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  As per the terms of his contract, the assassin produced an insulated foil bag from a fold in his dark cloak, unrolled it, then slipped his weapon inside. He sealed the bag at the top and pressed a lizard-like thumb against a red dot marked out near the bag’s top.

  There was a hiss as the weapon was vaporized inside the bag, then another as the bag itself turned to ash and drifted to the ground below.

  The Tolores-shaped thing threw open the door to the restaurant.

  She floated inside.

  For a long, drawn-out moment, the alley was filled with nothing but the clatter and bustling of a busy working kitchen.

  The figure in the darkness waited and listened. His ears weren’t as developed as his eyes, but if all went to plan, he wouldn’t need them to be.

  Several more seconds passed before the first scream rang out. It was a scream of surprise that rose quickly into one of utter, abject terror.

  The next scream followed almost immediately. This one skipped out the surprised part entirely, and plunged straight into the depths of horror.

  The screams came thick and fast after that, howling and screeching and wailing through the open door and flooding out into the alley.

  The shadowy figure allowed himself a satisfied nod. He reached into his belt and took out another disposal bag.

  He wasn’t generally superstitious or religious – it didn’t pay to be in his line of work – but he offered up a quick prayer of repent to any gods who happened to be listening, because he couldn’t really see the harm in it at this point.

  Then, with that out of the way, and the screams of the dying ringing in his ears, he pulled the bag over his head, sealed it as best as he could around his neck, and squeezed the red button.

  CHAPTER SIX

  The windows, which had been affording Cal a view of what he still considered to be pretty much the whole of outer space, but which was in reality nothing of the sort, had become opaque. Projected onto each one, a lengthy and unpleasant piece of security camera footage was drawing to a close.

  Cal knew it was drawing to a close because everyone was dead. Very dead. It was difficult to see how any of them could get much deader, in fact.

  When the video had started to play, Cal had thought he was looking at some sort of fancy dress storage facility, or alien-themed costume party. There were thirty or forty figures on screen, with only four or five bearing more than a passing resemblance to any of the others.

  There were agonizingly tall ones who looked like their elongated limbs were in danger of breaking if they moved too quickly. There were a number of short, squat ones whose compliment of arms ranged from zero to low double figures.

  One was hairy, like Mizette. One was small and lizard-like. Another appeared to have testicles where its ears should be, but didn’t seem to be in the slightest bit concerned, although one or two of the others did a double-take as they passed him.

  Despite the mind-boggling variety of things he’d never seen before on screen, Cal realized pretty quickly what they were all doing. They were eating.

  “It’s a restaurant,” he had said, quite knowingly, as if he were the only person in the room qualified to make that call.

  “You don’t say?” Mech had grunted, but all eyes had stayed fixed on the screens as a blobby four-armed creature floated in through a door at the top right of the image, glowing faintly in the dim mood-lighting.

  The hush in the room had deepened as the creature opened its gaping mouth and projectile vomited a glittery stream of floating green dots. The dots struck an absurdly-designed waitress on the back of the head, flipping her into a forward somersault so dramatic and spectacular it could’ve clinched her a gold at the Olympics, had she not landed quite so heavily on her face.

  The diners all turned to see what the commotion was. There was no sound in the footage, but Cal could imagine the hubbub of chatter fading away as all eyes went to the fallen waitress, who briefly twitched and spasmed on the floor before becoming deathly still.

  Most of the waitress’s body was blocked from the camera by a table, but the back of her head could been seen between a gap in the legs. Not that there was much left to see. Around 30% of her skull had been burned away, revealing a brain that shimmered with sparkles of green. Cal was no expert on the physiology of whatever the fonk that thing was, and had no idea if her brain always glowed like that, but he guessed it probably didn’t.

  The floating creature rotated sharply to the left. Its mouth opened again and a wide beam of green pinpricks struck someone that appeared to be made almost exclusively of legs. The alien flipped over the table, smashed into its snake-like dining companion, and sent them both tumbling into a table of what appeared to be garden gnomes.

