In a Galaxy Far, Far AwRy

Book 17: The Church of Steeple

Liam Gibbs

IN A GALAXY FAR, FAR AWRY book 17: THE CHURCH OF STEEPLE

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: 978-1777638603

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, but not yet ’cause it’s being worked on just for you

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 17: The Church of Steeple

Chapter One: Forecast Calls for Stupid

Chapter Two: Who Goes There?

Chapter Three: Company’s Coming

Chapter Four: All Access

Chapter Five: Business Lunch

Chapter Six: Fancy Meeting You Here

Chapter Seven: The Neighborhood Watch Is Going to Hear about This

Chapter Eight: Coup D’étated

Chapter Nine: Heard, Understood, and Acknowledged

Chapter Ten: Organize and Rise

Chapter Eleven: Whilst All Hope Collapses

Chapter Twelve: Forget about These Guys?

Chapter Thirteen: Escape Attempt(ed)

Chapter Fourteen: One Little Indian

Chapter Fifteen: The Gang’s All Here

Chapter Sixteen: Unfinished Basement

Chapter Seventeen: People Never Call Ahead Anymore

Chapter Eighteen: Hair Accessories

Chapter Nineteen: Quick! My Parents Are Home!

Chapter Twenty: A Little Less Weekend at Bernie’s, A Little More Weekend at Bernie’s II

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: Forecast Calls for Stupid

February 20, 9110. 4:16 a.m. (Galactic Standard Time).

Locked in the bomb shelter at the basement of Station One, Good Guy headquarters. A scramble of emptied cans and boxes left accrued on the floor. Domineering fists thundering at the door, causing its obese-beach-guy icon to throb. That beach guy was liable to detonate. Down here, so were Good Guy leader Lieutenant Colonel Matross Legion’s allergies. His sinuses didn’t mix well with canned gnawl.

“We will enter, Legion,” a tranquilized but no-less-potent voice seeped through the door. The voice of a recent recruit, has-been actor Catastrophe. Given any other situation, the tone he’d used would soothe Legion, sedate the worry spots growing on his hairless Trioxidillian forehead. Creepy Guy Yeah Why Not must have slipped a sedative into his pomade.

Legion clutched his Alaphan necklace to his barraging chest. He barely noticed the shelter’s waxy smell. Sending a frantic prayer to Alaphus though He’d offered no help today, Legion curled against the sooty wall. Stacks of opened and expired cans of blue peaches, green mushrooms—a brash mismatch of color and food—congested the view of the weakening door. Didn’t matter now at the end of his life. Especially with all these wires he’d disemboweled from the walls in a tantrum. He loved a good panic tantrum. Wasn’t skilled at them, but he loved them.

A hundred fists assailed the door like a hundred hatchets chopping wood, smudging the beach guy outside. But the assault did Legion a favor: he loathed the ironic motif decorating this bomb shelter. Or any of the other symbols that identified the rooms around Station One. He wondered if Janice, the station’s haunt control, had a few loose bytes. Haunt controls were software that took verbal commands and made them physical action, so called because their automation made things feel haunted. In this case, someone must have told Janice that beaches were part of the vegetable family because she’d mixed them with icons of celery adorning the hall outside. Must be one of those haunt controls that thought grenades constituted a food group. Power Plant did. He also thought animals constituted a food group, made weirder because he might be referring to the Muppet.

The things that occupied Legion’s thoughts when he had only three minutes to live.

The door swelled again with a menace of sound.

“Janice, acknowledge. Estimate when collective entity Adelphoi will break through that beach guy. Fast-forward the commercial break.” Legion hugged the cold wires that draped his shoulders, waist, antennae, arms, anywhere but exposed skin. Cold wires were cold. A squawk scuttled through his breast. Never mind the clanking plastic cans dangling from his ears or the clanking tin cans dangling from his impact suit, which prompted the question, “What had he been thinking?”

“Collective entity Adelphoi will break through your precious door in forty-nine point three astigmatisms and offer you the chance to win...a luxurious coffee grinder valued at free.” Roaring game-show applause erupted and then departed. “Buy two salsa-and-parchment chimichangas at Backside Eruption and pay for three in a symbolic way.”

Oh, yeah. And someone had toyed with Janice’s calendar system. Same old Good Guy prankster Power Plant. Heh. Heh heh. Heh?

A gunshot snapped like bones breaking. The door splintered. Yes, a bomb shelter’s door splintered. Shards of plywood pounced over the discarded cans and attacked Legion, flecking his face. Another crackling gunshot punched a second hole through the l-tech door. Latent technology stored objects in computer memory until summoned. The public trusted it, but Legion knew it was corruptible. So the blown l-door and that beach guy disintegrated into l-tech powder. His attackers could have instead commanded Janice to open the door. Their assault proved one thing: mindless slaves liked breaking stuff.

Good Guy Sixth Sense’s brown eye peeped through the hole, identifiable even with his inch-thick glasses missing. He looked like a hunter. Or a stalker at a park. Maybe both, if you combined the two.

The things that scurried through Legion’s thoughts when he had only forty-nine eye defects left to live.

With one last fist, the door finally burst off its mechanism like a ruptured dam. Not even a bomb shelter, with twenty-inch-thick walls and a half-inch-thick door, could protect Legion. For one sliver of a moment, the clamor drowned the aboveground rain that drenched as thick as oilcloth.

At the ruined doorway, Catastrophe wrung his hands together with a schemer’s smirk and that oh-so-tasteful “Truckers Do It for Any Reason You Give Them” T-shirt still on backwards. His hands produced that farting sound Power Plant always found hilarious. He and his overly tanned skin fronted the mob, behind him Sixth Sense, who still wore the shock collar around a bunched-up shirt collar, and a shopper who’d stopped off somewhere for a lobster patty. The lobster patty tried thrashing its way out of her mouth.

Catastrophe chuckled. “Told you you couldn’t keep the adelphoi back forever.”

Legion’s back lumbered up the ruined wall. He tightened his grip on himself. “I could have straightened up the place if you’d called ahead.”

Everything had been calm four hours earlier. Maybe four hours. Conking your head on the floor played with your perception of time, but four hours sounded right.

Sharp silence destroyed the deluge, signaling his arrival. Creepy Guy Yeah Why Not, the gray-skinned leader who’d rallied this mob against Legion, blundered in like an untrained stilt walker. He ducked through the door, underneath the lumber hanging from the doorframe in a tilted w. He shouldered through his flock toward Legion, twiggy arms as wide as his Cheshire smile. His fingers groped forward like a stick bug, and touched Legion’s temples—

Alaphus, help me, please—

* * *

Four hours earlier in Legion’s office in the top floor of Station One’s lobby building.

Rain outside surged in pellets that attacked the l-windows, rattling them in their frames. However Good Guy computer administrator Ace Spandex had labelled this weather pattern in Janice’s system—thunderstorm, monsoon season, family swim—it beat the snot out of those windowpanes. Mother Nature was furious at somebody, and that somebody was aboard Station One. Her vengeance was evident from the fisherman with the yellow slicker and the missing tooth and the missing leg and the missing eye and the other missing leg paddling a coffin through the parking lot. Not saying he was the object of Nature’s scorn, but circumstantial evidence made him a prime suspect.

On top of that was the meteor shower surrounding the station, which prompted Intergalactic Protection to post warnings on any surface Janice could fit one on, including Good Guy field leader Plastique’s back. “Meteor shower imminent. Be advised that travel in and out of Station One is prohibited between five o’clock and October. Clearance sale: feverishly fight over more pets at our gift shop because we just discovered keeping animals in a gift shop is illegal.” Legion checked his window, up through the rain and into the stars gazing back like glass eyes. He had no doubt that the three lazy rocks above didn’t constitute a meteor shower, so why IP forbade anyone from traveling through was beyond him. Blind alcoholics could navigate through that “shower,” and Legion knew because some had stopped by on their way to the Beers of the Galaxy semihourly festival.

The air conditioning in the office kicked on with a hiss. His back steadied against the edge of his desk, his ankles crossed, Legion turned his attention to the curriculum vitae IP had supplied him on this datasheet, a wafer-thin computer. With their short-lived and aggressive recruit Tolliver’s termination and subsequent termination, IP’s new field marshal, some Trioxidillian named Horcross Breeng, had ordered Legion to hire a recruit/marketable action figure, a command decreed by their sponsors. Legion sure wasn’t filling that spot with Wicked-Awesome Man, the Gharalgian on page fourteen “so wicked, he was awesome. Also wicked.” Direct quote.

And why did Wicked-Awesome Man’s profile appear on every third page? Probably because he claimed he could unclog toilets. Know what? That was reason enough for Legion because, for all of pilot Franchise’s assertions about having plumbing skills, the urinal on the computer tower’s twelfth floor still overflowed.

Legion tapped the OFF icon, and the datasheet crinkled from its milky white to transparent red. It sagged in his hand.

A hot breath trickled out of Legion’s lips. The gunshot that had dug through his old friend Sopher’s head barked in his mind. He flinched at the imaginary sound. “Janice, acknowledge.” For some reason, Ace Spandex had taken to referring to Station One’s haunt control as Janice. “You give me a reason why I should reject all these applicants. And without the a cappella routine.” Janice was auditioning for a haunt-control quartet.

“Sure thing,” Janice said. No dice on the a cappella routine: a tenor, then an alto, then a bass, and then a dolphin’s chitter filled the silence. Still beat her game-show mod, the next mod in the long line of rotating personalities she assumed because of an installation error.

Legion thumped a fist against his desk. “At least you got ‘One Less Lonely Girl’ out of my head. But try the song-and-dance again”—by “dance,” he meant the time Janice had grabbed baked chickens from the food court and waltzed them around the station—“and I’ll melt you into slag because I have access to flamethrowers.” Because of that chicken routine, teriyaki footprints spoiled the station. Why did customers insist on licking sauce off the carpet fibers?

“I can’t provide reasons to reject these applicants,” Janice said. “You haven’t set any rejection parameters or purchased fourteen thousand bags of Hippie Grain’s new cracked-wheat-and-literal-stone bread.”

“If I need fourteen thousand bags of bread, I’ve got either a sheep farm or a near-fatal medical condition.” Legion shifted his legs—they tingled with sleep—and reactivated the datasheet. The Bombastic Flatulator? Wasn’t that one of the rides in the station’s new amusement park? “Then tell me who I should hire.”

“Hires the dude whats skin’s all pointy and stuff!” Power Plant bellowed from the corner of the office where he grabbed his sixth, seventh, or hundredth trinket from Legion’s shelves and bounced it off the wall. Half of it bounced. The other half shattered and embedded flakes in...well...everything.

Oh, yeah. He was here. Legion tilted the datasheet when a light panel hovered in for a closer look. “Jeff, you’re in timeout. I don’t know why Ace dragged you in here by the ear, but he used the words enormous scissors and suspension bridge. Besides, we already hired the pointy guy. He’s Pincushion. He’s been with us since May.”

Janice came alive with noisemakers and sizzling applause. “You’ll regret not taking a bite out of this sale—”

“Now is not the time to advertise alligator bags again, Janice.” Legion glared at the speaker near the ceiling. “You’d also reach an audience if the alligators were dead.”

Power Plant smashed another trinket, something Legion couldn’t identify. Only a week ago, he’d taken a dose of Hyperthesia, a medication that suppressed his special ability, his light-based hyperability. Since then, the imp still found a way to destroy everything in Legion’s office because the Good Guy leader once considered redecorating the room within said imp’s earshot. The bruises Tolliver had dealt him had healed, and his missing teeth had been replaced, so his words had dropped his recent lisp. “How abouts hirin’ the dude what talk in my head?”

“He’s Sixth Sense, he’s been here since December, and, speaking of timeouts that never teach you the definition of everything in moderation, stop installing pressure-sensitive garbage disposals inside our couch cushions. You almost got him with the last one.”

The light defecator—his words, not Legion’s—launched another bauble against a wall. Power Plant and breakables: a highly caustic combination. If he turned out sterile, evolutionary scientists everywhere would pop open champagne bottles. “How abouts the guy what runs fast?”

Oh, well. At this point, Legion just embraced it. “He’s dead. Look, I know your Hyperthesia keeps you off duty for at least four more days, which means more homegrown biological epidemics than usual. But is there any way to keep you occupied other than staging a crime scene in my office?”

“Hey, you can hires the guy what clone hisself.”

“That’s Franchise, you’re roommates, and he urinates ink now thanks to you.” Legion tossed the datasheet at the mess of others accumulated on his desk. The office’s chill sneaked underneath his collar. “If I offer you a grape soda, would you treat this timeout seriously?”

The rain still beat the l-windows, belching a tempest that would make King Neptune throw up. Legion’s fault, really, for uttering “The grass looks a little dehydrated” in Power Plant’s presence. So Power Plant had upped Station One’s rain setting from zero to eleven or eleven hundred. He thought the weather application was a toy with “fierce knobbies and doodads and switch-’ems.” It had none of those.

In the parking lot, a transport flipped over, its suspension screaming. How could the tempest throw it like that, what with orientation software to keep it upright? Power Plant and whatever dementia kept him going, that was how. Legion glanced at the reflection of his office in the l-window. “Jeff, why are you even awake at this hour? It’s past midnight.”

Power Plant spiked another bauble into the carpet. It leaked a glowing orange fluid that devoured the carpet fibers. “’Cause I’m so awesome, an’ my name’s Jeffy.”

