In a Galaxy Far, Far AwRy

Book 12: His Kingdom Come

Liam Gibbs

IN A GALAXY FAR, FAR AWRY book 12: HIS KINGDOM COME

Copyright (c) 2021 Liam Gibbs

All rights reserved.

This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission.

As awesome as this book is, it’s a work of fiction. I know, I know. We were all hoping, but it just ain’t gonna be. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s freaky imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblances to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely bonkers and coincidental. In other words, sadly you can’t get Schizophrenic’s autograph.

ISBN 13: 978-1777139650

First printing: April 2021

{ PLOT DEVICE PUBLISHING }

The Story So Far...

This stupendous, amazing, spectacular, not-at-all-overhyped comedy/science-fiction series can be found in the following parts:

Book 1: Serial Fiction Sideshow, available in the hearts of one and all

Book 2: Home Sweet Home Invasion, available in the hearts of one and all

Book 3: Technophobia, available in the h—you’re starting to see a pattern here, aren’t you?

Book 4: Armageddon Trigger Finger, available in...hey...your heart. And one and all’s too.

Book 5: The Genetic Equation, available blah blah blah.

Book 6: Power Tool, not available. Just kidding. Totally available.

Book 0: The Story So Far, you know the drill.

Available on the Author’s Super-Awesome Site

Book 7: The Lesser of Two Egos

Book 8: Untitled of Attitude Adjustments

Book 9: Those We Left Behind

Book 10: Metaphor for Life

Book 11: Oh, Crock, Here Comes a Meteor!

Book 12: His Kingdom Come

Book 13: A Wolf in Sheep’s Armor

Book 14: Man Versus Machine Part 1 of 1

Book 15: Our New Hiring Policy

Book 16: Life Like Broken Glass

Book 17: The Church of Steeple

Book 18: Blood Bunny

Book 19: Disease of Behavior

Book 20: The Paper Tiger’s Yardstick

Book 21: This One Has a Dancing Gibbon

Book 22: My Brother’s Captor

Book 23: Marching Orders

Book 24: We, Robots

Please visit www.inagalaxyfarfarawRy.com for more information.

Other Stuff the Author Spewed Out

Maybe check out these other things ’cause they’re superfine too!

Not So Superpowered, available at tiny.cc/nssuperpowered

Three Flash Fictions, available upon request from the author

Random limericks, available in bathroom stalls

Your Favorite Table of Contents

Book 12: His Kingdom Come

Chapter One: The Emperor’s New Armor

Chapter Two: Surprised?

Chapter Three: You’re Probably Wondering Why I Gathered You All Here

Chapter Four: Some Bosses Are Tyrants

Chapter Five: Wakey, Wakey

Chapter Six: Something’s Afoot in the Crisper Drawer

Chapter Seven: Inner Thought at Its Finest

Chapter Eight: What Are the Neighbors Trying to Pull This Time?

Chapter Nine: Safecracked

Chapter Ten: All Hands on Deck

Chapter Eleven: Duct Work

Chapter Twelve: A Sword to a Bomb Fight

Chapter Thirteen: Found Yyyoooouuuuuu!

Chapter Fourteen: So Glad He Didn’t Itch Back There

Chapter Fifteen: Would You Like Fries with That?

Chapter Sixteen: Chase Scene

Chapter Seventeen: Over and Out

Appendices

About That Guy Whose Book You Read Once

Connect with the Series

This Isn’t Even My Final Form!

The following story ain’t professionally edited. I know, I know, why am I inflicting this on you?

For cool reasons.

Professional editing, covers, and the whole shebang takes money. And creating appendix material takes time. The In a Galaxy Far, Far AwRy series has been steadily seeing new releases, but they’re release at the rate of one per year, while they’re written at a rate of one every nine months or so. Do the math. The series will never catch up.

The author, awesome brain that he has, only ever wanted to share these stories with the world.

Money wasn’t ever a goal. I know by offering these books for free—professionally packaged or not—I’ll be losing money. I honestly don’t care. Since releasing the books free of charge yet without the “professional” look, I’ve found the stress of running this whole series has gotten much manageable. This leaves me with more time to do what I set out to do: write the stories and share them.

I still attend trade shows and comic conventions and sell the books there. Each book will, eventually, be given the professional touch. But, while we’re waiting, all I want to do is share these.

If you see something ain’t right, or something you want to comment on, please feel free. Think of yourself as a beta-reader: a pre-reader of something unreleased. Voice your thoughts at liamgibbs@inagalaxyfarfarawry.com. Until the book gets professionally released, I consider it a work in progress.

So what you’re reading here is the book without the professional touches. I’ve edited this book a dozen times or more, and so I believe it’s as polished as I can get it. I feel comfortable letting you see it. It will one day be professionally edited. One day. But until then, know that you’re reading what I believe to be as polished as I myself can get it.

Enjoy!

Or don’t. I really have no control.

Chapter One: The Emperor’s New Armor

February 6, 9110. 4:11 p.m. (Galactic Standard Time).

Mechanism would cleanse every unrefined churl, of that he was sure. Start with the solar system and move to the galaxy from there. All in this magnificent bodysuit. Oh, yes. Updated from the previous armor, capable of handling more than 50 percent more weapons, 60 percent more software, and 75 percent more spare mirrors so he could check his stately good looks. Fashioned with the magnificent crown attached to his helmet. Strong enough to destroy a modest army in a quarter of a second and shoot the eyes off Bad Guy leader Master Asinine’s chicken hawks from nine hundred yards away. Mechanism loathed boasting, but those chicken hawks were the reason he upgraded. Oh, he was kidding nobody. He loved to boast. He almost boasted to Master Asinine. A slip when he was a mite intoxicated, but he doubted Master Asinine’s three brain cells would have clued the rest of him in. Not even the leader of the brain cells, the one that thought up this week’s meal plan—hydrofluoric ice cream, quiche on a stick and that gunk that drips off Plaster—would have caught the slip.

Mechanism chuckled. A Bad Guy no longer, Mechanism today would enact his plan to wrest Master Asinine’s resources from under his nose and launch his own plan to cleanse the galaxy now.

Here in a deep recess on Station Zilcho, the Bad Guy space station headquarters, Mechanism held his assembly in a discreet meeting hall that granted little light. His underlings—those ridiculous ninnies who called themselves the Numbers but used lettered designates—clustered around the seating arena below in a four-hundred-strong, clattering horde. They knew Mechanism as Lord Alpha. Now called his Mechaknights, some wore armor shaped for males and others shaped for females. Then there was Number B, who wore male armor, but no one knew the real story.

Only Mechanism, Number A, and a few auspicious followers occupied this carpeted stage. Ah, yes. His army. Each member enjoyed equipment inferior to Mechanism’s: they could shoot eyes from only four hundred yards away.

His bodysuit, an off-white armor, stood a bone-crunching eight feet tall. The linkages that allowed his joints, neck, and waist their range of movement were colored mahogany. The Mechaknights wore similar suits, though they were beige and stood only seven feet tall. Their linkages were navy blue. Except Number B’s. He had requested violet linkages and told everyone not to read into it.

Behind him, Number LD clattered over his own feet and tumbled off the stage. Lightweight. The simpleton viewed an invasion as reason to down that second beer. If only he could hold it.

“I’ll stab you right in the neck for this.” Number A, the former Luzimoss Grennard and the only Mechaknight not encased in a bodysuit, stood behind Mechanism. Mechanism had appropriated him for his special ability, his hyperability, to communicate with himself in different timelines, and he took the position unwillingly. He had accepted only a protective exoskeleton that consisted of hydraulic tubing to enhance his strength. He embraced not the elegance, the splendor, of Mechanism’s kingdom. He wanted to shower everyone with flesh-devouring acid.

“You may try.” Mechanism ruffled straight the datasheet, the sheet-thin computer, in his gloved hand and pressed his thumb on the activation icon in its corner. The datasheet became rigid and booted into the checklist Number CH had prepared. Mechanism scanned it. “Weapons?”

“Missiles, lasers, light-bullets, all loaded and prepared. Check.” Number CO stood next to Mechanism. He cleared his throat and, through the speaker in his Mechaknight bodysuit, he sounded like Master Asinine’s phlegm blender. For what purpose had his Mechaknights included the phlegm blender? To blend phlegm. So disgustingly self-explanatory was that title that Mechanism wished some things required clarification.

Mechanism proceeded down the list. “Battery power for the Mechaknight bodysuits?”

“Charged. Check.”

“Computer interfaces?”

“Loaded with all stactics and not running Letchtech Panorama. Check.”

“Stactics? In my name, what is a stactic?”

“A strategy-slash-tactic, Lord Alpha, sir. Very effective tool.”

“Your disregard for language instills me with deep fear. However, let us continue. New Mechaknight naming convention that makes sense?”

“No, Lord Alpha. We’re used to the current number/letter one.”

Sigh. “Very well. Fuel levels?”

“At one hundred percent. Check.”

“Oil change?”

“Performed last night. Check.”

“And, really, no new naming convention? No? Fine. Shame.” Mechanism read the next item. Huh? “Mechanism theme music on portable drown-out speakers? Explain.”

Number CO’s smile sparkled in his tone. “For added terror. Remixed with more drum-and-bass and jock rock. Check.”

Very well. Mechanism resolved to not care. “Emergen—You know, it is not that I feel thankless you included a theme song for me. However, to what—No. Let it be. Emergency computer applications?”

“We sacrificed the emergency computer applications to include the theme music. Sorry, Lord Alpha.”

“What?” Mechanism fired an incredulous gawp at Number CO that he knew Number CO could not see through his helmet. “The emergency applications require four terabytes of memory on each Mechaknight’s onboard computer. They took fifteen minutes to upload and they control your...ahem...waste disposal functions. And you had to make room for the theme music? How long is this theme music?”

“It’s one song that runs for seventeen days and four hours. It concludes with a twenty-one-gun salute and a Wilhelm scream.”

By his blood, that sounded like one majestic theme song. “Very well. At least I can urinate in battle.”

“Without it, we couldn’t flaunt the greatness of your magnificence. The switch was a necessary decision.”

Either urinate or show off his greatness. Mechanism could not argue with their decision. “Fine.” He addressed his helmet’s computer now. “Control, acknowledge. Distribute power from my private supply to the station.”

“Power distributed,” Mechanism’s helmet said, though he needed no reply. He already noticed the result. A brrrrrrrrreeeeaaammmm chirped from deep within the floor. Instrumentation burped to the life it had not enjoyed for almost two months. Lights flooded to existence. Wind now circulated, exhaling stale air from the station and inhaling fresh oxygen. The haunt control—that software that translated verbal commands into computer action, thus named for its talent at making things seem haunted—would soon moisturize the station’s atmosphere containment bubble, its atmospheric bubble, so the oxygen would not thin out. The comatose Station Zilcho now had power. Yesssssss.

“Now we are prepared. Cue my theme music, ensure Master Asinine’s rubber ducky collection does not remain underfoot”—a duck squeaked, so he booted it away—“and follow me. May I have mercy on Master Asinine’s soul.

“Also, if any of you need use of the facilities, apparently now is your last chance.”

Chapter Two: Surprised?

“Go, my Mechaknights, go!” Mechanism yelled. Bad Guy Schizophrenic’s left head knew it was Mechanism because, even from that single-sentence barrage of noise, Lefty wanted to beat the self-importance out of that power drinker.

Lefty snorted. First the power had returned to interrupt his lunch, now this? He didn’t even stand or watch Mechanism bulldoze through his living quarters’s latent-technology door, which faded into computer memory to allow passage. Instead, he regarded that egocentric, egotistical, egomaniacal Eggo maniac with a raised hand and jabbed his datasheet with a finger on his other. “Let me finish reading the Saturday funnies, and I’ll get right on your smackdown. Not the best day for funnies, but at least they brought me my Ziggy.” He chuckled. “That freaking Ziggy. Always with his crock in a vice. Or in an alligator’s jaw in this case.”

A hand grabbed the back of Righty’s skull and whacked him against the oaken desk at which Schizophrenic sat. Lefty snorted. “Yeah, that’s a little bit of all right.” Lefty’s day just went from “Asinine said, ‘Ashlee,’ ‘Simpson,’ and a verb in the same sentence” to “hey, watching Righty nosedive into a desk isn’t a bad use of time.” He would have felt a few more minutes of euphoria except—crack—a hand planted him into his chicken noodle soup. Broth all over his unshaven stubble.

“For crock.” Lefty spat out a tuft of noodles. He wanted to slurp these things back one noodle at a time, not at the speed at which Asinine’s autogorger operated.

He whirled around, caught a glimpse of Righty’s bloody nostrils, chuckled again—if anything was funnier than Ziggy, it was Righty with a bloody face—and grabbed his pistol off his desk. “Your first target was a genius choice, you humility bottleneck, but I’m not so big on your second. That’s why I have to shoot a bullet hole through your wine hole. Here’s hoping you don’t care about ‘sampling the vintage’ anymore, if you know what I mean.” He slanted his pistol up at Mechanism’s nose behind that helmet. “I mean, you’re a wino and you should cut down on anything that smells like grape turpentine.”

Righty kept his nose angled up to staunch the rivulet of blood coursing down his chin. To maintain his dignity? Maybe a better way to maintain his dignity would be not singing show tunes in the shower.

Lefty first noticed Mechanism’s armor: updated, more menacing, taller, bulkier, noisier, laugh-at-abler. And the crown atop his head showed his pomposity far too well. Lefty searched the cramped room, watched five or six blue-jointed Mechanism clones hover around his bed and dresser. They folded their arms, venting a chorus of huffs with each smug lungful. Who were these miniature versions of that conceit radiator? Had a copy center set up shop across from his favorite cappuccino outlet?

Mechanism shoved Schizophrenic back into his creaky seat. Schizophrenic tried to stand but, with a weighty glove, Mechanism insisted not. Schizophrenic’s pistol clattered away, but Lefty saw no use in retrieving it. Mechanism obviously wanted him to remain seated.

“Shut your insolence.” Mechanism leaned his snooty helmet in so closely Schizophrenic heard the carbon dioxide filter from his breaths.

“Can I get a hankie?” Righty waved one of the Mechanisms down.

Ziggy never had days like this. Charlie Brown, maybe, but not with dinner on his face.

* * *

Bad Guy ninja Multipurpose lay in bed, folds of his ninja flesh draped over its crocking edges like a buttered egg over a double slice of bacon-greased cinnamon toast. Mmmm. The ninja’s combat breakfast, full of nineteen essential starches.

A team of Mechanisms—underlings Multipurpose could ninja-destroy in crocking seconds—attempted to lift him out of that bed. One squawked on his gabber, a finger to his ear though the gabber lay embedded underneath an inch of the helmet’s plastisteel. And if these clones were half as stupid as they acted, Multipurpose would never crocking let them lift him out of anything, especially now that he had bacon grease on the brain and some under his mattress.

The Mechanism with “CO” laser-painted on his crocking shoulders in navy blue letters said to a cohort, “Ask Number AQ how to lift gargantuan objects. He used to work in construction.” And would they cut out the crocking beeps of that grumbling forklift that backed through the door?

Still on the gabber, Number CS faced a wall. “You’re what with the gargoyle eating monstrosity? If Appetite won’t move, grab something stinky and lure it over. Maybe one problem can solve the other. Only thing that can stomach this living beach ball, right?”

Crocking crock! Appetite in his living quarters? That thing would sniff out his cache of whale meat. Multipurpose launched out of bed and ripped out a noxious cloud of gas from both ends. “I’m up, I’m crocking up, oooooh my brawn is crocking burning.” He careened onto the carpet. Ninja calf muscles weren’t fond of jerky movements. Got to crocking remember that next time he attempted an assassination. Or a leisurely stroll.

* * *

In the safety of his dim lair, Mechanism had finished watching Number FR weld shut all entry points to Plaster’s prison. Nobody had seen that Bad Guy thug since Master Asinine had locked him up for mutiny a month ago. Mechanism saw no point in capturing a Bad Guy already captured.

Now he watched the feed that piped from Number BD’s eye slit into his own visor. He supervised because he could not trust Number BD with anything as complicated as grabbing the morning news datasheet. Or fetching his slippers. Number BD would not receive a good boy biscuit today. Perhaps his frequent mistakes and the carpet urinations were because Mechanism had him neutered three Tuesdays past.

A scene displayed itself in the corner of Mechanism’s visor. The background was Bad Guy inventor Brick’s laboratory, which contained a mess of scientific accrual that had degraded to obsolescence more than a few centuries ago.

Numbers AR, BD, CL, and FF entered with stealth in their heels and CL’s skunklike body odor under his arms. Number BD wore a muzzle. Good thing he had gone wee-wees before the mission.

The party of Mechaknights sneaked up on Brick as a cat would a mouse except his Mechaknights didn’t shed clumps of fur all over the furniture. Number FF lifted her arm, metallic wrist aglow with energy. And—chk-kk—a pulse zipped from her wrist into Brick’s skull. A second passed...two...Then Brick’s head clunked on the cedar desk at which he sat. A slather of scientific goop splashed his face and slapped the desk’s surface. Brick lay unconscious.

Excellent. Mechanism’s plan had progressed so speedily that he had time for that congratulatory pat on the back he’d almost cut from his schedule.

* * *

Smack! The back of Master Asinine Sucks’s noggin bounced off that thar textured wall in his living quarters. His ten-gallon hat went flying. He hit the gungy carpet with a crack. He struggled onto all fours an’ wiped the blood offa his new gash. Now where’d that ten-gallon hat go? A mini-Mechanism—the varmint actin’ like the top cowhand ’round here—scammed it, put it on, and adjusted its position. What got Master Asinine Sucks madder’n a wet hen was how much better it looked on that city slicker than on him.

“So, are you cowpokes wantin’ a hoedown?” Master Asinine Sucks flexed his fingers, clicked his jaw, and reached for the lasso looped over a belt hook. “Then ya got one. Yeehaw.”

The mini-Mechanisms checked Master Asinine Sucks with a prolonged pause. They exploded in under-the-breath giggles, squattin’ with hands on knees. Where the crock had these varmints even come outta? The hat thief—no, hat waddy—put an oversized glove to his helmet. “Idiot brings a lasso to a—Wait.” The waddy spiked to attention. “Is that Asinine’s Electrify Your Insides Lasso?”

“Nope.”

“His Turn Your Intestines to Spaghetti Sauce Lasso?”

“Uh-uh.”

“His Spam Volcano Lasso?”

“Nope.”

The waddy plumb burst into a tantrum o’ giggles again. “Idiot brings a nonatomic, nonspaghetti, nonvolcanic lasso to a Mechaknight bodysuit fight.” He tore the hat off his helmet—good thing, too, because his glove had poked holes in its ten gallons, the sapheaded waddy—and slapped it over a knee. The feather’s stem plinked against his metal leg.

Master Asinine Sucks wound the lasso around his own neck once, twice. These city slickers were right. He couldn’t tell a skunk from a housecat for tryin’ a lasso here like he was gonna rustle up these varmints. And he wasn’t even wearing his spurred boots.

* * *

“Lieutenant, shoot him! I’m the real Asinine!” Hands suspended in the air at shoulder height, high tension in his spine, Master Asinine motioned to the evil clone of himself at his side.

Here in the Wreck Room, Asinine’s favorite place to wreck stuff, Bad Guy second-in-command Lieutenant IQ 23’s pistol aim whizzed from Real Asinine to Phony Asinine to Real Asinine. He gasped. Sweat dribbled down his forehead like drool from a toddler’s mouth. Desperation in his grunting. In his eyes. In the way his pistol rattled in his hand.

“No, Lieutenant. I’m the real Asinine. He’s the clone.” Phony Asinine thrust a thumb at Real Asinine. What a phony. No, not a phony. A phony scam artist. These clones, always claiming to be the original. Dastardly.

Lieutenant IQ 23’s pistol zipped from Phony Asinine to Real Asinine. Back to Phony Asinine. Back to Real, Phony, Real, Phony, smacked lizardlike Braindead, who had stood beside him but now staggered into a window. Didn’t matter. Dude never talked, anyway, so what was he good for? Not even a suggestion from time to time.

Lieutenant IQ 23’s teeth ground together. Chattered. Pistol rattled in a loose grip. “You’re b-both identical. I don’t know who to shoot!” He slapped a hand over his forehead.

“Lieutenant, look. The piece of Beady Eyes I’ve held onto all this time. This proves I’m the real deal.” Asinine reached into his pocket. Plucked out the shard of his Asinine marionette. The nose shard with lifelike snot goop. Ah, his lost friend. How he missed his jive-talkin’ doll before that freak dolphin explosion had claimed another wooden life.

Lieutenant IQ 23 aimed. Squashed that trigger. Splattered Phony Asinine’s brains out. Signed his death warrant with one light-bullet, two light-bullets, three times a lady. The pretender slapped against a coffee table at which Asinine would no longer enjoy his double-doubles. Blood speckled the wall and candy-cane-striped carpet.

Phew. The cottony tension lifted. Asinine’s hand slapped his breast where his heart badunk-badunk-badunked inside. He dropped the nose shard and gulped a lungful of sweet air. Legs wobbling, he flopped into an armchair. “Nice work, Lieutenant.” His hand reached for the bowl of ribbon candy that sat on the coffee table’s glass top next to the clone. “I don’t know what I would have done if you’d mistaken me for Phony Asinine. Probably a lot of dying.” He cleaned some blood off a candy and popped it into his mouth.

Though his limbs had calmed, IQ 23 still quaked. He reached for his chest to still his overactive lungs and raging heart. “Sir, p-please. I don’t know how many more identity crises I can handle this month.”

“Last one, I promise. But let this, therefore, be a lesson, Lieutenant. You know my slogan: ‘Never mess with cloning technology.’”

“Sir, that’s your motto. Your slogan is ‘Mess with cloning technology.’”

“Whatever. One of those can be a lesson.” Master Asinine chomped down on another ribbon candy. Who knew why? He hated the stuff, but the sugar gave him that extra boost he needed to recover from yet another clone conundrum. And he had enough of it to choke a tyrannosaurus, the kingpin of the seedy prehistoric underworld.

After a few shaky attempts, IQ 23 managed his pistol into its holster. He didn’t scream, didn’t hyperventilate, didn’t shoot wildly at the ceiling like a tormented action goon. He’d put the debacle behind him. Good lieutenant, always forgetting situations. His hand ruffled around the ribbon candy. He placed one on his tongue, gagged, and spat it out. Just as well. Ever since Natural Candy introduced granite as a flavor, everything had gone downhill. The release of their ore-flavored candy cemented that. And, yet, Asinine ate those, too.

Master Asinine surveyed his Wreck Room and the scatter of viewscreens that had energized to life after months of dormancy. What awesome fixtures. For reasons Asinine hadn’t yet discovered, power had reawakened the station. He glanced through a window at streetlamps that brimmed with light, at buildings revived with newfound energy.

“Now, Lieutenant, how shall we fill the rest of our day? Investigate the station’s new power?”

“You were never into detective work, sir.” Lieutenant IQ 23 veered away from the ribbon candy. He smacked into a viewscreen and collapsed. Braindead returned from the window and helped him up.

“Okay. A little miniature golf, then. Perhaps we’ll bake some cookies.” Asinine snapped his fingers. “Ooh. Another weasel hunt.”

An explosion rocked the Wreck Room’s front doorway. Master Asinine spilled off his chair. His arm flailed at the minibar and missed. His other arm grappled at Braindead’s face mask for support but missed. His backside flailed at the carpet and—aha—he hit something. Pay dirt.

“Or perhaps we’ll just deal with this thing.” Asinine leaped to his feet.

Laser fire lit the room. “Sir, take cover!” Lieutenant IQ 23 ducked behind the minibar. His pistol was low on charge, but he grabbed a fistful of ribbon candy and went hog wild on anything that looked thin-skinned.

Braindead brandished his gun and measured his shots. The smoke from the cloudy explosion hadn’t dissipated, so he fired at the opening it had crunched into the door.

Master Asinine rolled aside, fumbled for his pistol. “Lieutenant, aim that ribbon ammo at the eyes. Better yet, the mouth. Our attacker might be dieting.”

Lieutenant IQ 23 sprang up from cover and whipped another ribbon candy at the cloud. “On it, sir, but I can’t see the whites of his eyes let alone the reds of his tongue.” He whipped another. It clicked aside and clanged down the air vent. Oh, great. Asinine couldn’t remember if the prisoners of his ant farm escaped. If so, they’d soon find the mother lode. In a week or two, Asinine would have to fumigate the space station. Could you fumigate a station?

Braindead somersaulted behind the bulletproof coffee table, because bulletproof was the only way to go when selecting military-grade furniture. He threw the table onto its side and hunkered behind it. The clone’s corpse rolled away.

Asinine scrambled to his feet and joined IQ 23 at the minibar, this time not for a shot of that Freon-smelling liquid he’d opened earlier. He chugged the liquid, anyway, and he swore his thoughts had hit the roof and, whoa, time floated around the room, man.

Lieutenant IQ 23 whipped off another ribbon candy. “Who are these attackers?”

“United fandom. I’ve been spreading hate on a lot of Intergalacticnet sites lately.”

“Attack!” gushed a cry from the smoke that still hadn’t dispersed.

“No, that’s not the war cry of someone who’s eight, sir,” Lieutenant IQ said.

“Well, I did turn some heads on a Girls Scream at Boy Bands site recently.” Asinine’s gun peeked out from cover for another blind shot that sliced through a light-panel chandelier and caused more damage than the explosion. The chandelier shattered onto the floor. “For your own safety, never say Jon is cuter than Hargoth. Never.” Asinine fixed IQ 23 with eyes as hard as icicles. “Never.”

A crunch of metal on carpet wrenched the Wreck Room. And they ruptured through the cloud—two, three, four, a baker’s dozen of robotic-suited androids wielding firearms. A baker’s dozen was five, right?

Asinine sneaked a glimpse around the mocha-brown minibar. Something about these robots nagged him. He couldn’t figure out what, but...perhaps it was the way their bladed arms, spiked knees, and shoulder cannons would look way awesome if they hadn’t demolished Asinine’s door.

One robot blasted the ceiling where the chandelier had hung but...hey, you snooze, you lose, because good ol’ Asinine had already destroyed that piece of his own property, sucker. Heh. Showed them no one busted up Master Asinine’s favorite stuff except Asinine. Wait, that wasn’t a good thing.

“Look, he’s already dead.” A second robot pointed at the clone’s corpse and leaped up for a high five that the first ignored.

“Idiot. That’s a clone. You remember his slogan.” The robot with the musical voice saddled forward. Its oversized boot crunched over the remains of Asinine’s chandelier. On its shoulders was laser-stenciled “B.” His voice sounded too melodic for a door murderer.

This robot looked familiar. No...not a robot. It stepped too cockily for a robot, its words too smug to be calculations, the lilt in its voice too inflected to be a program. And its stripes looked purple, not blue. “Master Asinine? I know you’re still alive. I know you’re here. Come out and we’ll make your inevitable death easy peasy, lemon squeezy.” What idiot squeezed lemons? If this guy captured and tortured Asinine, Asinine would definitely have some new comedy fodder.

“Yeah, we’ll skin you alive.” One of the henchmen squatted. A blade shushed out of a wrist sheath, and that wrist sliced forward. His head zigzagged as if he waggled his encased tongue around in his helmet. What a waste of a waggle. “Yeah, skin you. Peel your skin off, and we’ll find out who thinks Jon’s the cuter one then.”

Asinine whacked IQ 23’s arm. “Never.”

“Oh, shame.” The leader palmed the tongue wiggler’s face. “Someone forgot Number CD’s skinning medicine.” Ah, so their names were letters. And compact discs were still technologically viable.

