so long as he didn’t cross any royal decrees. Today, however, he had started to behave strangely as soon as Dargen had called for his attention.
It was an honest fact that Dargen did not think he’d ever seen the old soldier as tense as he was in that short conversation, and that included the time he’d led a counter-insurgency against a Hunter assault.
It wasn’t until Zripob had said it aloud that it finally made sense; Snorlax knew the Chehnasho from somewhere, and whatever their history was it gave Zripob a real advantage. That was important; not many things could scare old Snorlax, least of all a Chehnasho half of his size, and yet…
“Kill this man,” Zripob had ordered Snorlax, as though he expected to be obeyed.
Dargen snorted at the absurdity of it; to be ordering Snorlax like that could only have one outcome, and it wouldn’t be in the Chehnasho’s favour.
Suffice to say he was surprised when Snorlax didn’t hesitate, and then he was too dead to be further surprised when the trigger was pulled.
+++++
Zripob wiped the blood off of his vacuum suit, inspecting it between his fingers before wiping them clean. The plan had changed, as plans tended to do, and it looked as though they’d changed in his favour.
He liked those kinds of changes.
“What’s your name, soldier?” he asked, locking eyes with the Thurgian veteran. “Your real name?”
The Captain of the Guard that Dargen had called ‘Snorlax’ stood to attention, a fact that was not lost on the extremely confused soldiers who were now staring at the scene and wondering what in the void they should do.
“Irgid, sir!” Irgid replied. “Irgid Tahazh! I served in the Iron Lines, sir!”
“Klabek’s company,” Zripob recalled, remembering the few times that the mercenary groups had served together, and more rarely against each other. “Good soldiers. How did you end up in this shit hole?”
“Bad luck, sir,” Irgid said unhappily. “The Iron Lines were on the Dominion payroll when we were forced to surrender. Overwhelming numbers.”
Zripob nodded his understanding, that certainly made more sense than a desperate need to find the shittiest place in the galaxy and move there. “That would be a crime in the Dominion forces, soldier.”
“The Dominion can go eat a grel, sir!” Irgid replied sharply, showing that he hadn’t lost all of his spirit. “May I… inquire as to why you are here, sir?”
“I was intending to take control of this station,” Zripob answered.
Irgid’s eyes widened in surprise, but also in doubt. “By yourself, sir?”
“I was intending to evacuate all of the air, soldier,” Zripob told him flatly. “I still am, unless you have a better suggestion?”
Everything that then played out across Irgid’s face showed that the Thurgian was considering his options, a very good quality in a mercenary. If he was half as terrified of Zripob as he thought he was, the rest would be easy.
He was. “I’d rather you didn’t do that, sir!”
“Then what should I do instead?” Zripob asked patiently. The ultimatum had been given, now he just had to wait for Irgid to come up with the plan.
“These are my men,” Irgid said, gesturing to the baffled group of soldiers. “Such as they are. Criminals of various kinds, but no murderers – you can’t trust them – and trained as hard as I could train them.”
“What do they think of the King?” Zripob asked. It wouldn’t be much use if they were obedient to that fat oaf, but you could never be too sure what people might cling to in a place like this.
Irgid grunted. “Same as most,” he said, his displeased tone conveying the rest of what Zripob needed to know.
“Why haven’t you removed him yet?” Zripob asked. “He is only a single human.”
“Only a single human?!” Irgid asked incredulously. “He could rampage through my men and crush them all! Besides, he provides a level of protection from enemies who don’t come expecting a human.”
“There are ways to fight a human that don’t require great strength,” Zripob told him. “And there are people who can provide protection that you’ve only dreamed of. Tell me, soldier, have you ever contemplated government-backed piracy?”
+++++
When Dargen had not immediately returned from delivering the human to Snorlax it had been strange, and although there was always the possibility of him having been waylaid by other work, King Carl felt uneasy.
He finished the final bowl of stew by slurping it down and wiping his face with the remains of his shirt. They always got filthy after every meal, but he had the servants to clean them and availed himself of their various services instead of bothering to maintain the manners he’d set aside almost a decade ago.
He allowed one servant to remove his soiled shirt, and another two to help him into a clean replacement. There was no point in being King if you had to go around looking like a vagrant, and no point in having servants if you never used them.
“I believe I’ll go for a little walk,” he said. “It’s good for a King to stretch his legs! I’ll go down to the training field and see what’s got Dargen so busy!”
It wasn’t because he was worried about the horrible-looking creature at all, but there was something that was off about his sudden failure to return and do everything that King Carl bade of him. What was the point of having a minion if he didn’t obey every order you gave him? King Carl made a note to punish Dargen for his insubordination.
He made his way – slowly, he’d just had a big meal after all – to the training field. He’d made a habit of visiting the field once every few days to ensure Snorlax was training the men properly, and he could pass this off as just another trip. The training ground was always filled with the sounds of troops obeying orders, and Snorlax shouting them, and sometimes with the sounds of pain when a soldier needed to be punished for some transgression.
That was how an army needed to work.
Today, however, the training ground was silent, and that was not only strange, it was unheard of.
King Carl’s uneasiness grew as he saw the emptiness of the training field, and reached its crescendo as he discovered Dargen’s broken body laying alone in the field, shell and body smashed by a single blast of a kinetic pulse gun.
King Carl tried to swallow his fear, and he was unsuccessful.
He heard a noise behind him, and turned slowly to see the newly arrived Chehnasho holding a kinetic pulse gun. King Carl’s face felt as though it had been slapped hard, and it took him a moment to realise that the toad-man had just shot him in the head.
It hurt, but that’s all it did, and King Carl laughed. “You! Do you even know what you’re dealing with? I’m a human! You can’t stop me with puny weapons like that!”
The toad-man smiled, and it was a nasty smile that served to deeply unsettle Carl; any other alien would have been afraid, knowing it had no chance and having heard of the danger that humans posed, but not this one.
“I knew a human once,” the toad-man told him. “He taught me some things.”
King Carl saw his army finally arrive, and take up position behind him, kinetic pulse guns and fusion blades drawn. They were ready to fight, and with Captain Snorlax amongst them they would not waver.
King Carl felt a resurgence of his courage. “Did he teach you to fight an army?” he snapped. “Captain Snorlax, kill that man immediately!”
A moment later King Carl became very aware of the fact that he no longer had much in the way of legs, and that this sudden amputation, and the impact with the ground that followed, were two surprising things that hurt a great deal.
He howled in agony, flailing his arms wildly until they, too, were removed under dozens of hacking blows that cauterized his wounds as they cut, and soon left him as little more than a head and a torso.
The toad-man stepped in close and kneeled. “The human taught me some things. These things, however, I learned on my own.”
“P-please…!” Carl blubbered, his face still pressed into the rock under its own weight. “P-p-please!”
The toad-man croaked his laughter. “Irgid has told me all about the things you’ve had him do. Truth be told, that’s not why I’m doing this; I just wanted to kill you.”
“I’ll give you anything!” Carl gasped out, desperate to somehow survive this, even without his limbs. The sheer terror muted the pain that boiled away where his limbs ended.
“You’re already adding a number to my name,” the toad-man replied coldly, referencing something that Carl had no possibility of knowing or understanding.
The final stroke of the blade fell, bringing silence, and Six Skulls Zripob raised his latest prize.