Legion turned from the window that revealed the storm’s war against every solid object. For those keeping score, the storm was winning. “Levels of awesome aside, don’t you keep a regular sleep schedule”—he threw up his hands to deflect Power Plant, who whizzed past with flailing arms—“or a regular blood-sugar level? Remember what I said about acting on every thought that mistakenly comes out of my mouth. Because the moral of the story is to stop acting on every thought that mistakenly comes out of my mouth.”

“Don’t remembers nothin’.” Power Plant paused before seeing if Legion’s snow globe of the planet Minerva could bounce. Not much of a pause, because a second later he found out the hard way: no. “That moral count for my penguins army?”

“Double counts if those penguins still run the infirmary.”

Chapter Two: Who Goes There?

The gray man wrestled his limbs across the parking area under the orchestra of meteors constituting this meteor shower. Intergalactic Protection had issued a warning that the shower risked anyone coming or going. This he knew because of the Transcript. Yyeessss, of course. Mmm-hmm. He smiled. The shower was why he chose to begin his mission on this day. It gave people the illusion they were trapped.

Intense wind accompanied the rain with ghostly song. No one realized the odds of a collision in this meager shower were roughly eight million to one. The inhabitants here considered it one to eight million. Someone had misplaced the decimal or shifted the zeroes on purpose. Or perhaps the people here were comical morons. He guessed this from the reality shows they viewed. Who hurled that much chocolate syrup at each other? Where did they even find the budget?

But enough about meteor showers, mournful rain, and people suffering intelligence paltry enough to inflict reality shows on its public. Station One’s lobby beckoned ahead like a lighthouse in a blanket of fog.

Intergalactic Protection had crafted a district of Station One into a shopping mall to join the food court. No, not a mall, not even a tourist trap. Oh, no no no. A retail mecca. How had IP billed it? Yyyyeess. A retail jackpot. Six exclamation points. They yearned to sell those surplus carpets.

Since opening as a retail jackpot yesterday, the atmospheric bubble, that gelatinous layer that held in the station’s atmosphere, remained unlocked to outsiders, and now swaths of consumers infested this station. Perfect for his mission, though not advisable for a military outfit. Then again, anyone in this era had a marginal toehold on intellect. The so-called intelligent included.

Chocolate syrup. Everywhere! With sprinkles!

His knuckles scraped against another drenched civilian transport, raking a dent across the civ-tran’s side. His seven-foot body, so awkward and cumbersome, looked like a rectangle with limbs gangling off the corners. Disobedient arms swung like wind-broken tree branches. Languid legs shuffled unmanageably. Like reedy twigs at the ends of those lanky, uncooperative arms, his fingers glanced against a law-tran here, a med-tran there, a handicap sign for a parking spot. Now the wheelchair had no little stickman.

He passed the memorial statue of Good Guy field leader Reef on the left and robot Car Alarm on the right. One fallen soldier, one fallen foghorn. The rain, as bitter as a shower of icicles, chicken-pecked the exposed flesh of his shoulders, arms, hands. Well, it should have felt bitter, but he couldn’t feel it. He felt nothing. His dead nerves served as an advantage and a detriment in his situation. And in syrup wars. So the wrathful weather’s assault only shoved him from side to side as if he wobbled atop a teeter-totter. His fingers would look blue and iced if not for the gray tones no color could negate. They looked only ...paler. Yes, paler.

He tromped over a grassy median combed down by the rain’s ammunition. The lobby’s yellow light shone through its l-doors, antithesis to the endless melee of weather. Someone had messed up when setting the climate, and he bet on Power Plant and his inability to discern level 3 from level 300.

He reached the lobby doors and pigeon-bobbed through on legs too long and too difficult to command easily. Yyeeeessss, Legion, Steeple had come to meddle. Show him to the chocolate syrup.

The templates of these Good Guys would taste so...

...deeeeelicioussssss.

Chapter Three: Company's Coming

Janice’s warning rang through Legion’s office, rattling paintings against walls. “Attention: an entity not listed in any legal registry has entered the lobby. Entity tagged as entity four-five-seven-zero. You have either a visitor or a vacuum salesman. Let’s check behind door number thirty-six to see what entity you’ve won.” Janice’s game-show mod took center stage. She could at least learn to number doors sequentially. One day, Legion hoped to win a two-week vacation.

Legion massaged his hairless brow between his forefingers. “Janice, if you marked off thirty-six rooms for an announcement, I’ll castrate your wires.” Kicking the garbage ionizer, he flopped his hands against his thighs. “You’re wireless. Why can I never win?” And now the ionizer’s sushi residue accented his carpet, and his office smelled like seaweed. “Janice, acknowledge. New command to entity Ace Spandex to install wires. Less important: relist entity four-five-seven-zero as entity...uh...New Entity. I guess. And disclose any pertinent information on entity. Most important: tell entity Power Plant to stop bouncing glass off my floor.” And in Power Plant’s direction, “Because somehow he never hears my requests to stop even though we’re standing in the same room.”

“It ain’ts works that way.” Power Plant made a casualty out of another ornament.

A studio audience erupted in ruffling applause behind Janice’s next report. “Well, Bob, let’s see what we have here. I’ve conveyed your orders to entity Ace Spandex. His response was, ‘What the crock is he talking about?’ He seemed positive—”

“You use the word positive to refer to wrestlers beating each other with folding chairs.”

Janice clicked to her next announcement. “Our new contestant has been renamed to entity Uh New Entity I Guess.”

“Uh New Entity I Guess? You’re serious?”

“A bioscan and genescan reveal entity Uh New Entity I Guess’s DNA to be Terran circa ten to fifteen thousand years ago. He is seven feet, three inches tall. He weighs eighty-six point four kilograms. He is gray skinned. His heart rate indicates calm. I received an error number four-six-two from psiscans. He has not tasted the new extremo gastronómica muerte chili dog at Lo Stromo y Fiesta in the Gorging Court. A scan of his intestines indicates he likes pistachios.” More applause fizzled in to sprinkle Janice’s speech with that rollicking studio-audience atmosphere. “So spin that wheel!”

“You forgot my order to entity Power Plant.” Legion flinched at the demolition of another military award. “He’s knicked almost every knack I own.”

“Even I know when to give up, and my brain is plastic,” Janice said, barely audible over the crunch of another snow globe. That had been Legion’s favorite: it depicted Bad Guy head of security, the two-headed Schizophrenic, wringing Bad Guy leader Lowensland’s neck. Lowensland had commissioned it. At Schizophrenic’s suggestion. Lowensland called himself Master Asinine in public, if that explained anything.

“Point taken. Janice, acknowledge. Belay the intestinal scans until further notice. And, for the last time, ‘further notice’ doesn’t mean every time Catastrophe is researching a bit part in a medical drama that’ll never dig itself out of developmental hell.”

Legion needed a minute. He sat on his chair, about the only object Power Plant hadn’t hurled across the room. This new visitor, Uh New Entity I Guess, sent a chilling, skeletal scrape along his spine. A DNA pattern from thousands of years ago? An unsuccessful psiscan? Ace had just installed a new patch in Janice’s psiscan software. A free one, which explained why everything the software printed on a viewscreen came out as wingdings and currency symbols. And nobody under the age of eighty-four ate pistachios.

“Okay, okay. Uhm...” Got it. Legion stood when Power Plant seized his chair. “Janice, acknowledge. Block entity Uh New Entity I Guess from leaving the lobby. Relay any pertinent information to entity Sixth Sense, and summon entity Sixth Sense to meet entity Uh New Entity I Guess. New command to entity Sixth Sense to scan entity Uh New Entity I Guess’s mind.” He tossed up an arm to block the chair’s shrapnel. “And throw in the intestinal stuff.” Served Sixth Sense right for using his telepathy when Legion tried to convince him it was really beef in that taco.

What did lo stromo y fiesta even mean? What was Legion putting in his body?

* * *

The first agent Legion would send would be the one media-named Sixth Sense, the Good Guys’ telepath and telekinetic. Oh, ssssooooo tasty. Steeple licked his lips, his mouth watering. Oh, how he knew these plans. He’d scoured the Transcript many times, memorized it. Sixth Sense was integral to the overall plan. And he would arrive quickly with that delightfully scrumptious mental template. Sniff, sniff. Why did the lobby smell like stale coffee? Oh, the coffeehouse. The one installed on a military space station.

A ding signaled the arrival of an airfoil in the bank of four that cozied together in the inlet at the end of the lobby, across from the “artwork” of visceral death Power Plant had hung here. Framed and everything. One piece of art illustrated a standoff between two Terrans holding fusion cannons. At some point, the lines blurred between standoff and suicide pact.

A light panel above the airfoil blinked on. The corresponding airfoil swished open, and out stepped Sixth Sense, clothes too large and bagging around the ankles, sleeves hiding his hands. Steeple was right. The Transcript was right. He’d used page fifteen as toilet paper on the trip here, but it was right. Hey, everyone needed to heed the plumber’s call.

Steeple’s lips twisted into a pinched smile. He licked them, already tasting the honey of Sixth Sense’s template. Breathed it in. How...mmmarveloussss, mmm-hmm.

Stale coffee smelled like burned fire ants. Legion should know for the benefit of his guests.

Sixth Sense approached, unsure eyes edging across the lobby in a stuttered line, steps hesitant. He rubbed the back of his neck to alleviate the chafing from that shock collar Power Plant had locked on him.

Finally, he spoke. The lobby was so blank of character his words stumbled around the walls. He said he had come as a welcoming committee until their leader, Legion, arrived. A lie. Legion was attempting to summarize the mess in his office into an insurance claim. Why he’d overturned his own garbage ionizer, no one knew. Even the Transcript gave only a shrug of surrender. If not for Legion’s fondness for caramel-coated fish sticks, Steeple would feel no pity for him. Yes, before this day ended, Steeple would visit Your Caramel-Coated Fish Stick Emporium in the shopping district. A shame the business refused to expand its market to literally any other product.

A thought brushed against Steeple’s. The sensation felt as gentle as cotton balls rubbing together, but a taste of honey played with Steeple’s appetite. Oh, how ssssucculent. Sixth Sense was attempting telepathy on him. Wouldn’t work. Steeple’s hyperability rated above Sixth Sense’s. Perhaps he should allow Sixth Sense access to his memories of puberty. But he hated sounds of screaming.

Steeple hung a hand off the lobby’s front desk and reached out. Not literally, but telepathically. Entered Sixth Sense's mind, sensed an eidetic memory. Why did Sixth Sense wear glasses in this age of eye correction, why the asthma? Ah, he was a farmer’s son, from a family that didn’t believe in DNA resetting. Toyed with recollections inside the brain of this farmer’s son. Too many machinery accidents cooped up inside, so Steeple decided to stay away. He could do without seeing another severed toe through someone else’s eyes. He simply smirked while piloting through this mindscape, performed aerial loops and tailspins through personality, memories, knowledge, habits. Felt tempted to coerce Sixth Sense into picking his nose. Did so. Steeple found something amusing about watching someone go knuckle deep.

Sixth Sense pushed his glasses up his nose and asked what Steeple was smiling about. Oh, nothing, nothing. If Sixth Sense only knew. Time to twerk this delicate mind before its owner grew too uneasy. Steeple left the desk and his fingers eeeaaassssed over Sixth Sense’s temples, explored—mmmmmm, his tongue slithered over his lips—found the area of this titillating brain he needed and...click. Sixth Sense now knew what he must do. Steeple informed him he was an adelphos, part of his gathering adelphoi. Now, red rover, red rover, call Ace Spandex over.

Steeple smiled more broadly. Aahhhh. That vibrating euphoria he felt whenever entering someone's mind, memorizing and tagging the person’s unique mental template...that rush tingled through him now. It frothed over his body like sweet vanilla cream. Warm, enveloping. Wait. Had he wet his pants? Nope. Eeexxcccceeelllleeennntt. Wouldn’t be the first time. Tell no one.

Chapter Four: All Access

“Attention: entity Sixth Sense has lifted entity Uh New Entity I Guess’s restricted access.”

Legion fired his office’s speaker a puzzled look, complete with pursed lips, head tilt, and void “huh” to his slack cheeks. He called this look his bafflement value meal, all indications pointing to “say what now?”

“What was that?” he wondered aloud. He wrapped his arms around himself when Janice pumped another burst of cold and rotten pork stench through her vents.

“’Cause I wanna-ted to hear what the wall’s breaky-breaky sound like.” In the corner where the most glass shards ruined the carpet, Power Plant flaunted his chest proudly.

“I’m not talking to you. And you should know that sound from the last dozen things you breaky-breakied. And I thought I asked you to leave my walls alone four or five times. And fix your collar.” Legion scratched his head. “Janice, acknowledge. Open viewscreen. Display entity Sixth Sense and entity Uh New Entity I Guess’s position, bird’s eye view at preset angle, distance of six feet. Follow entities at pace. Oh, and you know what? Janice, acknowledge. Relist entity Uh New Entity I Guess as”—what, what, what?—“entity Creepy Guy.” He was creepy enough. “Yeah. Why not?”

“Opening viewscreen, displaying as requested. Relisting entity Uh New Entity I Guess as entity Creepy Guy Yeah Why Not.”

“Janice, the pause in speech means the end of the command.”

“And congratulations for entering the lightning round of our show!” Sparkling applause. At least Legion was in for more cash and prizes.