Behind the coffee table, Braindead’s fingers curled around the butt of his gun. A hiss fizzled through his mask’s air filter. Lieutenant IQ 23 noticed. He gestured a hand in Braindead’s direction as if to ward off evil spirits. But, hey, with ribbon candy, anything was possible. “No, Braindead.” He couldn’t raise his voice above a murmur without revealing his position. “Don’t be a hero. They’ll kill you.”

“They’ll also mark up my amazing bear-skin rug.” Master Asinine shrugged at IQ 23. “It’s a grizzly rug. You can tell by the mouth. It says, ‘Aaarrrr.”’

But Braindead, of the bred-for-war Virillian species, had already made his decision. He knew his priorities: serve the public trust, protect the innocent, uphold the—Wait, he wasn’t a police cyborg.

If Asinine’s slow-motion machine were running, it would have retarded this gunfight to a crawl. Braindead...sprang from cover...blasted a light-bullet...hit Number CO. Another hit...a third...and Mr. Not Good Enough for three letters collapsed in a jangle of gears. The other four...still keen on shooting Asinine’s stuff...raised their weapons...wrists alit with laser fire...light-bullets toyed with Braindead...missed him by a hair’s breadth...Lieutenant IQ 23 grunted, “NnnnooOOOOOOoooo,” in slow-motion hilarity...light-bullets struck the bowl of candy that belched out mounds of hardened glucose...hit a viewscreen...hit a candle...missed his rug, yes...hit his Predator Versus Alien Versus Your Wallet poster, no!—

A bullet snagged Braindead’s shoulder. His gun clattered against the coffee table. He buckled. Number B snapped forward. Seized his neck. Hoisted him aloft. Braindead’s legs kicked the air, the table, Number B’s metal-plated crotch.

“Where is Asinine?” Number B crunched his fingers tighter.

Then that nagging sensation in Asinine’s thoughts slapped his notice. These goons, their suits. With their leader now choking the life and bug eyes out of Braindead, he saw them clearly. They all wore Mechanism bodysuits! Whoa, Mechanism would be macked off to discover a Halloween store had produced knockoffs of his pride and joy. After all, they got a jump on the costume melee by eight months.

Asinine punched the minibar. “Little Mechanism clones. I knew we should have protected this place with camel spray.”

“Sir, camel spray would have proven ineffective in this battle.”

“Do you see any camels around here?” Asinine swept a hand around. Silly lieutenant.

Asinine fired again, but he found no angle. He needed to bank a shot, but whenever he tried, he blew another hole in the perforated wall. He crawled to the cupboard space behind the minibar—nearly empty—grabbed a package of peanuts. He tore it open and...huh...why not?

He tipped out a handful of salty ammo and chucked it over the counter. A patter of nuts rained onto the carpet, clinked against metal, jangled around that vent.

A choke. Asinine risked a peek and watched Number GP sink to his knees, hands clutching his throat. A recovered Number CO squatted at his side. “You okay?”

“What’s wrong?” Number B asked. He still watched for Asinine’s presence.

Number CO plunged his fists over Number GP’s armor in fruitless chest compressions. “Frank’s down. We should have taken his peanut allergy more seriously.”

“Frank was my ride.” Number B’s finger yanked back the trigger, and a light-bullet punctured the ceiling. “Asinine. I’ll rip that pecker’s arms off for this.”

“Frank was a good man. A good friend. A good driver.” Number CO would have wiped a tear from his cheek, but his glove clinked against his helmet.

“Did anyone catch where those peanuts were thrown from?” That high-pitched inflection lilted Number B’s voice. This purple-jointed Mechanism must have been macked off that his speaker made him sound as if someone had nailed his Yankee doodle dandy to a wall. He threw Braindead onto the chandelier debris. “Asinine, you’re in here. I know. Come out. I will not tell you again, silly dilly.”

The minibar stood a few feet behind and to the right of those Mechanisms. In mere seconds or perhaps weeks, they would discover Asinine’s hidey-hole.

Lieutenant IQ 23 jerked his head at the door, which stood behind the minibar but in the line of fire. “Run, sir. Out the back. I’ll cover your escape.” He gripped his handful of ribbon candy. They were his last salvo unless he wanted to take a chance at the beer nuts on the countertop. If that failed, he could lock and load the bowl of party mix.

“I can’t let you stay behind. You’re a good lieutenant, Lieutenant. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. Well, except me. I might be in a bad mood if you let these bogus Mechanisms beat my high score in Chair Puncher.”

“Sir, you dropped your Chair Puncher machine into the mutiny pit because Plaster complained about the food. You missed him by a foot.”

“Your point, Lieutenant?”

“Right now the machine is destroyed. And your high score was ten.”

“They might have brought jumper cables.” Asinine prepared himself to bolt out of the room. “Lieutenant, let’s go.”

“Run, sir. Run!” Lieutenant IQ 23 erupted out from the minibar. He flung ribbon candy at the Mechanism goons. The candies pecked their eye slits, cracking, fracturing, shattering. That’d show anybody who thought ribbon candy was edible.

Number B ducked behind a chair. “Diabetics, take cover!”

No time to save IQ 23. Asinine burst through the door into the bright hallway—any second now, those party crashers would find him—glanced left, nothing, right, noth—side hall! Asinine prepared his utensil glove’s salad-fork fingers for attack—scurried away—close to Brick’s lab—place smelled like crap from a masonry site, so he could guess what Brick had recently been up to. And what he’d recently eaten, too. Green olives would never again top Asinine’s pizzas.

* * *

“You’re powerless without your precious ribbon candy, silly.” Number B slapped the confectionary bullets out of Lieutenant IQ 23’s hand.

Number B’s head snapped to the other Mechaknights arranged behind him. “Number CD, capture Asinine. No skinning him.” Number CD opened his mouth to gripe, so Number B whacked his chin. He’d rip that jaw off, but the helmet included no workable jaw and Number B didn’t feel like tearing through this psycho’s chin assembly.

Number B said, “Mr. Skinner Poo, if you so much as peel a potato, Lord Alpha will remove your head. He wants Asinine alive, and we decided against the armor’s potato peeler because of you.”

“Against my better judgment.” Number CD’s words would have sounded less mangled if his tongue weren’t licking the mouthpiece.

“The rest of us wanted the salad spinner. Healthier choice.” Number B wanted to sever that tongue, but he would have bloodied his swanky bodysuit and its sporty contours. He traced a hand around the armor’s weapons sheaths. Mmmm, the contours.

Number CD leaped over the coffee table. His heavy thruster boots clanged against the short staircase that divided the room’s back area from the leisure area. Despite the clangs, Number B heard the others snigger behind his back. “Okay, people, my voice rides high. My suit has that codpiece they measured improperly.”

Lord Alpha might need Braindead later, so killing the snake-skinned grunt was a bad idea. But Virillians were mute, so Number B would get no answers from him. He shoved the Virillian aside with his steel-toe boot and lunged at the lieutenant. “Where is Master Asinine headed?”

Lieutenant IQ 23 spat a ribbon candy at Number B’s eye slit. He missed, but he slobbered a stripe across the eye slit. Oh, gross. Candy-scented spit. Thick, too.

“I won’t even tell you the size of his underwear.” Lieutenant IQ 23 looked as if he wanted to spit up another candy but had no time to shove in another round. “He wears boxers, size medi—” He smacked his palm with a fist. “No! I just revealed the answer!”

“Enough.” Number B backhanded IQ 23 across the cheek. Something caved, shattered. Probably a cheek bone. Good. Touching that weak-willed toady made his skin crawl.

Chapter Three: You’re Probably Wondering Why I Gathered You All Here

Mechanism surveyed Master Asinine’s lower class peons and the ilk, those Bad Guys of which Mechanism once claimed to be a part, that sat around the aluminum buffet table in Station Zilcho’s measly cafeteria. The place reeked of lemon freshness. It remained unfurnished aside from this table, a service counter at the back, and a cardboard standup of cartoon character Cosmonaut Chimp’s evil twin, Derangemonaut Chump, and his orangutan sidekick, Chim-Chim.

Light brightened this once-starved station since Mechanism had distributed his private power supply. That moronic Master Asinine had never realized that right underneath his nose hid a teeming series of power cores Mechanism had stolen last week. The cores were ready to breathe vigor into this station or, as Master Asinine had once said, “juice this sucker up for awesome. Awesome awesome.” In fact, he had said it last night while he poured a can of Sasquatch Rocket Fuel energy drink into a power cell in vain hope.

“So...” Mechanism let that word slither into the core of his captives’ fear. His heavy boots clunked on the linoleum floor from here to the barred entrance at the cafeteria’s rear. The acoustics of the room transformed each step into a boom, as if Death stomped on the floor.

Mechanism pivoted around, and his boots squeaked on the linoleum. He pced another line to the entrance where Number B and Number N guarded, Number B’s rifle held from right hand at hip to left hand at shoulder.

The Mechaknights had stowed Master Asinine’s red-shirted generics, the lowest rung of the Bad Guy grunts, in a basement cell, but his media-named peons sat arrayed around the table. Such cannon fodder: Lieutenant IQ 23 with a bandaged cheek, Braindead nursing a pierced shoulder, the obese ninja-aspirant Multipurpose, the brick-skinned scientist Brick, the brainless gargoyle creature Appetite, the two-headed Schizophrenic, the cowboy yokel Master Asinine Sucks, and the pungent remains of a charred marionette.

Mechanism chuckled. “So you are wondering what this concerns, all of you save Appetite, who has preoccupied himself by eating that vermeil mirror. Attempt not to feign indifference. I can read your expressions. Especially Appetite’s: ‘I desire to eat this vermeil mirror.’ Schizophrenic, guard your arm because that gargantuan oaf is observing it as if it were a vermeil mirror.

“Nevertheless, my dull-witted sham cohorts, this—”

“Dull-witted?” Lefty snorted. His snort echoed through the cafeteria’s emptiness. “That hunchback Scapegoat hasn’t come around in weeks, so—” His eyes finally rested on Righty, and his insolence withered away. “Oh. He must be talking about you.”

“You think you can crocking waltz in here and—Hold on.” Multipurpose braced a hand on his knee to lift himself off his hydraulically reinforced seat. It whimpered.

Lefty slapped his forehead. “You quote-unquote ninja, stop trying to stand. There are only so many hours in a day.”

Mechanism stopped pacing. “Indeed, Multipurpose, we do not have all night. Note that this pristinely enhanced and—might I add and, yes, I will—transcendently godlike armor does not offer muscle ointment, so you are...allow me to address this in terms you may one day comprehend...S.O.L.”

“Spot-on lithe?” attempted Multipurpose’s quack-level intelligence.

“Please brush your teeth this year. Your breath smells of rigor mortis.” Mechanism continued to pace. Boom...boom sounded each step. “My dull-witted sham cohorts, this is what a layman calls a ‘hostile takeover.’ I assure you, no recourse is available to you, so stand aside and allow me to proverbially grind my heel into this shifty operation your leader calls a criminal organization.”

“Yes, Lord has ground your organization to dust.” Appliance fluttered out from behind Mechanism’s shoulder where it had remained beside a fridge doojigger underneath that service counter. Mechanism’s all-servitude-no-pride, can-shaped automaton clanked its pronged claws, which caused another echo to panic around the room. “Prepare yourselves to witness the end of your criminal tirade, because Lord will scrape everything you’ve become off his heel.”

Master Asinine Sucks raised a hand. “Uh, don’t know how that’s possible, partner, since ya can’t scrape an operation off your heel. Unless it’s an insect regime. Okay, I see it now. Ya can continue.”

“I mentioned the word proverbially,” Mechanism said, to which Righty raised a hand. “No, it is not an amphibian. Now I understand why Master Asinine accomplished nothing.” Mechanism massaged his helmet’s temples, which commanded the tiny apparatuses inside his helmet to massage his grand skull. He fell backward into an latent-technology chair’s holographic outline, and the l-chair conjured itself from his bodysuit. The great Frederick Snogsbottom had said those beneath him would force him to have days like this. He should have worn a cape. Outdated accessory, but somehow it commanded audiences to silence. He waved away the thought. No cape. His boot turbines would set it alight. Fire hazards had no place under his authority. “Anyway, if you shall now shut your futility holes so I may continue...or at least begin...we may see daylight this week.” He stood again. Boom...boom around the linoleum floor.

“My sham cohorts, my alliance with you has come to an abrupt end. You have noticed my sentries, Numbers B and N, and if you have not, you are more shortsighted than I give you credit. They prevent your escape. You see, I was never your ally. I had planned my attack from the day I joined this disorganized organization six months ago. The resources, the library of equipment, the sheer power of the Bad Guy armament were too grandiose to pass up, not unlike the mere scent of the grapes of Champignon.” He sniffed the air as if those heavenly grapes were present. “Ah. Aged quite perfectly.”

Appliance buzzed closer and now flanked Mechanism’s ear. “Excellent choice of scents, my liege. Your selection of wines is sublime. Not a hint of—”

“Machine, immediately cease everything you are doing.”

Appliance dropped to the floor as if at the snap of someone’s fingers. It clunked on the tiles and settled against Mechanism’s heel. “Yes, Lord.”

Brick sprang from his chair and stomped the floor. The linoleum cracked. “I supplicate you to emancipate us from our manacles, Mechanism. At a later date, you will only bewail this pronouncement to incarcerate us.” Number B’s monolithic rifle pinned Brick in place. This made Mechanism chuckle again.

“So what do you want, you weapons-grade wino?” Lefty asked. Schizophrenic folded his arms and put his feet against Brick’s back. He did not shiver in the fear he should have felt. How darling.

“Power. Control. Your servitude, you well-meaning failures.” Mechanism shrugged. He was born to rule. Born to squash bugs such as these. Born to eliminate the genetically stupid from livingkind’s chromosomal pot. “I want the dimwitted and foolish to pay for how they have mishandled our illustrious galaxy. Those unworthy churls must die as they deserve, filtered away to allow a suitable society to reign.”

“Incoming connection.” A viewscreen hummed into the real world from its virtual existence. A dot first punched outward into a four-foot line. It slapped Mechanism aside and stretched upward into a square. An image flickered onto its surface. On its left appeared that insolent Master Asinine, half off screen. On its right, nothing but rattling pipes that crisscrossed the wall in the back, because Master Asinine still could not understand the basics of camera framing. Not a shock since he still could not tie his bootlaces. And when he stuffed them into his boots, that did not constitute finding an “uneasy middle ground with footwear.”

The viewscreen revealed a room lit only by soft dots in a machine off to one side. Mechanism failed to identify the location from which Master Asinine broadcast his hopelessness. Still, he set his onboard computer’s analyzers to the task of finding out.

“Well, hello, Master Asinine.” A sinister grin twitched across Mechanism’s lips. He wished his outward smile projector were running so he could display his shimmering smirk. But that pimple dominated his face. “How may I help you?”

“Oh, cut the crap, Mechy. Can I call you Mechy? Also, can you cut crap?” The half of Master Asinine he showed looked less than amused. What a poor, poor failure Master Asinine was. “So, all this time, you’ve plotted against me. You must be the one eating all the chocolate chips.”

Mechanism graced Master Asinine with a head tilt. “No, that was not me.”

“Sir.” Lieutenant IQ 23 cleared his throat in a juicy rumble. “You never had chocolate chips. You do, however, have chocolate-covered grasshopper chips. And you’re the one eating them.”

“Oh.” Master Asinine’s face donned its all-too-familiar befuddlement. “Then you must be the one eating all the cheese of head.”

Mechanism nodded no.

“Sir, that was also you. Remember no-questions-asked mealtimes?”

An earthquake of groans growled from the crowd. Master Asinine Sucks tried to suppress a vomit. Tried.

“Well, no matter.” Master Asinine toughened his expression. “I know you have it in for me now. Your hired guns are proof enough. They didn’t buy your armor at a Halloween store. You equipped them! They tried to capture me, almost killed my bodyguard who, by the way, can’t play on this season’s Bad Guy hockey team anymore. And he’s our best forward. Think about that, Mecha Moonshine.”

Lefty laughed. From his pocket, Schizophrenic pulled a datasheet marked “People Other Than Me Cracking a Joke.” Amid a chime, it activated, and he finger-scrawled across its surface. “Mecha...Moonshine. Got it.” He deactivated his datasheet and returned it to his pocket. “Red letter day. I see someone browsed my suggestion blog.”

“But I heard everything you said, Mechy. Everything. I’m on to you.” Master Asinine finally broke that humorlessness. His body rippled with convulsions of laughter as fitful as machinegun bursts. Instead of laughing, however, he said, “Guff-aw. Guff-aw.”

“What are you doing?” Mechanism asked.

“Laughing maniacally. Fine. I’ll skip ahead to the part where my exhaustive laughter forces me to catch my breath.” He braced himself on his viewscreen and clutched his chest. He began huffing, which fogged the viewscreen on his end until he whitened to a ghostly image. “There. Done. Anyway, I know about your plan. You see, unbeknownst to you, I planted a bug on my dear lieutenant. Heh. A bug that has revealed your plan to me.” He keeled over in another pitch of fake laughter. “Guff-aw. Guff-aw. Guff—”

Between two fingers, Mechanism held up a crumb-sized device. “This bug?”

“—faw?” Master Asinine slouched. “Oh. The greatest of crocks, you found it.”

“My plan is no longer secret. What did you hope to glean, idiotica?”

“So many good ones.” Schizophrenic reached into his pocket again. “I should leave this thing out.”

“Well, I don’t care.” Master Asinine kicked the viewscreen, and it rattled in place. By now, it had defogged, and Master Asinine’s lack of glory was visible again. “I don’t even believe you. Take over my empire? You don’t have the steel gonads. You have steel something, but it’s not gonads. I hope.”

“You disbelieve the word of a follower of Frederick Snogsbottom?” Mechanism shrugged. “Let me prove my...gonadery.” Another smile. Oh, Mechanism should have covered that pimple with concealer and used the smile projector. These prodigious smiles needed an audience. “Number B? My nonillustrious ex-leader requires proof.”

“Gladly.” Number B’s voice exuded nothing but evil pleasure. A suggestive lisp made Mechanism question the Mechaknight’s intentions behind asking Number BL for a spot check at the Mecha gym. Number B clicked his rifle up and, in liquefied motion, released a popcorn salvo of fire.

Brick’s head exploded in stone and brains. Pulpy mess squirted the wall...Brick’s body tumbled to its knees...the clatter of stones collapsed onto its lifeless belly...cracked more tiles. There, among the horrified Bad Guys and Lefty, lay Brick with a leaking chimney. Or perhaps a leaking garbage chute, if Mechanism judged by the unfathomable speech Brick substituted for English.

“Watch out!” Master Asinine threw his hands in front of his face. “Anyone hit by word shrapnel? Those eleven-syllable words come at you like rocket javelins.”

“Flawlessly engineered, Lord. Even the dimmest of minds can now comprehend your intentions.” Appliance still rested against Mechanism’s heel. “They must be positively agog in admiration. I would check, but I cannot position myself to look up.”

Mechanism flourished his hand at the viewscreen. His fingers brushed it, producing a crackle of static. “There is your proof, you witless wonder.”

“Meh.” Lefty looked sour. He stuffed his datasheet into his pocket. “I give ‘witless wonder’ one a three.”

Mechanism planted his hands on his hips and leered at Master Asinine. Then he faced the crowd of Bad Guys. Master Asinine Sucks wore a sneer and tensed nostrils. Schizophrenic acted uncharacteristically undivided: Lefty looked amused by the display, and Righty grinned, unaware that a goop of Brick’s brain had slopped onto his cheek. Multipurpose stared unblinkingly, his mind’s eye probably morphing Brick’s body into a turkey leg. Braindead looked brain dead. The display frightened only Lieutenant IQ 23, his pallor bereft of color.

Mechanism’s helmet dinged. Ahh, perfect. The haunt control could not yet locate Master Asinine—it still cataloged the station after its reawakening—but Mechanism’s onboard computer had found him based on his pipe-entwined background. He enjoyed the computer in his helmet, under his transcendent command. Now the capture of the Bad Guys neared completion. “If none of you wishes to further test my intentions—”

Lefty coughed. “I reeaalllyyy doubt you have the backbone to blow off Righty’s head.” He poked a thumb at his body partner. “In fact, there’s a ten spot in it for you. Twenty if you nail him right in the eye.”

“Oh, that would be fun.” Righty clapped.

Mechanism turned his back on the Bad Guys but addressed them over his shoulder. “Attempt not to access the haunt control. I have commanded it to unlist you from its memory. Now, I must attend to your leader’s capture. Number B, if anybody decides dissention is a must, you are to demonstrate my intentions again.” He tossed a murderous grin at his former allies. “Start at the feet and work your way up.”

“I’ll use their freckles as target practice.” Number B slapped his rifle. “I love burly sports.”

“Hey, fluke coincidence. I love gambling on them.” Lefty snorted. “Seriously. It’s an easy twenty.”

“Control, acknowledge. Unlock closest door and relock when I exit. Master Asinine, I shall not take long.” Mechanism did not even face his pretend leader to speak. He stomped toward the entrance...but stopped. He had forgotten something. “Oh, and Bad Guys? Welcome...to Station Mechanism.”

“Lord, before you depart, may I get up?” Appliance asked.

* * *

So Mechanism and his blue-jointed goons wanted to play this game, huh? Over the months, Asinine had suggested anything from hide-and-seek to hot potato with grenades, and Mr. Magnificence chose to play this crap. So be it.

Mechanism had improved his armor. Its chin extended down the neck to protect what hid behind it. The eye slit looked more curved and pointed in the middle, as if his eyes frowned. It was also thinner, which exposed less of his face. That antenna peeking out of the helmet’s temple could act as a bird stoop. Also, what was with the new crown?

In this piped hideaway, Master Asinine grabbed what he had cobbled together: a nine-millimeter pistol, a Hawkshank double-barrel shotgun, a nitrate-capsule launcher, and his favorite BB gun, the King. Oh, and Old Faithful. He loved his water pistols. He wanted to refill Old Faithful at the wash basin huddled in the corner, but only red sludge had come out instead of water. It wouldn’t have been a complete failure except, man, it tasted too much like his regular drinking water. And this place smelled like formaldehyde. And it felt as chilly as a meat locker. And he complained too much.

He stuffed Old Faithful and his pistol into a pocket and strapped the other weapons around his shoulders, back, and neck. He exited the hideaway and checked both ways in the yellow-lit hall. Nothing in either direction. But the right led to the cafeteria and the Mechanism army. If Asinine excelled at anything, it was diving headlong into impossible odds. Oh, memories of his first retail job.

He met with no generics. Mechanism must have captured the generics along with the media-named Bad Guys. In the hallway’s loneliness, his footsteps tapped loudly. He wished he could fly over the terrazzo floor, but that was Appetite’s thing. Well, blank stares were Appetite’s thing, but that gargoyle’s flight spooked Asinine out less. Also, Appetite hadn’t yet accepted the challenge to Asinine’s pie-eating contest. He thought that’d be right up that food behemoth’s alley.

Asinine skulked around the corner, his steps exaggerated. His guns clattered against one another. Around the corner...

The Bad Guys’ numbskull high-school ninja, Amaranthia! She stood as vapidly as if she waited in a class registration line and wondered how Airheaded Boy-Chasing had become Applied Physics 301.

“Amaranthia. Psst.” Master Asinine hurried forward, hugging his clattering guns to mute their festivities. Could the ninja hear him? She stood across the hall, red outfit swimming in a cool breeze. He needed to get her attention. “Hey, free food for students.”

Amaranthia jolted into this reality. A wry smile snaked across her lips, and her eyebrows slid down her forehead. Man, either she had a mad-on for macaroni or she just remembered Asinine’s glue prank last week. Heh. Asinine: one. Amaranthia’s new hairdo: zero.

Amaranthia shifted her body to face Asinine. She sashayed forward as if on a model’s runway. The smile blossomed. Always with the smile. She’d probably filched Asinine’s dance party mix and stuffed every angst-ridden teeny bop onto her gabber.

“Good. I found you.” Asinine rushed at Amaranthia and slapped his hands on her shoulders. “We need to run. Do something. Grab a bite to eat. Escape somewhere.” Asinine was so wound up that each word spurted out. “Mechanism. He’s...he’s crazy. He’s got a bunch of smaller Mechanisms now, and they’ve captured everyone. Braindead, Schizo, Lieutenant, Braindead, a chair. Who will fetch me my coffee and say I’m a generous organ donor now? Anyway, forget my daily affirmations. We need to launch a counterattack before Mechanism sets the snack machines on diet mode. No one likes sugarless gum.”

Amaranthia circled him. Her high heels knocked the floor with every catlike step. “You stupid, stupid gitch?” she said, her rising inflection making every statement sound like a question. She called him out on being a gitch every day.

“No, you don’t understand. We need to hide. Now.” Master Asinine tugged her arm, but she remained in place. “He’s coming. He’s—”

Mechanism clomped around the corner and saddled up behind her. No problem. Asinine and Amaranthia could take this high-society stiff-wad together. Asinine tightened his grip on the nitrate launcher. Amaranthia tightened her grip on her katana. But she remained facing Asinine.

“Hello, Master Asinine.” Mechanism’s pomposity sounded even vainer through his new suit’s speaker. “I trust you now realize who stands on whose side. Actually, perhaps I should not trust anything with you.”

“What are you talking about?” Asinine stepped back. His eyes jumped between Amaranthia and Mechanism, Mechanism and Amaranthia, Amaranthia’s burgundy-hilted katana and Mechanism’s thick arms, the man-eating plant licking its lips in the hallway inlet and his own protein-to-fat ratio.

“You are, indeed, history’s longest intelligence drought.” Mechanism stepped past Amaranthia, who regarded him with a twisted smile. “Amaranthia has worked for me for nearly two months now. I acquired her before I suggested to you to do the same.”

Master Asinine felt no jitters. No icy sensations froze his body. He didn’t drop his guns in shock like he did whenever he licked a live wire. He felt only a numbness tingle him. “A double cross? This is not the birthday present I expected.”

“Your birthday falls nowhere near February, you fool’s fool.”

“Well...it’s on a third.”

“No, it is not.”

Asinine whipped up his nitrate launcher and leveled it at Amaranthia’s head. Amaranthia swatted it away. It glanced against the wall and dropped to the floor. Asinine leaped away from Amaranthia’s axe kick. No one would chop his thigh in half except Schizophrenic. Asinine wondered why it didn’t take much for Schizophrenic to goad him into any dangerous situation. Want some candy? Not anymore, goon.

Asinine’s kick found its target: Amaranthia’s head. She stumbled back, recovered with arms in an X that blocked a punch. She chopped away the Hawkshank, and it clapped against Asinine’s chin. Asinine missed her eyes and popped two fingers into her forehead and, crock, those Stooges had good aim—

Mechanism crossed his arms and chuckled.

—Asinine blocked a punch, backflipped, caught Amaranthia’s stiletto heel, threw her back. She tumbled, flipped back up, punched—Asinine blocked—she punched again—blocked—she kicked—jerked aside—she whirled another kick into Asinine’s temple—Asinine passed on the favor by spinning his face into the floor. The floor was less than thankful. Also chilly.

Asinine smeared blood off his temple. Man, those stiletto heels deserved their name. He grunted. “Okay. I get it. You’re still mad because I revoked your heart-beating privileges.” He raised a finger. “Still, don’t think I haven’t caught you pumping blood lately. Young lady, you’re grounded.” Amaranthia’s punch responded to him in the jaw. “And now I’m revoking your punching privileges.” Another punch to the jaw. “Should have revoked that before the first punch.”

