21

Back in the storied history of humankind, before the Earth-That-Was became little more than a charred, blackened cinder, a blight upon the rest of the Solar System, where even Venus could cringe and say the planetary equivalent of "Ooh! That looks nasty! Have you got ointment for it?", great generational ships were constructed. Not willing to wait for physicists and engineers to realise they had got practically everything wrong about trans-luminal travel, humankind decided that the best way to go about seeing the wonders of the universe was to throw a few thousand people headlong out into the galaxy and see if they could hit something nice. Like a galactic version of Marbella, without the drunken foreigners and people selling cheap tat on the beaches.

Long did these ships travel, with populations increasing, air supplies becoming dangerously low and personal space becoming something that people remembered fondly. Most of these generational ships came to terrible, brutal ends. Flying into stars, crashing into moons that only wanted to spin around their parent planets in peace, becoming fodder for whichever large-eared scavenging aliens decided that the ships were salvage and the humans aboard little more than pests to be whipped into servitude. The usual.

One of the few ships to survive came into the orbit of, perhaps, the most violently anti-human planet the galaxy could have produced. Everything was either toxic, corrosive, unendingly hungry or all of the previous and worse. The air wanted to kill humans. The soil wanted to kill humans. The flora certainly wanted to kill humans and the fauna wanted to kill humans, eat them and use the remaining bones to pick their well-used teeth. To the humans aboard the generational ship, this was a problem, until they found the only intact structure remaining on the planet.

The Tether. Twenty-two thousand miles long, stretching from the surface of the planet, up beyond the atmosphere. Five miles wide, constructed of materials that the humans marvelled at, that could withstand practically any amount of stress and torsion. It was a triumph. A feat of engineering that the humans promptly invaded and turned into a dystopian nightmare. The humans lived there for hundreds of years, avoiding outside contact and developing new technologies that made it easier to watch cat videos in the comfort of their own minds.

Though these humans shied away from the outside galaxy, the galaxy did not ignore them. Not completely, at least. In the intervening years, the DWAIt Corporation found their first hyper-drive, stole the technology and used it to go around finding and stealing even more technology, whether the originators of that technology wanted them to or not. Once those dissenting aliens were vaporised, DWAIt Corp went on to patent, trademark, copyright and violently protect their acquisitions.

One of the things used to protect some of that technology was the aforementioned flora and fauna of the Tether planet. After many failed attempts, the loss of several teams of highly competent, well-trained, stalwart and easily consumed soldiers, scientists and engineers, DWAIt Corps had harvested themselves a large stock of plants and animals that could kill anything that tried to steal DWAIt Corp's stuff. They populated a small, little known planet with these creatures and plants and placed some of their most important and secret designs (stolen) within a vault that could only be opened by DWAIt Corp employees fitted with implant technology gained (stolen) from the Tether. The only place where anyone thought that kind of intrusive technology was 'cool'.

"And you want us to go to this planet?" After finding Friss and Lap, resting amid the corpses of a large number of formerly-protesting, formerly-alive revolutionaries and a fair few Crime Response Officers, Demi had asked what the hell they were doing there. The explanation was not simple. "Are you insane?"

"I'd like to think that I'm ... No. No, you're right." Friss acknowledged Lap's crinkling as the Planeian fluffed up the body they were using as a pillow. "Yes, I am insane. A little bit. But I can handle that. What I can't handle is this itch that I've had since last night."

He began to scratch his backside, scowling, then pulled down his Repli-leather pants and looked at his buttock. It had a new, raw looking, tattoo of Lodka taking up most of the cheek, the leg-like appendages trailing down the back of his own leg. He gave a noncommittal shrug and pulled his pants back up. It appeared Demi was not the only one to have failed to remember everything from the night before.

"Alright, so, something-something plants and animals. Blah-blah-blah dangerous. What, and I stress that this is the fourth time of asking, the hell are we doing here? And why did I end up in a sewer with Briyun?" She glanced to the side to see Bri grinning and waving at her with her little fingers and long claws. "Who seems nice. What did you do, Friss? Why are there yet more dead people around us?"

"I didn't do anything this time! We got here, looking for Briyun, hey Briyun, and you saw these guys and, well, you see the result." Friss waved at Bri. Bri waved at Friss. Lap used the arm of one of the dead revolutionaries to wave at everybody. "First, let me say, you can't hold your liquor and you are, by far, the meanest drunk I've ever met. Sorry, Lap."