Janice played a game-show jingle as a viewscreen budded into solid form. It flickered on to show Sixth Sense and this new visitor wandering through the lobby’s left-hand door, headed...to the armory? The storage building? Both structures stood about ten or so minutes from the lobby. Maybe the computer tower, which sprouted up next to the armory building like a fifteen-story beanstalk. But why would Sixth Sense guide him anywhere? Was this over that farming training Legion had denied him? The budget didn’t include wheat-silo tutoring, and that was that. Legion could justify the cow-milking lessons. Fresh milk, you know.

Legion flinched at the pattering rain at his window. Thunder bellowed. “Janice, is ‘lightning round’ literal?”

* * *

The half-cybernetic computer administrator Ace Spandex hunched quietly in his laboratory, lights off, sounds off. Well, not his laboratory, per se, but nobody else wandered into the master communication room on the top floor of Station One’s communication tower. The darkness was formless, but it soothed him like a security blanket.

All his stuff was strewn about, so most of the time, he lived, breathed, and deactivated here. Kept him safe from some of Power Plant’s more poisonous hobbies. He said “some” because, 3.6 percent of the time, one found him regardless of where he hid. His programming now harbored phobias over doll’s heads.

Ace leaned closer to a microchip he studied, which catnapped inside a harness atop a table he’d dragged into the center of the room. It had come from Sixth Sense, who’d handed it to Ace for help to clear it of a data worm. In addition to the worm, someone had beamed a tracker onto this chip, which activated once anyone accessed the data. Lucky for Sixth Sense, Ace blocked the tracker. But what data was worth tracking? From what Ace had read from Sixth Sense’s file, his parents were murdered over this data.

Outside, lightning scrabbled across the sky. With one finger accessing the memory chip, the computer expert parsed its data, all 320.6 exbibytes of binary-encoded memories. He’d told Sixth Sense he’d finish examining this thing in ten days, but he’d now taken almost a month. The Good Guys’ rivals, the Bad Guys, had unknowingly included a would-be galactic conqueror, Mechanism, in their ranks. Mechanism’s attempted conquest had stretched Ace’s microchip timeline. He’d promised Sixth Sense he’d scrub out the data worm some brothers, the Urgs, had beamed onto this chip. A tough act since simply connecting to the chip meant the worm could infect him. This he felt like a fever threatening to break. But his immune system was programmed by Mechanism and so was a product of that megalomaniac’s genius. Like it or not, the guy knew his wines and his antivirus software.

He cleared his throat—the phlegm cleaners recycled the spicy gunk to his stomach—and waited for his software to finish examining the data. To do that, it had to read everything, and Ace got a visual smack of whatever Sixth Sense’s dad had seen.

He shut his eyes, leaned his elbows on the table, let data tumble down his vision. A memory here, a memory there...nothing substantial except Sixth Sense’s history of trying pig slop.

Ace Spandex leaped at the br-breep buzzing along his temple. If sound were a feeling, this sound was a prickle. His gabber, a tiny communicator that sat in his ear, had partly busted 1.1 days ago. The cookbots had found it and assumed it was a pea and...well...the rest was history. And part of someone’s stool.

“Incoming connection from entity Legion, sweetums,” Janice said in his gabber. “Answer within the next five seconds for a chance to win a free advertisement. No restrictions apply, honey bear. For you, they never do. Nnnnever.” She smooched the air.

Ace clonked his head on the table. Janice had somehow adopted a bug in her programming and now thought she and Ace were in a relationship. Ace felt less repelled by her pet names after he’d swapped her previous Sly Stallone voice mod for something feminine. Frankly, he just wanted to get rid of the haunt control’s slur and constant hollering for Adrian.

“Janice, acknowledge. I don’t think I should have to clarify this, but we’re not dating. I also don’t think I should have to clarify it for the fortieth time.”

Still nothing controversial on Sixth Sense’s microchip. Well, except first-date advice from dad. It wasn’t controversial on 45.9 percent of the planets in the Lower Antilles Spatial Region since confetti wasn’t involved. “Janice, acknowledge. Is this connection flagged as important?” He grabbed a cola can on the table, realized it was empty, and flicked his wrist to send it spiraling into the garbage ionizer. The ashes of its demise smelled like shuttle exhaust.

“Importance level is rated six. And congratulations! Our free advertisement contest has just been modified to include a no-purchase-necessary clause. You’re in the final round of our program. Nice job, babe.”

Great. Ace moved on to the next bit of information: Sixth Sense learning to corral gnawls. These Urgs had buried issues if they were chasing this data across the universe. And weird that Sixth Sense had lost his German accent and diction. His parents’ were thicker than peanut butter.

“Janice, acknowledge. Accept incoming connection.”

“Done, Acey.”

“And stop calling me that at work.”

“Hey, Ace.” Legion’s voice crackled through the gabber.

Ace scratched his ear from the tickling pulsation. Ace didn’t even know why he used a gabber. His hardware included a communicator. Old habit. “Legion, if this is about trying to score free broadcast again, I told you I’m not built with the proper antennae.”

“Not about that.”

“Good. You shouldn’t watch Rational Clown Posse anyway. I’ve seen you at Station One’s face-painting booth. You’re still impressionable from the drugs the hospital pumped into you on your visit.”

“Actually, that explains so much about my recent sleeping habits.”

Ace wandered to the fridge doojigger and opened it. He grabbed another cola. Empty too. What exactly happened during his brain defrags? “And how is Jeff’s timeout going?” He grabbed a full can.

“You know what? I turn my back for half a second, and he’s gone. I’ve got Catastrophe tracking him across the station, and he’s either decorating our Fireballs with seashells—”

“Explosive seashells?”

“—don’t you know it—or starting another public incident, which might explain why my first aid kit is missing. No matter what, ready the giblet shields.”

Ace would have felt concern, but instead he used 4.3 percent of his CPU to check Sixth Sense’s Halloween costumes through his dad’s perspective. The cowboy look was not nice to him. “So what’s got you calling me this late at night on my off time?” Oh. That wasn’t Halloween.

“Tell Ace what you’re calling for in the next five seconds, and you’ll walk away with this—new—dining set,” Janice blurted in.

“Ace, I need you to monitor Sixth Sense,” Legion said. “He’s guiding a questionable visitor through our station to the armory, the computer tower, or that sock tower the laundrybots built and the janitorbots refuse to clean. Anyway, Sixth Sense is acting weird. Janice listed this visitor as Creepy Guy Yeah Why Not. Don’t ask. Just teach Janice what stammering is. And I really need that new dining set.”

“Maybe this Creepy Guy Yeah Why Not has some dirt on Sixth Sense. I do now.” Ace eyed his can. Why did it taste like liquid rubber? Oh. That was the advertised flavor. “But you know how impressionable his telepathy makes him to strong mental energies. Once he wandered too close to a chicken farm, and not five minutes later, his nose was bruised, and he had feed speckling his mouth.” He squinted into the can and...oh, wow. A doll’s head. How had Power Plant squeezed that in there?

“Let’s file that under ‘medical expenses I won’t deal with.’ For the time being, Pincushion is intercepting the two of them—”

“And if he arrives in five seconds, you’ll have a shot at winning a vacation for two to the nearest brown dwarf if you can outlast the radiation. We can finally take that vacation we’ve been talking about, honey.”

“Janice, you hate traveling and you also can’t. Besides, what have we discussed about irradiating all carbon-based life?” Ace sighed.

Legion said, “Anyway, Ace, make sure they don’t access anywhere else. I’d go, but I have to check over some application profiles IP sent over. Looking at these, I realize the adage ‘everyone’s a winner’ was never more tongue in cheek. Oh, except when applied to Winner.” He huffed. “An immortal. Didn’t IP get their fill of immortals when the immortal had gotten his fill of napalm in Station One’s pool? For swimming and drinking.”

“Intercepting what who when where why now?” Ace checked his window. A meteor flashed into a fireball upon contact with the atmospheric bubble. In his mind, he heard it growl aflame. The station’s defenses took care of it before it hit the ground. It dissolved it into dust in the lashing rain. “Oh, and how? Can’t forget how.”

“Seriously, Ace. Please cover this one. These applications are killing me. I’ve got hundreds of these th—I just clicked to the next one, and it’s Schizophrenic’s. Does IP even vet these?”

“Legion—”

“Ugh. Forget it. I need a break anyway. I’ll intercept them with Pincushion, but I need you to coordinate while I’m on the move. I want this visitor in a detainment cell and on his way out of here the next chance we get.”

“Don’t know when that’ll happen what with the meteor shower.” Ace approached a window and pressed his hands on its uninviting surface. The meteors above wandered aimlessly in the sky, vague forms behind the rain’s veil.

“Ace, I see maybe three rocks the size of my fist. It’s a meteor drizzle. I’m sure we can beg IP to send a law-tran out here.”

“They were the ones who issued the meteor warning.”

“Their weatherman needs his vision adjusted. Just keep an eye on our visitor. I’m sending you my viewscreen. Control, acknowledge. Cut connection.”

A click concluded the discussion. A viewscreen sprouted out in front of the wall of screens lining the room’s windows. It depicted Sixth Sense and Creepy Guy Yeah Why Not traveling through an armory hallway. What was Sixth Sense thinking, guiding an unknown around their weapons? They nearly forbade Franchise from setting foot in there.

This new visitor was as uncoordinated as a marionette with an epileptic puppeteer. His arms swayed into walls with deficient control—he whacked a painting to the floor—and his stiff legs didn’t bend properly at the knees. His skin resembled thin leather and didn’t give much when he skidded against a wall.

Pincushion showed up in the viewscreen’s eye. No sound accompanied the interaction, but the field leader pointed toward the direction from which Sixth Sense and Creepy Guy Yeah Why Not had come. He still wore those shorts a toddler had puked on when IP forced him to attend a charity barbecue. He hadn’t had time to change yet.

“Viewscreen, acknowledge. Increase volume to four.”

“Honey, pookums.” Janice clicked whatever program she used for a tongue. “Don’t talk around me when I’m here.”

* * *

Pincushion gestured to the new visitor whose eerie smile nettled him like razorblades scraping his spine. Something not right about this individual. His brow creeped Pincushion out. If the eyes were the windows to the soul, this guy’s soul had an eave.

“No, sir, you can’t wander around the armory. I know this station is a retail jackpot, but some areas are closed to the public. One place happens to be here because of the explosives. Another place is Power Plant’s living quarters for the same reason.” The wall next to him buzzed with an arrow labelled TO THE ARMORY FOR AMAZING SAVINGS ON THE COST OF LIVING. But no one would take it seriously since it was written in small caps.

The visitor must have lagged back a few grades in school because Pincushion found himself repeating his assertion a third time. And then doing that eyebrow thing that worked on the old bums when he was a kid. Now one of them was a doctor making a few more thousand a year than Pincushion. Back to the eyebrow thing that wasn’t working with this visitor.

A dazed Sixth Sense had accompanied the visitor. He blundered into a wall sconce. It jammed against his shock collar and cracked, snapping it out of alignment with an audible buzz. Sixth Sense wriggled in sync with the buzz. When the buzz ceased, he blinked. The visitor grazed the back of his head with two fingers, which reset him, sending him forward again like a windup toy.

Sixth Sense smiled again at Pincushion. “Come join us, Abioye. It’s perfect where I am.”

The visitor reached out to scrape Pincushion’s cheek as if to comb a lock of hair behind his ear. Pincushion’s African hair didn’t come in locks, though. Why was the visitor trying to scrape Pincushion? He seemed to emanate coldness. Pincushion sidestepped to avoid the visitor’s fingers. His metal knee almost made him misstep.

“Do I have lint on my media outfit?” Pincushion brushed his shoulder. “No. Still just the pea soup a kid decorated me with. Wasn’t even half digested. Peas all over the place. I’m not mad about it. Just keep your distance.” He dodged another brush from the visitor. “Sir, if you try to touch me one more time, I’ll use my rape whistle.” He pulled his pistol out and let sinister light glint off it. “Here it is.” Second look. Wait, this was a wadded barbecue bib. Switched hands, dug out his pistol. “Aha.” Good first-and-a-half impression.

The visitor finally said hello, his voice as dry as his skin. The single word was drawn and rattled Pincushion’s spine, as if a snake had slithered down the stranger’s throat and spoke for him. Definitely a “special case.” His awkward chin, like a point chiseled down to a blunt end, focused his stare. He licked his upper lip and began reciting facts about Pincushion in his brittle voice. Name: Abioye Iwu. Birthday: January fourth, 9064. Employment history: became a police officer on Mission Beach on June twenty-eighth, 9090. Incapacitated in the kneecap and retired on August seventeenth, 9095. Now suffers from insomnia, with an alertness regulator in an earlobe. Became a Good Guy on May twenty-fifth, 9109, currently serving as field leader. Mind template: with a hint of sssswwweeeeeeeeet butterscotch.

Pincushion’s arm hairs bristled. “So you own my rookie card.”

The visitor snickered, which came out in a stuttered hiss. He rested a hand on that sconce Sixth Sense had hit and remarked that Pincushion would make an iiiiiinteresssssting addition to the adelphoi, mmm-hmmm. Adelphoi? The visitor reached out again, his fingers wriggling like the legs of a spider weaving a cobweb. Pincushion felt that ghostly cold wisp around him. Those spindly fingers tweaked toward his cheek and—

“That’s it. On the floor now, Touchy-Feely.” Pincushion dodged back, dark lips pulled over bared white teeth. He clicked his gun to ready a light-bullet with a charge and looked sideways along his cheek. “Sixth Sense, back me up, brother.”