“Ew, blood on my hand!” Amaranthia smeared Asinine’s blood on a wall and fanned the rest off in horror. “Ewwww, so grody.”

Asinine snapped forward with his BB gun in one hand, Old Faithful in the other. Old Faithful had run dry of ammo, but they didn’t know that. Oh, wait. It was transparent. Okay. Forget Old Faithful. He threw it at the plant. Bon appetit.

“Freeze, Amaranthia. I’m onto your game: hitting and kicking me until my face turns black and blue. Well, you forgot this little gem.” He cackled at his BB gun. “This thing doesn’t pack much punch, but at this range, you’ll have a black eye for your next forty date nights. So don’t even budge—” Amaranthia sweep-kicked the BB gun aside. “Aw, man, stop kicking all my stuff.”

Amaranthia reeled back for another punch, a two-pronged eye gouger couched in her palm. Its tiny blades peeked out between two fisted fingers.

“Amaranthia, that is enough. Thank you.” Mechanism uncrossed his arms and stormed forward, each step like a death toll. Terrazzo crunched under his heels. “Master Asinine, this farce is now over. Your empire is mine, you dolt-headed clown.”

Asinine gasped. “A two-in-one insult.”

On the back of Mechanism’s forearm, a panel buzzed open, and he aimed a pinprick laser at Asinine’s nose. Asinine hoped Mechanism had set the laser to “sinus decongestant.” Otherwise, he’d soon suffer a nose full of hurt. Either way, these nasty sniffles would be cured. Glass half full.

Mechanism stopped strolling around and ruining the floor. “If you so much as attempt another finger poke, I will drive that beak you call a nose into your skull.”

“Hey. That isn’t where noses go.”

“Indeed my point.”

Mechanism clubbed Asinine over the head lightly enough to not cause the permanent brain damage he so often said Asinine already suffered.

Chapter Four: Some Bosses Are Tyrants

Luzimoss raked his hand across a table of machines and screamed, shredded at the hair on the part of his head that wasn’t metallic, what could he do, couldn’t even tear out that microchip, no way he could free himself.

Okay, calm down, he thought. He was Number A in this ridiculous war. So what? He still needed to act cool, exercise self-control.

Number A. What a ridiculous name. What a ridiculous contradiction. What a ridiculous exoskeleton he wore. Cables ran the lengths of his limbs, and a squeaky robotic harness gripped his torso to enhance his physical aptitude. He looked like a Mechaknight except more laughable. He was no lettered number. His name was Luzimoss. But that pecker that now called himself Luzimoss’s master insisted he act as said pecker’s toady in every murderous scheme that arrogant war dog planned. Also, in every trip to the winery, which Luzimoss wouldn’t mind if Mechanism stopped threatening to kill the cashier whenever she couldn’t remember where they stocked the robust whites. He could also stop pretending Luzimoss cared what a robust white was.

Luzimoss dwelled in an unused room in the innards of Station Zilcho’s deepest basement, Mechanism’s secret storage area—make that formerly secret after that barbarian had revealed his desire to “cleanse the galaxy, enslave whomever remained, and commence a petition to legalize chocolate éclairs.” Only a red warning light bathed the room’s contents in bloody hues: infernal devices, tables, chairs, snack machines, and an outdated tablecloth. Luzimoss smashed whatever he found in the red darkness.

What macked Luzimoss off most—he slammed his bracketed fist into a wall because that stupid microchip had hijacked his life—was that he’d been Mechanism’s maze rat for too long now. Mechanism had shut off his knowledge hivemind, his one link that allowed him to communicate with versions of himself in other timelines. His head felt...empty, lifeless. The armored control freak had such a stranglehold on Luzimoss’s access to the outside universe that he’d denied Luzimoss news feeds. Crock, on occasion, Mechanism had denied him dinner feeds. Yes, Mechanism had control issues.

And now Mechanism used Luzimoss against his will. Luzimoss whipped his arm across a tabletop of that monster’s ghastly creations. They popped and shattered against the concrete floor. He was a tool for that amoral bigot. And, without his knowledge hivemind, he was useless. The flathead screwdriver of the toolbox. His hand touched his right eye behind which the microchip sat. All he needed was something to pry it out of his head, let loose with his hyperability, and deduce his way to freedom. Of course, if he pried the microchip out—if it couldn’t read his vital signs for even a second—four hundred thousand lives would fall victim to a bomb Mechanism had hidden somewhere. All because that pompous freak adored power. All because he strived to gratify his own devilish grasp for supremacy. And he sought control of this universe by stepping on Asinine—a man who learned all his battle strategies from subjects covered on the backs of cereal boxes—and seizing control of the Bad Guys, which he’d already accomplished.

Luzimoss could think of no recourse. He couldn’t access his knowledge hivemind, take back his life, stop the bloodshed that would ensue from this pointless war, he felt his throat tug sickly, what could he do? His arms vibrated from restlessness. He had clawed at his temple, at that microchip dozens of times, had bargained with himself not to tear it out along with his eye. But the lives of hundreds of thousands of innocents caught in this despicable war would end if he did.

There had to be a way. Short of juggling magnets to wipe out the microchip’s programming, anyway. He’d tried that. Conked himself over the head a few times. Some talents weren’t his.

Whatever he’d try, he’d use caution. If he learned to activate his knowledge hivemind, he could inadvertently trip an alarm. After all, Big Brother Mechanism had shut it off for a reason. Of course, if he managed to activate it, he’d have to endure the knowledge of all the idiotic things Good Guy soldier Power Plant had tried lately. His last capital idea before Luzimoss had lost his ability was filling a toilet paper roll with a spin-activated flammable discharge. His best friend Franchise was not a happy camper that day. Neither were the emergency med techs.

Chapter Five: Wakey, Wakey

Master Asinine awoke in...he blinked the fogginess away...in...this...where was he? Laser rope bound his shoulders, wrists, waist, and ankles to a hover chair that hummed a few feet off the ground. His hands clawed the arms of the chair, but he had no leverage to wriggle out of his bindings. A mild sedative kept him drugged. Though he could move, his limbs tingled. If this was another renaissance fair, he’d give ye olde mayor a piece of what was left of his mind.

Above him droned a light panel so overzealous to prove something that it probably gave him skin cancer. It burned his vision. He squeezed one eye shut and examined his surroundings. He tried to swivel, but some jerk had set the chair to anchor mode. Probably the village drunk. Oh, wait. Cross out the fair. He had no idea where he was, but motivational posters of Mechanism in proud stances hung from every wall. One depicted him with folded arms. Its caption read, “You: I Am Superior.” Asinine doubted that but, then again, it was on printed material. If the Bad Guys had a printshop, Asinine would order one of those Mechanism posters later for Schizophrenic. Lefty hated Mechanism, and Asinine loved a red-faced Lefty.

Someone shuffled around behind him. Asinine heard a clang whose report echoed through this room in which a foxtrot of lights boogied on and off against the stark black background. The station had power, but someone still lurked in darkness. Whoever it was had probably been the one to jack up Asinine’s spotlight.

He tried the ropes again. No such luck in escape. He would have kicked himself, but the ropes prevented him from doing even that. “Crockasaur. Caught again.”

Someone grunted a chuckle. Mechanism, behind him. “Well, perhaps if you did not ice your desserts with liquid nitrogen. Control, acknowledge. Lights to thirty percent.” Thankfully, the light panel obeyed: it dropped its eagerness a few notches, letting Asinine’s eyes relax and laying off the skin cancer to give him a mere suntan. Just in time for beach season. Score.

“So, you have awoken, you simple boor.” Smugness blunted Mechanism’s words.

“Yeah, I do that a lot. Almost daily.” Asinine tried to twist himself around, but the laser rope didn’t yield. He still couldn’t see Mechanism behind him. The laser rope tickled his armpit, though. Tee hee. It also chafed against his crotch, but he had no plans to reproduce, anyway.

Now that the light panel’s brightness had dulled, Asinine spotted snack dispensers glowing in the corner of the room. “So you stole the candy machines. You don’t know how long I’ve nursed a hankering for cheese doodles. Can you grab me one? If you knock the machine around just right, it’ll spit one out for free and hopefully won’t topple over on you.”

Mechanism finally wandered into Asinine’s field of vision. “Be silenced, earwax. No one cares about your cheese doodles or your hapless plan of stealing one from the very machine you own. Besides, these machines are programmed on diet.”

“I knew it. You vegetarian!”

“Attempt no escape. In case you have yet to notice, I have bound you.”

“All according to plan.” Asinine jerked an arm but couldn’t wrench it free. Ugh. Skin burn. “All according to your plan.”

“Precisely conceived and enacted,” a British voice said in a butler’s tinge. Mechanism had hired a butler? Asinine needed one of those. Or at least someone who pandered to his needs. Perhaps someone who called him “sir” and agreed to his every misguided idea.

“Machine.” Mechanism clunked his helmet on a juice dispenser. A can rumbled out. “You are simply to perform menial tasks. If I desire a sycophant, I will build one with lips and a buttock locator. Can you see a target on my imperial backside? No, only a ventilation grill. So shut your speaker.”

Whoa. A butler named Machine. If Asinine hired one, he’d call it Lieutenant IQ—Wait. Somewhere a bell rang.

The bell hurt Asinine’s brain, so he zapped a stream of electrified mind death at the hunchback in his head who rang it. That shut the bell up. “Where are we?” he asked. “Also, did I miss today’s episode of Magic Horse Lumberjack?”

Mechanism retrieved the dispensed juice can but didn’t open it. “We are in my central control chamber. Mine, yessss.” Good snake impression.

“I knew we weren’t at the renaissance fair when I saw those posters not renaissancing.” Asinine nudged his chin at a wall.

“I have transported you here to thwart your further meddlesome stupidity. Not that I worry about you barring me from my goals. I merely wish to prevent you from spray-painting lewd graffiti on my likenesses out in the halls. Indeed, you’ve marked me with a black eye and told the masses I eat my own poo-poo, an affront I will brook”—he pounded a nearby table—“no longer.” The table collapsed on his armored foot.

“I also wish you to witness firsthand what hours of my genius will accomplish and what months of your leadership could not. You had not the mental fortitude to bring your goals to fruition. In your master asininity, you failed to explore this station to its fullest. I, on the other hand—that is an idiom, so do not check your other hand—discovered this chamber near the station’s core. I then erased its existence from every blueprint to which you had access and programmed an l-wall to mask the l-door. I rerouted all functionality here so that I would enjoy master dominion over this station. You assumed your child’s tower controlled this station’s affairs, but I assure you, it enjoyed only the smallest measure of hegemony. Also, while we are discussing the subject of ways I am superior to you, enter no more fashion contests. Even now, my retinas are no match for your brash piano tie.”

“That explanation must have taken hours. We did miss Magic Horse Lumberjack. It was the second part of a two-parter. I’ll kill you! I swear I’ll kill you!” Spit flowed from Asinine’s gnashing teeth. He jerked in the chair, trying to shoot across the room. He managed a squeaky bump forward.

A clank-clank clank-clanked from the blanketing darkness in front of Asinine. Amid a flittering buzz, a shadowy form zipped in front of the dance of dotted lights that were no doubt activated computers. “If you felt even a tingle of an idea of besting Lord—”

“Machine!” Mechanism threw the unopened can at his unseen butler. The can struck something in the darkness and fizzled open, spraying Mechanism. “What have we discussed about empty flattery? If you must boast of me at length, boast of my ability to twist you into disturbing artwork.”

Mechanism scowled at the butler, distracted by thoughts of abuse. He disregarded the butler. “Master Asinine, I now enjoy sole control of your station, and your forces are under house arrest. All two thousand men, women, and lemurs.” He breathed a bumpy laugh. “Lemurs in a criminal organization. I would say that is idiocy personified, but they are exquisite at predator mobbing.”

“You can also train them to fry eggs.”

“Ah, yes, the eggs.” His voice thinned with faraway thoughts, but he shook off whatever memory sidetracked him. Perhaps he thought to restore Asinine’s access to the twisty straw cupboard? “With this station’s power restored, it now hurtles through the cosmos to the Good Guys and their Station One headquarters so that I may launch the next phase of my illustrious plan. And fret not, for I have recorded Magic Horse Lumberjack. You are not its only fan.”

“But those recordings will erase my breakfast snacks. You wouldn’t dare.”

“Reality does not work that way. And I most certainly will commandeer this station for my purposes, for it now obeys only my navigational input. In fact, we are already closing in on Station One.”

The darkness buzzed as if, behind its veil, a moth flitted into an incandescent bulb. “Oh, such mastery at your fingertips, my liege.” Mechanism’s butler glided out of the darkness, revealing itself as a flying cylinder that—aye-yai-yai—reflected rays of light at Asinine. Holy mirror ball of blindness! Asinine tried to wave a hand in front of his face except—oh, yeah, laser rope. Okay, no hand wave. The ol’ one-finger salute was also out of the question.

The butler, who looked like a can with claws, swam through the shadowy air and faced Mechanism with nothing more than a pinprick eye. “You are by far the most gifted master I have ever—”

“For the final time, gag your kissery program.” Mechanism swatted the butler away. It spiraled into a tailspin and clinked against Asinine’s favorite candy machine, the one that dispensed truth, justice, and macadamia-nut brownies. Aw, great. There went the row of justice-and-oatmeal cookies.

“Yes, Lord. Incidentally, I adore the manner in which you tell me to—”

“Machine, terminate your rambles lest I terminate inviting you to my wine dinners.”

Asinine shifted his weight: buttock-trading time. “You invite your butler to dinner?”

“I must. I otherwise risk accomplishing nothing at work.”

“I require seventeen hours a day of basking in Lord’s glow.” The butler clacked those three-pronged claws and buzzed back into its hiding place next to the tiny lights.

“Now, my ‘darling’ Master Asinine.” Mechanism crammed his face into Asinine’s headspace so closely that Asinine smelled the nitrogen slushing around the speckled mouth plate. “Your reign ends now. Your kingdom is mine.” Mechanism retracted himself. A persistent gaze abraded Asinine until Mechanism strolled away.

“Oh, and if you ever show here with feathered boas as suspenders, there will be trouble. My system indicates that your wardrobe causes mental anguish. Yes, I read your fashion newsletter.”

Asinine’s face stretched in disbelief. “You read my secret newsletter?”

“Secret? You publish it on the Intergalacticnet. You sent me the link. And do not ask me to click the Like button again, dunderhead.”

“I’m confused. I’m what sixteen-syllable word?”

“Control, acknowledge.” Mechanism snapped proudly into a rigid posture.

“Yes, Your Highness,” the haunt control said. No fair. Asinine only ever got it to call him “flunked flunky,” and that was after Schizophrenic had messed with it.

“Yes, I am royalty, am I not?” Mechanism chuckled at the haunt control’s response. “Control, acknowledge. Report the estimated duration until we arrive at Station One. Also, report how long I have endured Master Asinine’s presence. I feel I must soon clobber either him or myself over the head to end the irreparable damage to my intellect.”

“Damage to your intellect?” Master Asinine clicked his tongue. “You take that back, Mr. Fussy Pants. Incidentally, what does that mean?”

“Estimated time of arrival at Station One: seven minutes and fourteen seconds. You’ve endured Master Asinine’s insufferable presence now for four minutes and fifty-six seconds. You’ve bested your previous record of four minutes and twenty-one seconds. I shall prepare for you a chilled bottle of Les alcoholiques in your chambers, my sire.” The haunt control sounded a clink to end its talk.

“Excellent.” Mechanism rammed his crowned helmet into Master Asinine’s comfy space again. Cough. Ugh. That reek of nitrogen. “In little over seven minutes, dear Master Asinine, you shall see what genius provides in place of”—the helmet swiveled up, down, and into Asinine’s eyes. Perhaps he’d had second thoughts about Asinine’s kingly outfit and its, quite frankly, superb novelty tie—“whatever you are.”

“A colossal fan of marmalade?”

“The Good Guys had best enjoy their time, for it will end swiftly. Now, if you will excuse me, I must make one more stop before we confront those Good Guy whelps.” Mechanism headed to the door, each step a thunk against the concrete.

“The snack room?”

Mechanism paused in midstep, his foot tapping the concrete. He crooked his head to one side in thought. “Fine. Two stops. Control, acknowledge. Contact Chef Number U and have her prepare shark-fin soup. She will also include a set of double-ply napkins. Cushiony soft for royal lips.”

Chapter Six: Something’s Afoot in the Crisper Drawer

Good Guy interim leader Reef slid open the drawer in the fridge doojigger—and the acidic stench bulldozed his nostrils with no clemency. He snapped back, bumping Sixth Sense, who stood behind him wearing a justified smile and an impact suit a size too large.

“See?” Sixth Sense pushed his glasses up his nose, but they slid back down.

If Legion, the permanent leader of the Good Guys, hadn’t been hit with a starship and put in the hospital almost a month ago, he’d be dealing with this instead. With his permanent-leader pay grade. Instead Reef got the honor.

Reef pinched his nose. “Ugh, who’s responsible for this? You? Science? Did science conceive this?” He had now looked upon the face of evil and returned as a scarred child. He no longer worried himself over Good Guy Momentum’s upcoming Slug and Sluglike Desserts buffet. By far, this was worse.

Reef and Sixth Sense occupied Station One’s restaurant-style mess hall, now vacant since Intergalactic Protection had financed a food court two floors above. Something Reef had swung to get those sponsor kowtowers off his back. Light sprayed the kitchen through the one-meter gap above the service counter’s granite top.

Reef and Sixth Sense peered down at the fridge doojigger that sat in the kitchen behind the service counter. Reef guessed the thing in the doojigger was a sandwich. Maybe a forgotten wedge of cheese? Or halibut? By that token, it could have been someone’s liver. No matter what, it reeked of dirt and mildew, and grass had claimed its top. Shaved bologna peeked out from the...bread? Or maybe the bologna was a tongue. Reef would call this stuff enigmeat. Anyway, a plastic baggie contained the experiment itself, but the grass had outgrown the baggie, attacked it, and conquered the cheese drawer. And it glowed and hummed “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.” Or the alphabet song. Or “Baa Baa Black Sheep.” They all sounded the same.

“Wow. Ugh. Okay. According to the haunt control, it’s festered in there for three weeks.” Sixth Sense stepped forward to slam the seal on the fridge doojigger.

Reef held a hand against the seal to stop Sixth Sense. “Wait. I think it said, ‘Kill me.’” The skin on his back felt as if a colony of insects scurried along it. “When you told me no man or beast could fathom this tremendous foe, I thought you were exaggerating. Turns out you downplayed it.” He had to ask this next question, since Momentum only recently realized rocky road ice cream was not a literal term. “Momentum isn’t planning to use this in—Okay, just making sure because I think it reached out for me.”

Reef rubbed the back of his neck where his hairs perked up electrically. He felt an uneasy hunch that this sandwich—or perhaps he should use generic terms and call it an object of interest—was giving him radiation burns. “It’s things like this that made Smithereens decide to sleep in the hangar bay from now on.”

Okay, Reef had had enough. He slammed the doojigger shut and blinked away the noxious fumes that sizzled in his eyes. Possibly one of their maniac agent Kamikaze’s lunches he forgot before being carted off to an asylum recently, which means the food was aged just right. “Make sure it doesn’t leave. And, whatever it is, whatever language it speaks, don’t mention my name around it.”

“Okay. Sure. Uhm. I’ll give it a shot.” Sixth Sense watched Reef trot down the length of the kitchen to the l-door. The l-door vaporized with a whoomp. Oh, yeah, and when Legion returned with his l-tech phobia—surprise—he’d find Reef had swung a latent-technology deal too.

Reef passed into the hall and said to Sixth Sense, “Make sure it doesn’t escape. I have to figure out whether to call a waste disposal crew, pest control, poison control, or the Ghostbusters. Or maybe I’ll just convince Jeff to eat it.”

“Uh. Jeff. Okay. What will you tell him it is?”

“I’ll be straight up. He eats paste. He’ll have no qualms about this. And he tangled his hands in dental floss last night, so if he wants out, he’ll have to bargain with me.”

Reef stretched up his ears. A high-pitched wail emanated from outside. Metal creaked, bent. A window cracked. And, through that window, he watched a lamppost reach up, almost snap free from the bolts that anchored it. He wandered back into the kitchen, toward the window. Utensils that dangled over the counter now swayed on the assortment of l-hooks. A discarded pan levitated up...banged Reef in the chin. Huh? No. First, ow. Now, huh?

The haunt control clicked in. “Negative gravity generators activated.” Outside, the bent metal, a walkway plank, stopped curling. It bobbed in place under its own weight. The lamppost settled. The haunt control gelled the window crack shut with a slurp.

“Warning: something enormous drifts within attack range of this space station.” The haunt control’s voice spoke ominously, which worried Reef because the last time the haunt control sounded ominous, someone had planted a weasel in the toilet bowl of his living quarters. Now he wore steel bandages. “That’s right. Yak Attack’s colossal discounts are poised to descend upon this station, taking no prisoners. Save thirty percent on Himalayan domestics, forty percent on Tibetan plateaus, and a mammoth fifty percent on cybernetic polo breeds. Each purchase comes with a free poop shovel.”

Reef hadn’t even reached the window before Yak Attack had ad-attacked him. “Control, acknowledge. I just got snack-attacked. I don’t need a yakking.”

The haunt control stopped yattering long enough for him to take a single step. But it soon chimed in with another portentous announcement. “Warning: something enormous drifts within attack range of—”

“If this is Northern Pike Strike, I’m not interested.”

“Station Zilcho has drifted to within one point one light seconds of Station One and still approaches. Hailing frequencies are open.”

What? Station Zilcho, here? And it was powered? Reef’s heart either skipped a few beats or was taking the rest of its life off. His mouth twitched, though he couldn’t figure out what to say: “Holy piss, how can Asinine get any more ludicrous” or “Holy piss, Asinine couldn’t possibly get any stupider.” Pulling in a close third was “Holy piss, I shot myself in the foot when I took this interim-leadership gig.”

None won out. Reef tried something equally diplomatic: “Control, acknowledge. Tell Asinine this is the most suicidal scheme/cry for help he’s ever pulled. What cockamamie crap did he concoct this time? And I’m putting a fifty-words-or-less stipulation on your response.”

Sixth Sense joined Reef at the window, squinting through his thick glasses.

“Entity Master Asinine did not issue the command that moved Station Zilcho.” Even the haunt control sounded as if it threw a party over that announcement.

“Okay.” Not Master Asinine? Reef might not have to self-administer a lobotomy after all. He adjusted his collar and pinched his shirt into alignment. So who hailed them? The thought that the two stations drifted so closely together made coldness scan through his nerves. “Control, acknowledge. Accept hailing transmission.”

“Hailing transmission connected. Output from negative gravity generators increasing as object approaches.” What had happened to the station’s defenses?

Reef still stood in the kitchen hall, so a viewscreen shimmered overtop a grill adorned with chunks of rat and bile. The ashen remains of a pungent goulash recipe.

Reef’s stomach coiled. That face on the viewscreen, as amoral and emotionless as a mannequin, stared through a chilly eye slit at Reef as if it stared down the shaft of his spine. Something churned up his throat. He wanted to spit at that reprobate’s image.

“Hello, Reef.” Mechanism didn’t need to cackle maniacally to infuse Reef’s dread with that foreboding abrasion of senses. How dare this war-brained tyrant show that helmet around here after he’d snuck in under the assumed name Wiler a couple weeks ago. Reef’s chest cavity melted to soup in the same way Power Plant’s compost launcher could make it.

Reef snapped his fingers at Sixth Sense and sliced the air in a rehearsed signal: start offensive procedures. Sixth Sense fired past Reef, past some stoves, and out the kitchen’s l-door to initiate those procedures where Mechanism couldn’t hear.

Reef addressed the viewscreen with a sneer. “Mechanism. Or should I call you Wiler?” Every word tasted like burning poison to Reef. “Why would Asinine surrender a chance to trash-talk somebody, especially to you? He relishes trash-talk. His head might explode once he reads the transmission transcript. Save me some nose mush.”

Mechanism drummed his fingers on the desk at which he sat in front of those posters that advertised his “pristine pristineness.” He was smug, even through his helmet. “Reef, I invite you to venture outside.”

“No thanks. Last time a Bad Guy invited us outside, Kamikaze melted into bouillabaisse and Power Plant complained about a wasted bucket of toenail clippings. I’m not sure which was stranger: Kamikaze dissolving into goop or Power Plant being so committed to something that he produced a bucketful of it.”

“I insist. You see, Reef, you and I have had a...hate-hate relationship. I single-handedly infiltrated Station One under a guise, copied your database, and escaped with a prisoner. I disrupted your mission at Intergalactic Protection’s personnel campus. And you...well...heh...I am still waiting. Now, I must do something I despise: repeat myself. I invite you to venture outside. I present you no alternative.”

“Besides the fact that you’ve placed two spatial bodies in dangerous proximity, what stupid scheme have you planned?” Reef grabbed a spatula with a severed rat’s tail still curled through the slits and squeezed his hand around its rutted plastic. He snatched up a collection of laser cleavers and threw each at the viewscreen, wishing—longing—for Mechanism to somehow feel the attack. “And why would we decide it’s a good idea to walk outside? I like outdoor strolls as much as the next guy, but you’ll have to offer dinner and a sunset before I’m ready for our first date.”

Mechanism’s head cocked. “What?”

“It sounded better in my head. The point is I’ll stay put.”

“Then I will phrase this in a manner even you plebian infants will understand: surrender...or die. I offer surrender as a privilege.” Mechanism leaned closer to the viewscreen. “It is a privilege I may revoke at any time.”

“Surrender? What—” Reef glanced at an exit in the mess area past the service counter. “Control, acknowledge. Carry closest viewscreen with me.”

“Carrying closest viewscreen. It would be easier if you weren’t chubby from gratuity snacks.”

“Hey. I’m working on it.” Reef now only weighed a few pounds over his pregratuity girth. He wanted to slap the haunt control, but it cleaned his oxygen, so it held all the cards.

He hopped over the service counter and slunk toward the exit. It faded to allow him to step out. Misdirected wind flogged his clothes. He turned his head up—gasp. Oh, crock. His stomach and liver tangoed in his belly. He choked on air.

He peered up at the “eye” of Station Zilcho, the unholy, black-as-evil shaft of a gigantic fusion cannon. Likewise, it peered down at him. And Station Zilcho hovered only a few hundred thousand miles above, as close as a moon, so close it almost fooled Reef into reaching out to touch it. In cosmic terms, the two stations were kissing. If sunlight weren’t illuminating Station One from an array of solar lights that floated underneath the atmospheric bubble, Station Zilcho would have plunged them into night.

The filtered chuckle that scratched through Mechanism’s mouth plate made Reef’s skin writhe. “Now you understand your predicament. Our stations are locked in binary orbit at a dangerous nearness. I have deactivated your security system and am now readying an army to infiltrate your home. Your only option is surrender, or I will carve your frail station in two.”

Reef mustered only a small voice, shook words through skeleton-white lips. “Control, acknowledge. Activate station’s defenses.”

“You didn’t say the magic word, fatso. And try an apple at snack time.” The haunt control sounded as if it savored that insult. Who had installed this mouthy mod?

“Please?”

“That isn’t the magic word,” the haunt control said. Reef wished it had something he could kick.

* * *

Good Guy agent Burnout sniffed the confines of this secret area his younger brother Power Plant, with Franchise, had discovered. A football-field-sized room with plenty of empty space. A stalwart, seventy-foot-robot army. A giant beeping timer. A chair holding a dead body. Scratch that. A headless body. Aside from the reek of gas leaking from that body, this place smelled like sunned prunes, something out of that same brother Jeff’s laundry hamper, or something out of Jeff’s New Year’s bash.