  It took the legs-thing less than a second to hit the floor, but most of its innards got there before it. The snake-creature’s mouth moved frantically. It tried to slither away, but another sparkling trail of green from the floating woman tore out its throat, leaving a shimmering coating over its slick exposed flesh.

  And so it went. The garden gnomes died next, practically exploding as they were hit, mid-flee, by the attacker’s mouth-beam. At some point during those first few deaths, the restaurant erupted into chaos. Misshapen bodies lumbered, darted, crawled and flew for safety. One by one, they were all cut down by the glittery green glow of the beam.

  A few minutes later, there was no-one alive in the restaurant but the thing who had killed everyone else.

  Cal glanced around at the others. Mech was transfixed by the closest screen, his leathery brow deeply furrowed, his metal jaw clenched tight.

  Mizette was back to slumping her weight onto one thigh and was idly plucking random loose hairs from the end of her tail. Every second or so she’d glance at a different screen, despite the fact they were all showing the same identical footage. She spotted Cal looking at her and winked back at him. He smiled fleetingly, and directed his gaze along the line.

  The green gooey thing had formed itself into a perfect ball-shape, and was rocking backwards and forwards, paying the footage no heed whatsoever. Whenever he rocked backwards, his eyes would loop up and over until they were pointing towards the back wall, then he’d roll the other way until he faced front again. He looked quite happy, Cal thought, although the lack of anything resembling an actual face made it difficult to be sure.

  Cal’s gaze lingered on Gunso Loren, who stood watching the footage in respectful silence, while doing her best to ignore the blob of slime rolling playfully around near her feet. Of all the people in the room - or the ones who weren’t comprised entirely of goo, at least – she was the most difficult to judge. Just when Cal had thought he had a handle on her, she pulled the gun and seemed to become someone else entirely.

  He was looking forward to getting to know her better, mostly so he could figure out what made her tick, but also because there was something quite hypnotically attractive about her. She didn’t have supermodel looks – the blue skin that gave her the appearance of a corpse trapped under a frozen pond would’ve been a strike against her, for a start – but she had caught Cal’s attention the moment she stepped through the door, and when she had jammed a kick-ass handgun into a giant robot-man’s face, she’d won his heart.

  Cal turned his attention back to the video footage. Everyone in the restaurant was still dead. The killer floated in lazy circles in the middle of the room, surveying its handiwork.

  “So, what…? That thing puked all those people to death?” asked Mech.

  “More or less,” said Sinclair, who was sitting on the edge of his desk, angled so he could watch a screen but still see everyone in the room.

  “No,” said Cal.

  The footage paused, seemingly of its own free will. The president’s fixed smile dipped just a fraction. “No?”

  “It’s not vomiting. I mean, it looks like it’s vomiting, because it opens its mouth and all that sparkly stuff comes out. Which, funny story, kind of hap
pened to me once. Back home, we have this stuff called Goldschläger. It’s an alcoholic drink. Swiss, I think. From Switzerland. It’s sort of cinnamony, but with these flecks of gold through it that…”

  Cal caught the expressions of Mech and the president and briefly shook his head. “Doesn’t matter. It wasn’t vomiting. On the video, I mean. If you wind it back, there’s a guy who has, like, balls for ears. And by ‘balls’ I mean…”

  “We know what you mean,” said Sinclair.

  “Anyway, I was watching this guy, wondering how you get through life with testicles fixed to the side of your face, and noticed that when the, uh, the thing came in and opened its mouth, he cups his hands over them,” Cal said. He looked around at the others. “You know, protective-like?”

  “I don’t get it,” said Mizette.

  “Balls are very sensitive things,” Cal explained.

  “Oh, I know,” she replied, then her tongue flicked out and licked across her snout in a highly suggestive way. Quite what it was suggesting, Cal had no idea, but it was definitely suggesting something.

  Cal shifted uncomfortably. “So I suppose it kinda makes sense that that guy uses them for ears, but I’d imagine he must constantly be worried about loud noises. Someone shouting would be like getting kicked in the nuts, and no-one wants that.”