Sixth Sense blinked as if Power Plant had puffed a cloud of flour in his face again. He promenaded around Pincushion, maneuvering between a pair of oak wing chairs, each step as unhurried as if underwater.

Pincushion watched him out of the side of his vision, one eye still affixed to the interloper. “And contact Legion while I keep this stickman cover—”

Pressure pierced Pincushion’s wrist! A finger dug between his arm bones and knifed his forearm with searing pain. His world lit on crocking fire. He choked, almost spat out mucus, blinked back tears. Sixth Sense held his arm in a death grip.

“Hagen—” The outrageous agony rupturing his arm made speech a tortured effort. “Brother, what are you doing? Is this about your latest performance assessment?”

Pincushion had the hypermutation of bony extensions prickling out of callused holes in his skin. Sixth Sense avoided these spikes when he locked his arms around Pincushion’s neck and wrist, yanked him back, and planted a knee in Pincushion’s tailbone. “He’s restrained.”

The visitor praised Sixth Sense. Even in the impossible anguish Pincushion experienced, he felt an oily tang to the visitor’s words.

The visitor informed Pincushion he would soon join the adelphoi. He reached out again and scraped his fingernails against Pincushion’s temple—

And enlightenment washed him.

* * *

Ace jittered back from the viewscreen footage. He tripped over a clutter of boxes behind him, flipped, slapped against the floor, tumbled over his head like a football rolling point over point, smacked into a table, and along the way upended everything that could possibly make that roll any more embarrassing. A fart tooted out somewhere in there. Lucky for him, he’d opted for Greek salad instead of baked beans at lunch.

There was no room for words here. Sixth Sense and that guy with the chopstick arms and pencil legs and Pincushion and that guy—holy crock—and Pincushion—and Sixth...and S...Hagen had pinned Pincushion back and that guy touched him—and Sixth Sense—Hagen did that! What did Creepy Guy Yeah Why Not have over Sixth Sense? Did they share an asthmatic kinship or whatever bonded these reed-thin types?

“J-Janice...uh...Janice, acknowledge.” Ace Spandex blinked his eye’s shutters. In the viewscreen, Pincushion stepped away from Sixth Sense as if he’d forgotten the previous five minutes, as though his memory were as fleeting as a goldfish’s or Power Plant’s when so many shiny objects clanged around him. Did Pincushion now have a thing for shiny objects? They both advanced smoothly, like rollercoaster cars leisurely sliding into line before the ride began. But...Sixth Sense and Creepy Guy Yeah Why Not and Pincushion and Creepy Guy Yeah Why Not and...and...and holy mother of all piss crocks!

“Awaiting command, honeybun.” Janice’s voice dripped like sap trickling down tree bark. “Meanwhile, let’s hear from our sponsors.”

Ace slathered clammy sweat off his forehead, wiped it through his hair. “I have no idea what I—Oh yeah. Legion. Do that thing where you contact entity Legion. What was the command? Contact entity Legion.”

Ace’s software had jacked up his fear level a few notches, and he kept having to dial it back down twice a day. Okay. Done. Now he had to straighten his head, regain his bearings. Ace. Head straight. Bearings regained. He launched Head Straightener and Bearing Regainer version six. Maybe backflip into the table again, but his pizza was already smeared over him. He plucked a pepperoni slice out of his nostril and examined both sides. Whatever. He shoved it into his mouth.

Legion popped onto the connection. “Ace, what’s happening? I’m on my way to escort the visitor—”

“The visitor’s name is entity Creepy Guy Yeah Why Not,” Janice said.

Legion stopped talking at a dead halt. Ace heard him stammer a word, then another, only guttural rasps that came from a brain whose wheels had stopped spinning in the right direction. Finally, he settled on, “Janice, stop insisting.”

“Legion, listen. Listen.” Ace needed a fifth of a liter of oxygen right now—his lungs felt heavy, his voice shriveled—so he gulped in the appropriate intake of breath, a precise amount he’d never mention he knew to a date. “Listen. Okay?” A real date, not Janice. “Just listen. I got—listen—”

“What am I listening to? Wait, you drank Space Cow’s chocolate milk again, haven’t you? You need to stop when they say, ‘We add our secret ingredient.’ That’s not an advertisement, Ace. That’s a legally mandated warning.”

“Janice caught me issuing commands to other haunt controls. I think she’s slipping something into my water, but I can’t be sure if it’s vodka or arsenic.” Ace swiveled around toward his mess of pizza, but he wasn’t looking at it, only through it. Possible since it was from Transparencizzeria. He brushed his hand against the table, feeling knots of wood at fifteen magnifications. “Anyway, remember Creepy Guy Yeah Why Not?”

“Is there any possibility I could not remember Creepy Guy Yeah Why Not?”

“Gist is don’t go. Don’t meet him. Where are you?”

“I’m about to enter the armory building.”

Ace rushed across the room for no reason, accidentally kicking aside an empty coffee cup. He stopped and waved his hands around the air. “Do not. Stay away.”

“Do not stay away?”

“Do not. Period. Stay away. Period. Creepy Guy Yeah Why Not performed some voodoo hex on Sixth Sense, and then they both performed the voodoo hex on Pincushion. It’s....”

“This is exactly like when that woman coughed in your soup, and you thought you had glaucoma.”

“No. Okay, a little, yes.” Ace bit down on a slice of pizza. At least he thought he had, but it turned out he wasn’t holding anything. He needed a flashlight to find his food, the only meal that refracted light like a prism. “This looks like mind control.” He checked the viewscreen to see Creepy Guy Yeah Why Not looking deeply through it as if studying Ace. Ace’s skin writhed.

“Ace, how sure are you Creepy Guy Yeah Why Not mind-controlled Sixth Sense? Maybe you’re seeing Sixth Sense being influenced. One time, Sixth Sense crossed paths with a light panel and then wandered around all day saying, ‘Click, click.’ The only way we could wake him up was to convince him he’d burned out.”

“Wait for me. Please. Hide somewhere and contact me when you arrive.” Ace grabbed the coffee cup and tossed it into the ionizer.

“Okay. I’m stepping into a closet. Nope, not a closet. Actually a single-stall bathroom. Occupied by someone with many tentacles and very obvious emphysema. Let me get back to you.”

“Do that.” The click in his gabber ended the conversation. “Janice, seriously, I had a lot to drink earlier, so please tell me my blood-alcohol level or call poison control. Up to you.”

* * *

Steeple smirked at his two peons, the beginning of his adelphoi. Induced mindlessness. Oh, how delicioussssss. One possessed the hyperability to, like him, influence minds. He could also manipulate objects within eyeshot. The other possessed the hypermutation of bone protrusions that prickled from his skin and, as his template indicated, an application to that hypermutation he had yet to discover. This Pincushion had learned in the academy he possessed the ability to pee into a cup from seven yards away given a high enough balcony, and that had been a point of pride for many years. This new hyperability was better than hyperurination. Also better than his skill with a beer bong.

Steeple gave both adelphoi a gabber calltag on which to contact him. It was a disposable one, foamphreak5096. He wasn’t proud of it, but at least he wasn’t one of the first 5095 phreaks. That would have been reprehensible.

Steeple commanded Pincushion and Sixth Sense to follow him as he gathered more willing disciples. They nodded. Pincushion even offered to guide them along an optimal path. Yyyeeessss, that would be splendid. Steeple’s thirsssssty lips split in a smile that...oh, crap. His ribbon mint dropped out of his awkwardly long jaw. It rolled down an air vent with a tinny clatter. Crock. Just the right glucose-to-sucrose ratio to make his pupils dilate.

Chapter Five: Business Lunch

The Gorging Court, Station One’s food court, smelled like a foul mélange of all ethnic cuisines as long as someone considered carrion a separate entry. Vulture Value did. So did the medical office, and what were they doing in the food services business anyway?

Detritus took a seat across from Wasted, plopping a food tray on the floating table between them. The tray held a quivering mountain of grayed flesh that felt like unyielding rubber when he poked it. Guessing from the name of the meal, best-case scenario was it included orangutan. Worst-case scenario was it included live orangutan.

Detritus and Wasted were Bad Guys on Station One posing as Good Guys. Detritus had the hyperability to blow himself up, and he swore he’d try it for the first time one day. Wasted had the hyperability to convert oxygen into drunkenness, and so he spent most of his time asleep or singing off key. And they were here to mess things up for Legion, slip back home to Bad Guy headquarters, and tell the big boss, Master Asinine, all the grand trouble they caused. While looking for that grand trouble to cause, they bumped into a mystery room with a row of monolithic robots, a timer with Virillian numbers—Virillians being a mute species, so what did they count for?—racing toward some unknown deadline, a headless corpse, and some viewscreen scrolling computer instructions he couldn’t understand.

The Gorging Court looked especially busy today, every voice frothing into a single conversation. Today was a galactic holiday, so IP had fed the public some touristy story to entice them to Station One. Thanks to a deal involving a family-of-four admission price—twenty moolahs and an animal sacrifice—Detritus had waited ten minutes for the line at Chemical Conundrum, the least dangerous eatery in the joint, to peter out before he ordered. He caught a glimpse of what they injected into their food to keep it fresh, but by then it was too late, and now he risked ingesting a hefty dose of MSG and embalming fluids.

Wasted sat across from him, cradled in that same wheelbarrow Detritus had pushed him around in since they’d arrived here at Station One.

Detritus swept off the goggles he wore for some reason and put them on the table. “Okay, buck.” He sighed as he grabbed his fork and fought off a swipe from his food. “It’s been three days, and I still ain’t figured out those gigantic robots in the hidden room, what that command line meant, or how you manage the bathroom on your own.” Wasted was asleep right now after a binge with a two liter jug of water, but Detritus felt like talking this aloud anyway. “But the dude in the video—the guy who got shot and beheaded and then you thought he was a hedge—he seemed crocking scared of whatever those things were put there for. And the Good Guys are sitting on this whole robot business. So we got two choices.”

A fan whooshed on above Detritus, which picked up his reddish-brownish hair and swirled it around.

Wasted sleepily snorted. He woke up, looked around in a moment of sobriety, and then noticed the giant monkey head with a microphone tongue into which a patron spat his order. He snickered and muttered something, but the only words Detritus caught were “grease,” “food,” and “that combination won’t stay down.”

“Buck, listen up. Either we call this mission a wash and hightail back to HQ before those robots hit the zero hour, or we find some way to stop them. But I ain’t going home to get laughed at. And claiming we did something nasty here is out of the question, ’cause even my doctor says I’m a lousy liar.”

“Heh. Yeah, I rem—” Wasted interrupted himself midword to snort and then never finished his thought thanks to his drunken narcolepsy.

Detritus forked up a mouthful of his mystery goop and swallowed it. It went down fighting. “So our only choice is stop them robots and whatever malarkey they got planned. That’s mission one. Wake up.” He leaned over the table, tapped Wasted’s cheek, and fought his food’s escape attempt via knife combat.

“Ya took them Virillian studies in school, which is a feat in itself since ya managed to crawl your crock into class twice a week. So as long as we clear-head you up for a couple hours, you’ll probably figure out all them serifs and dots in that Virillian language jambalaya, maybe tell us what them robots is crocking up in the crockpot.” He checked everyone who stood close by, hushed his voice, and leaned in. “And, hey, if we solve this robot problem, the Good Guys’ll be so convinced we’re on the up an’ up, ain’t nobody on this station gonna touch us. Might even make leadership.” Wasted was asleep again, so Detritus was talking to himself. Same as always.

Behind Wasted, a bear in a top hat piloted an undersized convertible civ-tran around tables and diners. On its way back to the circus probably. Detritus waited for the putt-putt of the civ-tran to fade. “And the key to this thing is you gotta sober up.”

Quick fact about Wasted: the more he imbibed, the more his thinking cleared. He was a reverse-logic drinking buddy. So Detritus had a plan, and it involved his dear friend and any liquor store within stumbling distance.

“So tonight?” Detritus waited for Wasted’s belch to reverberate away, which took almost half a minute. “We’re goin’ on a bender.”

Wasted choked awake. “Woohoo, a bender.” His fist shot into the air on an arm that barely supported the weight. With all that movement, his complexion went pale, and he tipped his head over the wheelbarrow’s edge to let loose a lavish stream of corn-speckled vomit. Seagulls cawed out of Island Meat Mayhem’s animal traps to peck at the mess. His pastel face still hanging over the edge, Wasted grunted, “I love benders. They’re the best kinda benders.”

Detritus threw a handful of napkins as thick as dishtowels at Wasted. Some slipped into the barf bag dangling around Wasted’s neck. He grabbed his goggles from the table. “Clean yourself up. Tonight we’re crammin’ back hooch, and then we’re crammin’ out Virillian crockwash.”

Chapter Six: Fancy Meeting You Here

Legion blurted a gasp that cartwheeled out his throat in hiccups when the l-door to the janitorial closet whistled away. He clutched a hand to his chest, preparing to duck from a latent explosion, but saw it was only Ace Spandex who entered the secluded and petite sanctuary in which he’d found a hiding place.

“Okay, between Power Plant treating my office knickknacks like dodge balls and this Creepy Guy Yeah Why Not you claim has bewitched Sixth Sense, I’m out of patience and bladder contents. So no beating around the bush. What exactly happened? Smells like marmalade in here.”

“Janice, acknowledge. Lock closest door.” Ace Spandex fell against the l-door that reappeared. His shoulder rattled a shelf that held bottles of cleansers, tubs of detergents, and thermoses of solvents probably from the same company whose containers tricked Sylvester the Cat into keeping salt and rat poison beside each other in the same cupboard.