“When did you say you guys found this place?” Burnout had been peering at the dark veil that shrouded any object more than a few feet away. That veil blanketed their newest friend Scapegoat, whose coleslaw sentences puttered from its murky deep. Near Burnout stood Jeff, Franchise, and Ace Spandex. In his signature baseball cap and burgundy outfit, Ace Spandex meandered around restlessly, worrying about the time or rubbing the back of his head or scratching the laser scar on his right brow, staring at nothing. He jumped at the slightest noise and once whispered something like, “He’s coming,” but, when pressed, he complained that his programming rendered him unable to tell, whatever that meant.

The hunchback Scapegoat, a former Bad Guy prisoner left here to rot, waddled into the light for a moment, first his head, then his hunched back. His nostril engulfed a finger up to the knuckle. Burnout was trying to break his new friend of a few antisocial habits. One was nose excavation. “Buddy, you need to stop digging for gold. Especially the white stuff. That’s fool’s gold.”

Franchise picked up the conversation that had dropped. “We found the room maybe two weeks ago. We should have said something sooner, but we didn’t know how to bring it up. ‘Guess what? We found a dead body and a countdown timer in a room the haunt control can’t catalogue’ sounded a tad inappropriate for dinnertime.” He cracked a knuckle.

Jeff leaped at Franchise and slapped him across the back. “An’ everytimes we founds ya at din-din, Jakey here was stuffed up with a mouthfuls o’ Space Cow crap.” Jeff bounded around so excitedly that pinpricks of light sparkled from him due to his light-based hyperability. That happened whenever he drank soda. Not the carbonated stuff. The syrup. Burnout had told him not to cram his mouth underneath the spigot at Space Cow, and now a stomachache waited for an opportune moment to attack.

“This room isn’t lit well. I can’t even tell if this is a real dead body or a mannequin stuffed with old socks.” Burnout poked the body’s neck below the headless stump. It crinkled like papier-mâché. “I mean, who builds a room even the haunt control doesn’t know about, programs it to use only one light panel, murders someone, and leaves the evidence? This certainly isn’t an air purification chamber like the blueprint says it is.”

“Yeah.” Power Plant’s shockingly blond hair tickled the light panel. He had come dangerously close to breaking it every time he flung it at Franchise’s head like a samurai’s Frisbee. “Ain’t ’zactly the land o’ sunshine in heres.”

“Neither is our trash ionizer, so stop—” Burnout reconsidered. “Actually, last time you stuffed your head in there, you got a B plus in math, so keep it up.”

Scapegoat shuffled past and almost banged into the distracted Ace Spandex. “Exactly sunshine ain’t here in the land...” Burnout ignored the rest. Scapegoat talked unintelligibly enough, but to combine his speech with Power Plant’s into one paint mixer of words was akin to hooking his brain up to a G-force accelerator. Burnout loved his little brother more than life itself, but scrambling was for eggs, not conversations.

“Scapegoat, buddy,” Burnout called to the hunchback in the camouflaging darkness. “Where are those flashcards I made you? You still have to work on your c words.” Oh, wait. There they lay, scattered on the interlocked floor. “So, Jacob, I don’t follow. Explain again exactly what you found here.”

“And explain where’s Ed wit’ my macaronis-and-bees sammich,” Power Plant said. “I ordered for dat like eights kilohours ago.”

“It’s probably a good thing he forgot.” Burnout squinted into the darkness. Where was the body’s head? Oh, on the foosball table Jeff had hauled here. Too big to be a foosball, the head was still wedged into the blue team’s goal slot.

Franchise finished cracking the knuckles on one hand, so he proceeded to the other. “And I’m flabbergasted Ed saw nothing wrong with a bee sandwich.”

“Hey, man. When I’s finished eatin’ its, I farts total coolness.”

Franchise considered this. “Advantage Jeffy.”

“Ya should see me afters my glass sammich.”

Franchise rubbed his chin. “Oddly, I think I’d like to.”

“Guys, the room.” Burnout scratched his fire-engine-red hair. He looked for Scapegoat again, but his childlike new dependent had slipped back into darkness.

“Right. The room. Remember that awful smell of rotten steak? Well, when Jeffy and I were searching for the source of that smell, we found this place. But it didn’t appear on any floor plan. When we came in, we found Constructo Guy Number—”

“Constructo excuse me?” Burnout’s lips curled.

“Our headless champion.” With a heel, Franchise tapped the dead man’s chair. “He was the smell. Turns out some of the smell finally seeped out into a vent that led—guess where—straight to the vent directly above Jeffy’s bed. We then found the army of gigantic robots and a timer we can’t switch off. And we don’t know what the timer is counting toward. We wanted to tell Smith because of his bomb enthusiasm, but he might have tried setting it off.”

Burnout checked the timer, a four-by-six-foot box with Virillian digits that beeped away the seconds leading to some future event. He thought he recognized a seven, but Virillian numbers converted to the decimal system so obliquely that he couldn’t be sure.

“When we investigated the timer, a video showed Constructo Guy dying from a shot in the head.” Franchise twisted his fingertips together. “So what should we do? I mean...dead body”—he swayed a hand at the body—“army of robot sentries”—at the robot squad—“hidden room. Countdown timer in the most obscure numbering system known to anyone. I have a hunch Kamikaze was planning a parade.”

Jeff gasped, an overextended smile gripping his face. He leaped at Franchise, but Franchise palmed him away. “No, Jeffy, Laser Squirrel won’t show up at this parade.”

In the red glow of the timer, Burnout shrugged. That was all he offered because, the longer he stood in this room, the chillier his blood ran. He swore he felt as cold as if he stood in a blizzard. This room was...wrong. Scapegoat’s blame-attracting hyperability made Burnout want to pin this whole mess on the hunchback.

“I don’t know what to make of this. I’ll have to bring it up to Reef. What’s strangest—” Burnout remembered his brother’s lunch order and adjusted his wording. “What’s strange is I can’t find a haunt control listener in here. No speaker. Whoever hid this room didn’t want the station to control it. It’s completely off the grid.”

“Like Jeffy’s vomiting aptitude?” Franchise sidestepped away from Jeff.

Jeff jumped at Franchise again. “I just realize I’s usings the word ap’itude wrong my entires whole life.” This time Franchise couldn’t dodge him.

* * *

Reef raced around a hallway corner. Had to reach the armory, figure out his next move. He panted—his lungs felt like acid or like Kamikaze had poured acid into them—and sweated a deluge down his face, neck, back. Unable to control his momentum. Smacked against a wall when he bounded around that sharp corner. The armory, only a few twists away. “Cont—” Swallowed back some saliva and brackish sweat. “Control...” Stopped, planted his hands on his knees, hunched, leaned against a wall. Lungs scorched his chest with excruciating overexertion. Never felt so much agony. Stomach bubbled from acid reflux. Letchtech’s peanut-butter cream puffs had inflicted this on him.

Had to control himself. Control. He panted. Control. He wiped his lips. “Control...acknowledge. Evacuate all...nonessential personnel...off station. Initiate atmospheric...lockdown. Let only escapees...pass lockdown.” Should have given those orders earlier, especially to evacuate the station, now that Letchtech had installed the new escape pods. He’d focused too much on reaching the armory. First stop, though? Perhaps hit the shower. He felt as clammy as a sewer.

“Gabber...” Had to catch his breath, swallow back spittle. The swallow crinkled in his ears. Even that ate at his energy. Mechanism. That helmet. So sterile of emotion, yet it implied so much of what hid behind it. “Gabber, acknowledge. Contact all...active Good”—swallowed again. Braced himself on a trash ionizer slot—“Guy entities. Tell them...this isn’t a drill or...in Franchise’s case...tell him it is.”

“Connection to entities Ed, Momentum, Pincushion, Sixth Sense, Smithereens, and Withered Old Battle-Axe attained. Entities Ace Spandex, Burnout, Franchise, and Power Plant are unreachable. Connection to Null not bothered with.”

Ed? Listed as a Good Guy? What had Power Plant meddled up this time? The blond freak-out had taken nearly four months to consider Legion a Good Guy. But he listed Ed, the new intern at his fake nation, in the haunt control after a month? And since when did he have access to reprogram the haunt control?

Reef worked to control the insufferable wheezes. They racked his ribs. He wanted to howl at the overachieving light panels. His exhaustion eased up, though. “Ed, why are you still here? We’re in the middle of an assault. You should evacuate.”

Ed’s young voice chirped through the connection. “Not yet, Mr. Reef. I need to finish folding President Abends’s hit-the-fan impact shirts for tomorrow’s planned dinner uprising. Would you like me to set one aside for you?”

“No. I—Actually, to be on the safe side, yes. And grab me a hit-the-fan pair of pants, too. In the meantime, Ed, I ordered a full-station evacuation. That includes you.” He lifted his leg to allow an ankle-high floor sweeper to rattle past.

Clothes ruffled on the other side of the conversation. Why did the ruffle of clothes include a squeal of hinges? “Hold on. I only have eighty-seven more flak shirts to fold.”

“Ed, the first thing that scares me is you know exactly how many of these ludicrous T-shirts Jeff owns. Second is it’s more than one. Third is you’ve twice refused to evacuate. Get the piss off this station. Everyone else, listen up.”

“Eh, buddy.” Smithereens’s voice. The bomb expert’s mustache scratched against the mouthpiece. Man, these new Letchtech gabbers sounded crisp. He suddenly loved sponsor kowtowing. “What’s this about something enormous within attack range?”

“I’m about to address that. You may have heard the announcement about something coming within attack range of the station. This isn’t a drill, and Ace didn’t mess up another installation.”

“He didn’t download another angry-drunk voice mod for the haunt control?” Pincushion’s deep bass voice spiked with a hint of nerves.

“No, but wasn’t it fun to hear the haunt control tell Braindead it loved him, then call him a two-faced liar?” Heh heh, yeeaaah, it was. The smile disappeared. “This is serious. Station Zilcho drifted to within around two hundred thousand kilometers of us.”

“Say what?” The gabber muffled Pincushion’s surprised bass squawk. Crock, these things were works of technological art. It paid to accept endorsement money from IP’s unscrupulous funders. “The two stations are orbiting that closely? Can the negative gravity generators handle the pull? What senseless plan is Asinine trying to kill us all with this time?” Even now insomnia slurred his bass-tone words.

“It’s not Asinine who launched this attack.” With a squish, Reef’s sweaty hand slipped from the trash ionizer. “It’s Mechanism.”

A pause lulled the conversation, so bereft of sound it felt as if a black hole had sucked Reef in. Finally Momentum said, “Mechanism is behind this?”

Reef felt as if his legs had softened to wet sand. He ventured farther down the hall. “Yes. Asinine’s involvement is under question. You can tell it’s not the royal logic bomb himself by the lack of clown cars. Everyone, meet me at the armory. All nonessential personnel is evacuating.”

“Buddy, does that include the peanut vendors in the gym’s spectator balcony?”

“‘Essential’ is hard to determine but, yeah, they’re evacuating. I’ve locked the atmospheric bubble, but if Mechanism breaks through that, this place will become a killing ground. He’s got the brute force on that sky-blotting behemoth. Whatever we do, we have to ensure he never boards the station.” Reef winced. “Problem is...our station’s defenses are inactive—”

Momentum’s voice powered through, muttering words under his breath, probably a few four-letter ones he blurred into one long censorship bleep. “Who gave the order to deactivate the defenses?”

“It was Mechanism. He downloaded our database last month and found out our access codes. I only managed to activate a lockdown. Look, I need everyone to meet in the armory. Now. Mechanism’s making his big push, and we gotta push back. Can anybody tell me where Burnout and the others are?” The floor sweeper returned, so Reef dodged it. “And can someone pass by Null’s window and wheel him out?”

The older-than-stone Mabel snort-guzzled through the connection. Not even the volume adjustors in the gabber compensated. Reef put a hand to his ear to massage it. “That reminds me. Someone wake up Mabel. She might come in handy.” A guy could dream.

Chapter Seven: Inner Thought at Its Finest

That sideshow-brained Reef endeavored to best Mechanism. How droll.

On Station Zilcho, the central control chamber, the top floor of the central control tower, proved an excellent choice from which to attack. Through its windows, Mechanism monitored the station’s horizon, and it provided a clear vantage of Station One. Alas, a Teen Pop Brawl poster hung from a cabinet, but Mechanism had torn that off.

From here, Mechanism coordinated the capture of those imbecilic nimrods, the Good Guys. He needed not station himself behind the vicarious jurisdiction of a viewscreen. And the tower pointed straight down at Station One, poised to bore a hole through their atmospheric bubble, that same bubble they had hardened to a defensible rigidity. Too bad Asinine had festooned this chamber with hand-drawn flags proclaiming his love of Chihuahua barks. Mechanism shook his head.

Station One looked blurry through that hardened atmospheric bubble. Mechanism had not expected the Good Guys to execute a lockdown. Well, that mattered little. Soon he would break through, and those Good Guys would be no more protected than lambs at a slaughterhouse. At least Mechanism had had the foresight to shut down their weaponized defense systems. Nothing would stop his genius.

His high-ranked subordinates stood like statues, guarding in case of unexpected attacks. With pride, enthusiasm, and a shellac-scented lotion, Number B buffed clean a trophy, the bejeweled skull of a recently slain Bad Guy generic. He’d balanced his legs to leap into heartless action. Number C stood at attention on the mirror side of the chamber. He had not the same murderous seed in his bones, but he brewed a decent cocktail, and his back massages felt sublime, so he made the cut.

“You know what’s not great about this hostile takeover thing? I’ll probably die at the end of it. And I never got to try my recipe for mayo pancakes.” Ah, and that left Master Asinine, forgettable and yet not forgettable enough. He was never in control of the Bad Guys, though he enjoyed the illusion greatly. Still laser-roped to that hover chair, he spat out frequent clips of half-witted speech and that ad-libbed sonnet about how this coup d’état had forced him to miss a Cosmonaut Chimp clip show. Did he not realize the foolishness of every clip show in the history of fiction?

Mechanism had redistributed the station’s principal functions from his tiny cubby in the station’s lower-level entrails to this chamber. He no longer had to dwell in that meek fleapit with its meager breathing room, chalky air, and scant shelf space on which to display his model trains.

“My imperial master.” Appliance fluttered from the full-circle ring of windows across the central control chamber. Mechanism had allowed it to fly again. Its propulsion unit needed a tune-up, sounding like playing cards sputtering betwixt the spokes of a child’s bicycle. Actually, perhaps it should not be tuned up. It gave Mechanism some paltry comedy at which to chortle. Yes, and chortle he would.

With his jaunty chortle dispatched, Mechanism glorified Appliance with attention. He still would not face the flying tin can, though. He preferred not to break away from the window through which he viewed Station One. “What is it, waste of my time?”

“Lord, a series of four-meter escape pods has launched from Station One.” Appliance clacked its pincers—argh—right beside Mechanism’s ear. Mechanism’s right hand should have taught this bot some manners. Oh, if only it were worth the effort.

Indeed, small spacecraft ejected out of long ventricles projecting from Station One’s north side. Mechanism imagined the snapping report of each one that expelled and glided through the semigelled atmospheric bubble. They floated away, lost to Mechanism forever.

“Escape pods? This I gotta see.” Still strapped to his chair, Master Asinine hunched to stand. Another laughable effort. He reddened from exertion and soon gave up. “Okay, I’ll use the power of my imagination.” He squeezed his eyes shut. “Oh, yeah. Wow. Man, those are some escaping escape pods. This reminds me of Missile Command.”

Bother. Mechanism had allowed Asinine audience in this circular chamber, hoping he would remain silent. He didn’t. Still, Mechanism relished—adored—that Asinine would firsthand witness the wilting of his plans in favor of what Mechanism would accomplish only hours from now. To become king of the galaxy. Ahhhhh. Even Asinine’s witness of something as inconsequential as the escape of these pods tingled Mechanism’s most tingly parts.

Okay, enough tingling. “To alleviate your concern, machine, I expected their escape.” Perhaps Mechanism had not furnished Appliance with the intelligence he had thought or that flying drink mixer would have known better than to question its Lord’s omniscience. “The Good Guys are clearing out the nonessential peons. And doubtless that atmospheric bubble only allows them passage, not us. Could any of our vessels masquerade as a Good Guy escape pod, we would easily penetrate that bubble. And that Good Guy vessel our ‘friend’ Plaster had hijacked not long ago is no doubt unlisted in their haunt control. Alas, I must break through it the...enjoyable...way. Control, acknowledge. Open viewscreen. Load atmospheric bubble cracking program.” The viewscreen obeyed.

Appliance buzzed closer like a mosquito vibrating in Mechanism’s ear canal. “But, Lord, is it wise to let anyone leave? These are potential hostages. Or possibly old-fashioned, family-fun target practice.” Again, questioning brilliance. Perhaps Mechanism should engage his suit’s slapping mode after all. He navigated through its menu tree: DISCIPLINE, SLAP, SENSE. He clicked the THIS HURTS ME MORE THAN IT HURTS YOU checkbox and placed the crosshairs on Appliance. One more chance, machine.

“Let me go down and talk to the Good Guys, straighten things out,” Asinine said. “They like me.”

“Go back to Missile Command.” Mechanism tossed a glance over his shoulder at Asinine, though he really wanted to toss a hand grenade.

“Fine.” Asinine shut his eyes again. “Whoo. Nice shot.”

Mechanism returned his attention to the buzzing Appliance. “Thus far, the escapees know nothing of what is happening. They are launching away from us and cannot see this station. They doubtless think this is but a drill. Reef would not stir a panic by divulging my presence. If we attack the nonessential personnel, we would reveal our hand, and the Good Guys would call for reinforcements. Therefore, those peons are neither hostages nor target practice, and they must not know of my bid for power. We can also not waste resources supervising them. For me to ascend to supremacy, we require their absence. Trust me on that.

“However, machine, I am sending Number A some identities. I want him to use his hyperability to determine which escape pod these people occupy. When he finds them, he will send a contingent of Mechaknights to intercept them at a discreet time. Since Number A is the same Luzimoss unwilling to do my bidding, you will ensure his obedience.”

“Oh, but of course, Lord.”

“Oh, and machine. Know that, if you ever again question my ingenuity, I will feed you to my fuel cylinder.” Now that he mentioned it, he checked his system levels. “Ooh, I am practically running on fumes.” He stalked across the chamber to a power console he had transported here. Appliance followed with that dreadful ffft-ffft-ffft his motor spat.

Mechanism punched some digits into the console’s keypad, wrenched the pump from its holster, and inserted the nozzle into the receptacle between his suit’s buttocks.

He folded his arms and waited for the recharge to commence and then finish, staring into the distance. “This is not undignified, I will have you know,” he said to Appliance. He glanced around the room to ensure none of his Mechaknights witnessed this event. None. Excellent. He would rather not make eye contact.

“Of course not.” Appliance rotated away.

“There was no other place to install the socket. Incidentally, the rectal thermometer is inserted in the same fashion.”

“We will never speak of this again, Lord.”

Chapter Eight: What Are the Neighbors Trying to Pull This Time?

In a tattered housecoat, outfit, and slippers, Harrier sneered at the sodding announcement that echoed around his living quarters, perhaps even rattled his toothbrush cup into the loo to the right. The message had right shaved ten years off his life. He checked his pants. Good. At least it hadn’t dwindled his bladder.

Almost a month ago, the Bad Guys had caused a Good Guy starship—with him and the others on board—to bulldoze through the Great Stellin Fusion Station. Maniac pilot Kamikaze had failed to avoid the blast those Bad Guys had barraged the starship with. There were no casualties, though massive injuries were sustained, including Harrier’s severed wing. He now had only one. Control, their greatest and only asset, was lost, and Harrier suffered for it.

Harrier had been hospitalized and now was on medical leave from active duty, ruminating here in his bedchambers about how Legion had allowed that fiasco to occur, about how Legion had allowed many fiascos to occur, how Legion led the greatest fiasco of all time, the Good Guys. Harrier punched a wall. Blasted Legion. If not for his severing Harrier’s wing, Harrier might have remained unscathed that day.

In a confusion of material Harrier couldn’t be bothered to clean, his clothes hung off the backs of chairs, lamps, his dresser, and a countertop. His bed, unmade in weeks, sat angled off the corner of the room. To the side opposite his bathroom was a kitchen with more encrusted dishes than those of a thousand malcontent chefs. He may have spray-painted “Viva la” over his framed copy of The Persistence of Memory, but then again, anyone but a narcoleptic would have finished the thought. He did not sodding care to.

The air was right cottony. He sighed out a despondent drag and scratched the five-day bushel of feathery whiskers on his chin. He felt sleepy. Minced even. The painkillers that the hospital had prescribed caused lethargy. And nausea. And—he checked the bottle—huh. Night terrors. Would you have a gander at that? That explained last night’s visit from the Easter Bunny militia.

If only he’d joined the new Letchtech medical plan, he could have right covered his wing stump with EverAnalgesic. He should clean up the disarray in this room, but he had no energy, and who the sod cared where his laundry lay? Or where his laundry hamper lay? Where did it lay, anyway?

The Bad Guys. He knew they headed this attack. Those chaotic bampots served only to cast doubt on the value of the Terran race. And the Good Guys? What uncontrolled, nasty pieces of work they were. Harrier clenched the bottle in his hand tighter. If only they’d stayed far away from the blinking Bad Guys, the real authorities would have squelched Master Asinine and his parade of pillocks long ago. The Good Guys exuded disorder every time they left the station, from the debacle over that genetic transformer to the disaster at the Firmatech Center, from the misfortune during which Legion had savagely severed Harrier’s wing to that drinking-box flavor snafu at the convenience store.

Harrier exercised the slashed nub where his wing had sprouted. It still felt blinking raw. Bloody cold. Legion could have saved him without amputating a limb. Legion had made it out of the Great Stellin Fusion Station without losing a major appendage. And hadn’t the Good Guys recently allowed Mechanism to waltz into the station and leave with a prisoner? A textbook example of disorderly security protocols. How could they hope to put order to the galaxy? Half of them couldn’t blooming put order to their underwear drawers. Also, crock them.

Harrier kicked back a swig from his bottle of vodka. Yeeeuck. He set the bottle down and stared at it with an extended tongue. It tasted like chemical cleanser. How could Reef stand this stuff? It would spiral Harrier’s world into blooming chaos, something he detested more than that vile event that had lost him his wing, more than the purple whipped cream the haunt control constantly endorsed. No. Drunkenness was not for Harrier. He was not good at getting tanked.

He pondered the haunt control’s announcement that still crackled in his room’s speaker. What was occurring outside his small world? “Control, acknowledge. Enable viewscreen. Display threat.”

“Displaying threat,” the haunt control said. Codswallop. Harrier didn’t bother to brace himself. “And, hey, if you’ve grown tired of that musky old vodka, try Inebriated Rudy’s Shame Is for the Weak White Russian. Sold at any fine drinking establishment. Inebriated Rudy’s. Because eighty-six-proof is for mama’s boys.”

Harrier rolled his dry eyes. He was already drinking Inebriated Rudy’s. Crock, he so desired to spear that haunt control with a javelin smeared in bird deuce. The encrusted kind of deuce.

The viewscreen shot at him like oncoming traffic. He leaned forward lazily and...whoa, almost spilled out of the chair. No matter. The carpet was shag and he liked shag carpet. Too bad this wasn’t shag, so it mattered if he spilled out of his chair.

The viewscreen showed space. Nothing but sodding space. Or perhaps Power Plant’s brain. What a piss of a—wait. No. That wasn’t space. Space included stars. No stars glowed brightly in the viewscreen. In fact, a giant object blotted out everything. Now tiny dots of light—not stars, but similar—speckled the viewscreen’s display.

“Control, acknowledge. Zoom out viewscreen display by forty...no, fifty...eight hundred—Crock, simply make that object visible.” He drummed his fingers on the chair.

“Zooming out viewscreen display. Impatient drumming not appreciated.” The viewscreen zoomed out. The rush of pixels that crowded the display made Harrier’s vision smear and his stomach stretch something proper. Whatever blotted out space shrank into a compacted view the size of a baseball to reveal the starry sky around it.

Yes. There it floated. Station Zilcho. It looked modified...upgraded. The speckles of light were blooming streetlamps. And where the crock had that attack laser come from? That mattered not. It was ready to violate Station One’s innermost child. Harrier should have heeded the order to evacuate. He would nevertheless steer clear on this fight. Just another avenue down a chaotic traffic jam between the patently unqualified Good Guys and the riotously stupid Bad Guys. Good versus evil was never so sidesplitting.

No. Harrier needed to find out what the sod was happening. He wobbled to his feet and won the war against his painkiller-induced weakness and his corn-dog lunch. He would not let this battle bugger into chaos. He must ensure a measure of control remained despite the acidic discharge he’d just regurgitated onto his sweater. Wait. That wasn’t the remnant of a corn dog. So what was on that lunch tray?

He lurched to his dresser to change into day clothes. He’d have grabbed something to sit on and watch the battle but his clothes probably covered his bleeding lawn chair.

Chapter Nine: Safecracked

Luzimoss clutched the metal part of his head. He sat on a metallic table in the spacious room that whispered due to the air conditioner and the haunt control’s advertisement about whispering air conditioners. Alone in Brick’s experiment workshop with only the scent of uncooked beef, uncooked pork, uncooked rice, and uncooked vermin. Oh, and live vermin, too, but the live vermin smelled like uncooked vermin.

The room was a calamity of half-constructed gadgets and irradiated lab rodents that evidently employed no survival instinct if they hung around this room too long. A gravity generator here, a robot hound there, and, huh, a VideoChip Reader not even fit for a museum over there. With stacks of videochips labeled “Mr. Asinine’s Crazy Home Stunt Videos.”

The “Lord” had pulled back the veil on Luzimoss’s hyperability. Oh, yay. The “Lord.” Luzimoss hissed through his nostrils so hard they smoldered. He wanted to gouge out his own brain.

He’d used his hyperability of communicating with himself in other timelines to deduce the chances of Lord’s two targets being in this escape pod or that escape pod or whichever escape pod. If he used his hyperability in any other way—say, to figure out how to rip the microchip out of his head without setting off that bomb—he would set off that bomb. He pounded his head with his armored hands. If only he’d never crossed paths with the despicable Good Guys or the vile Bad Guys. Or fruitcake.

A luckless rat found an unpackaged cracker and nibbled. Whatever was in that cracker couldn’t have been healthful, because the rat ballooned to triple its size and floated away. If only it watched out for that hovering ceiling fan.

A buzz grew louder. Luzimoss wasn’t sure how long he’d been listening to it, but he’d just now noticed it. The buzz drew closer, and suddenly Appliance circled around to stare at him eye to eye apparatus. “Lord would like to know how you’ve performed on your task before he deactivates your hyperability again.” The robot sycophant clacked its pincers.

“You tell ‘Lord’”—Luzimoss spat on Appliance’s eye apparatus—“I’ve completed his task and have sent his contingent of Mechadogs to carry out his dirty work. There’s a ninety-seven percent chance I guessed the correct escape pod.”

“Excellent.” Appliance clacked its pincers again. Why must it do that? “Then you have a ninety-seven percent chance of living.”

“Really?” Luzimoss’s face heated until he sweated from his inner fire. “‘Lord’ uses me as a bomb trigger, and you bring up my chances of living. How much chance did he give you?” He lunged off the table and snatched Appliance out of the air. Oh, how he wished he held a flyswatter. Several of Brick’s androids used them as frat-party spank machines, so one always lay near. “Huh? How much chance? Lord wants me to help him cleanse this galaxy, kill the ‘unworthy,’ and take away everyone else’s freedom. Maybe I should take something from him!” He dug his fingers into the grooves in Appliance’s body and began tteeeaaaarrriiiinnnnggg the weaseling pewter can in two.