  He cupped his hands over his ears, just like the creature on screen had done. “He covered his balls. That thing wasn’t puking. It was screaming.”

  President Sinclair considered this. “Legate Jjin?”

  “It’s… feasible,” the officer admitted, although he clearly wasn’t happy about doing so. “I’ll have our specialists look into it again.”

  Cal nodded. “Good idea, Jjin. And if they need my help, don’t be embarrassed to ask, OK? Promise me?”

  Jjin’s face contorted into such a sneer he looked as if his face were made of rubber. His right eye twitched, and a vein on his temple pulsed a deep purple through his blue-tinged skin. If looks could kill, Cal, wouldn’t just be dead, he’d never have been born in the first place.

  “Screaming, puking, who cares?” Mech grunted. “What’s it got to do with us?”

  “This footage was sent to us two days ago. We don’t know where it was taken, but the time stamp tells us it was recent,” said Sinclair. “What we do know is that the killer used an entirely new type of experimental weapon. One that was designed by my predecessor, President Bandini. We don’t know how she got it.”

  “She?” said Cal.

  Sinclair motioned to the screen. “Yes. The killer.”

  “That’s female?” Cal spluttered.

  “Of course she is, man. It’s obvious,” said Mech. “She’s a quadroog.”

  Cal squinted at the four-armed creature frozen on screen. “Is she?” he said. “What’s a quadroog?”

  Mizette pointed to the screen. “That is.”

  “Oh, right, well thanks for clearing that up,” Cal said, but the sarcasm was completely lost on the wolf-woman.

  “So… wait,” said Mech, whirring softly as he turned to the president. “You people designed this weapon, but don’t know if she was puking or screaming?”

  “We didn’t design it,” said Jjin. “It was designed by former President Bandini himself.”

  “But it was theoretical,” Sinclair added. “He sketched out a few ideas, did a little of the math, but there was never even a prototype. Besides, notice anything unusual about the quadroog?”

  “She’s got four arms,” said Cal. “And three eyes, and... Actually, how long a list do you want?”

  “Lady’s got a hole in her chest,” Mech said. “Right there in the middle.”

  “I didn’t know if that was deliberate or not,” Cal said.

  “Why would she deliberately have a hole right through the center of her body?” asked Mech.

  “Oh, like that’s the weirdest part! Why would she have three eyes?” Cal replied. “It makes no sense. Depth-perception wise, I mean.”

  “How comes she’s like, even alive?” asked Mizette.

  “Oh, that’s an easy one,” said Sinclair. “She isn’t.”

  The video images began to play again, and the floating quadroog resumed her leisurely rotation. After a few seconds, she turned and drifted off camera, leaving the bodies of the dead behind.

  “Watch,” said Jjin, in a whisper that managed to convey both terror and awe in the same breath.

  They watched.

  They waited.

  “I don’t see anything,” said Cal. “What exactly am I looking…?”

  His voice tailed off into silence. On screen, the dead were moving. They sat up one by one, more or less in the order they died in. The waitress with the back of her head missing got to her feet first. As she did, her brain slopped backwards out of her open skull and she immediately fell over again.

  By the time the waitress was back on the floor, the thing that was mostly legs and the snake-creature were on the move. Both clearly carried injuries which should have killed pretty much anything, yet there they were, walking and slithering around like they didn’t have a care in the world.

  In a matter of moments, the restaurant thronged with the walking wounded. Or, perhaps more accurately, the walking dead.

  “So… what? They’re, like, zombies?” asked Mizette.

  “Space zombies,” Cal corrected.

  Mech sighed. “Look, man,” he began, his voice low. “I’m sorry I lost my temper earlier and all, I’m not a violent person by nature, so don’t take this the wrong way or nothing, but if you add the word ‘space’ to something that it ain’t necessary to add the word ‘space’ to one more time, I’m gonna punch your mouth off.”