He slid to the floor. He pinched his nose, rubbed his eyes with his index fingers, and huffed out a lingering breath. “Pincushion was standing like...like...I don’t know...his hackles were up. Then Creepy Guy Yeah Why Not cornered him. Sixth Sense sneaked around him, grabbed his arms, and locked him back. Creepy Guy Yeah Why Not grazed his temple, and then Pincushion went from hackles raised to ramrod straight and stopped struggling. Didn’t even blink. Just stood like a mindless robot. No free thought, just instruction. Creepy Guy called him and Sixth Sense his ‘apple foil.’ That term might be a tad, one hundred percent inaccurate. It does smell like marmalade in here.”

“Silly, Acey. He used the word adelphoi, a plural of adelphos.” Janice, ever the dictionary.

“What’s an adelphos?” asked Legion.

“From what I gather, something that drools babyishly. Sixth Sense and Pincushion are his baby squad now.” Ace bit his upper lip. “I swear Creepy Guy Yeah Why Not put them under a spell just by touch. Or”—he raised a single digit—“maybe Pincushion finally realized that puke didn’t wash out of those navy-blue shorts of his. Janice, acknowledge. Display previous viewscreen recording.”

Legion took a seat under a shelf of turpentine. One bottle had been left uncapped. He detected the chemicals that singed the air with a corrosive tang. Together he and Ace watched the footage of Pincushion’s capture, from the ambush to the zapping with Sixth Sense’s shock collar—weird what a little shock could do—to the final mind control.

Upon its finale, Legion said, “Okay, two situations. One, Pincushion does look ridiculous in those shorts—”

“I’ve told him eight point five times. Don’t ask where the fraction comes from.”

“—and two, we’re dealing with an interloper whose details Janice can’t pick up from a simple bioscan.” Legion rubbed his chin. “First things first, is everyone present on the station?”

“Janice, acknowledge. Identify all Good Guy entities on Station One.”

“I’ll do anything for one of your foot rubs, sweets, but first, let’s go to our judges on that answer.” Janice replied with a tone so sugary Legion checked the wall to see if it bled syrup. It did. “Entities Ace Spandex, Catastrophe, Franchise, Incendiary, Legion, Organism, Pincushion, Plastique, Power Plant, Scapegoat, Sixth Sense, and Withered Old Battle-Axe are on station. Entities Pincushion and Sixth Sense are exhibiting strange bioreadings.”

“How can you give her foot rubs?” Legion asked.

“Janice, acknowledge.” Ace scratched his nose. “Relist entities Sixth Sense and Pincushion as nonhostile civilians, access level zero.”

“And Janice, acknowledge. What is this stuff?” Legion traced his finger along the syrup and brought that to his nose. “Why does it burn like the stuff the cookbots use in their hoof gumbo?”

“That’s the special sauce, silly.” Janice slipped into game-show mode. “And one lucky contestant can double their winnings by guessing what that sauce is.”

“Now my hackles are raised.” Legion leaned against another wall. This one cried ketchup. So what was their next move? They had enough reason to assume the interloper was up to no good, like Franchise and Power Plant in an eating competition, because Legion was positive an eating competition shouldn’t entail a round called Test of Wills.

He stood and paced the limited space of the janitorial closet, scents mutating from tangy marmalade to salty ketchup to the secret sauce he was convinced was paint solvent.

Legion still concerned himself with two other things. First, was Creepy Guy Yeah Why Not’s influence reversible? Second, when the time came to transport this guy off station, how could Legion ensure he wouldn’t attempt the same voodoo on his escort? Legion couldn’t exactly drop him into a box, smack a mailing label on it, and call Planet Express.

Or...wait. “What are the legalities on shipping living things?”

Ace looked up. “I went over this same thing with Power Plant and Franchise when they wanted to race across Stratus Cloud.”

* * *

Steeple whacked a hand on the door that remained solid when he approached it. His arm swung as if it hung dislocated from its shoulder. The door...locked. And he with no access. He smiled. This was no obstacle, only a...okay, it technically was an obstacle.

He lumbered aside and commanded Sixth Sense, who stood behind him, to resolve this problem. Sixth Sense, unsmiling, strolled toward the door with identical steps tapping in identical taps. How delectable, the sameness of his adelphoi’s movements. How sinfully delectable. Mmmmmmm, yyyeeessssss.

The wall beside the door held a portrait of Intergalactic Protection’s former field marshal, Ravioss Hullinger, below that the words REST IN PEACE: TRIOXIDILLIANS ARE HORRIBLE AT KEEPING TRACK OF BIRTHDAYS TO 9110. The portrait faded into a picture of Field Marshal Horcross Breeng, with the words OTHER TRIOXIDILLIANS ARE BETTER AT KEEPING TRACK OF BIRTHDAYS TO LET’S WAIT AND SEE. REGISTER YOUR DEATH DAY GUESS AT THE GORGING COURT TODAY TO WIN A TRIP FOR TWO TO HIS FUNERAL.

Sixth Sense checked the door in a rectangular visual sweep and squinted with concentration—

The door ripped from its frame and corrugated into a violence of metal and wires. The sounds of anguish accompanied the door’s butchery. Metal and plastic spat crumbs from the wreckage Sixth Sense mashed into what was now only a pellet of refined ore. The structural massacre smelled like chalk. Steeple felt a rush tingle within him. Ohhh, how lllluuuusssccccious.

Sixth Sense stood aside, displaying no more character than a table. The way was clear, he told Steeple.

With Ace Spandex now limiting their access, Steeple and his adelphoi would have to travel as a unit. So plans changed, but not much, he told his zealots. First hit: the washroom. The Big Slush on the way to Station One was not a benefit. Its aftertaste was not either. Next, they would hunt Ace Spandex. However—he chuckled, showing his misalignment of teeth—they were free to play with whatever Good Guys they happened across. Yyeesss.

Silly Ace Spandex. No one restricted Steeple’s access.

No one.

* * *

“Warning, entity Sweetums—”

“Janice, how do I get through to you?” Ace Spandex whipped to his feet, butting his head against the coat hook on the janitorial closet’s door. “It isn’t Sweetums, it isn’t Honeybunny, it isn’t Beloved Dearest, and it certainly isn’t anything other than Lord Master Ruler Great Sovereign Ace Spandex, Esquire.” Catching an interrogative glint in Legion’s eye, he shrugged. “Yes. Esquire.”

Legion gave him a sideways glance. “If we start the line of questioning with that, I have a few follow-ups.”

“Janice, acknowledge. What’s the warning?” Ace stepped away from the wall.

“Sixth Sense has circumvented restricted access from armory floor one, hallway sixteen. One lucky contestant could go home with a shiny new Racehorse Fandango. And, judging by Legion’s look, a pink slip.”

Ace threw his hands up. “First Hagen grabs the last ice-cream sandwich from the fridge doojigger, the one with cookie bits. Now he’s circumventing important stuff?”

Legion was already telling Janice to unlock the l-door. He rushed into the hallway. “Doesn’t matter. We have to stop him. Alaphus has to come through one of these years.”

Ace jetted of out the janitorial closet. His hydraulic legs carried him five miles per hour faster than Legion, so within 1.7 seconds, he clasped a hand around Legion’s shoulder. He spun Legion around before his leader reached the next door, which stood down the hall as if staring with a barreled chest. “Legion, everyone needs to steer clear of that guy. I don’t know what his deal is, but if you charge in there, you’ll wind up in the same boat as Sixth Sense and Pincushion.”

“Creepy Guy Yeah Why Not already has unrestricted access to any and every part of the station. Ace, this is a boat I have to sail.” Legion stomped his heel, but the fibrous carpet muffled the emphasis.

“You don’t have to be that sailor, Legion. You can negotiate another route in calmer trade winds.”

Legion flinched his shoulder from Ace’s hand. “Ace, if I don’t steer the rudder right, he’ll take more of my navy. Who’s next? Franchise? Incendiary? Catastrophe? Any of my first mates are at risk. I’m their life raft, Ace. This is the only boat I can sail.”

“There are other life rafts, other lighthouses, Legion.” Ace advanced a step toward Legion with conviction, his face flushing 3.7 degrees warmer than normal. “Don’t go down with this ship. Let me steer the helm.”

Legion looked baffled. “Are we still talking about the intruder?”

“I thought we were talking about the seafood place in the cafeteria.”

“Warning, entity Sugarplum. Sixth Sense has now entered armory floor one, hallway nineteen. Systems indicate he is traveling toward the barracks and possibly the pancetta in your fridge doojigger.”

Ace cracked a fist on the wall. “This intruder must be stopped before he takes more of us or our leftovers.”

Legion marched down the hall. A hand dug around in his pocket and produced his Marsek pistol. “Creepy Guy Yeah Why Not’s boat is about to spring a leak.” He thundered to the l-door, his fear of latent technology seemingly forgotten. Ace could only blink, standing frozen with emptiness in his gut.

“Warning, entity Precious—”

“Janice, acknowledge. Stick with just one pet name.”

“Yes, entity Darling. Can we snuggle now?”

“Later. And your processor weighs eight point seven tons. I’m not the big spoon this time.” He caught himself when Legion stopped and regarded him with trepidation. “I mean we don’t spoon.”

Chapter Seven: The Neighborhood Watch Is Going to Hear about This

Something clunked against Franchise’s wall. Maybe it was an ocelot. That might sound as though he’d lost his mind as Legion, Organism, several cousins, and Station One’s gardener often said, but they lurked around the station: the head trainer at Animal Fiefdom could tame anything with a conch.

In Franchise and Power Plant’s living quarters, Franchise hopped off his bed. The mattress showed its age with a groan of springs. He tossed aside the datasheet he was reading, and it landed with a crinkling flitter on the fire blanket he used as a bedspread for roommate-related reasons. He ducked his head into the hallway outside and checked left...right...le—Aha. Sixth Sense. And Pincushion, whose metal knee and insomnia seemed to not affect him right now. Both flanked some gray-skinned stranger. The stranger staggered as if animated at only fifteen frames a second. His fingers twiddled like stick-bug antennae, and the knobs of his spine protruded out with such accent that they looked like the islands of an archipelago in the ocean of his threadbare shirt. He smelled like salted Plasticine.

“Hagen? Abioye?” Franchise stepped into the hallway. Almost absentmindedly, he cracked his knuckles in slow motion. “Holy halitosis, is this the contortionist who escaped from the station’s people museum?”

They stopped, all three of them, as synchronized as if they shared a brain. Stopped as one, turned as one, and rolled their eyes at Franchise as one. Were they reflecting on Pincushion’s puke-sodden shorts? This hallway had revealing lighting and—oh, crap. Franchise had spilled cereal on his shirt. And he had that lunchbox photo shoot later.

As one, the three regarded Franchise with eyes so tenacious they definitely, positively, certainly were not thinking about Pincushion’s puke-sodden shorts in this lighting. They smirked as one. They advanced as one. Strode as one, swayed arms as one. All three of them, like fraternal triplets.

Franchise didn’t reenter his living quarters. He put his hands up and cautioned back a step. He stumbled, thankful his knee had finished healing after Mechanism had blown it to fragments in his bid for the galaxy. “You guys are giving off a really creepy vibe. And Hagen, I’m comparing this to the time you mind-scanned a copy machine and stood stark still for four hours saying, ‘Bvvvvvvvt.’” Still backpedaling, he bumped into a high-standing table that held only a flower-patterned vase. “Hey, uh...check out Pincushion’s shorts. The crotch looks like a Rorschach test.” The vase danced around and clunked to a rest. “Doesn’t it?”

“Jacob.” Pincushion recited that word in a trance. A chill skittered along Franchise’s backbone. “Come, brother. You require...edification. It’s calming, serene. We share thoughts.”

Franchise gulped. “That’s the weirdest thing to ever come out of your mouth, and you once regurgitated a goldfish you ate on a dare.” He hit the wall of the hallway that led to the station’s tavern, Alcoholics Unanimous. He swallowed what felt like a bottle cap. He’d already cracked his knuckles, but he still worked them. His shirt, a thin layer of cotton, clung to his back. He considered using his hyperability to create multiples of himself.

Pincushion broke pattern and approached him in strides as deliberate as a bride in a wedding procession. “Let us enlighten you.”

“Last time I was enlightened, I didn’t eat sugar for a month.”

The thought of sprinting down the hallway and into the station’s subterranean tunnels didn’t occur to Franchise until Pincushion had almost reached him.

Chapter Eight: Coup D’étated

Ace Spandex darted across the Gorging Court that swarmed with sluggish Terrans, Trioxidillians, Ulfarians, and Gharalgians. They probably waited for that meteor shower to pass. Maybe also the thunderstorm Janice had conjured up. Ace had decreased the rain setting a dozen times, but Power Plant kept jacking it back up to transform Station One into a waterpark. Ace had quickly grown sick of dialing it back, so he let Power Plant have his fun. Kept him distracted from trying to transform Station One into a fire park.

Legion trailed behind by a few yards. Ace Spandex hurried at 13.44 miles per hour, clocking faster than Legion, who lagged behind at 8.12 miles per hour. Ace and Legion had just watched Sixth Sense and Pincushion tackle Franchise. A kerfuffle ensued, some Franchise clones got in the way, one tried defecating on Sixth Sense, another tried giving Pincushion an atomic wedgie by wrapping his underwear around his own spikes, but ultimately Creepy Guy Yeah Why Not won and assimilated Franchise. Now Ace and Legion darted across the station to lock that army behind something Sixth Sense couldn’t rip through. Anything the breakfast outlets in the Gorging Court whipped up could help.