Appliance’s wings flickered. Something cracked, something yielded, and—

Yeearrrggghh! Luzimoss’s brain crackled with fire. Around his skull flared an intensity so bright he felt as if he were caught in the head vice Asinine had often used on himself just for kicks. He released Appliance and tore at his hair, banging to his knees. His head hadn’t felt this tortured since his last audit.

Appliance faltered in the air but maintained altitude with a sputter. “Lord’s property does not threaten Lord’s property. Remember, you feel excruciating pain whenever you even touch me. I am necessary to Lord.” It clacked his pincers. Again with the pincers. “You are a mere luxury.”

The pain subsided, but Luzimoss still writhed when Appliance buzzed off. “Remember your rank in this takeover, slave. Oof.” It hit the doorframe and ricocheted out.

* * *

Mechanism rued the atmospheric bubble looming around Station One. He could bombard it to tatters, but he wanted to uphold the illusion that nothing was wrong on Station One. Therefore, a hidden entry demanded itself.

He addressed the viewscreen again. It had waited now for ten minutes, so it had faded to semitransparency and reminded him of its presence every so often: “Awaiting command. Join Hip Chat Party Line and save a bundle on your next oil change.” Blah blah blah.

Mechanism kicked Master Asinine’s chair. It clattered to the floor. Master Asinine was still tied to it, so perhaps this would jostle free any jujubes he had stuffed into his brain. If only that caveman thought like something more advanced than an ape.

“Viewscreen, acknowledge. First, silence your commercialistic gimmickry. Second—What in blazes?” Mechanism recoiled from the viewscreen. Graphical kittens pranced around its display, and glitter and streamers rained from its top. “Master Asinine, you must answer for many things. One is your appalling choice of window dressings. However, the more immediate one is the atrocity you call this viewscreen.”

Master Asinine tried to right his chair, but his tongue was not long enough to boost him up. He gave in. “That’s the Monstrosities of Rock viewscreen mod.”

“And this?” Mechanism jabbed a finger at a tabby on the viewscreen. “And this?” A purple star. “And these?” Balloons and streamers. “And, positively, this?” No idea, but it looked fit to be squashed in the center of a slumber-party pillow fight.

Master Asinine’s cheek was mashed against the floor. “Yeah. I wanted to replace the house cats with man-eating ones, but the mod’s user notes say the Monstrosities don’t roll that way. So...what can you do?” The tabby began a meowing melody to the tune of “Jingle Bells.”

“What can you—Not install it in the first place! Viewscreen, acknowledge. Rever—” His head snapped back to Master Asinine. “You realize this is why nobody respects you. Viewscreen, acknowledge. Revert to previous settings.”

“Reverting.” Vanity lights and pink clouds obscured the display amid a glittery chime as if concealing an “extreme viewscreen makeover, tee hee.” The clouds and lights disappeared, replaced by...leather black, denim blue, and a quintet of boys in the upper left corner who tried vainly to look smug and fierce. They pulled off narcissistic.

“What is this brutality to my eye visor?” Mechanism swatted his hand at the viewscreen. “The Pouty Boys? Is that one of their...‘hits’...playing in the background? Viewscreen, acknowledge. Silence that accursed ear scratch. And revert to previous settings.” Mechanism lowered his head. The noble Frederick Snogsbottom would have looked at this in shame. “Please may this not be—”

A harp serenaded the viewscreen’s transformation and soon...“Love ’Plosion Girls? Pray tell, what—” Mechanism pictured his happy place: the furthest winery from Master Asinine. “Viewscreen, acknowledge. Revert back to factory settings.” Mechanism flopped into a chair that frothed out of swirls of l-tech magic.

“Factory settings were deleted and replaced by the Melodrama Queens viewscreen mod. Ten albums now available for a moolah at your local music swamp. Great for high-school dances or leveling uneven bookcases.”

“Oh, my Mechanism, how do you erase factory settings?” Mechanism wanted to palm his face. Correction: he wanted to rip his face off. “Control, acknowledge. Cram their inexcusable heartbreaking and girl craziness. Deactivate.”

“Cramming and deactivating. Ten for a moolah. Think about it.” With a sinking whir, the viewscreen shrank to a dot.

“I will simply command my ‘machine on the inside’ to enact my dirty work for me. Should have performed this action in the first place.” He fitted a hand over his face, massaged his temples, and activated his helmet’s communication software.

“Can you turn the viewscreen mods back on?” Master Asinine’s cheek still smeared the dust on the floor, but now his tongue lolled out over an oil stain. “I want to hear Love ’Plosion’s views on crazy dancing.” He caught the judgmental tilt of Mechanism’s helmet. “And privately funded health care?”

* * *

Blinding! Hot! Agony! In his skull! Ace Spandex opened his mouth and flopped onto the chilly floor. The scream he wanted to unleash never came to voice. With innocent ears present, that seemed like a good thing, because the haunt control’s censorship program would bleep out most of his scream and then slap him.

He struggled to his knees, but he couldn’t support his weight, all 308.16 pounds of tissue, jangling metal, and coolant. His stomach and abdomen clenched into tight fists of torment. He opened his mouth to warn Burnout but could muster only a gurgle. And an “oof” when Scapegoat tripped over him.

Mechanism had recently kidnapped Ace Spandex when a starship he was on was hijacked and flown back to Station Zilcho. Now Ace was Lord Mechanism’s repurposed cybernetic puppet. And so Lord’s command signal punched through his thoughts: “Deactivate the atmospheric bubble.” NnnnnnnnoooooOOOOOOOO, not on his life even if this signal fried everything in his brain from its medulla down to its mesencepha—why the piss was his head filled with crap about anatomy? Lord erased Ace Spandex’s memories of his fourteenth birthday for this?

Ace’s teeth chattered, but a new throb of agony lanced his pain centers with sixteen volts. His teeth clenched now, threatening to snap into ivory splinters. A new message: “Deactivate the atmospheric bubble. Now.” No. Same message, new arrogance.

Everything in his vision melted to shadow. A spectral presence guiding it, a menu system spirited into his vision and climbed through its option tree. What? He hadn’t commanded it to do anything. No!

Ace Spandex’s hat fell off. That exposed his steel scalp. He’d tear out his hair, but he couldn’t find it in all that steel. He was balding and he wasn’t even twenty-five age cycles old. Crock you, Lord.

He clawed at the floor to find a groove, a defect, anything to haul himself out of the darkness and toward Burnout. Finally a peep niggled from his throat but not as loud as Power Plant’s complaints about how Space Cow used fewer hoofs than Butchery Burger. Oh, the humanity.

He selected his program catalogue. No. He hadn’t. Something steering his brain had. What th—Who’d done that? Now a program list scrolled across his vision.

Suctions in his fingers. So said the menu system that intruded on his sight. He activated the fingers, which clung to the unseen floor. One hheeeeaaaavvveeeee, and his brain exploded in pain like a nuclear station. Another hhheeeeaaaavvveeee, and his skull detonated in scorching anguish, but that was all right because he planned to replace it with something that didn’t pound as if it were on fire. A bucket, perhaps.

He panted, but the respiratory bags that had replaced his lungs dulled the inferno of his breathing. He choked up coolant and spit, sweated out oil. He hhhheeeeaaavvvveeedddd again and...collapsed at Burnout’s feet in the dim orange light. Scapegoat tripped over him again. Once was apparently not enough.

Burnout gasped. “Ace, what’s wrong? Jeff, Jacob, give me a hand here.”

Ace Spandex’s program list highlighted one item after another: Audiophoric Sound Analyzer, Bristol Photo Gallery—Ace Spandex would murder Lord Mechanism for filling his head with Bristol’s buggy garbage—down to Letchtech Haunt Control Manager. Click. No. Stop! Who was behind this? Who had commandeered his brain? Ace Spandex demanded to—He jabbed his elbow on the copper-scented floor. That prickled his funny bone. Anyway...Ace Spandex demanded to know.

Ah. He knew what to do: overload his processor. He distracted the menu. Selected anything. Letchtech’s Memory Defragmenter. Intergalacticnet chess. The Space Cow locator that had weaseled into his brain when his firewall had failed. Notepad. Notepad? Sure. Why not? Notepad.

Power Plant leaped at Ace Spandex, who thrashed against the floor in a charged convulsion. “If we playings Twister, we need that circles mat. But let’s plays it in black-an’-white.” He clenched a fist over a pitiless frown. “Right foots red killeds my daddy.”

“Something’s serious.” Burnout plunged to one knee to lift Ace Spandex, drag him onto—“oof, ugh”—his shoulders. “Urrrrk. What the...Jeff, do you still feed Ace clay in his sleep?”

“Nah, I don’t listens to none haunts control ads none more.” Power Plant thumbed himself. “I eats that clay m’self.”

“I don’t know what’s happening. Ace, what’s happening?” Burnout stepped back to check Ace Spandex’s head, feet, hands, head again, back of his skull, shoulders, looking for something, anything, any clue what was happening, Ace Spandex wanted to tell him, but something had inflated his tongue. No metaphor. His system had blown up his tongue to rhino-hide thickness.

Unbidden, Haunt Control Manager launched in Ace Spandex’s mind’s eye. No, his plan to overload his system had failed. He wanted to slam his feet on the ground, throw a temper tantrum, halt this activation.

Franchise hopped to Ace Spandex’s feet and tried fruitlessly to lift him. Not even clo—hrrrrkkkk. Ace Spandex felt Lord’s newest signal from his stomach to his head.

A flash of white made him feel as if all blood in his body vanished. Load Atmospheric Bubble functions. Click. Stop it, stop it, stop it.

“Jacob.” Burnout waved at Franchise but his notice didn’t leave Ace Spandex, who convulsed to keep him unfocused, unable to stop himself from enacting whatever vicious function Lord needed. Burnout tried to lift Ace Spandex again, but his arm weighed no less than forty pounds. “Jacob, find help. Reef. Sixth Sense.” He shrugged. “A crane.”

“An’ caffeine for me.” Power Plant danced a jig. “I’s gettin’s a caffeine.”

“Someone who can help and a sedative for Jeffy. Gotcha.” Trying to crack spent knuckles, Franchise electrified a nod and darted toward the door. He collided with the doorframe and his shoe tore off, but at least he made it out. He scrambled back in to retrieve his shoe.

Haunt Control Manager continued: deactivate Atmospheric Bubble functions. Why couldn’t Ace Spandex stop Lord, no, Lord would gain access to Station One, stop, stop, stop, STOP, SSSSTTTOOO—

Click.

Chapter Ten: All Hands on Deck

“Crock.” Reef slammed the heel of his palm on the armory door. “Burnout is still offline. And Shower Stall of Style is holding a half-off sale on shower accessories while I’m stuck in this mess.” That last announcement didn’t ice his veins like the one that proclaimed Mechanism’s onslaught, but he swore he’d own a shower mirror if it were the last thing he did.

He passed through the armory’s door—“Control, acknowledge. Lock armory door”—and bumped into Good Guy speedster and aspiring-cook Momentum, who reacted with that look of revulsion he wore whenever he had to heed the recommended amounts on a recipe. Reef had no patience for Momentum’s attitude. And this place smelled like a septic locker room.

The others had already arrived: Momentum, Smithereens, Pincushion, Null, Mabel, and Sixth Sense. And Ed. Reef hunched. Ed hadn’t escaped. Instead, Ed was tallying everyone’s supper orders: whatever Momentum wasn’t eating. Reef was still dumbfounded that Power Plant had more interns than all other imaginary nations combined.

The other Good Guys had already armed themselves, some with guns, Null with a blank look and a stream of drool, and Mabel with a handbag, a peach-fuzz lady’s mustache, and snoring that the Richter scale couldn’t measure. Smithereens tossed Reef a shotgun, which clattered when it hit his hand.

“Bad news, everyone,” Reef said. “Death and Bad Guy bad news.”

“Now isn’t the time to run through Asinine’s bucket list, brother,” Pincushion said. The spiked extensions of his bones, poking out of callused holes in his skin, gleamed in the light.

“This has nothing to do with spreadable cheeses.” Okay, calm down. Give everyone the facts. Fact: Mechanism had launched his bid for dominance. Fact: he would soon break through the atmospheric bubble. Fact: if he broke through, he’d likely succeed in killing everyone aboard this station. Fact: the Good Guys had no plan to counter this. Fact: Momentum’s popcorn salsa needed work. Fact: and fewer cornflakes.

“Okay, what is this, you’d better believe it?” Invard elbowed past Pincushion and Null. Pincushion tumbled back on his metal knee, but Null only switched drooling sides.

“What?” Reef stomped forward a step, rattling pistols behind the sign-out counter. Invard was an Intergalactic Protection auditor the higher-ups had sent to ensure money expenditures were aboveboard. And he hadn’t evacuated. “Invard, as if I didn’t already have Jeffy’s oblivious intern to handle, you didn’t get off the station while the getting was good either?”

Invard’s nose slanted up at Reef. He smoothed out his Gharalgian suit jacket with his hands. “And let you manage your ammunition budget on your own? You’d better not believe that.” That nose swept away, but his haughty eyes remained pinned on Reef as an eagle would pin its prey. “If you’ve dropped us into another waxy ball of trouble, this will max out your luxury vehicle allotment.” Invard parried at him with a finger and, his eyes still affixed to Reef, he wormed back to the tail of the group.

Reef’s awestruck gaze followed him. “It’s amazing how you categorize our spending. Really...truly...amazing.” Invard didn’t react except to point his nose up again. Fine. Reef had more pressing matters.

“Everyone who isn’t concerned about half-baked expenditures, this is...” Those words dropped out of Reef’s mouth like a fumbled football out of a bad catch. He focused on a stain on the wall and nothing at the same time. This situation felt all too familiar. “This is it.”

Flashes of three-years-past conversations zipped through Reef’s mind like a rushing subway train. Reef sitting in a lonely chair...a boardroom at Intergalactic Protection...pacing suits-and-ties...an echoing voice...wacky hat day...“We should forget you ever existed, you drunken waste”...an exceptional continental breakfast...hyperstasis handcuffs unlatched from his fists...“but we need your hyperability”...a hat that read, “I Golf, Therefore I Am.” Was this...was this why IP had rehired Reef? What he’d saved his hyperability for? He—

“This is it?” Momentum broke the reverie and poked a finger into Reef’s Adam’s apple. He’d never trusted Reef, but recently he’d gotten downright antagonistic. “You plan to lead us out of a siege, and you can’t hold a thought for a few seconds.” His flicking shoves bumped Reef back. “How will you lead us out of this? Huh? Plan to use your hyperability? What the piss is it?” He swung a fast-forward punch at Reef, clipped his ear, struck the wall. “Tell us, or I’ll drive this gun barrel up—”

Reef charged at Momentum, swung the loudmouth around, slammed his head against the wall. His arm choked down on Momentum’s neck, which bobbed with his struggle. “Mechanism is using Station Zilcho as a lunar proctoscope. We’re locked in orbit with the Bad Guys. Only our atmospheric bubble is preventing them from coming aboard and reenacting their favorite botched surgeries on us. And I can’t find Burnout, Power Plant, Franchise, or Ace. So save the crocking backtalk. You got that?” Momentum’s jaw firmed and he curled his lip, so Reef cracked him against the wall again. “Can I hear a ‘yes, sir’?”

Momentum felt that last one. His face eased at the sharp pain, but it hardened a moment later. He spoke through his teeth. “Fine. But I haven’t forgotten. Sir.”

“Get over it.” Reef threw himself away from Momentum and checked everyone else. Pincushion looked ready for war. Smithereens held a beeping bomb in each hand. Ed wore his purple frosh T-shirt—prank whipped-cream stains included—and jotted down Sixth Sense’s dinner order: anything but the food court’s Momentum special.

“Everyone, Asinine didn’t coordinate this attack. Otherwise, the worst we’d have to fend off would be a bombardment of sneakers.” Reef weaved through the scant group and leaped over the armory’s counter. “Mechanism is in control. He has an army he calls his Mechaknights trying to break onto Station One. We didn’t receive a warning about his attack or Station Zilcho’s proximity because someone shut down the station’s defenses.”

Momentum stomped at Reef but blundered into the counter. He backed away. His belligerent sneer didn’t. “It was you, wasn’t it? You deactivated the defenses. You let them in!” Rushed over the counter—in a blur Reef couldn’t track—slammed onto Reef—wrestled to the floor—zipped punches that sliced wind.

Reef wrapped an arm like a noose around Momentum’s neck and landed an elbow. The flash-fast agent bowled off and slipped against the counter. Reef grabbed the gun he had dropped during the wrestling match and leveled it at Momentum, who snapped up his own gun at Reef’s head. Reef upheld his aim. “I’ll say this one last time. We’re under siege. You have problems with my authority? Take it up with our new Head Shrink Bot Academic Edition. But if you want me to stop cracking you in the neck and sneaking out a beefy toot when I’ve trapped you in a chokehold, you’ll do as I say.” He and his pistol snapped away.

“Everyone, load up.” From the rows of firearms behind the counter, Reef grabbed a pistol and fit that under his belt. He grabbed an elephant gun, because if anything could give that tyrant pause, it was something that made elephants think twice about where they swung their trunks. “Why we bought elephant guns, I’ll never know, because the last time we found ourselves caught in an elephant uprising was...” Reef pursed his lips from a blank memory.

Smithereens filled in the blank: “The launch of that new Space Cow line of burgers in November, buddy.”

“Trunkadunk Day. Thank you. I should have known since it was mentioned in that memoir book, Galaxy’s Most Violent Flower Festivals.”

The haunt control trumpeted a fanfare so loudly Reef expected a military band to march through. What? Why? “Atmospheric bubble breached. Your prodigious captor would like you to now submit to his Mechaknights, who will locate you momentarily. Try the new rancid blueberry swirl smoothie on sale in the Letchtech food court. While compost supplies last.”

Reef froze. He whirled at the armory’s door though he couldn’t see through it without using Letchtech’s radioactive eyedrops. Holy crock, Mechanism had infiltrated Station One. Already! How had he broken through the bubble? His hand crept to his pistol, inched along its shaft. His vocal cords crystalized, and his throat rasped a croak. He watched the others. Momentum’s blistering stare could bake a pie, and he would somehow find a recipe to make that pie taste like a carpet.

“Everybody.” Reef’s eyes found Smithereens’s terrified gape. “This is it.” His attention leapfrogged to Ed, who looked as blank white as Smithereens. “They’ve broken through.” To Pincushion, whose jittery arms belied the false bravado in his dark brown eyes. “We don’t have long before they track us here.” To Invard, who was probably tallying the threads in Reef’s impact suit to balance IP’s outerwear budget. “They’re not taking me without a fight.” To Null and Mabel, who had both slept through most of this year, this decade...life. “I’ve got better things to do tonight than die.” And finally Sixth Sense, whom he shrugged at. “One of my better pep talks.”

“Good Guys, exit the armory and surrender.” Was that...Was that Mechanism? No, the voice sounded different, but the reverberation laced into it sounded familiar, as if a miniature Mechanism spoke. One of those Mechaknights the haunt control mentioned. What was a Mechaknight? Maybe a Mechanism hand puppet. Reef wouldn’t put it past that bigheaded snob to employ tiny hand-puppet drones.

“They don’t like to keep their victims waiting.” Pincushion approached the armory door though it remained locked. He brushed his hand along it. “Any chance Asinine ordered Mechanism to shoot ham sandwiches at us?” His stomach grumbled.

“Are you listening, Good Guys?” The clack of a gun snapped through the door. “Exit the armory, or I will peel the flesh from your bones. We forwent the potato peeler on our suits’ Swiss Army knives, but I have a pretty shiv.” An airy giggle tickled through the door. This was definitely not Mechanism, but maybe he’d injected his DNA into some vapor-headed infant. Perhaps the cashier who worked at Station One’s candy store and couldn’t calculate change even with a cash machine.

So the tickle-fight contingent of the Bad Guys had trapped them in the armory. Reef checked his paltry weapons. He needed something loaded with nerd juice to repel this pop-crowd ditz.

“Sixth Sense, you and I are headed for the haunt control room. I have no idea why I can’t reach Ace, but we need to reboot the haunt control manually. We’ll activate the station’s defenses even if we need to urinate on the computer’s mahjong processor. Hopefully, that won’t erase my record times. Smithereens, Pincushion, and”—Reef sneered at Momentum—“you, if you’re finished doubting my orders. You three need to bring up the rear and help us escape. Don’t die, because poker night will get really lonely without your deep pockets, lousy bluffing, and oversalted potato-chip dip. Null and Mabel, you stay here and”—he shrugged—“blend in.”

Mabel smacked her pale lips but didn’t awaken.

“Good work, Mabel. Ed and Invard, you two stay with the Great Narcoleptics. Hide. You will not”—Reef pointed toward the armory’s door, at the hallway outside—“leave. Invard, if you must complain about our overhead, tally up our expenditures on goat’s blood for Power Plant and Franchise’s squirt gun fights.”

Ed massaged his temples. “This is just like my fraternity hazing, except it looks like I’ll get to keep my hair.”

“Time is up.” The strangely giddy Mechaknight slammed a fist into the armory door, but the four-inch steel resisted with a rattle. “I’ll skin your skin from your bone—Poopy. Give me a moment to think of a less repetitive threat.”

Reef bit his lip, drawing blood. “Control, acknowledge. Open viewscreen. Display hallway outside door.” His words squeaked out. Nobody had ever before skinned the skin from his bone poopy, but whatever that involved, he resolved to wash his hands afterward.

A viewscreen showed his worst nightmare after his nephew’s jellybean throat volcano. Amaranthia and four Mechaknights, three with blue joints and one with...purple? The purple one must have been the giddy one. One Mechaknight was posted outside the armory door, working at its locking instrument with a droning toolkit. Two Mechaknights elbow-bumped, as if only seconds stood between them and a Good Guy massacre. The purple one stood with arms crossed. Amaranthia scrutinized them like a supervisory foreman, maroon-sleeved arms ready for a fight.

“Okay, everyone.” Reef swallowed down the tremor that wigwagged through his gut. “If we want to live, we fight back. Catch them off guard. When they open that door, our element of surprise disappears. Are we ready?” If Reef were a praying man, he’d cash in some prayers now.

Everyone nodded. Smithereens, Ed, Pincushion, and finally Momentum. Invard shed a tear and nodded so sharply Reef swore he heard an adding machine ding, which was strange because they stopped dinging around 1990. The corporate weasel slithered behind the counter, bubbled out a whimper, and ducked. Mabel might have nodded, but Reef attributed that to her dream of winning at bingo.

Ed pulled out a datasheet. He couldn’t steady his finger enough to activate it. “Archduke Smithereens, I may need to push up your meeting with President Abends to the afterlife.”

“Everyone.” Reef hefted his guns up and forged toward the door. “Archduke.” He nodded at Smithereens. “It’s time to live or die.” Fact: life sucked. Fact: sucked hard.

* * *

Mechanism entered the hallway that led to the Good Guys’ armory. The walls glittered with reflected light, shinier since his last visit. Perhaps Letchtech had upgraded Station One’s cleaning contract. This bore a pleasant contrast to the walls of Station Mechanism that its reawakened haunt control had not yet polished.

Aside from Amaranthia and his Mechaknights hunched at the door, the area felt lifeless. Indeed, the nonessential staff had fled. Mechanism had expected a few late dolts, but alas, no one wandered about to tide over Number B’s merry bloodlust until Mechanism arrived. He had not commanded the haunt control to obey his Mechaknights’ command, or they would have broken through that door already. He wanted this battle contained, and his Mechaknights acted too impulsively.

Amaranthia stood immediately behind Mechanism’s inferior servants, her katana and a fan of ninja stars ready for dispatch. She checked herself in a makeup compact. What pitiful choices Mechanism had made in his hiring process. However, he reminded himself that, when one attained the pinnacle of intelligence, one expected no other to match oneself. Or himself. Or however that sentence made sense. One could not...one...he—Oh, silence. Mechanism sounded like a Shakespearean Scapegoat.

His helmet dinged. A notification from Appliance. His Mechaknights had acquired the escapees he had specified to Number A. And the hundreds of cats infesting the station. At least some good news graced his expertly crafted onboard computer.

Now, to the dilemma at hand. First, he needed to limit the Good Guys’ rule over their own station. “Control, acknowledge. Ignore all commands from all Good Guy entities.” Thanks to foresight, through his puppet, Ace Spandex, Mechanism had granted himself administrator access to Station One’s systems.

“Ignoring all Good Guy entities.”

Good. Now, to gain access to this armory. “Stand aside, flakes.” Mechanism shouldered past Amaranthia and kicked aside Number HW. The technologist jangled into a loveseat. If even the Mechaknight technologist could not unlock a simple door, this army had problems. Perhaps the technologist had used that cheap Patchy Dan burgling software. There was a reason it came preinstalled, goon.

“Heh.” Number B clapped his hands together and pranced in tiny hops. “First we crack the shell. Then we crack the nuts inside.” He squeaked a giggle.

“Do not squeak, you maturity oddity.” Mechanism aimed his wrist at the door and said, “Control, acknowledge. Unlock closest door.”

Whoomp. The door disappeared—“Go, go, go”—Reef shoved through—out launched one-two-three Good Guy lemmings—guns blasted—Number B blocked a shot with a glove—a Momentum-shaped blur pounded Number Z to the floor—fired at Number D—Number D’s eye slit shattered in a spider crack of blood and chipped plastic.

“Eh, buddies, run, run!” The lemming called Smithereens slapped a bomb onto Number HW’s chest. He dived around a corner to join his suicidal friends. The bomb’s clasps clawed through Number HW’s chest plate, clacked, fastened on. Number HW clawed at it with frenzied gloves. The bomb’s beeps grew wilder. Louder. More insistent—

A desperate boom broadcasted a cloud of loveseat upholstery and a barrage of shrapnel. Mechanism threw himself back. He flung his forearms up. An agonized scream of metal overpowered the cackling explosion. Mechanism risked a view: Number HW’s ribcage was open in a scramble of guts. His limbs remained attached to his body by ribbons of skin. Twists of armor lay sprawled over the loveseat. He twitched, twitched...ceased.

The Good Guys scrambled down the hall. What bothers. Were none of his Mechaknights experienced in foot chases? One could not find good help these days. And inflation aggravated the situation.

“Number Z, my system indicates you will find four lower-class simpletons in the armory. Capture that spare baggage without killing. You will not meet resistance. Their best shot is a coma victim, and one of them is adept at no more than fetching me lunch. I will take a turkey club, no bacon.”

A narrow gun ejected from Number Z’s leg holster. She grasped the gun and hiked toward the defenseless halfwits who still occupied the solvent-scented armory. “Stand still, prisoners. You can’t hope to win. We have stactics!”

“And Amaranthia,” Mechanism said. That curt sentence spat such imperious authority that even the plants, had they ears, would have snapped to attention.

Amaranthia did not. Still focused on her reflection, she twittered her finger among the curls of her strawberry hair. She masticated her bubblegum, what was once watermelon but now reeked like a flavorless chew toy for the simpleminded.

“Amaranthia!”

“Geez?” Finally she jolted to alertness. She did not need to respond so snootily. Of course, what else could Mechanism expect? She was campaigning for student body president. “You woofed?”

Mechanism vowed to stop using his baker as his talent scout when hiring lackeys. “Capture the fleeing Good Guys. I would rather them alive than dead. If, of course, your hair is sufficiently puffed.”