  Cal glanced at the cyborg’s metal jaw. “Is that what happened to you? Did you say ‘space’ one too many times and someone did that to you? Did someone hurt you, Gluk Disselpoof?” Cal rested a hand on Mech’s armored arm. “Do you want to talk about it?”

  “Shut up, man,” Mech scowled, jerking his arm away and facing front again.

  “Hey, strong men cry, too,” Cal said. He lowered his voice to a whisper. “Strong men cry, too.”

  “I’m going to cut right to the chase,” said President Sinclair.

  “Finally,” said Mizette, huffing like a sulky teenager.

  “If word gets out that the Zertex Corporation has created a system to weaponize the dead, it’s going to have a catastrophic effect on our stocks,” said the president.

  “Boo-hoo. If I had a heart, it’d be bleeding,” said Mech. “Why should we care?”

  “News of the weapon will also likely derail our peace talks with the Symmorium, setting back years of progress, and plunging us into a war that will kill billions on both sides,” Sinclair continued. “You’ve seen war first hand, haven’t you, Mech?”

  Mech’s metal jaw tensed. “Yeah. Yeah, I seen war.”

  “So you’ll appreciate my desire to see it avoided.” President Sinclair picked up his little basketball and tossed it from hand to hand again. “We have been approached with this footage by a Remnants warlord named Kornack. He has generously offered to sell the master copy to us, along with some other information and the location it was taken from, rather than sell it to anyone else.”

  “You mean he’s blackmailing you?” said Cal.

  Sinclair’s smile hit him with both barrels. “Yes. In a nutshell. But we really must prevent that footage getting out.”

  “Then buy it,” said Mech. “Ain’t like you don’t have the money.”

  “We do, and we fully intend to,” said Sinclair. “But he refuses to come to us, and a Zertex crew in the Remnants would draw a lot of unwanted attention. Understandably, I think, we don’t want the rest of the data transmitted through open space unencrypted. We need a disguised Zertex ship to get the data and send it back to us on an encrypted channel.”

  “You want us to go,” said Cal.

  “Well check out the big br
ain on, Eugene!” said Sinclair. “Or would you prefer me to call you ‘Butcher’?”

  “Uh, I prefer Cal, actually.”

  “Cal?” said Legate Jjin, his impossibly black eyebrows knotting into a single v-shape above his nose.

  “Nickname,” said Cal, quickly. “Back in the day, some of the newspapers used to call me ‘the California Butcher,’ on account of me, you know, probably eating someone in California or something. It was a while ago. I was young. I forget.”

  He puffed out his cheeks and glanced between Jjin and Sinclair. “Anyway, it seemed a bit long-winded, so a lot of people just called me ‘Cal’ for short.”

  “I have no record of that,” said Jjin.

  “It was all very low-key,” said Cal. “Might have been a dream, actually. But I like it.”

  President Sinclair blinked slowly. Eventually, he shrugged. “Fine. Cal it is,” he said. “You’re right. I want you four to go and make the handover, then bring the data back here so we can act on it.”

  “Why us?” asked Mech.

  Sinclair’s smile broadened. “No reason.”

  Mech looked along the line. “No reason? You just randomly picked us four reprobates to travel halfway across the galaxy and pay your ransom? That’s don’t make any sense.”

  President Sinclair tilted his head left and right, peering at the dial on the cyborg’s chest. “You sure you don’t have that thing turned up?” he asked, grinning. “OK, you got me. There are all kinds of reasons we decided you guys were the best folks for the job. It’s a carefully planned out operation, but all that matters from your point of view is this: make the drop, and you get full pardons. All of you. Released from the jails you’ve been rotting in, given new lives, new identities, if that’s what you choose. A fresh start.”

  Mizette stopped fiddling with her tail and let it drop behind her. “Where?” she asked.

  “Wherever you choose. We recommend somewhere within Zertex controlled space for your own safety, of course, but it’s up to you,” said Sinclair. His eyes flicked to Mech, answering his question before he could even ask it. “And we’d give you money. More money than you can imagine.”