Ace stopped to let Legion catch up. Legion trailed thirteen tables behind. Though the patrons here muttered some praise at him for leading the Good Guys, they were too bored to stir much. The meteor shower had stopped Space Cow from receiving its shipment of gruel fries, so diners were less than energetic.

Legion stopped and surveyed the crowds strewn about the Gorging Court’s tables. His shoulders slouched. “Come on, people. We have a situation on the station. Get out! There are maybe four meteors up there. It’s so irrelevant that space garbage floated through and smacked into the station’s hedge maze.”

“Allow them to finish their”—Ace jolted back when he examined the patrons’ meals—“platypus?”

Legion broke into a run—“Seriously, there’s a mass-tran every ten minutes. Or take Power Plant’s catapult”—and reached Ace in 14.8 seconds. Sweaty and short of breath, he hunched and pointed at the far end of the Gorging Court where a clear-glass elevator airfoil stood tall. It was out of order and had become a homeless person’s apartment, but then again, name one tourist attraction whose food court’s airfoils didn’t have drifters listed as Occupant.

Legion and Ace Spandex cut through the station and into the subterranean tunnels, toward the barracks.

They resurfaced in the hallway that separated Alcoholics Unanimous from the corridor of living quarters where that gray-skinned interloper and his gang lurked, where they had assimilated Franchise. They didn’t dare venture into the barracks itself, so they remained in the adjoining hallway. The hallway held the acrid hint of beer that had dried on the floor days ago.

Ace locked the l-door leading to the barracks so it wouldn’t evaporate when they hit its preset vanishing range. He wanted the barracks on lockdown until he was ready. He activated a three-inch-wide sound dish that wrapped around his ear in segments that click-clacked in place. Putting his ear to the door, he detected no errant footstep, no awkward shuffle. Not a creature was stirring.

Janice had scanned the building of all entities. Fortunately, only Franchise, fresh from a piloting class, had entered the building when Creepy Guy Yeah Why Not and his entourage rolled through. The faceoff was so quiet on the viewscreen that Legion had heard spurs with every step and a western whistle hoot through the silence. Janice had a bad sense of humor.

Legion and Ace Spandex had earlier come up with a strategy. First thought: send in the lunch lady. Dealing with her was no small accomplishment. Civilian casualties not being an option, second thought: send the Good Guys’ alpha team in. Franchise was alpha’s pilot, so that might have influenced that decision. But since the team also consisted of Power Plant and Incendiary, both distance combatants, alpha was a team that didn’t need to step within arm’s length to take down this gray-skinned visitor. But given this attack was on the home front, maybe sending Power Plant wasn’t advisable after his pancake-batter overdose.

Third thought: send the betas in. Catastrophe, Plastique, Scapegoat, and Mabel. Legion’s best hope was Scapegoat jumbling sentences enough to blow a gasket in Creepy Guy Yeah Why Not’s dusty brain. Pop. Sizzle. Let Catastrophe and Plastique do the heavy work. Well...Plastique. Catastrophe often flooded enemies’ senses with that shellac he used to keep his skin tanned. Nobody told him it was shoe polish or that “copper brown” didn’t mean he’d achieved that bronzed hue. Finally, they’d send the elderly Mabel in to command her army of cats to claw out this visitor’s—

Okay, even in Ace’s head, Mabel wasn’t a prospect.

Fourth thought and last, last resort: give up, sit in a circle, and sing “Kumbaya” until they starved to death. Legion’s idea, actually.

But they settled on a different strategy: send Catastrophe in. As an earth elemental, Catastrophe controlled geological matter. He could entrap this newcomer in the concrete walls themselves. Power Plant and Incendiary would back him up, play interference. Well, Incendiary would play interference. Power Plant would play interference with matches.

Still no noise. Ace commanded his sound dish to retract. It folded away with metallic shushes. He turned to Legion, who stood with an arm braced against the wall, heaving thick wheezes of air. “Given any thought to swapping your legs with hydraulic attachments?” Ace asked.

Between gasps, Legion said, “Janice, acknowledge. Replace entity Ace Spandex as my emergency medical contact.” He hobbled to the door and collapsed against it onto the carpet.

Ace shifted over. “Power Plant and Incendiary can be here in a few minutes. Incendiary is just finishing the signing of a treaty between Jefftaria and Legionopolis.” Jefftaria was Power Plant’s fake nation, and Incendiary was its college intern. This made sense. Right?

“Shouldn’t I be there? Didn’t they name me the king of Legionopolis?”

“Not anymore. Your duly-appointed king is now the guy who runs the ice-cream machine’s bone disposal at the carnival.”

“Him? One of his arms is shorter than the other!”

Bold footsteps ascended the staircase that led from the shadowed underground tunnel. Legion and Ace Spandex exclaimed gasps—

Catastrophe sauntered up, his teeth a reflective white, his tone still painted in overemphasized brown—darker than the usual orange—and a single stud earring winking proudly from its perch inside a lobe. “Hello, my adoring fans.” His waxy aura sauntered up with him.

“There are two of us here, and neither of us has watched a single movie you appeared in,” Ace said. He was suddenly glad Catastrophe hadn’t heard that remark, or he’d be treated to a viewscreen showing of some low-budget nonsense of Catastrophe’s. This was what Catastrophe called film studies.

Catastrophe held a datasheet under one arm. Ace looked at it sideways. “Did you bring another headshot datasheet? You know this is a mission, not a casting call.”

“A good publicist sees everything as a dual opportunity.”

“You said that about the cancer-awareness meeting.”

Catastrophe reached Ace and Legion, who stood to give him room at the door. That was when Ace smelled the T-shirt he wore. It smelled like a locker. He read the T-shirt’s jaunty print. “‘Truckers Do It for Any Reason You Give Them’?” Indeed it showed an obese trucker saddled up to a cafeteria counter, butt cheeks melting over a bar stool. It looked as if the trucker hadn’t budged in weeks. “Are you aware you’re wearing that with people around? ‘Truckers Do It for A—’ And it’s on backwards! You’re flouting so many decency rules you make me wish the Fashion Police wasn’t a joke. Go change, or at least turn that thing inside out so the trucker’s colostomy bag doesn’t show.”

“I was preparing for a movie audition. Which reminds me, where’s my trailer?”

“Nonexistent.” Legion stood. “Forget the T-shirt. Here’s the situation. We have a visitor on the station, Creepy Guy Yeah Why Not, and—”

“Wait-wait-wait.” Catastrophe waved a hand in the air, inches from swatting a pillar. “Back up a minute. His name is Creepy Guy?”

“His first name is. His last name is Yeah What Not. And he put Sixth Sense, Pincushion, and Franchise under some sort of mind control. He’s gained access to a couple of restricted areas, and we have no idea what he’s up to. So we’re waiting to assemble the rest of the team, and then everybody but Mabel will hit this Creepy Guy Yeah Why Not as a unit.” Legion smacked a fist into his palm. “Mabel’s contribution will be to offer him a seven-year-old peppermint that fused to the other seven-year-old peppermints in her purse. Sound like a plan?”

“Great. Give me a minute to realign my aura.”

Legion whirled a hand in the air. “Then namaste already.”

Catastrophe stepped away from the door and shut his eyes. His posture straightened, and he raised his chin as if praying to the light panel. He spent a minute in this meditative state until he cleared his throat and let loose an ululating screech, his tongue vibrating like a motor. His head revolved on his neck in pre-exercise stretches. Then the childbirth-like breathing: “Hee hee, hoo hoo. Hee hee, hoo hoo. Hee hee—”

“Ace, what is he doing?” Legion asked.

Ace’s face was already buried in his palm. “Getting into character.”

“—hoo. Hee hee, hoo hoo—” Catastrophe’s head still rolled around his neck. Old socks still reeked from his shirt. Even the walls seemed to pull away in disgust.

“Into character? Catastrophe, your character is Catastrophe. You’re about to take down a threat sneaking around our base and changing us into mindless followers or, in Power Plant’s case, nothing out of the ordinary.”

“—Hee hee, hoo—”

“Stop that.”

“—hoo.” Catastrophe fell silent, his head halting its rotation. Then, “And a, e, i, o, u, and sometimes y. The brown fox jumped over the lazy dog.” His lips molded each word as if to teach phonetics to a child. “The brown fox—”

“Ace?”

“He’s warming up his mouth to deliver his lines.” Ace turned over his forearm, and a small laser assembly chirruped out of a flip panel. “Be thankful you’re not in public with him.”

“But his only line is ‘Hey, you there with the annoying habit of taking control of everybody, stop taking control of everybody.’”

“He does this whenever we go to a restaurant. All you can do is wait it out.” Ace drummed his fingers along a control on his flip panel, tightened a bolt. The laser assembly disappeared like a gopher that had finished checking for its shadow.

“—over the lazy dog.” Finally silence was all that remained of Catastrophe’s recital. His eyes popped open, and a smile spread his orange lips. “Okay, what’s my character’s motivation?”

“Doing your job,” Legion said.

“Perfect.” Catastrophe stepped back, interlocked his fingers, and stretched them out. Each finger cracked like a forest twig snapping. “Let’s sign some fans, meet some babies, and kiss some autographs.”

“You might have mixed that up,” Ace said.

“But maybe not.” Catastrophe straightened his collar with two sharp tugs and puckered his lips to a mirror datasheet. He ran a finger along a whitened eyebrow cresting his tanned brow line.

“Remind me again why we hired you.” Legion shifted aside when Catastrophe squeezed between him and Ace to reach the door again. “Just one reason.”

“Hold this.” Catastrophe ripped a lapel mic off his T-shirt and handed it to Ace. It smelled like old socks too. “Okay, now. Control, acknowledge—”

“Hold it a second.” Ace Spandex put a hand on Catastrophe’s shoulder. Catastrophe stood 7.3 inches taller than Ace, so it was a stretch. The shirt even felt like old socks, fibrous and rough. “Do you have a plan? You don’t even know what you’re up against yet. The smart thing is to wait for the rest of the team”—he tried to speak over Catastrophe’s next command to unlock the l-door—“but of course you won’t listen to anything I say because I’m not your agent.”

The l-door sang away, revealing the long corridor that spread to both ends of the building. Each direction ended at a set of heavy double doors and a lit exit sign Power Plant had laser-pained over with “Danger: Fresh Air.” At one end stood Pincushion, two Franchises, Sixth Sense, and the intruder who resembled little more than a poorly drawn stickman.

This was the first Ace had seen Creepy Guy Yeah Why Not without a viewscreen. His gaunt skin was an RGB value of 215, 187, and 168—gray—his elbows and knees were knobs wrapped in skin, and his chin resembled one dulled end of a crescent moon. His neck looked like a hollow shaft. His eyes were sunken in gray sockets under the shelter of an ashen brow. His legs, accounting for half his height, reminded Ace of those of a grayscale flamingo. His arms weren’t any thicker, with fingers growing yellowish nails in need of clipping from something with the caliber of a hedge trimmer.

The interloper and his entourage snapped forward in simultaneous stride. Not rushed, but not lethargic. A gentle 3.2-mile-per-hour gait, as if they’d stop at any moment to admire nature.

Catastrophe bounded into the hallway and squared up against them. “Creepy—” He examined Legion to make sure. Then Ace. “That’s the name we’re going with? He goes on screen with that moniker?”

Ace shrugged. “We’re checking Janice’s sanity with a magnet later.”

Catastrophe’s face screwed into deeper confusion. “Wait. Who’s Ja—?” He stopped himself. “Never mind. I’ll get a debrief later.” He turned back around. His hand shot into the air and gripped nothing. A dramatic flourish, as if snatching a mosquito out of midair. His next words echoed off the walls like billiard balls knocking around a pool table. “Okay, Creepy Guy Yeah Why Not. I have three requests. First, shorten your media name. It’s ridiculous. You won’t land a starring role with that thing. Everybody will think you’re the second assistant to the catering-truck advisor. Second, what official Jack Fistbomb merchandise would you like to sign up for? We currently have a sale on exploding cakes. Third, please release our associates from whatever hoodoo you’ve placed them under, and vacate these premises immediately. By the power of cinema, I compel you!”

Legion stepped back to Ace, finding shelter against a pillar. “He’s for real, isn’t he?”

“You should hear him in a public restroom when the stalls are full.”

The interloper’s smile grew, its corners like devil’s horns. He spoke, a low rumble that was both unassuming and sinister. Every word crept up Ace’s spine like an inchworm. The interloper told Catastrophe the outcome of this night was already foretold, already written in a transcript he had read, reread, and committed to heart. He then commanded Sixth Sense and Pincushion forward. He knew of Catastrophe’s command over geological matter, so he told Franchise and his duplicate to remain close to prevent Catastrophe from sheathing him in concrete. If he wanted protection, shouldn’t he take advantage of Sixth Sense’s hyperability, tell him to erect a force field?

Sixth Sense and Pincushion advanced. They fanned out to either side of the hallway, keeping close to the pillared walls.

Catastrophe’s head scanned left to right to left in an effort to keep both Good Guys in his field of vision. “Fine then,” he said in a voice sopping with melodrama. “Prepare for me to raze destruction upon you.” He lifted his other hand to mirror the first.

Legion tapped him on the shoulder blade. “Please don’t raze. We’re currently at a raze-budget deficit what with all the construction on the station, and you’re still not listening.” He looked at Ace Spandex. “His media name is Catastrophe, but I keep trying. And we’re checking Janice’s sanity?”