Amaranthia snapped shut her compact. She sauntered past and swung her katana like a clock pendulum. It gleamed in the light.

“Alive!” Mechanism increased his bodysuit’s volume. “Kill them only if they give you trouble, but let live the one called Reef. I need him vocal.”

“Whatevs?” Amaranthia sheathed her katana and lumbered down the Good Guys’ path of escape. She danced away from Number HW’s body, hands twitching at shoulders—“Ew, ew, ew, stay away, blood, ew, ew? I’m wearing my new Gagagovingo high heels? Holy crud sticks?” Such a substandard intelligence.

“Yes. Holy sticks of crud.” Mechanism wanted to vomit. What dreadful hired help. “Holy sticks of crud indeed.”

* * *

Someone approached Reef. Smithereens had made short work of one Mechaknight, but the haunt control’s hardware remained far away, and they needed to see what they could do to regain control over it.

“Smith, Momentum, Pincushion.” Reef’s voice echoed in the unoccupied corridor. “Sixth Sense and I need cover. Distract Mechanism. Smith, use your glue-and-glitter grenades if you must. They’re distracting enough.”

Smithereens tore open the Velcro arts-and-crafts flap of his bomber jacket. “Always ready for anything, eh, buddy.” He grabbed his felt-skinned explosives.

Chapter Eleven: Duct Work

Wowakazow. If Franchise had spent one more instant around a corpse that smelled like dried tuna casserole, he’d swear off tuna casserole. And he loved tuna too much to come to those terms. Luckily, he’d ejected himself from that room in time to maintain both his adoration and his sense of smell.

He ripped around a corner. Where had everyone disappeared to? No support staff bustled around. The place was so eerily vacant that his footsteps tapped. Air whispered.

Where could he find Ace Spandex help? He wasn’t about to raid Pincushion’s medicine cabinet, since Ace certainly wasn’t roiling around the floor because of foot fungus.

“Control, acknowledge. Contact Reef.” If he couldn’t find Reef, he’d summon Reef to him. With that crane Burnout had suggested.

“You are no longer in command of this haunt control, you unwashed member of the proletariat. To become a washed member of the proletariat, try Errol Soap. Now with sudsier animal fat. Mmmm-mmmm.”

“Crock, Jeffy, you unlisted me again.” Franchise kicked the wall. He squeaked a scuffmark of dirt on it, but the wall cleaned itself. He kicked another scuffmark. “I don’t know how you figured out what the proletariat is, but I’m gonna wring your bony neck, anyway. Still, good job on ‘proletariat.’ And on proper sentence structure.”

He heard something. Huh? From down the hall, a metal-and-piston crunch paraded toward him. He cracked a knuckle and looked left...at...He squinted. Oh, great. Another robot militia. Franchise wanted to scream. This was the seventh consecutive Friday that Robot Mart’s ad execs ruined.

A pop...a sizzle...another pop and sizzle. Attack fire. Robot Mart went all out on this ad campaign. Franchise examined the wall. A...laser burn? He prodded his finger into the wall where a scorched hole marred it. And his flesh felt cold. And his finger dug out drywall. And he exhaled a short but vacuuming gasp. And he turned to the militia that machinegun-marched closer, crunch, closer, crunch, closer. Okay, a belligerent haunt control plus a riot line of robots plus real laser fire, square root of pi...

Robot Mart couldn’t have sent this horde since they didn’t fire coupon datasheets. That was real laser fire. Wait a second. That was real. Laser. Fire.

“There’s one now. Get him!” A robot, “Y” laser-painted on his shoulder, jabbed a finger in Franchise’s direction. If the finger had been positioned via rifle sights, it would have pointed straight at Franchise’s eye.

Franchise’s pulse zapped from a flicker to a gallop. Oh his crock, oh his crock, get away! His legs spewed him around the corner. He collapsed, leaped back up, doddered forward on autopilot. Run, hide, run, hide, run, hide, here they came, run, hide. He bobbed on his heels, bounced around, cracked his knuckles, wrung a hand over his face, another nightmare come true, but as long as these weren’t clowns riding razor surfboards, he’d be okay.

“A vent!” He’d proclaimed that aloud but couldn’t help it. Yes, vents, his new best friend. He hopped at the vent on the wall near the ceiling, tore off its grill in a grasp of hooked fingers, sliced three lines along a thumb, kissed the grill—thank you, thank you, thank you, it could have his firstborn—discarded the grill, it clattered onto the gray terrazzo, jumped, crawled inside, go, go, go, still smelled like bad pork, go.

“I’m coming for you, Good Guy.” Crock, crock, must have been Y, he could tell by the voice, crock. “I’ll find you. You can’t hide.”

Franchise elbow-crawled down the vent’s incline, away from the threat behind him, forward into darkness, into—Oh, geez. Was the bathroom below him? He jerked up and banged his head against the vent. Who’d overflowed the toilet again?

Chapter Twelve: A Sword to a Bomb Fight

Smith pressed against a ridged wall. Those Mechabaddies threw around that light panache for the fight flash like the cookbots threw food in a food fight: at anything that moved and some gaudy wall fixtures, eh.

In each hand, he clutched a beeping party favor and, by party favor, he meant party disfavor. These ranked among his favorites because their blast radius extended to ten meters of fun, eh. Well, fun for everyone but the target. He’d miss these dearly, but those robot baddies deserved a good lesson in guest etiquette. Lesson one: stop blasting holes in the terracotta couches.

Beside Smith, Pincushion slapped against the wall and blinked with insomnia. His dark skin sharply contrasted with the silver wall. Momentum appeared next to him in a blur that stopped between heartbeats.

Pincushion nudged him with a spiked, cocoa-colored elbow. “Momentum, zip around them, brother. Draw their fire at each other.”

Momentum Buddy nodded, though his cockamamie speed kicked the nod into overdrive, eh. He whizzed off like a bottle rocket from one of Smith’s jitter spitters, bless their little nitro-fueled heart valves.

Pincushion Buddy tapped the response regulator behind his ear to give himself a wake-up boost. His insomnia lifted. He jerked, wrenched, and finally dislodged his spikes from the resistant wall. He should have thought before he leaned against it. “Smith, I’ll sneak out there. While Momentum zips around, I’ll peg them off. You’re the last line. If they get past us, use a...I don’t know...glass for the mass or hail to the nail or—and this might never have occurred to you—a regular grenade.”

Smith’s mustache curled. “No can do, eh, buddy. Left my glass- and nail-related shells under my bed—”

“Not a good hiding spot.”

“—but I brought some real flicker kickers, eh. Word of warning: when the blasty gets nasty, do yourself a favor and stand ten or fifteen yards away. Off the station, maybe.”

Pincushion swallowed. “Smith, we talked about collateral damage.”

“You talked about collateral damage, buddy. I caught up on some collateral sleep.”

Pincushion Buddy opened his mouth to speak, but reconsidered his words. “Forget it. Whatever I say, you’ll only rhyme your way out of it.” He checked his gun’s charge reading and probably figured that, if there was any good way to die, it was by diving into battle armed with that thing. Eeehhh, no way would the Smitherator rattle into battle with a meager gun, eh. Bombs needed no charge reading, only a charge. And a good throwing arm. And fertilizer.

Buddy darted forward, hopped over a bench, rolled onto his spikes. Smith took position on the other side of the hall. Both watched Momentum Buddy dash around three blue-jointed Mechagoons and a purple one, flinging himself in circles to slap those baddies across the faceplates. He also spat out a neener-neener-neener.

“I got this.” One Mechabaddy waved around a laser pistol, but the vague Momentum blur spanked it aside. It snapped into another Mechabaddy’s face. A third shot at him but plugged her buddy with a bullet in the mullet. The purple one stepped back, slunk away, measured his timing—

Smith reached out on reflex. “Momentum, buddy, watch out!”

Purple lunged and bashed his rifle against Momentum’s skull. Momentum slipped, skidded forward, smacked his head against the ground, and cracked into a pillar. He sprawled, legs up, back twisted awkwardly. Out cold. Purple pounded toward him, raised the rifle above his head—Smith gasped—thrust the butt into Momentum buddy’s noggin’. A noggin’ floggin’.

“Ooh, that felt sssooooo darling.” The purple Mechabaddy’s knees buckled in rapture. “Ssssooo darling I wish I had shared the moment with my poodle. Curly Toes loves a good rifle smash.”

“They’ll kill Momentum. I have to help.” Pincushion thrust his gun arm forward. Fired. Hit a blue-jointed Mechabaddy in the chest. Raced forward, pivoted right. Shot another through the neck. Reeled right again. Double-tapped two bullets through the female baddy’s sternum. Good show, buddy.

Purple grabbed his rifle by the barrel, wound back...and cracked the rifle’s butt across Pincushion’s jaw. Pincushion spun, arced up, dropped next to Momentum. The rifle snapped into two sections, so Purple examined it and tttwwwiisssttttted-clicked it back into one piece.

The Smithernator had to act. Last line of offense. He hoped Reef Buddy and Sixth Sense Buddy would reboot that haunt control and activate the defenses soon.

Smith flung one party favor at a blue-jointed Mechabaddy. It magnetized to his chest. Click. Three, two, one. A shower of shrapnel needled the wall among a spray of blood and a mangled chest cavity. Blow for the show, eh. Heh. Not bad for an old-timer.

Smith clutched his other party favor, whirled around. Amaranthia, standing behind where that blast-for-the-fast Mechabaddy crumpled. She worked with Mechanism now? She’d started with Kyril, proceeded to Asinine, then continued to Mechanism. She’d probably work for ol’ Smithy if he offered her a bagel.

She kicked high—“like, totally hyah”—Smith dodged—baddy speared her katana forward—Smith ducked—slapped his party favor to activate it—Amaranthia jumped, kicked a three-sixty of hurt—decked Smith across the jaw—stinging chin—Smith swallowed a tooth—“take a mouthful of toes, dude?”—Smith didn’t want to take a mouthful of anything—almost dropped his bomb—Amaranthia parried forward—a red silhouette—Smith dodged a punch, a knee thrust, a kick for the lick—well, maybe take a mouthful of painkillers—go time—bomb time—now-or-never time, Smithernator—swiped forward at her stomach with the party favor—

The bomb hung in midair. But...but...Smith didn’t move...couldn’t, eh...locked by fear. He followed the length of his arm...into his hand...where the bomb hid...tucked in his fingers...pierced by the katana. He trailed the shaft of the katana...that same katana that had speared his sternum. Not locked by fear after all. Oops.

Blood dribbled from his mouth. He felt nothing. Sensations dizzied away. He searched Amaranthia’s expression, that killer’s curl to one corner of her lips. Hhhoooo, b-b-bbboooyyy, Smithy.

Good night, buddies, he thought. The old Smithernator’s juiced his last you’re-on-fireworks bomb.

Amaranthia’s katana drew back, crunching out of his bones. Smith’s body caved to the terrazzo. His vision faded to a blank for the spank. His bomb, popping springs and wires, slipped from the katana and smashed against the floor next to his body. Amaranthia squashed it under her blood red heel. Smith tasted blood.

Heart stopped beating. Not good, eh.

* * *

Reef stopped when Sixth Sense examined the direction from where they’d come. “Hey. Uhm. Wait. Did you hear that?” the bottle-glasses-wearing Good Guy asked. A tick of the clock, two ticks echoed away. “It sounded like Jeffy and Franchise rearranging mannequins at the mall again except minus the whacking of the security guards’ batons.”

Tick-tock sounded the clock. Reef eased a hand onto Sixth Sense’s shoulder. “Enough about softened skulls. We need to move before those Mechaknights catch up.”

“Amaranthia. A bomb. A...sword...” Sixth Sense shuddered out the words, a finger creeping to his temple. Behind his glasses, his eyes shimmered under thin puddles of tears. “I can’t pick up Smithereens’s thoughts. I’m not absorbing his personality.” He blinked. The puddles broke and raced down his cheeks. “I’m not rhyming or blowing up everything I see.”

Reef’s eyes slipped to the floor with Sixth Sense’s tears. His throat tugged.

But they needed to move forward. “We have to kick-start the haunt control.”

“Reef?”

Reef whirled around, grabbed his shotgun, clattered it up at the voice. Harrier eased down the corridor. In both hands, he wielded a lawn chair above his head as if he prepared a weighty swing. He lowered it.

Sixth Sense pushed his glasses up his nose, fingers peeking out his oversized sleeve. “Wow. Okay. Interesting weapon.”

Reef almost plummeted to his knees but opted for a classic: the upper body slump. “Harrier, what are you still—How c—Okay, when I order all nonessential staff to evacuate, does everyone just hear the sound of a frog giving birth in Happy Land? I ask because Letchtech installed seven dozen escape pods for just this purpose.” Maybe the line cooks at Cheese Cistern stayed behind. Huh. Quick stop by the food court, anyone?

Reef thumped forward and grabbed Harrier by the arms. “Harrier, we need to get out of here. Mechanism is attacking the station. He’s chasing us down and forcing us to listen to him talk about his brainpower. At one point, he looked ready to break out a fourteen-piece orchestra to make an announcement. We’re safe for now, but a choir could ensue at any time.”

Harrier shook off Reef’s grip, wearing aversion like a skin graft. “What anarchic element have you sodding Good Guys introduced this time?” With features creased, he glanced at Sixth Sense, who seemed at war with his brain over combining the attitudes of Harrier, Reef, several of those Mechaknights, and the seagull that had somehow found its way onto Station One and now tapped around this hallway. Harrier looked macked off enough to bite off its head. Was that considered cannibalism?

Where was Harrier’s attitude coming from? “Anarchic element?” Reef said. “We didn’t introduce anything. Jeff declared martial law on the lawn outside, and he replaced the lobby’s Stratus Cloud flag with a skull and crossbones, but you already know today’s the sixth.”

Harrier discarded his chair and plunked himself down on an oak bench. He dropped his head into his hands. His back arched as if to accentuate the rough stump where his wing used to extend. “Each morning I awaken, I am faced with the egregious disorder this team of wankers has wrought upon Renovodomus.”

“Harrier, Mechanism means business. We need to get to the haunt control and reboot it.” Reef put a hand on Harrier’s back—

Harrier swiped the hand away. Through a set jaw, his words felt like punches to the gut. “Do not blooming touch me.”

Reef edged back and sidled up beside Sixth Sense, whose sleeves hung off his fingertips. He raised his open hands. “Okay, Harrier. I won’t. But Sixth Sense and I have to leave. We have to reactivate Station One’s defenses. Hide. Please.” He sidestepped, but Harrier’s indignant stare remained locked on him.

“Okay, like, totally don’t move? Or I’ll so totally gut you? Also...can you tell me where the ladies’ room is? Totally drank too much water.”

Reef froze, and the shotgun slipped out of his grip onto his foot.

The sound of heel-on-terrazzo pecked closer. Reef didn’t budge, not an inch, but he wanted to rub his foot. Shotguns were heavy.

Amaranthia’s katana slashed across his line of sight, dividing it in two. It traced a light path along his collar, around his neck, and ended in a point at his larynx. It didn’t break his skin, but droplets of blood hung from it.

Smith’s blood.

Amaranthia scowled at Reef and Sixth Sense. She twisted her bubblegum around her index finger. “Don’t try anything? Or I’ll seriously, like, totally open your belly? Even you, wing guy?” Her katana zipped at Harrier, who puffed his chest as if daring her to attack. “And no force fields, nerd, or I’ll so cut your friend’s throat? So don’t anybody move?” She shuddered. “Oh, gross. Blood.” Holding her sword out, she cleaned it on Reef’s pant leg.

Sixth Sense stood as rigidly as a war statue. “Yeah? Okay? Like, uhm? I’m totally not moving? I totally don’t want my belly opened? Please don’t totally kill us?”

Reef stood frozen beside him. “You have to totally stop letting her below-average vocabulary take over your brain.”

“Totally.”

Amaranthia tapped a bubblegum-cocooned finger into her ear. Her gabber’s headgear rushed out in a click-click-zip. “Gabber, acknowledge. Contact Mechanism? So totally don’t wanna talk to that troll right now? But if I report in, I get a new Felamin handbag? Gotta have. Soooo gotta have.

“Yeah, chief troll? I mean”—she cleared her throat and adopted a tone of mocking officialdom—“Your Highness? I, like, totally caught those Good Guys?” She slurped her bubblegum back into her mouth. “Yeah, Reef is here? And that psychic nerd and the wingy bird dude. But not the totally hot redhead. Natch, dude. Okay. Totally. Gabber, acknowledge. Totally cut connection?” The headgear slithered back into its earbud.

“The chief troll totally wants you freaks in the lunchroom? So”—she clanged her katana against the floor, spearing hash marks into its surface—“hands behind your heads? Be good ’cause I gotta knock you out.”

Reef, Sixth Sense, and Harrier interlocked their fingers behind their heads. Harrier grumbled and shot a sideways glance at Reef as if to say, “This is the anarchic element you’ve wrought, you daftie.”

Reef kept his voice low. “Sixth Sense, if everything you say sounds like a question, you’ll dig latrines for a month.”

Amaranthia chopped a hand against the back of Reef’s neck, and he was out.

Chapter Thirteen: Found Yyyoooouuuuuu!

Still...writhing. Limbs...clenched—urk—locked at 52.6 pounds per joint. Pain...still so excruciating, he felt as if shelled peanuts were being crammed into his nostrils.

“Jeff, enough with the peanuts!” Burnout plucked Ace Spandex’s nose empty. “They don’t help.”

“Whatcha talks about?” Power Plant grabbed another handful from the salt-powdered bag by his side. “He prob’ly wanna eats.”

“No, he probably wants to breathe.” Burnout tugged on Ace Spandex’s arm to pull him into a reclining position. It didn’t work.

“Hey, ain’t my fault Acey havings the most crampiests midlife crisis in ever.”

What could Ace Spandex do? To pull himself off the seamed floor, he marshaled the energy to wheeze air into his withered lungs. One arm...slithered underneath his body, grasped the floor, his hands slippery with cold sweat. His other arm...fought him with scorching muscles...pulled underneath. He hauled himself onto hands and knees...felt a weight like a pillar driving him back down.

“Jeff, get off him!” Burnout heaved at Power Plant’s arm.

Ace Spandex, trembling. Pressure clamping inside his chest. Knotted scar on his right brow hot. Unbearable throbbing...in the organic part of...his head. He fought for control...planted his arms on the floor...shifted his knees forward, feet down...clenched his bladder. Close one, bladder. Shut that hose.

Burnout grunted, still helping Ace Spandex to his feet. His grip gave, and he tumbled against a wall. “Where’s Jacob? He left twenty minutes ago.”

“Nap maybe he take to needed, yes, yes,” Scapegoat said in his Igor-like drawl. He shuffled along the back under the robots’ feet. His fingers wiggled in the air as if he sat at a computer keyboard.

Ace Spandex accessed his brain menu. Pangs of electricity threatened him. No. No! Had to fight this, tooth and nail programming. He hammered through the bubbling sensation in his limbs. Lord couldn’t...urk...coul-coul-couldn’t...win this one. Disconnect. Ace Spandex flipped through one menu option, another, then another and another. He built up speed. Another, another, another. Quickly before Lord knew what Ace Spandex was trying. Found the main menu. Click. He found the Lord’s Sublime Controls directory. Click. The Access and Connections to Lord’s Greatness That Others Cannot Hope to Comprehend application, click—nngggg, another shock—Disconnect from Lord’s Perfection checkbox, click—urk, that hurt—am I sure, of course, click. Gggggggaaaaa-aaa-aaaaaa—

—aaa. Aaah? The pain. It...subsided as if someone yanked out an electrical conduit. Ace Spandex inhaled. His lung apparatus gurgled. Sweet, sweet silence. His breathing rate tickled the meter at around 20.18 liters per minute. Phew. He chuckled, breathed once more to feel cool air puff through his mouth. He tried to steady his arms and legs, but he spilled against the spotless floor, anyway, and it felt exquisite.

“Ace?” Burnout hadn’t closed the distance to Ace Spandex since he’d fallen backward. His squint made him looked puzzled, apprehensive. “Ace, are you feeling your version of okay?”

Ace Spandex relaxed to subdue the burn of his exhausted limbs. Just for a moment. He only needed a moment. Then he expunged his lungs as suddenly as if he’d tripped off a cliff. “I’m...I’m okay. Just...bad pizza.”

“That’s it. I’m never eating in the food court again.” Burnout stepped back. “By the way, nice haircut.” He nodded at the top of Ace Spandex’s head.

With a start, Ace Spandex realized he’d dropped his hat. His chrome scalp showed! He hadn’t yet revealed to the others what Mechanism had done to him. Startled foot jerks pivoted him around the polished floor. Where was it—Wait. A signal. From... Lord. Was he still connected? He tore at his hair. “No, I broke free. What the cr—” Signal accepted: four Mechaknight entities were approaching. Details: in search of missing Good Guy entities, beginning with the area where entity Franchise first appeared. Ace Spandex wasn’t hooked into Lord’s command, but he could access this one last feed.

Oh, piss. Oh, crap. Lord had already tanked through the atmospheric bubble. He was aboard. Ace Spandex programmed himself to forget his hat, but he set a system reminder for midnight. Also, he’d have to schedule a bathroom break for when his processor was idle. “Mark, Jeff. We need to run.”

Jeff stopped lobbing peanut shells at Scapegoat despite the Don’t Feed the Scapegoat sign he’d laser-painted on the hunchback’s impact shirt. “Wha-huh?”

“Run!” Ace Spandex scampered toward the door. “They’re here!”

“Who here?” Power Plant blasted into the air on a chalky bed of cloud and light. He aimed at the door. “A Lasers Squirrel balloon? A Thanksgivings balloon? A me balloon? A balloon o’ balloons?” He careened into the doorway, bounced back, and waited for the door to fade into computerized bits. He sped out—

Light-bullets flashed past him. He smacked the corridor’s adjacent wall and flopped onto the floor. In a military crawl, he scrambled back toward the room, his fingers jumbling for purchase against the metal tiles. “Holy crap, Marky, they ain’t shoots balloons. They ain’t even shoots water balloons.”

Ace Spandex stepped away, fell backward into Constructo Guy’s chair, onto the dead man’s lap. He’d shut off the station’s defenses. He’d caused this!

“Jeff!” Burnout jumbled over his feet and dived at Power Plant, connected hands, hauled him in. Both brothers clambered up, and Burnout swung Power Plant away to shield him from the door. The fire wielder ignited his hands in thirsty flame. “Control, acknowledge. Lock closest door.”

The haunt control’s listener outside the room had heard him. “You are no longer in command of this control, you unwashed member of the proletariat.”

Burnout kicked the doorframe, and his bone-dry heat boosted up, producing a distortion around his body. Through the door behind him, light-bullets decorated the hallway in burnt sienna but four hexadecimal points too red. “Jeff, did you unlist me again? And congratulations on ‘proletariat.’”

“I unlists lots o’ peoples. What unlist mean?” Power Plant advanced on the door.

Burnout blocked him with an arm that shot across his path. The hand unlit and thudded against the doorframe. “Jeff, stay behind me. I don’t know who they are, and I don’t know what they’ll do—”

“Mebbe them’s Gastros o’ Gold soldiers the haunts controls threatens on us. Them Logistican restaurants is fierce, ya knows.”

Ace Spandex grunted to his feet instrumentation and hobbled over. He wasn’t at 100 percent—his system check revealed his energy levels hovered around 95 percent—but he made it across the blank room. “Jeff, no matter what racial stereotype you make up, nobody wants you wandering out into the middle of gunfire except you.”

Light-bullets chunked at the doorframe, angrily pecking off splinters of metal.

“I ain’t wanders outs in the middles o’ gunfire. I wanders into the mid—Oh. I sees ya point.”

“We won’t be able to use the haunt control, so we can’t lock this door,” Ace Spandex said. He couldn’t explain how he knew, but Lord Mechanism had shut off everyone’s access.

The gunfire stopped. Ace Spandex waited a few moments but nothing followed: no spray of light-bullets or salvo of heat. Silence. He didn’t know what to think. He shrugged at Burnout, who tightened his lips over his jaws.

Then, “Good Guys, we are the Mechaknights,” a melodious voice said. A squeaky giggle followed. “Come out with your hands high or we will...tee-hee...flay the flesh off your bones. Oooooohhh, I positively tingle. A flaying. Number N, feel my arm hairs.”

“You’re wearing armor,” came someone’s deadpan response. “Oh, you have an arm hair panel. How lucky for me.”

“I tiiiiinnnnn-gggllllleeee.”

Ace Spandex tapped Power Plant’s shoulder. “See, Jeff? The Logisticans never sound cheery about body sensations.”

“Name’s Jeffy,” Power Plant said.

Burnout reignited his unlit hand. It blistered at 1148.2 degrees Celsius. “I’m going out there. Whoever’s tingling is going to feel an altogether different sensation in a few seconds.” Power Plant inhaled to speak, but Burnout preempted the thought. “Not tickling.”

Burnout checked Ace Spandex, then his brother. “I’ll find out what a Mechaknight is. Forestall them. When I say so, you run. Ace, if Jeff spins in place, pick him up and go. I’ll be behind you to make sure Scapegoat’s safe.” He glanced around the darkness. “Scapegoat? Where are you?” He ignited a baseball-sized fireball that hovered and glowed. A torch. He followed the fireball deeper into the room.

Ace Spandex searched around. The fireball provided a brown ember that reflected off the immaculate floor, but no Scapegoat. Huh? Where was that hunchback?

Burnout spun around. Panic shuddered his shoulders. Oh, crock. Scapegoat meandered outside toward the arm-tingling threats.

“Scapegoat, get back here!” Burnout spun at the door.

A single shot. A single thundering report. Viewed through the picture frame of the door with Scapegoat dead center, a light-bullet slid into the hunchback’s gut and punched out his back, below the ribs and one inch left of the spine. Scapegoat pitched off his feet. Blood belched out and lapped the floor.

“No, Scapegoat!” Burnout grappled past Ace Spandex, threw himself into the hall. His hand gripped at the adversaries outside the door’s view. Flame snapped, popped, sizzled, burst forth to produce an insurrection of screams.

Ace Spandex gunned out of the room. Power Plant exited next, and the light panel they’d brought into the room followed. Ace and Power Plant peered down the expanse at...three small Mechanisms with letter codes on their shoulders, all aflame. Their agonized screams swathed the hall like a storm beating a ship at sea. Their helmets guarded against the flames until—pop—eye slits cracked and melted off. Flames slithered into the new openings. Little Mechanisms N, AY, and...Ace Spandex couldn’t analyze the last letter code that hid behind the flame, but the Mechaknights spilled to their knees and clanked over the tiles. Two males and one female, he deduced from the shapes of their suits of armor. Their screams dissipated. Their writhing slowed. One used his last muster of strength to bellow a nasty word.

“He owe the swears jar,” Power Plant said. “Except he deads. Lucky break.”

Burnout collapsed at Scapegoat’s side. He doused the flames on his hands and shaped his arms into a basket. He attempted a few positions but couldn’t work out how to lift the hunchback. Tears trundling down his cheeks, he breathed an h that didn’t lead into a word. His eyes pleaded to Power Plant, to Ace Spandex. “W-we...” Desperation squeaked away the rest of his sentence.

He wiped his tears onto a sleeve. “Drying,” the impact shirt said. “Your tears feed my usefulness.”

Scapegoat shuddered in unconsciousness. Burnout set his hands on the open gut where the entry wound squirted blood. “Sorry, buddy.” His voice sounded wet. He planted one hand to the hole and wiggled the other under Scapegoat’s back. The top hand glowed, first with matted pink, then orange. He removed his blood-saturated hand and the entry wound had fused shut. The exit wound had stopped leaking, as well. Everything smelled like burned flesh.