Friss scrunched his face up and waved an apology toward Lap, who used the dead person's arm to perform a dismissive wave. Lap didn't seem to take the supposed slight personally. Demi couldn't believe it, however. She had become drunk many times before in her life and had never finished the night knee-deep in entrails and viscera. Not that she could remember. To think her drunkenness could have caused this slaughter made her reevaluate her life choices. That reevaluation took all of two seconds and the conclusion was that her life choices sucked.

"Can I scooch in here a second? I'd just like to say, I've only known Demo here for a little while, and she is a delight? Despite, you know, all the mass-murdering? No-one's perfect, eh?" Bri stood with her hands on her hips, rocking backward and forward, tail flicking behind her as she continued to hold a huge grin on her stoat-like features. "I think we can be good mates?"

"I'm not a mass-murderer!"

"Beg to differ." With a sweep of his hand, taking in the rivers of blood, the bodies and the broken, twisted revolutionary placards, Friss raised an eyebrow. "When some Crime Response Officer recognises you, Demi, the first option is never to kick them in the groin, yeah. Shoot them, yes, but kicking them in the groin gives them a chance to recover, which the guy did. Apparently, that was where his parasitic twin sat and you kinda killed him. After that ..."

Friss whistled, widening his eyes, grimacing, looking away, trying to hide a grin and a laugh. Yet, even as Friss had mentioned the groin kicking, she had a flash of memory. She had kicked the guy in the groin and only then did Friss call for a disguise from Lodka. Even as the protest collapsed into a free-for-all brawl, blaster fire pinging all around her, Demi's face had become surrounded and then infested by flying things and she had missed pretty much everything that happened after that.

She remembered Friss shouting at someone, Lap making tearing sounds, with their voice as well as with people's flesh, and something, someone, grabbing her and throwing her down into the sewers. It seemed possible, after reviewing the evidence and taking counsel from her better moral judgment, that she had, indeed, contributed to the riot, despite what her worse moral judgment had to say about things. Forget about it. That's what her worse moral judgement had to say. She put off sentencing herself while she deliberated her guilt and, also, found out why they were on this planet in the first place.

Something dropped from her forehead, in front of her eyes. She looked down to see the creepy crawly things that had infested her face had started to die, tunnelling out of her skin, repairing it as they left and fell to the blood-soaked ground. They had performed their task and now their lives had come to an end. She wondered if that would be her eventual fate? Completing what Friss wanted her to do, only to die. From execution for her framed crimes, attacked by someone Friss, or Lap, or she, had upset, or by Friss himself. She had decidedly pessimistic expectations of her survival.

"I didn't ... look, fine. Whatever." She wanted to sit down, but all the available spaces were bodies. "Why did we come here?"

"Well! Glad you asked!" Jumping towards her, Friss gathered Demi up, his arm about her shoulders, squeezing and leading her away. "I told you the plans for the next part of my maturation doll-inspired heist and you happened to suggest we needed a specialist. Lap and me met Bri, ooh, three years ago? Four years. And she's just the specialist we need. Perhaps we should have come while sober but, hey, gotta ride that wave, right?"

"That's great. Yeah. Wave." Demi couldn't remember that part of the previous night, which meant she'd have to listen to Friss explain it all again. While sober. That may not be a good thing. "So, what, exactly, is Bri a specialist at?"

"Killing things?" Without her noticing, Bri had joined her and Friss, wrapping her own arm across Demi's shoulder, atop of Friss'. "I'm a wicked predator?"

As Lap joined them all, wrapping their two-dimensional arms around everybody and leaning their head on top of Demi's, Friss called to Lodka and had them transported back to the ship. The now-familiar feeling of becoming incredibly tiny and having a sense of what sausage meat felt like, as the machine spurted it into the awaiting skin, hit Demi and she caught a glimpse of the Flesh-Route. It never ceased to make her feel nauseated.

But so did seeing all the dead people wherever they went. Literally, everywhere they had gone, people had died in horrible, seemingly inevitable ways. And now the crew had yet another killer aboard, albeit a generally personable killer. But, then again, so was Friss. Lap could be downright adorable. Bognrd she had not known long, but, despite his continuous bellowing, seemed nice enough. Which left her. The only one that didn't want to be a killer, but had reluctantly, accidentally, become one.

She needed another drink. Preferably one that removed her memories permanently.