“If this Creepy Guy gets rid of Catastrophe’s tacky earring, he can do whatever he wants,” Ace said.

“Your baptism will take but a second.” Now only 8.01 yards away, Sixth Sense broke the formation he, Franchise, the duplicate, Pincushion, and Pincushion’s shorts had. The telepath stepped into the center of the hallway, Pincushion behind him. Ace noticed how smooth his speech was, lacking his characteristic self-interruptions and stammered beginnings of sentences.

Catastrophe, his hands still held in relaxed fists above him, maintained watch over Sixth Sense. Finally his grip tightened, and a pattern of finger grooves crunched into the walls on either side, close to the ceiling. His hands dropped—two slabs of the ceiling tore from the finger grooves, causing riots of cacophony like TNT charges. The slabs rained down, barely missing Sixth Sense. Flotsam dropped into his hair, and a lump knocked off his glasses. He didn’t stop moving, didn’t flinch, didn’t retrieve the glasses that spun against a couch. He reached Catastrophe.

“Oh, crock.” Ace leaped forward, preparing the laser assembly under his forearm’s flip panel. It purred out, happily ready for action.

Catastrophe reached into the air for another handful, but Sixth Sense was on him, grabbed his arm—stamped a blow across his face—Pincushion got in on the fun, stuffed a fist into Catastrophe’s stomach—Ace shot a light-bullet from his needle laser at Sixth Sense, only on stun—no effect—Pincushion gripped Catastrophe’s ears—pounded his head against the wall—Catastrophe’s arm dropped—with it another jigsaw mess of the ceiling, another firecracker of sound—Ace shot again—Creepy Guy Yeah Why Not languidly approached—Ace raised his needle laser at him—nothing—again—nothing—Franchise and his duplicate moved to block the shots, intercepted the next—

Legion grabbed Ace Spandex, yanked him back—“It’s pointless. Let’s go.”

—Ace struggled free—fired again—

—“Ace, leave him!”—Legion dragged Ace into the hallway to Alcoholics Unanimous—the copper of beer replaced the sweat of old socks—“Janice, acknowledge. Lock closest door”—the door reappeared—the chaotic crunch and smack of battle became muffled—

Ace fell against a pillar, stumbled onto the carpet, gashed his arm. He sprang up and plucked carpet fibers from the blood to which they clung. “What happened in there? It was as if nobody felt anything!” He stamped his needle laser. “I had this thing set on full stun. That’s enough to take down a gnawl and whatever that thing is scurrying around inside the ventilation ducts. I think it’s a mutated rat with a forked tail, but what happened in there?” He extended his arm at the locked door...

...that now groaned. Ace Spandex and Legion watched, clutching each other. Folds crinkled the door, its otherwise-perfect surface chipping, speckles of powder seasoning the floor.

And in a chaotic death knell, the door clapped into a ball. A haze of dust coughed out and dissipated, and then Creepy Guy Yeah Why Not and Catastrophe stood in its place, stalwart. The door ball crashed to the floor. Catastrophe wore a robotic visage, his palms clasped together as if he’d crumpled the door with his own bare hands.

“Run, Ace.” Legion shoved Ace down the hallway and took off. He skidded on the carpet and veered into the underground tunnel. Ace followed.

* * *

Upon entering the station’s gray-walled, subterranean tunnels, Steeple stumbled across that raisin-faced pilot Mabel that the Good Guys hired for some inconceivable reason. Fitting she was down here: everything in the tunnels was desiccated and dusty. When he reached into her brain, made her an adelphos, he felt cobwebs, as if his mind had to clear through gossamer blankets to attach to hers. Dead air in her brain. He commanded her to stand and join his army. A hiss of white noise. So he commanded her to at least use the haunt control to summon the rest of the Good Guys to this location. She responded with a snore like an air conditioner whose blades had spun off their cogs. Her mind would not taste enchanting, no, it would not. The only animation Steeple had witnessed in that first-century elder was swatting an errant butterfly off her neck. It was a caterpillar when it had first crawled on.

So he commanded her to wake up, bray like a donkey, scratch her cheek, roll over to sleep on her other side—Oh, look at that. She obeyed something.

Worse than Steeple’s accountant.

Steeple couldn’t survey the tunnel to assess his next move from this modest position on the dispassionate floor. His disciples crowded him. Though he stood taller than them, they distracted him with idle trances, blankly awaiting his next command. The blankness of this congregation’s stares tasted ssssoooooo mouthwatering. Steeple wanted to pucker his lips over his fingers.

Sweeping the TRY ALL 714 DIFFERENT ANIMALS IN OUR GORGING COURT banner aside, he tapped his foot. The Transcript described two directions in which to advance, and he could not determine on which to focus. Franchise couldn’t create new duplicates because Steeple’s hold left the self-multiplying Good Guy with a tenuous grip on his hyperability. Same with all congregants. Sixth Sense could use his telekinesis to destroy locked doors, but only when Steeple’s concentration was undivided. So combat against the remaining Good Guys was out of the question. That meant overtaking Legion wasn’t advisable if the Good Guy leader reached more backup. Still, the coming victory tantalized Steeple’s inner being so divinely it tasted like sweet, sweet syrup trickling on his waiting taste buds.

Where could he attack next? he said aloud to no one.

Sixth Sense heard and offered a suggestion. He stood stalwart under Steeple, under the banner, under the flock of impatient vultures circling the ceiling and awaiting death for those who had attempted the banner’s offer. Sixth Sense revealed that, if the congregation hurried, they could overtake Legion. Also, the new members of the fold still awaited their “Welcome to the Team” lanyards.

Their what lanyards?

Yes. Sixth Sense coughed into a fist, a punch of sound in these rocky tunnels. He said Pincushion thought the indoctrination would appeal to the unwashed if new members received lanyards. It was in the suggestion box by the lawn gnome storage shed.

They had a suggestion box?

Sixth Sense scratched his nose. His lips rested on the sound of his next word, obviously a w word, though the rounded phonetic took a second to crawl out his mouth. Finally he reported that the congregation thought Steeple had asked the Franchise duplicate to set one up. But those duplicates messed up a lot of instructions. The fact that the duplicate did anything but wipe his nose on the hallway floor meant Steeple was in the ballpark.

Gross. Never mind. Steeple corrected Sixth Sense. What he’d said was Franchise should put away that Horseman of the Apocalypse storage box.

Oh. Sixth Sense leaned against the wall. The box was a gag gift–slash–Biblical scourge from Power Plant. The mind reader must have discerned the lack of sway in Steeple, so he added that Pestilence was a cool guy once you got to know him. He shrugged. War was kind of touchy.

* * *

Intergalactic Protection assassin Hearse downed another fluffy cupcake. His tenth. Yes, these cupcakes were rousing, sublime, mystical. He smeared this one between his palate and the roof of his mouth. Transcendental. Also caramel filled. The perfect combination: transcendence and caramel. Hearse sucked the breading from his fingertips. Mother would have loved these. Her favorite flavor had always been transcendence. Hearse would stop for another bite, but only on his way back from the bathroom. He suspected the cupcakes were also diuretic.

A door faded across the rambling plaza of the Gorging Court. Hearse picked up the warble and advertisement touting new diuretic cupcakes—he knew it!—and saw the patrons of this eating establishment barely react to the two figures who slipped out through the door and scampered across the tiling. One banged his head on the floor.

Hmm. The floor banger was Legion, his quarry. Intergalactic Protection had hired Hearse to dispatch Legion when the time was right, but he acted here under the auspice of ensuring that agent Scapegoat was sincere in his desertion of the Bad Guys and recruitment in the Good Guys. Now that Sixth Sense had read Scapegoat’s mind and cleared the hunchback, Legion was Hearse’s only reason for staying on Station One. But until he was told to move in and kill, Legion was under his protection.

Legion hurtled off the slick floor, forehead sheened in polish. He skittered away from anyone who wandered within six feet of him, limbs flashing around to ward others away. His associate, Ace Spandex, did the same. From what did they flee? From whom? Perhaps the Bengal tiger had escaped the zoo again this morning. Good thing that Bengal tiger was declawed. And tamed. It had probably purred and licked Legion and Ace Spandex into submission, hoping for a belly rub. This bore a moment or two of investigation, because if it were that Bengal tiger, Hearse would participate in a session of who’s a good kitty.

Hearse approached the door through which Legion had stumbled. A finger of cold air traced his skin, like a ghost trying to romance him. Stupid ghost. Hearse had no time for spectral romance.

Ah, the door led to the station’s subterranean tunnels. Sedate and coordinated footsteps clicked up those concrete stairs. No Bengal tiger, but perhaps two white-striped tigers. Bah. Those white-striped tigers were so self-important. “Look at me. See my majestic white stripes. See how I do not belong to an endangered species. See how mannered I act as I sip my tea and host my theater forum.” Give it a rest.

Wait. Hearse studied the air, analyzed the sounds. Five distinct sets of feet climbed these sooty steps, one now only a flight below. Legion was prey to someone. This was unacceptable. Hearse had a mission, and Legion remained under his protection until such a time Hearse obtained the kill order and additional cupcakes he needed. That Trioxidillian would die, but under only certain conditions IP deemed right.

The Good Guy known as Franchise emerged from the skeletal hue of the staircase, then agent Catastrophe. And then...who was this? Someone altogether new ascended, someone resembling a collection of pewter-colored reeds glued together and set into motion. Hearse’s visor registered no information for this someone.

Behind the reedy stranger came agent Sixth Sense—without glasses—agent Pincushion, and another agent Franchise. This procession, as a protective assembly around the stick figure, stiffened the hairs on the back of Hearse’s neck, an eerie sensation he felt only when visiting a senior’s home.

Catastrophe and the first Franchise passed Hearse without reaction, only impassive stares focused straight ahead. Yes, just like a senior’s home.

“Halt, unrealistically gaunt stranger.” Hearse planted his hand on the abdomen of the reedy figure who may or may not have designs on stealing cupcakes. If he were the health inspector, the Gorging Court and most of the armory were at risk. “What is your business with the one known as Legion?” The reedy figure’s skin felt as inauthentic as vinyl.

Agents Sixth Sense, Catastrophe, and Pincushion folded around the space between Hearse and the reedy figure. One of the Franchises mooned Hearse. “How dare you use that gesture on Hearse, the master of assassinations and mentioning such at children’s parties?”

The reedy figure waved his protective service aside with fingers as thin as parched baby carrots. Like a showcase curtain, they parted. The figure examined Hearse, remarked how Hearse was indeed in the Transcript of this event, yyyeesss, mmm-hmmm. Hearse commanded his visor to rescan the figure. Even his visor said, “This guy’s off his crocker.”

“Whatever your transcript denotes”—Hearse pulled his pistol from its holster and displayed its shimmer in the light, a glint running down the maze of grooves, curling around, and scurrying up the other side—“it best not include shutting down the cupcake confectionary.” He activated the targeting program in the visor over his cataract-covered left eye. The visor burped on. He kept his breath in check, though his forehead heated up—

He buckled. No, not the vision, not now! His hyperability brought upon him a searing vision of somewhere he’d never visited, presented the same scenario each time. It always began as an earsplitting whine at the center of his mind’s inner voice. A white flash corrupted his nervous system. A sandpapery sensation rubbed the inside of his skin. He tasted leather, smelled copper, felt every muscle constrict. Locked in place in his own body. Then a zap, and his world turned into a starship looming under a glassy sky. Everything he heard was a rumble. Smoke billowed from the starship. A rooster’s head—

He awoke. The reedy figure had slipped a Hyperthesia pill, his hyperability-suppressing medication, onto his tongue, and he had reflexively swallowed. He looked up at the figure, who cupped his chin and...would relish welcoming him to the fold? Hearse regained his breath, calmed it to a steady cadence. Despite the save, he would enjoy destroying every reed on this stickman from the inside out. No one folded Hearse except Mother playing peekaboo with him as a child. The reedy man brushed his chin, his templ—

Every hostile sensation in Hearse simmered away. Steeple removed his hands from Hearse’s temple. And now everything felt cozy and perfect and glittery. Hearse smiled. He loved unicorns now.

* * *

In a purposeful visual sweep from right to left, Steeple checked the patrons of this dining establishment. A boisterous line hungered before the counter at Meat Pillagers despite the eatery changing their quintuple donkey omelets to a heaping pile of avocados. What a gyp. Steeple hated “subject to change without notice.”

He again appraised the Gorging Court from east to west, the sandwich tent, the polar-bear cages. A tingle rinsed him. Ohhhh, such a lovely tingle. And such an unsuspecting crowd. Yyyyeessss. To his growing adelphoi, he issued the command to round up the individuals collected in this court of food. How fortuitous that this meteor shower trapped everyone here for indoctrination. This would taste...bbblllissssfffuullll.

Visitations at Station One used to number a few construction workers here and there who came only to fix parts of the station under warranty and didn’t question why everything that broke bore scorch marks and the words “Jeffy wuz hear.” But since the retail jackpot had opened yesterday, visitors thundered in the hundreds, mostly families. Today was a low point: due in part to the spotty meteor shower and more in part to the fart Mabel had ripped near the oxygen supply, around six hundred consumers populated the station today. How such a foggy aroma seeped out of such a withered body was why Mabel visited her dietician twice a week.

Six hundred converts. Six hundred ssssavorable converts.

Steeple’s congregation complied with his decree. One of the Franchises had to first finish up and buckle his pants. No, please not in reverse order.