Ace Spandex dropped to his knees where blood leaked into the floor’s seams. He probed both hands underneath Scapegoat. “Let me lift him. I sense decent vitals. He’s already lost almost two quarts of blood. He’s dangerously low, and you used terrible medical treatment to stop the bleeding. My systems indicate he might still be bleeding internally. That Mechaknight shot him near the iliac crest, about an inch away from the sacrospinialis, so...” He noted Burnout’s withered gawp. “I mean, ‘Allow me.’”

“Be careful!” Burnout clenched a hand around Ace Spandex’s arm. It still registered heat at a feverish 55.2 degrees Celsius, but Ace Spandex’s temperature regulator saved him from a burn. It didn’t save him from Burnout’s fiery leer.

“Ain’t it supposed sunny today?” Power Plant peered through the panel windows along one side of the hallway, at the jet-black blanket of night draping the parking lot at seven thirty in the afternoon. He wandered toward the window.

“Jeff, back away from there.” Burnout leaped across the hall and grabbed Power Plant by the waist. He pulled to guide his younger brother back, but Power Plant remained fixed in place, his heels digging into the floor.

Power Plant smacked his cheek against the window, muttered a “yowch,” and replanted it. Smearing the cheek across the window, he looked up. “Station Zilcho is upstair. Why Asinine drived his entire RV to ours place?”

“Scapegoat needs a doctor.” Ace Spandex shifted his hands under Scapegoat, adjusted, found the ideal positions, and...heave. Holy piss, even his mechanized leg pistons creaked. He mentally scheduled Scapegoat a treadmill for tomorrow. One nonstop, four-day session ought to do it. “And a personal trainer.”

“No crock he needs to see a doctor. Jeff, stay with me.” Burnout grabbed his kid brother and guided him away from the window, shielding Power Plant with his body. “We need to get to the escape pods. Get Scapegoat to a hospital. Regroup and return. Those things...They look like versions of Mechanism. I don’t know how many there are, but it makes sense now why the haunt control sounded like a high-society elitist.”

“Escape pod?” Power Plant sliced a nod left and right. “No. No, no, nuh-uh, no ways. We’s can’t leaves Jakey. He still here somewheres. Thems big robot dudes, theirs friends gonna attack Jakey up.”

“We don’t know how many of these things there are, so we need to leave and regroup. We’ll come back for Jacob, Jeff. I promise.”

“Name Jeffy.”

“This way.” Ace Spandex’s feet pounded down the hall. “At an average speed, we’ll reach the pods in eight minutes, seventeen seconds, and some change.”

Power Plant whirled away from Burnout as if he swung a baseball bat. “Fine. We’s go. But”—he stamped a foot—“we’s comes back to rescue for Jakey. An’ the cotton-candies machines.” He stomped down the bright hall behind Ace Spandex. “Hey, wherever’s ya learns maff, does they teaching a speed-reading course?”

“A prerequisite for speed-reading is normal reading,” Ace Spandex said.

Power Plant snapped his fingers. “Crap.”

* * *

Oh, poo. Number B had narrowly dodged the firestorm that had eaten Number N, Number AY, Number OB, and his Disney Princesses key chain, which had melted into a puddle of Belle and Ariel. He had escaped by ducking behind a stone bench. He now slouched against that bench and examined his armor. The glitter glue with which he’d decorated his bodysuit had charred to a dull matte and stank like marker solvent.

Couldn’t move. Poopy sticks, this armor. The raging heat had scrambled his movement instruments, so they needed to restart. But his onboard computer had reactivated with a festive beep. He commanded it to contact Lord Alpha.

An image of Lord Alpha’s face filled his eye slit. Behind Lord Alpha sat a crumpled pile of Good Guys. Computer labels identified them as Reef, Smithereens (deceased), Pincushion, Harrier, Sixth Sense, and Momentum, all of whom wore hyperstasis handcuffs to subdue their hyperabilities. It identified Amaranthia, who shuddered at her sword and wiped it on the leaf of a rubber plant. It also identified a discount store, Vertigo Discount-o-Rama, in the background. Ooh, cheap shopping spree. Squeeeeee!

“Tranquilizer injected due to overabundance of inelegantly giddy laughter,” his helmet said. Oh, fumble bottoms. Lord Alpha allowed him no fun.

“What is it this time, Number B?” Lord Alpha grumbled. He wasn’t lifting anything, so perhaps he was using his suit’s waste disposal function.

“I’ve located most of the missing Good Guys. My helmet identified Burnout, Power Plant, Ace Spandex, and Scapegoat. They escaped, but I’m not far. I shot Scapegoat to prevent them from moving quickly.”

“Ah, excellent. The Good Guys with the traitor, Scapegoat, among them. That leaves only their multiplier, Franchise. When you capture those unworthy lugs, bring them to me, especially the brothers. They can be”—he rubbed his hands together—“very useful when played against each other.”

“Excellent stactic, Lord Alpha. Onboard systems indicate I’ll be able to resume pursuit in shorter than three minutes. Until then, I will enjoy gazing upon the freeze frame of your face I am about to capture. And”—click—“done. Perfect backlight. Depicts perfectly the color of your helmet’s irritated expression.”

Chapter Fourteen: So Glad He Didn’t Itch Back There

“Why me, why me, why me—” Franchise choked on nervous spit. “Excuse me. Anyway...why me, why me, why me?”

He was still crawling through the constricted vent shaft. His heart thudded so loudly he swore the beat pulsated down the passage. Or maybe it pulsated in his ears. He had trouble telling inside sounds from outside sounds since Jeffy had mashed candles into his ears and lit their wicks. If only Franchise hadn’t fallen asleep on prank night.

He turned left where another vent shaft intersected this one. Ahead, the shaft ended in a grill that—he drummed his fingers and estimated—opened into either the hallway near the armory or the trash compactor. So 50 percent chance he’d land in guns, 50 percent chance he’d land in discarded guns. Go for it.

A black dot hummed across his nose, circled, and hummed across it again. Huh? Oh, crock, a fly. He swatted at it, swatted again, but it buzzed around his ear and tickled the pinna. He flinched, clattered his ear against the shaft wall to swat the fly. It dodged around his head—holy crock, it flew up his nose. A speck of irritation drove into his sinuses. Ahhhh—he sneezed and sprayed the fly away in a snotty shower.

With the fly expelled from his life and snot dribbling down his nose, mouth, face, and dignity, he rumbled ahead on elbows. Whew. Trips through vent shafts were exhausting. And hot. Every gust of air whooshing through here felt like a demon’s sigh. He tried to wipe his brow, but the claustrophobic confines prevented him. He smeared his brow against the wall of the vent, but it was slippery—wham. He fell flat. Ugh.

A shadow shuffled in front of the vent grill. “Hey, Good Guy.”

Franchise froze. Oh geez, oh geez, oh man, oh crock, oh geez, oh piss, oh man, Y had found him. How, how, how?

Franchise scurried backward on his elbows. Go, go, go, go—

“No use hiding,” Robot-Suit Y’s voice echoed after Franchise. “We’ve got a guy who can guess your location anywhere. He knows everything you do within given percentages. Works wonders when you need to schedule a hundred Mechaknights into one shower stall.”

Chapter Fifteen: Would You Like Fries with That?

Reef shot awake in a dash of bright energy. It coursed slipshod through him from a bite that jabbed at his arm. He checked...and slapped away a needle that protruded from his bicep.

“Excellent.” Mechanism stood over him like a monitoring watchman, arms crossed and chest barreled forward. He blocked the light. “The stimulant awoke you.”

Reef’s eyes felt gummy, but he checked around. Among hover chairs and metallic tubular tables, in the middle of a scene of colorful restaurants as vacant as an after-hours amusement park, Reef blinked clear his vision. The decorative cactuses, the pungency of burned meat, the trash ionizers, the bright light panels overhead, the phony health inspection certificates, the figure of Death between Grim Crepery and the mutants’ washroom. Was this...Yes. Station One’s food court.

A platoon of Mechanism wannabes and Amaranthia lined one wall and, across the room, the captured Good Guys: Sixth Sense, Harrier, Momentum, and Pincushion. They all wore hyperstasis handcuffs with the exception of Momentum. Since his speed was genetic to his Fleeson species, Mechanism had chained his hands and feet.

A door faded behind them, and in trod another Mechaknight pushing two wheelchairs, one carrying Null and one carrying Mabel. Two more Mechaknights shoved Ed and Invard forward into the line beside Pincushion. Smithereens’s—Reef choked on a sob—Smithereens’s corpse lay bundled on the Fermented Sandwich mat, centered between the two contingents. A few Mechaknights dined on tacos. One had opened up Taco Shacko and now grilled a mesquite-scented meal on his glove.

Master Asinine sat strapped to a chair, bound by laser rope that wound him in crowded cables. He looked resigned to his fate, as if he had known struggling would prove as futile as his education. Though resigned, he still smiled. He enjoyed this. Reef wanted to smack that smile off, but he’d take pleasure in watching Mechanism slap him instead. Still, if Mechanism offered a courtesy hit, Reef would oblige with cement gloves.

A small cylinder with pincers buzzed around Mechanism’s ear. The armored degenerate thwacked it with a flyswatter attachment extending from his wrist, but the thing kept swarming him. And...talking? “Admirable swat, Lord. I would have felt that in my inner child if I had not deactivated that program.”

Reef stood and stumbled on a numb foot. When his foot stopped prickling, he wobbled into place next to Invard. Invard leaned closer and, with a high-pitched whisper through a corner of his mouth, said, “Your personnel incarceration budget just burst through the roof, you can believe that.”

“Invard, unless the next words out of the corner of your slithery lips are ‘You win a fondue set,’ I’ll punch the scales off your diamond-patterned underbelly.”

“Duly noted.” Invard’s high-pitched voice sounded grating. He leaned away. Only a moment later, he leaned back. “You can believe that.” He nodded as if to add an exclamation point.

A Mechaknight slapped hyperstasis handcuffs on Reef. He backed away. Mechanism stepped forward and began pacing in front of the line of Good Guys. He pivoted on his giant boot, squeaking against the polished marble floor. “Captives, now that your provisional leader has regained consciousness, you may be wondering what is happening. In short”—he intertwined his fingers behind his back—“I am the new law.” An oily smile was evident in that statement. Reef sensed in his tightened chest the bottomless pride coursing through the circuits of Mechanism’s bodysuit.

“A few hours ago, I infused new life into Station Zilcho—now relabeled Station Mechanism because Master Asinine’s use of imaginary numbers is subscholarly—”

“Hear, hear.” Asinine’s smile bloomed. “I’m a scholar of subs.”

Mechanism squeaked around for another lap. “I have taken control and repositioned Station Mechanism into a locked orbit with Station One, and Station One’s negative gravity generators have compensated to maintain that orbit. I now hold dominance over your station’s haunt control, so any attempt to unlock our binary orbit without a counterweight will force your station’s new gravity setting to crush you. You cannot escape. Oh, yeessssss, you are my prisoners.”

“To what end?” Pincushion asked. His deep words grumbled nervously.

Mechanism clapped his gloves together. “Splendid. The Q-and-A session begins. My goal is, first, to conquer this solar system and, second, to cleanse it. I will next expand to the galaxy. This galaxy needs to return to its erstwhile beginnings. A dive-bomb of stupidity has marred it for far too long, has subjugated the intelligent and the worthy for many centuries. It is time to right that wrong, to put order back into the folly that has dropped us into the spaghetti of imbecility.”

“That reminds me. When’s lunch?” Asinine asked.

“I plan to cleanse this galaxy’s turmoil, its mayhem of fools”—he passed Asinine and kicked his chair—“until only the intelligent and rational remain. Strict rule will prevail. Disorder will fade away.”

“Why keep us alive?” Reef stomped forward. A clatter of guns pinned him back.

“Like the Bad Guys, you remain alive provisionally. I may need to force you to aid me in realizing the final steps of my goal. And, I assure you, those final steps are imminent. However, your value may quickly diminish. Give me one iota of a reason to reassess my opinion, and you will join your associate, Smithereens. Now, I offer you a proposal I did not offer the Bad Guys simply because they have used my imported shampoo without permission, and I carry grudges to the grave. The proposal is thus: join me and avoid eventual death.” His smile returned to his words like a reinfection. “Be a Mechaknight...or be a Mechaknight victim. The choice is yours.”

“That’s a good offer.” Asinine’s face swung between Mechanism and the Good Guys. “Throw in a free toaster, and I’m all in.”

Reef bared his teeth like an attack dog itching to hear the magic word. “You’re an even bigger idiot than I thought, Mechanism. Recoup the rationality of this galaxy? Enact a strict rule? None of us would buy that, even with the free toaster. So stuff your—”

Harrier’s steps were the only sound in the room. He split from the Good Guy line and walked toward the Mechaknights on the other end, staring nowhere but straight. Nowhere. He reached the Fermented Sandwich carpet, stretched a leg over Smithereens’s body, and continued. He took his place beside Mechanism, turned around, and stared at the ceiling, at the floor, at his feet, at anything and anyone but Reef and the Good Guys. Everyone watched. Everyone gawked with silent gasps. The echoes of Harrier’s footsteps died. No one spoke.

Asinine exhaled a descending whistle. “Dis.”

Reef’s head slumped forward. How could...how...why...but...w...“Harrier. What are you doing?”

“I’m sorry, Reef. I just...I...” Harrier’s eyes wandered anywhere but forward. “I am simply sorry.”

“You have made the correct choice, Number RN.” Mechanism poked a finger into a hole in Harrier’s hyperstasis handcuffs. The cases on the cuffs unlocked, and the cuffs dropped to the floor. He placed a glove on Harrier’s shoulder, but Harrier shook it off and stepped away. Mechanism didn’t react, only regarding the other Good Guys. “Will anyone else accept my offer?”

Silence. Dead silence. Somewhere a pin probably dropped.

“No? Mechaknights, secure them in the stasis room. But leave Reef with me.”

The Mechaknights hiked forward and roughed the Good Guys toward an escalator. Only Reef remained to scowl at Harrier. Harrier still studied the ceiling.

Chapter Sixteen: Chase Scene

Number B clanked to his feet. Finally. Everything was back online. At first, his gears resisted, but after his system finished booting, they eased. Goody. His key chain was a molten casualty, but he remained unscathed. Good-bye, sweet Ariel.

He commanded his helmet to first purchase a new key chain. There. He’d ordered the necessities of life. Now, to contact Lord Alpha.

After he connected, he said, “Lord Alpha—”

Lord Alpha banged the heel of his hand against his helmeted head. “What now, you dreadfully obtuse right-hand...soldier, I suppose you are in some technical sense.”

“I’m back online and will resume my pursuit. My onboard computer reports the escaping Good Guys are no more than a two-minute hop, skip, and jump away.”

“Fine. I will join you imminently. In the meantime, they and the self-multiplier Franchise are our only quarries. Summon some Mechaknights to join your pursuit. And, Number B, allow me to be clear: you shall not hop, skip, or jump your way anywhere. If I find so much as a frolic on your action log, carefree or otherwise, you will be severely reprimanded. I have an image to uphold.”

“Yes, Lord Alpha.” He still planned on a twinkle-toe step or two. For giggles.

* * *

Burnout flattened his back against the corner of the wall. He poked his head around the bend, surveyed ahead. Cleanser and construction fumes still perfumed the ten-foot-wide hallway, a new addition. It extended a few yards before it expanded into a red-painted, forty-yard-wide triage of escape pod doors. In the bay area, velvet cordons outlined a slithering path to the escape pods. Green lights hung above the doors to pods that still remained, and red lights indicated which had launched. A yellow light hung above one pod: toilet flooded. Time to pull out that warranty.

When someone activated it, a massive emergency barrier would divide the bay from the hallway. Right now, it remained inactive, so the pod bay was free of obstruction. Nothing in the hall stirred except the camel on the advertisement that touted the benefits of mammal transportation. Ugh. Mammal transports smelled like baked feces and offered no in-flight meals. Well, the scavengers offered them, but those meals always consisted of leftovers.

Still keeping watch, Burnout spun his hand to signal the others. Their footsteps tick-tick-squeaked against the floor. Ace Spandex still carried Scapegoat, who had fallen unconscious and whose tongue lolled out. Not a pleasant sight: he’d recently gorged on grape and cherry lollipops, so his tongue’s encounter of colors resembled a world map’s continental divide.

Scapegoat, you have to live, buddy. Be okay, was Burnout’s only thought. Your definition of okay. His arms felt like jelly, pronouncing how much he feared the worst. Would Scapegoat survive the trip to the nearest SIPMA hospital, a hospital that specialized in treating people’s whose identities were secret? Would he even survive the trip to the escape pods? Burnout combed the hunchback’s hair away from his eyes. He raised his hand to stuff the tongue back in but...yeeeeuuuuugh...not without gardening gloves.

Burnout kept his voice low and hoped his trembling didn’t shove out his words sharply. “The escape pod straight ahead of us is available. Let’s go. No matter the sound we make, no matter the clamor, just run, fly, or leap your way in. I don’t care.”

“Cans I crabs-walk?” Jeff’s voice pinged around the lifeless hallway.

“Okay, I care a little. Not this time, big guy.” Burnout ruffled Jeff’s hair and smiled. Despite his tension, he wanted to keep his little brother’s spirits high. “Especially don’t use your sloth-walk.”

Ace Spandex said, “We might have lost use of the haunt control, but the escape pod bay uses a different system in case the main control goes down. Or calls us proletariat. Or calls us anything. What is a proletariat, anyway?”

“C’mon, man.” Jeff slapped Ace Spandex’s back. “Even I knows dat one.”

“No, you don’t,” Burnout said.

“So’s there.”

Burnout examined the hall. “Okay. We can launch the escape pod without a hack. Good to know. So we get to the pod bay, close and lock the emergency barrier so those robotic goons don’t follow, and get out of here. We fly to SIPMA, find Scapegoat the treatment he needs, then tell IP what Mechanism and his lettered Mechagoons are up to. That’s the plan.”

“Then we’s come back, rescue Jakey. Rescue the others. Rescue breakfast.” Jeff thumped his chest. “Jakey betters be okay.”

“I promise.” Burnout squeezed his little brother’s shoulder. Crock it. He pulled Jeff into a squeezing hug. “Jacob’s okay. He runs away from fireworks. He’ll definitely stay hidden with Station One under siege. We’ll come back for him.” He maintained the hug only a moment long before they separated. “You guys ready?”

Ace Spandex nodded. “We’re wasting time. If they’ve stolen the haunt control, we don’t have long before they know our location or call us proletariats again.”

“I already know your location, key-chain killers.” That voice with the melodious lisp. “Ariel will be avenged.”

Burnout choked. Wormy sensations squirmed through his flesh. “The weird one. He survived and now he’s name-dropping. Run!”

He dived, spun around, took flight, drenched the hallway in fire. Six, seven, eight Mechaknights recoiled with arms shielding their helmets. One goon dropped, immersed in flames that ate through her eye slit and roasted her inside her armor. Burnout cranked up the heat in that suited oven.

He sprayed again, stepped back. Glanced back at his brother, at Ace Spandex. Ace Spandex pivoted his back to the swarm of Mechaknights and shielded Scapegoat. With what? A spine built on chocolate milk and a muscle mass built on pizza wouldn’t protect anyone.

Jeff stood stalwart. His hyperability absorbed the light from Burnout’s fiery output and the chain of light panels interspersed along the ceiling. His hands glowed faintly from a ball of energy hovering between his palms. The ball crackled with enmity and snapped out with whips of light.

Burnout thrust his hands forward. He increased his output. Soaked the hallway, the floor, walls, ceiling, cute array of seats, ugly paintings, camel ad, everything. A wall of flame separated the Good Guys from the Mechanisms. “Jeff, get to that pod. Now!”

“Nuh-uh.” Jeff clenched his neck. Locked his shoulders. A trickle of spit beaded off his lip. “I ain’t goin’ nowhere.” His ball of light blossomed, pulsated angrily in his spreading palms. The whips grew livider. He jerked his head backward. “Wait, cans we go to the candies store? Runned outta mushmallows for fuel.”

“That’s not a candy store. It’s a candy-store ad.”

The hallway extended too far to make a dash without dropping their cover. Burnout pedaled backward, still spread flame back and forth in wide arcs like a fire hose.

A voice somehow squawked above the snarl of flames. “Good Guys, this won’t end pretty for any of you.” A giggle followed. “Give up and come with us. I have baked Lord Alpha a lovely batch of sugarless cupcakes, and you may eat one or two. Cuuuppppccaaaakkkkeees. They’re decorated with swirly icing that goes ’round and ’round and...yummy. I’m famished just thinking about them.” He smacked his lips. He? Sure. Go with that pronoun for now. Not that there was anything wrong with this, but some people should come with pronoun choices advertised.

“Monster! Sugarless is exacts opposite of edible.” Jeff hunched forward. He crumpled as if boosting a piano over his shoulders, his ball of light now as huge as a medicine ball. He choked up phlegm and grunted from withholding that dangerous amount of energy. “L-let Jakey go or I’s b-bake y-ya brains inta a l-lovely batch-ches of cuppeds c-cakes wit’ s-swirly i-icings. That be yummy.”

“Who’s Lord Alpha?” Burnout took position beside his brother. “Jeff, in a moment, I will drop my flame. When I do, spew your light out as wide as you can.” His hands flourished around the hall. Flame frolicked up the decorative columns bordering both sides. Those columns cracked from the walls and crumbled to the floor in shattered slivers. “Then, Jeff, fly at that escape pod. Fly like you’ve never flown before.”

“But I’s likes colliding wit’ stuff.” Jeff leaked out his words as if he expelled his last bits of oxygen. His nostrils oozed twin lines of blood down his philtrum. His arms quaked from rigidity.

Another gurgle and scream. A clatter of robotic parts spilled against the ground. Burnout observed a blackened figure behind his partition of flame.

“Whatever it takes to get down that hall and into that escape pod. Not crab-walking, so lose the smile.” Burnout swept his hands left. “And that smile, too.”

Too exerted to speak, Jeff nodded with razor-sharp bobbing. He couldn’t even separate his teeth. His sweaty face had squeezed and turned crimson. His ball of energy now forced his arms out as though he tried to embrace a planet. He harnessed a sun between his palms, like solar power on skin-cancer day.

“Ready?” Burnout waited one second. Two seconds. Three seconds for Jeff to wipe that goofy grin off. He inhaled deeply. Please, for Jeff’s sake, may this work.

He extinguished his flame in as quick a rush as it had gushed out. “Now, Jeff!” Burnout spun airborne—carried on a gale of heated wind—arced at his brother—

Jeff didn’t aim—disgorged every raging lumen of light in a supernova eruption—a Mechagoon burst on contact—Jeff roared until his lungs emptied—lost control—stumbled from the kickback of energy—recoiled—arms whipped apart—sliced lines across the array of bodysuits—severed Mechagoon after Mechagoon in half—they vaporized in bouquets of blood, guts, acids, Mechagoon-sized egos—arms and legs flew apart—Jeff’s dense beam arced up—cleaved the ceiling in two.

Jeff buckled, collapsed onto his side against a wall, heaved guzzles in-out-in-out-in-out. The blood from his nose dashed the floor. He finger-painted with it.

Holy crock, Jeff had evaporated them!

No time for shock. Burnout checked the hallway, the carnage of strewn arms, legs, hands, heads, entails. He landed next to Jeff and helped him wobble to a stand. “On your feet, big guy. We need to keep moving.”

Jeff regained his balance, stomped one foot, another, barfed on his foot, giggled, pounded another step. “I’s going. Let’s go,” he grunted in a strain of words as thin as a shoelace. He spilled forward but braced himself on a displaced velvet cordon. A pause, a new well of balance, and he seemed fine. “Okay, now I’s going. Wait, okay now—”

Burnout prodded his brother forward, avoided another steaming puke that showed Jeff had eaten too much corn again. But...something clanked behind them. Floor tiles shattered in porcelain snaps. Huh? Burnout hesitated, but his head edged around his shoulder, his hand still on Jeff’s back.

A surviving Mechagoon. He’d hit the deck at the right time and hid behind a crumbled pillar. “Trying to escape? You Good Guys are tooo cute.” The merry one, a Mechagoon with purple joints and “B” laser-painted on his—her—whatever—shoulder clambered up, readied a rifle—

“Nobody here is too cute.” Burnout shoved his brother forward. “Jeff, go!”

Jeff dived and took flight and spiraled ahead and beelined at the escape pod and landed next to Ace Spandex. “Mark, c’mon. We’s gotsa fights back, escape, order pizza!”

Burnout hotfooted forward. He didn’t want to burst airborne. He might need his coordination to smother more wall-to-wall fury across the hallway and its ugly paintings.

Another clank. Another porcelain shatter. Rifle thundered. A zipper of light-bullets darted past Burnout on one side—thunder—the other side. Burnout scurried left, right, left-right, zigzagged, made himself a difficult target. Thunder. The Mechagoon blasted apart the cordon, a painting, a decorative sliver that had remained intact. It looked shoddy, anyway. So many ugly decorations Mark felt embarrassed whenever someone visited.

“Jeff, keep running, go, move.” Burnout barreled forward and threw a hand in Jeff’s direction. Jeff and Ace Spandex spun around and sprinted forward, Ace’s hat slipping off. They passed the hallway’s expansion, and Burnout wasn’t far behind.

How the piss could Burnout access the emergency barrier? How the crock, what order could he give, the order, come on think. “Control, acknowledge. Close, lock emergency barrier.” C’mon, c’mon, c’mon, he kept darting forward, c’mon and—yes. Yes! Clattering l-panels appeared one plank at a time from the ceiling fifteen feet above. The haunt control couldn’t conjure the whole thing at once, but it was coming. Burnout’s command had worked. Next step was figuring out how to make the oven stop from going to eight hundred and fifty.

“Jeff, don’t crab-walk, it’s closing, keep runni—I said don’t crab-walk! Yes, I’m serious.” Burnout tore closer—the clattering slats of the emergency barrier materialized in a downward progression—he reached the bay—slid under the barrier. Its slats rattled to shoulder height. He tore through a cordon. He was going to make it. He made it!

Thunder. A bolt in his sternum. Burnout pitched forward and crashed to the carpet, explosive agony biting his chest. Blood arced up. He flopped onto his back to see the last slat of the emergency barrier materialize. It set into place in a ridge along the floor. Two iron bars plummeted from the ceiling, slid along brackets to fortify the barrier. A hole marred one plank where the light-bullet had penetrated.

Ace Spandex glanced over his shoulder. He gasped. Stopped. Turned. Still hauled Scapegoat’s limp body. Stepped forward, but another zip of rifle fire punched through the barrier. Burnout nodded no: keep going. Another blast of laser fire. It cut so closely to Scapegoat’s head that a thicket of hair fluttered away. Burnout glared at him to go. Ace Spandex stepped back. Scapegoat’s arms swung limply. Ace nodded a good-bye. And ran.

Burnout—gggaaahhh, flare in his chest—could only budge. Every sip of oxygen brought surfs of pain. He couldn’t concentrate, couldn’t conjure a flame. He choked, tried to claw forward, but—hhrrrrrrrrrrrrkkkkk—couldn’t...budge...the pain.

Jeff hadn’t seen anything. He kept sprinting away. Burnout revved his lungs to inhale. A sensation raked him like shards of glass serrating his chest. He choked, choked again, balled his fists, unleashed a scream, “Jeff, don’t look back, keep running!”

* * *

Power Plant barreled into the rear of the escape pod. Good thing those cushions padded it, because otherwise he’d have smacked open his jaw. Not wise to do that a week after chewing on a cherry bomb. Hey, if it wasn’t meant to be eaten, why call it “cherry”?

Different from the pod’s floor model in here. The spherical room of the cramped escape pod was a dark taupe along its rivets, windows, and weather stripping. The metal panels were dull silver. The vinyl bench surrounded the pod in a circle with gaps under armrests, one at the hatch, and one at the apple-scented bathroom cubby to the right. A limited set of controls sat embedded in one seat’s armrest. Power Plant wanted to check out that red plunger because maybe this thing came with a midflight ejection seat.

He rested his head against a window, felt its coolness. He drew his legs onto the seat. Every exhalation tasted like boiling water. His sweat glistened down the window and rained across the padded seat on which he knelt.

Ace Spandex slammed into the pod, hammering into the cushion with his hip. With his shoulder, he wiped the knotted scar on his brow. “Control, acknowledge. Create injury stretcher. Prepare for launch. Destination: nearest SIPMA hospital.”

“Oh, yeah, and control, ’knowledge. Makes me a red-meat icey-cream cone. Wit’ a cherries bomb on top and—” Oh, ho ho, wait a second. Cherry bomb. Heh. Well, if it was good enough the first time...

The escape pod hissed shut behind them. The hatch clacked into place, wheel-latched one steel bar, then the second. The escape pod was locked.

Ace Spandex laid Scapegoat on the stretcher. Straps rolled out its sides, slithered across the hunchback’s body, shook hands into a buckle, and jerked tight.

Takeoff! The pod roared out of the launcher. The negative momentum generators inside the pod kept Power Plant from spilling away from the window. If not, he would have tumbled out of his seat and broken his ribs on the floor as he’d done during the pods’ test drives. On purpose. Ah, the fun he had at his own expense. Also the throbbing pain.

The pod accelerated out of the station’s gravity and shot through the gelatinous atmospheric bubble. Through the window, Power Plant watched stars distort—holy crock, Station Zilcho zoomed at them, holy crock, holy crock, “holy crock, we’s gonna smack Station Zilcho in th’ face, nnooooooooo” and zoomed closer and “hoooollyy crock” and skidded along its atmospheric bubble and the pod surfed the bubble and kicked up a gelatinous spray and...

They passed. Power Plant slouched against the frosty window. Phew. Narrow miss. But now atmospheric gunk gummed up their shafts and pipes and pod doodads. But, hey, at least none of Mabel’s cats had made it aboard. Finally a urine-free ride.

“Hey, Mark. Wherevers we hides till this whole craze-o stuff blow over, cans it have a swimmin’s pool? And a trampolines for a bed? And can it not stinks like a dead guy dis time? Mark? Hey, Mark?” Power Plant turned from the window and...huh? Ace Spandex sat with damp eyes and a hopeless face that regarded Power Plant. Scapegoat rested in the stretcher. The hatch did its hatchy thing. But...“Mark?”

The hatch. The windows. Ace. Scapegoat and the stretcher. Where was Mark? Power Plant hopped into the middle of the pod. “Where Mark?” he asked. His voice sounded so small, like the mew of a kitten afraid to venture outside a dark closet. “Where’s he?”

Ace Spandex said nothing...nothing at all...he only shed tears...and nodded no.

* * *

Mechanism tromped through the hall. What drudged buffoon had allowed those insects to flee? There, Number B was ahead. The drudged buffoon in question.

Drudged Buffoon B hunched at the emergency barrier, his laser cutter working on the locking machinery in the wall. Had Mechanism realized Letchtech had installed a pod bay since his visit, and had he realized the bay operated on a separate haunt control, he would have anticipated this escape route. As an example to those who wanted to retain their freedom to stop Mechanism’s endeavors, he would dispatch the fugitive on the other side of the emergency barrier who was expiring on his own, anyway. Mechanism could no longer play one brother against the other.

Appliance buzzed around his temple. It sounded like a light bulb from Edison’s time that knew not when to perish. Through a skylight, the airborne can caught sight of the escape pod that whisked its passengers to safety. Or at least the illusion of safety.

“Lord, you neglected to disable the escape pods.” Appliance faced Mechanism and clacked its pincers.

Ugh. What an exasperating annoyance. Mechanism held steadfast to avoid plucking Appliance out of the air and crushing it. Serenity now, serenity now. “Machine?”

“Yes, my liege?” Another clack.

“Be a dear and shut up.”

“Of course, my l—”

“Now.”

* * *

Pain scurried through Burnout’s lower chest in stabbing spiders and forced his teeth together. He beat a damp fist against the floor but that only intensified the spasm of volts that crackled through him. His impact shirt fed analgesics into his bloodstream.

He had little time left. He felt it with every weakening heartbeat.

He winced at those heartbeats, which scratched against a splinter of bone. Stay calm. Let the anesthetic work its magic, he thought. Stop moving.

“Control...” Another torrent of claws scoured his chest, so he waited for it to subside. “Control, acknowledge. Open broadcast viewscreen. Broadcast to entity Power Plant.” He hoped the haunt control could find Jeff in that escape pod. Please, please.

“Seeking connection. Seeking con—Connection attained.” Good.

A viewscreen expanded from nothing to a three-by-five rectangle above Burnout. The image buzzed, and a darkened escape pod appeared. Jeff stood in its frame, his cheeks streamed with tears as Burnout’s did. His lip quivered restlessly.

“Mark?” Jeff’s voice...so small...so undone by grief.

All other sound, even white noise, dropped away. Burnout lay in a hearing-deprivation tank of his own imagination. He winced but steeled himself to speak, the painkillers allowing him a few words at a time. He tried to keep an even voice. “Hey, big guy. Were you hit?” He spoke as if he’d just woken up.

Jeff didn’t speak, only blinked. He squeezed back tears, muscles knotting in his neck when he shuddered and jerked his head in a no.

Burnout smiled. “Good.” Even his toes screamed at him.

A boom disturbed the emergency barrier, and a slat split inward. Burnout shifted his eyes but couldn’t pivot his head. The Mechaknights would soon break through, which afforded Burnout even less time than his wound.

He brought his attention back to his brother, his little brother who meant everything, who had endured more than anyone could ask. “Jeff, you need to listen to me. Are you listening?” His head felt hazy from his waning pulse.

Jeff nodded yes again, a quick nod. He released a sob. “I am. I listenin’.”

The emergency barrier rattled again. Something broke away. Rifle fire had severed a reinforcement column, which thudded against the carpet.

“Jeff, it’s time for me to say good-bye.” More tears. So many tears. “I can’t go with you.”

“Why not?” Jeff sounded so scared, as if his voice wanted to hide in his throat. He tugged a breath.

“The purple one with the B on his shoulder shot me.” Everything felt cold. “I’m not going to make it.”

Jeff smeared his tears onto a sleeve, not responding. His words were probably tangled in his throat.

“I have to leave you now. I’ve done all I can for you.”

“No, you gots t’ come. I can’ts go wit’out you.” Jeff’s eyes had reddened, veins cracking through the white that looked gray with sorrow.

“Jeff, you can. You can go without me.” Burnout squinted from pain. A twisting throb zapped his abdomen. But it passed in time for him to see Jeff wipe his cheeks. “You can make it on your own now. Everything I did, I did for your protection. I did it all to keep you safe. But I won’t be able to do that anymore. I won’t be around to help.”

There, in Jeff’s eyes, in those shimmering, blue eyes, dithered regret. “What ’m I supposeds to do wit’out you?”

“You’ll know, big guy. You always have. Do you remember the first time we went into battle? You flew in. Headfirst. You didn’t think twice about it. You were the point man, and no one even asked you. And when the Good Guys crashed into the fusion station, you got them out. Not me. Not Legion. You. You never think of yourself first. Only those who need you. You’re the moral compass. You’re what every Good Guy should strive to be.” He coughed. “You’ll always know what to do.”

Jeff quaked out a sob. “I sorry, Mark. I so sorry. You always hads to watch out for me. I made you do all this stuff for me. Always protectin’ me. You’s still theres ’cause of me.”

“No. I’m not. Don’t be sorry. You’ve got nothing to be sorry for. Nothing. This isn’t your fault. Do you believe me?”

Jeff might have nodded, but it could have been a weeping twitch. “O-okay.”

“Jeff, you’re ready for this life now.” Burnout managed a smile. It was only a slight one, but he hoped Jeff would see his confidence though he felt sickly enough to throw up. “You have to find your own way. Keep fighting. Make the best of things, because monsters like dad and mom...like Mechanism...like Master Asinine...they’ll all try to shut you down. Don’t let them. Don’t let anybody. Remember that, Jeff. You have to live your life now. You can do that. You’re so much more than anyone can ever crush.”

The other support bar clanked away, severed in two. One half rolled against a cordon.

“Okay.” Jeff didn’t stop crying, but he nodded. “Okay. I does this.”

“Good. And, Jeff? The most important thing: never—ever—come back. Do you understan—”

“No, no, no, no, no.” Jeff’s teary flood renewed its downpour. “We’s...we’s can come back. We’s comes get you. You an’ me, we’s be together again.”

Voices from the barrier now. Mechanism barking angry orders.

“No, Jeff. You need to stay safe. You need to stay away.” Floodgates opened in Burnout’s eyes, too, so he squeezed them back. He didn’t want Jeff to remember him like this, full of fear and grief. “Never come back.”

Jeff stopped nodding. He wiped his cheeks again, but tears flowed too fast for them to stay dry. “’Kay,” he said. His voice was foggy

“Good.” Burnout coughed. No, not Burnout. Mark. He wanted to die an older brother, not a soldier. The air thickened in his lungs, and his heartbeat felt like little more than a mumble. “Ace, keep him safe.”

Seated on a cushion in the background, Ace Spandex nodded solemnly. “I will.” A hoarse croak veiled his words.

A pang bolted through Mark’s torso, making him cringe. Blood streamed out, though not strongly. He couldn’t even concentrate enough to light a flame.

The pod bay’s haunt control echoed through the area with a click. “Warning: there is a lock breach at the main bay entrance.”

Mark ignored the haunt control. “I have to go now, big guy. I don’t want you to watch this next part.” He sniffled. His words sounded so thick.

“No, Mark, no. No, no, no”—Jeff leaped at the display. His arms extended off the screen. Something clattered—“please, no, don’t go, please, Mark, please, stay, we’s come gets you, please stay, please—”

“Good-bye, Jeff.”

“—no, Mark, no, no, we’s come get you, you’s don’t have t’ go, Mark—”

“I love you.” Mark shut his eyes and shuddered. “Viewscreen, acknowledge. Cut connection.”

“—Mark, no, stay, n—” The viewscreen blipped away.

And so did Jeff.

Mark felt no more than mere scraps of life left in him. His vision swam, but he guided a hand...carefully...slowly...into his pocket, felt around, and eased out the picture he kept of Jeff as a baby. In it, Jeff was smiling, his ears sticking out. White crease lines fractioned the picture in three. Mark’s hand flopped to his side, no energy to lift anything. He...nnggggGGG...rolled his head to the left, propped up the picture between thumb and forefinger.

“Warning: emergency barrier open.” The barrier disintegrated into its latent form. It could keep its physical structure no longer.

The purple Mechaknight stood from a hunch. Mechanism didn’t rush in. He strolled in as if enjoying a sunny day at the beach. He took pleasure in this.

He reached Mark and towered above him.

Mark’s memory slipped back to years ago. For some reason, he remembered the date: March 14, 9096. The morning had promised heat, but the sun hadn’t yet woken up. Mark and Jeff had. Each carried a backpack stuffed with clothes, food, and sundries. Mark stomped down the driveway of their childhood home, but Jeff managed only a limp since, the night before, their father had pounded his leg with a baseball bat. Drunk again. Mark had retaliated, used his newfound hyperability to scare their dad. Maim him.

An understated breeze rustled Jeff’s blond hair. “How comes we’s gotta go?” So innocent. He didn’t understand.

The first bird of the day chirped from a lofty nest in a tree.

“Because you deserve better than them, Jeff.” Mark continued to stomp away, slowly so his brother could keep pace.

“Better than mom an’ dad? What’s about them? What’s they deserves?”

Mark and Jeff turned off the driveway and made their way through a bike path that separated their suburban house from their neighbors’. Mark hiked up his backpack. He wanted to drop it and rush into the house, disintegrate those ogres for what they’d done to Jeff all these years. Burn them to cinders. His hand clasped the backpack strap so hard he sweated in the predawn warmth. His backpack strap blackened from the heat he produced. “I can’t even imagine how much they deserve.”

“So why’s we leavin’? Mark, I’s never seens you so anger afore.” Jeff stopped there in that bike path. Fences flanked them, providing shadow from the gentle sun that now peaked over the park napping on the horizon. “Why’s we leavin’? Where’s we goin’? Why’s you almost didn’t lets me go back for my Cosmonaut Chimp pajamas?”

Mark stopped. He sighed. How could he put this? Jeff had never understood before. “We’re leaving because of this.” He pointed at the bruise that colored Jeff’s cheek. “And this.” Jeff’s knee. “And this.” Jeff’s cracked collarbone. “And all the other things those beasts inflicted on you.”

“Wha’ beasts?”

“Dad. Mom. Those beasts. What they did to you over the years—all the beatings...It was...wrong. Vicious. Evil. And I’m making sure they never hit you again. You’re not useless, not a burden. You’re just...special. You’re my brother.” Mark searched Jeff and watched fear soften his cheeks. He placed a hand on each of Jeff’s shoulders. “Jeff, I will never let anyone hurt you ever again. I’ll keep you safe. For as long as I live, I promise I will keep you safe.”

The fear disappeared from Jeff. He nodded. Even smiled.

The memory ended there. Now, today, Mark looked deep into the picture of Jeff, paying no heed to Mechanism’s pistol aimed at his head. Another choke racked through his body, but it subsided. More tears dribbled onto his cheeks. He smiled one last time. “Stay safe, little brother.”

Mechanism harrumphed. “Such heroic nonsense.”

A trigger clicked, and Mark was gone.

* * *

Power Plant’s sight blurred through the tears. His thoughts wavered. He reached forward...hands shaking—

He hurled himself at the hatch, grappled the wheel locks but Ace Spandex wrestled him away. “No, no. You can’t go back there. If you open the hatch, we’ll die, Jeff. Jeff! He’s gone. You can’t save him now. Listen to me. You can’t save him now!” Ace Spandex held Power Plant away from the hatch and Power Plant fought and clawed Ace’s arms and tore at his impact shirt and Ace grappled him to his knees and Power Plant grasped at Ace to spill around him and Ace squeezed him tightly to subdue him and the melee of punching and kicking...and Power Plant eased, stopped the struggle...and Ace’s arms resolved into a hug...and Power Plant buried his head in Ace’s shoulder...and Ace lowered him to a kneel.

And Ace Spandex held him. “You can’t save him now.”

And Power Plant wept.

Chapter Seventeen: Over and Out

Mechanism yanked Reef by the ear into the boardroom, the only method of persuasion this insolent yelper merited. The yelper spilled into an l-chair that barked and bobbed upon collision. He banged his head against the boardroom table. And, being a yelper, Reef yelped.

“Hey!” Reef bolted up and grabbed the chair, reeled back, and shattered it over Mechanism’s helmet. It dispersed into virtuality, lost now in the computer ether. “You can’t drag me around like that. I mean...you can...but come on. Stop being a douche.”

Mechanism did not even gratify him with a flinch. “I have just murdered your elemental, so hear me when I say I am not here to trade frivolous putdowns. I have need of you.” Instead, he dusted his shoulder. Hmm. A scratch. He smacked a hand across Reef’s cheek. Oops. Reef had a scratch.

Reef hit the table again and smacked onto the floor. He massaged his cheek. “As if I’d help you. And, for the record, trashing the windows in my living quarters doesn’t convince me.” He jerked back from Mechanism’s curling fingers. “But a good punch does.”

Mechanism wrenched Reef into another chair. “I need you to initiate a public broadcast. Many people who escaped this station—the restaurant workers, the installation teams, the petting zoo staff, your administrative assistant—”

“I have an admin assistant?”

“—all suspect something. They may spread word that a situation has arisen on Station One. I need you to reassure the public. Inform them a software update had malfunctioned and caused the evacuation warning. Tell them nothing is wrong and they can return to work after the problem is investigated and rectified.

“Furthermore, inform the public that I have been undercover as a mole within the Bad Guys. Inform them I am a highly ranked Intergalactic Protection agent, and Legion planted me in the Bad Guys. I have now returned to my position within the Good Guys, my undercover task complete.

“Lastly, three Good Guys succeeded in escape. Inform the public these agents have gone rogue, and my Mechaknights will hunt them to rescue the public from their menace. Smithereens’s and Burnout’s deaths are their fault.” He smashed his fist over an abandoned coffee cup on the desk. “We will kill those rogues on sight.

“Afterward, end on a positive note. Make it convincing.”

Reef bit his lower lip and steeled himself. “Never. Shoot me if you want. I mean, shatter more windows.” He shirked back a step. “Who said anything about shooting me?”

Mechanism chuckled. “Oh, my dear Reef, that will not do. I need you alive. But, if you still refuse, know that we have intercepted one of the escape pods.” He snapped his fingers...or tried in this suit. These new gloves made folding his fingers together difficult. He tried again. No such luck. Blast. He commanded his suit to play the finger-snapping sound. Okay, now things were moving.

Number B appeared at the l-door that had moments ago faded to the tune of a plunging slide whistle. What clown had installed that sound file? Number B jabbed the butt of his rifle into the backs of—

“Topsy and Turvy, your vision-blistering acrobatic twin receptionists.” Mechanism smiled when Reef’s pallor whitened. “Yes.”

“Please, oh please—” Topsy quivered. Or Turvy. One of the two.

“—oh please, oh—” the other said.

“Shut up, victims.” Number B slid his rifle into its recess on his back and grasped Topsy’s and Turvy’s necks. That was the only way to silence these hyperactive twins. Otherwise, their ping-pong prattle would have burrowed deeply into Mechanism’s prodigious head, and he would have to drill out the tainted brain cells.

“During the evacuation order, these two attempted escape but were acquired. Reef, say good-bye.” A needle laser swiveled up from a panel on Mechanism’s forearm and—

In a flower of red that painted Number B’s bodysuit, Topsy’s head disintegrated. Or Turvy’s head. Mechanism could not bring himself to care which. At least the next of kin was already informed. Next of kin. Oh, dear. How jolly droll Mechanism was.

Number B looked sublimely amused with the redecoration. He tightened his glove around the remaining receptionist’s head. Topsy or Turvy whimpered.

“Now, let me repeat my request.” Mechanism stuffed his needle laser at Turvy...or Topsy...oh, bother. Whichever. “You will speak to the public via broadcast.” He crammed the laser forward into Topsy-or-Turvy’s nostril. Turvy-or-Topsy’s snivel echoed through the laser’s barrel.

Fright changed Reef’s face from resolve to a kitten’s shiver. He swallowed. “Get me a viewscreen.”

“Excellent. Do you require a teleprompter?”

“No. I’ll ad lib. I like to pronounce the words I’m going to say.”

“Your choice. Control, acknowledge. Open broadcast viewscreen. Broadcast to all listed news agencies. Broadcast audio to all noncaptured Good Guy entities and Bad Guy entity Master Asinine.” Mechanism yanked Reef closer so that he stood where the viewscreen would materialize.

“Broadcast beginning in five...four...three. Don’t forget to buy subscriptions to Telethug, the galaxy’s only mafia network. Or else...kapow, kapow. Catch my drift?”

A viewscreen sprouted to life in front of Reef, surging into a three-by-two-foot rectangle. Reef swallowed again and steeled himself. “People of Stratus Cloud, you may have heard about an incident earlier at Station One. I assure you nothing is wrong. We’ve experienced a malfunction due to a badly installed software update. The problem is under investigation, and we will inform the evacuees when they can return to work.”

* * *

Asinine struggled to loosen the ropes around his wrists, but he only produced more blood from chafed skin. If only he’d eaten Frosted Flakes this morning, he could bust out in no time because that stuff was faaaaannnntastic. Or something like that.

“Second, I would like to report the success of a long-term investigation we have launched,” Reef said over the public address system.

Asinine wriggled his wrist, his hand against the chair’s upholstered arm. No go. Ugh. His wrist burned. Well, his choices were to either escape or listen to Reef’s voice. He chose his third option, death, because, crock, if he slackened this laser rope even an inch, it’d be a miracle.

Reef said, “You know Mechanism as the robotic-suited Bad Guy. In reality, he was a double agent the Good Guys planted in the Bad Guys to gather information and report back. With his work complete, he has returned to the Good Guys.”

“What? Another double agent? What a gyp.” Asinine jolted in his seat, tilting forward. Oh, no. No...no...no no no no. Smack. His cheek hit the floor.

At least the floor smelled lemony fresh. He licked it. Huh. Not bad.

* * *

Harrier’s bones itched, his skin itched, even his bleeding itches itched at Reef’s announcement. He sat at Legion’s desk, holding in both hands an image still that was dated July 21, 9108: the Good Guy founding team gathered on the front lawn of IP’s headquarters on Minerva. Reef, Franchise, Legion, that puggled Power Plant shoving baby carrots up each nostril, Burnout trying to snatch those carrots out, Harrier, Ace Spandex, Momentum, and an official from The Book of Galactic Records to verify Power Plant’s nostril-stuffing achievement. Harrier’s friends...before he realized what uncontrolled bedlamites those wankers were.

Reef said, “Mechanism’s goal was an enormous success, and we will put the knowledge he gathered to good use in stopping Master Asinine.”

Harrier wished he didn’t have to hear the drivel Reef now disgorged. He dropped the picture of that mayhem team. His clawed fingers clutched the blooming datasheets on Legion’s desk, swept them aside, scratched long, curled paths on the desk’s surface. The computer set in the desk’s top complained in beeps and quacks.

Reef said, “Asinine’s reign of fashion terror will soon end thanks to Mechanism’s success. You also won’t have to tolerate public airings of his awkward home videos any longer.”

* * *

Franchise inched forward in the claustrophobic confines of the vent shaft. He could only move his elbows and crack his knuckles, so he hauled himself toward the grill-lined square of light ahead. Each shift forward was a reverberating thunk in the pliable vent shaft. “Mechanism’s a Good Guy? What a load of crock.”

He reached the vent grill and smacked it, smacked it, knocked it off. It rattled to the floor. He wriggled out to his shoulders and peered down. Seven feet off the floor. Huh. Hadn’t thought this escape through.

Reef continued his broadcast, “Lastly, I must inform you of a danger to the public. I am saddened to report three Good Guy agents have gone rogue. Founding agents Power Plant and Ace Spandex and new recruit Scapegoat have revealed themselves as criminals. They are responsible for a number of deaths in our organization. The public should consider them extremely dangerous.”

Jeffy? Gone rogue? Franchise punched the shaft’s wall. What a pissing lie!

A click and a circle of cold met his temple. A Mechanism clone had found him. Oh, no. Oh no, oh no, not the circle, no no no, and shuddered, please no, please no, please don’t do anything nasty, he cracked his knuckles, oh please.

“How was your trip?” Y asked.

Franchise’s face wrinkled. His body sagged from sapped strength and...oh, no. His palm slid out. Slipping, slipping, slip—he slammed onto the floor.

That solved the problem of his escape.

* * *

Power Plant’s tears had been spent. He didn’t even rack dry sobs anymore. Still seated on a cushion with knees hugged against his chest, he silently stared out the dusty escape pod’s window. Only stars stared back.

From the announcement broadcasting through the pod’s speakers, Reef said, “But don’t worry. A new team of Good Guys, the Mechaknights, will work alongside law enforcement to find these Good Guys...and kill them on sight. These rogue agents will not terrorize the public.

“This is a new era for the Good Guys. Thank you.”

Mechanism’s oily voice slithered in. “Control, acknowledge. Close viewscreen.” The speaker clicked off, and the pod’s air conditioner replaced Reef’s voice.

Power Plant convulsed in another shuddering breath. He shifted his chin away from the window’s lonesome view. “Where we’s gonna hide?”

Ace Spandex folded a damp cloth he’d found in the bathroom and laid it over Scapegoat’s forehead. His face was still long when he looked up. “I don’t know. I don’t know what to do.” He stood and drifted toward the pod’s controls where he sat and thumbed a plunger button marked “Boost.” Thumbed it again.

Power Plant turned back to the window. He wanted to crawl into its solitude.

Ace Spandex thumped his palm on the plunger button. “I think I flooded the engine.”

* * *

“Convincing enough?” Reef dignified Mechanism with dagger eyes and heavy huffs. He wanted to tear that tyrannical murderer limb from limb, but he didn’t want to clean the mess of wires afterward. Maybe Appliance would clean it for him.

Mechanism clapped his gloves together. Each clap sounded like the toll of a bell. “Yes, I believe you were. You have done well, R—”

Reef spat on Mechanism’s boot. “You’re a monster.”

“I know.” Mechanism planted his hands on his hips and stared out the window. Like a tiny gnat, Appliance buzzed too closely, so Mechanism batted it away. “I am the perfect monster.”

“You are, after all, Lord.” Appliance recovered from its slam-dance meeting with a whiteboard viewscreen on a wall. “Your Mechaknights have placed the Good Guys in stasis, as per your decree. Those Good Guys shall not interfere. We also captured the one called Franchise. We will soon transfer Master Asinine back to Station Mechanism to separate him from his media-named agents. You have orchestrated this attack impeccably. And no one knows the better, Lord.”

“No. I am no longer Lord.” Mechanism stepped away from the window. He lifted his chin and chuckled. “You may now call me King.”

THE END

NEXT BOOK:

Long live the king.

About That Guy Whose Book You Read Once

Liam Gibbs knew he was destined to write at age four, when he authored a breathtaking account of a cow who ate grass. The bovine saga failed to catch the public’s eye but earned the budding author parental acclaim. Since those early times, he’s gone on to write the novella Not So Superpowered and humorous articles for various magazines.

A twenty-year veteran of the brutal world of hand-to-hand comic book fandom, Gibbs cut his teenage teeth on titles such as Spider-Man, X-Men, New Warriors, and other Marvel comics.

Gibbs graduated college with a degree in professional writing, which included classes on fiction writing and story structure. He lives on the balmy shores of Ottawa, Canada, where he relaxes by watching staggeringly awful horror and science fiction movies. A health and fitness nut, he shoots lasers from his eyes, uses the word exclusive incorrectly, and once wrestled an exclusive brontosaurus. True story.

That one time I was deep in thought and—Hey, is that ketchup on the ceiling?

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Table of Contents

The Story So Far...

Available on the Author’s Super-Awesome Site

Other Stuff the Author Spewed Out

Your Favorite Table of Contents

Book 12: His Kingdom Come

Appendices

Chapter One: The Emperor’s New Armor

Chapter Two: Surprised?

Chapter Three: You’re Probably Wondering Why I Gathered You All Here

Chapter Four: Some Bosses Are Tyrants

Chapter Five: Wakey, Wakey

Chapter Six: Something’s Afoot in the Crisper Drawer

Chapter Seven: Inner Thought at Its Finest

Chapter Eight: What Are the Neighbors Trying to Pull This Time?

Chapter Nine: Safecracked

Chapter Ten: All Hands on Deck

Chapter Eleven: Duct Work

Chapter Twelve: A Sword to a Bomb Fight

Chapter Thirteen: Found Yyyoooouuuuuu!

Chapter Fourteen: So Glad He Didn’t Itch Back There

Chapter Fifteen: Would You Like Fries with That?

Chapter Sixteen: Chase Scene

Chapter Seventeen: Over and Out

About That Guy Whose Book You Read Once