* * *

Legion burst into his office, Ace Spandex behind, both tripping and skidding into Legion’s desk. Ace landed on top. Ugh, either his computer parts were heavy, or he needed to cut down on the late-night tubes of cookie dough.

Ace hopped off and tore toward the window. His palms cuffed the pane. “Safe on this side, and someone set up a log-flume ride on the east lot.” He swept the curtains shut. “Any thoughts on lifting that ‘no surfing’ bylaw?”

“That bylaw was enacted for Jeff’s safety.”

“Hey, wha’s up?” Power Plant hollered from the side of the office in which he waved. Oh, good. He’d returned. And now bounced a glass off the wall. It conked him in the head with a wooden knock.

“Janice, acknowledge. Lock closest door.” Legion leaped up and crammed his back against the door to brace it. If Creepy Guy Yeah Why Not wanted to waltz in here and hold everyone’s brains hostage, Legion would do something about it. And, sometime soon, that something would amount to more than fleeing and cowering in different places.

Legion clutched the cross that dangled against his neck and had whacked him in the eye a few times on the race here. His head throbbed. The floor tiles in the Gorging Court were harder than they looked. “He got Catastrophe. We sent Catastrophe to his doom! Ace—”

“I know, I know.” Ace Spandex wiped his sweating cheek on a sleeve. “We should have sent a bomb-defusing robot in first. Or maybe the instructor at the dog-training academy. Same personality.”

Legion caught his breath on a phlegmy gulp, but it fled again a second later. He wiped clammy sweat from his eyelids. He gulped again, an odd way to catch his breath, and swallowed down more phlegm. “Okay, new plan. We do something something and then the log flume.”

Ace paced around the door in thought, hands flittering like butterflies. “We need to cause chaos. Big, bad chaos. That’s the best way to disrupt this guy’s end goal. He mentioned a transcript, as if this thing is scripted. Well, let’s throw him off script. He disrupts us, we disrupt him. It’s like fighting fire with fire except not around explosives just this one time.”

“I don’t think now is really—”

“Fire with fire. This Creepy Guy Yeah Why Not will predict anything we do, so we give him the unpredictable.” Ace shuffled his back against the door, next to Legion. “Just give me plan B. I like the log-flume idea.”

“Okay, here’s the plan. We grab everyone but Scapegoat, we get to the armory to equip ourselves”—Legion extracted his Marsek from its holster and scrutinized it—“and we end this stalker.”

Ace Spandex held up a hand. “And then we ride—”

“And then we ride the log flume.”

Ace wiped his palms on the knees of his pants, leaving dark imprints of perspiration. “Because I haven’t taken a day off since Hannukah.”

“All rest and no play makes Ace a raving lunatic. I’ve heard it before.”

Chapter Nine: Heard, Understood, and Acknowledged

Plastique...grunted through her ninety-sixth ppuuuussssshhhhhup. Sweat trickled...dddooowwwnnnn her nose. C’mon, c’mon, ccoommmmeeee ooooooonnnnnn...only one hundred four mmmmmmmorrrrreeeeee in this seventh-to-last set.

Above her, the...hhhhhhaaaunt control burst into...breathy hhhhhhhysterics. Not what she needed right now. “Alert. Good Guy entities Incendiary, Organism, and Plastique, report for duty. Gabber Legion for briefing destination before leaving your present location. Entity And I Guess We Should Call Scapegoat As Well not recognized.”

Crock. Plastique cut short her eighth set of pushups at ninety-nine. Duty called, and the handbook was crystal clear on responsibility to duty in section eighteen, subsection one. She hopped off the herringbone-patterned carpet, grumbling about her missed pullups, toes-to-bar—

She tapped her gabber bud—“Gabber, acknowledge. Contact entity Legion”—and wandered past her browned peace lily. On the kitchen table sat a weeping fig, also parched and brittle.

—squats, shoulder thrusts, neck stamps—

“Seeking connection, see—Connection attained.”

—pelvic crunches, drill presses, Trioxidillian burpees, cockroach lunges (an exercise she’d invented after assessing her bathroom)—

“Lt. Col. Legion?” Plastique stopped at a bath towel draped over a chair. She smeared the sheet across her face. Much better. She took a bottle and spritzed her weeping fig for some reason. You never knew. Maybe it would scrape up the will to live. “What is this directive I heard over the haunt control? I need to meet you at an undisclosed location? Is this about all the wreckage out in the hallway of the barracks?” She grabbed a kiwi-and-goat-cheese energy drink with protein croutons. Really tasted that goat cheese.

—chest pulverizers, dominatrix arm curls—

“Yes, Plastique. I’m asking everyone to meet Ace, Power Plant, and me in the training gym. Haunt control says you just arrived at your living quarters. Shouldn’t take too long to sneak to the training tower. Keep to the sides of buildings on your way here. Stay low, covert. Got that?”

—and her abdominal giraffe struts. She slapped her forehead. Her giraffe struts!

“Lt. Col. Legion?” She drew her shaker cup from her mouth and licked the excess kiwi extract from her lip before a seaweed-thick chunk drooled off. “What is this about?” She would have to skip her quart of owl’s milk.

“I’ll brief you once you arrive. You’re to avoid Franchise, Catastrophe, Pincushion, and Sixth Sense. Someone on the station is doing terrible things with their minds. He’s...I don’t know...he’s a hypnotist or a mind control expert or a lawyer. Don’t talk to any of them. Don’t engage any of them in combat. Hold on a second. What, Jeff?” Legion’s voice became stifled, as if he talked in an aside. “Oh, and pick up some red meat on the way or else Jeff will topple inflation. I don’t know what he means b—Hold on.” Another pause and then, “Oh. Sorry. Topple a nation. That makes more sense. Jeff, you toppled one last week!” Back to Plastique. “Sorry. He’s obsessed with filling quotas lately. Just meet us in the gym. If you pass the east lot, take a quick check at the eighty-foot log flume, let me know how—what was that, Jeff?—how awesome it is on a scale of zero to...Jeff, that isn’t a number. It’s a body part. Or a garnish at the Productive Pantry.”

“Affirmative.” Plastique guzzled back the rest of her smoothie in one liberal slurp. Delicious electrolytes. Her first and third midmorning sprints often brought her from here to the training tower, so she knew the exact route and timing. This should be no problem, though she’d blend a peanut-butter-and-smoked-turkey-breast smoothie for strength. With marigold extract, of course. “As per duty handbook section one, subsection four, I will report for duty in a maximum of fifteen minutes, Lieutenant Colonel.”

“Double-time it, Plastique. Jeff, hafflecampow isn’t a number. It’s not even a word. Stop pretending to count.”

“Hua, Lieutenant Colonel.” She already stood in her kitchenette, pureeing the peanuts into the turkey breast with her bare fists and kitchen knuckles. Time to march to war.

* * *

Five minutes later, she stood at the door of her living quarters, glancing both ways down the single hall. Just as when she’d arrived, the hall was ruined and imploded. Probably another of the fish-head puppet shows Field Agents Power Plant and Franchise claimed were for charity.

Perhaps she’d spot Incendiary or Organism on the way. Safety in squad numbers. Her hands in karate chops, she tumbled into a sprint toward the training tower.

Chapter Ten: Organize and Rise

Ace Spandex danced back when bodysuit-wearing Incendiary burst into the training gym in a ruckus of metal. Ace’s system had felt edgy this last hour, sixteen minutes, forty-two seconds, so the shock spiked his processor activity and ended up inadvertently erasing his high score in Spatula Ninja. He knew he should have added the drive partition to his limbic lobe. Or should have added a surge protector. Or should have had a regular brain.

Incendiary was the last to arrive. Good. Ace flopped back into a beanbag chair that had found its way into the combat arena. The scant remains of the Good Guys were arranged before him: Plastique, Incendiary, Legion, Scapegoat, Organism, and Power Plant trying to stick his tongue into a recessed electricity panel. Power Plant prized out the panel, wires connected like tendons still clinging between bone and muscle.

Legion stood. “Gang’s all here. Good. Janice, acknowledge. Lock and reinforce all entranceways leading to this room.”

Janice clicked her digital tongue. “No can do, entity Legion. Acey promised tonight is date night, and we have a candlelit dinner in ten minutes. And you haven’t answered our latest question to make it to the final round of tonight’s show.”

“She wears the pants in this relationship, Legion. Janice!” Ace struggled to lift himself out of the beanbag chair, which refused by shushing its form around to mitigate the effort. “Jani—” He wrapped one arm over the side to reach the floor. “Ja—” No such luck. Tried the other side. Nope. Tried jerking himself out. Forget it. He stayed put. “Janice, you don’t eat dinner, and we have no date night. Follow Legion’s orders, or I’m removing your virus protection for a month.”

“Just for you, pookums.” Janice giggled. The shriek of metal girders slid down the doors and thundered into their cavities in the floor with assertion. They twisted to lock. The hunchback Scapegoat flung his finger out of his nostril and flinched away.

“That’s better. Thanks.”

“Just ‘that’s better’?”

“That’s better, love dove.”

“Thank you, Ace, for wooing your computer wife. There has got to be a way of never remembering that.” Legion rubbed his eye with a palm, and when he removed it, the wall bore an ad for Lobotomy Lucy’s. Looked as though there was a way. “Everyone, we have a situation on Station One, and it has nothing to do with Lowensland, his malevolent elves, or his attempts to bill us a user fee for his malevolent elves.

“Janice, acknowledge. Open predefined viewscreen.” Legion directed everyone’s attention to the viewscreen that blipped into existence to his right...and bumped him a step. Antagonistic little haunt control.

The viewscreen depicted Creepy Guy Yeah Why Not, a photo taken from when Sixth Sense had led him toward the armory. The photo sprang up, details filling in to a three-dimensional wireframe. Color painted the wireframe. The picture became moving footage, the viewscreen playing and replaying a three-second reel where Sixth Sense banged into a lamp sconce. His shock collar snapped, which clapped and sent a jolt up him. He jiggled from the current, stopped. Blinked. Creepy Guy Yeah Why Not stroked the back of his head, and he fell back in line, advancing like the adelphos he’d become. Cut back three seconds to repeat the loop.

“This Terran is an unknown. Bioscans reveal some strange things about him. Top of the list is he has genes dating him to about ten thousand years ago. And he has no file on Citizen Watch. No one has any record of his existence. He’s touring Station One, quelling free wills. A few minutes ago, a scan said he’d taken over...Janice, acknowledge. Identify all listed entities exhibiting unmatched bioreadings.”

“Not until you check behind door number three, Legion.”

“Janice, what’s behind door number three always ends up being a mountain lion. I don’t understand why I need to win a mountain lion.”

“Janice, acknowledge.” Ace struggled to shift positions in the beanbag. Didn’t work. The thing shushed in annoyance, content with eating him alive. He mustered an expression that showed resignation. “Do it or no one-week-anniversary movie night.”

“Anything for you, sweets. Listed entities exhibiting atypical bioreadings are Good Guy entities Catastrophe, Pincushion, Sixth Sense, and Withered Old Battle-Axe, and Intergalactic Protection entity Hearse.”

“He also tried taking over a display mannequin before realizing his mistake. But there’s your list, everyone. Priority one is we stop this man from taking anyone else. Priority two is we stop this man from anything. I’m permitting lethal recourse.” Legion ducked when Power Plant shot across the room from an electrical kickback. A buzz followed him. “Any questions?”

Incendiary raised his robot-suited hand. “Incendiary, vice-president of Jefftaria.”

“This isn’t a press conference, Ed.”

“Sorry. Just holdover from class. We get nicked on our final mark if...Right. Move this along.” Incendiary dropped his hand to his hip, causing a jingle bell of clanks. “How is this man walking around the place? And how could he immigrate onto Station One through the meteor shower?”

“‘Immigrate’? He’s not here from the old country. He’s—Forget it. We don’t know how he arrived. He’s not registered on any mass-trans that stopped by, and no civ-trans have come or gone since the shower started. To answer your first question, we restricted access for him and those he’s taken over. But Sixth Sense and Catastrophe are ripping through our doors.” Legion leaned against a wooden dragon someone had dragged in here for no other reason than to open beer bottles with its teeth. “Any other questions or concerns over foreign policy?”

Plastique stepped forward and raised her hand. In the training room’s lonely vacancy, her moves were magnified to booms.

“Okay, no need to raise our hands.” Legion threw up his arms. “At all. For anyone.”

Plastique cleared her throat. “Lieutenant Colonel, what is our plan of attack?”

“First, we stick together. Seems this guy prefers taking us one by one, so we’re not playing his divide-and-conquer game. As for our offensive”—Legion shrugged with sheepish embarrassment—“any suggestions?”

Power Plant careened past Legion in the other direction. “Ooh. That one taste likes raspberry.” He’d raised his hand before mentioning that.

“We point Jeff and any convenient electricity panel in his direction,” Ace said a moment before Power Plant collided with Scapegoat.

* * *

Plastique shook her head. This plan of attack wasn’t sound strategy. And if there was anything Col. Daddy drilled into Plastique during her kindergarten calisthenics, it was a disgust for unsound strategy. “Lieutenant Colonel, I’ve faced a few coups in my time. In my experience, our best option is to take the enemy en masse. We engage the enemy with an ambush strategy: one soldier from each corner. Our secondary mission is to figure out what to do about the rest of our squad. Since we don’t know his method of influence, we’ll have to squeeze it out of him before we can help them. So retract the lethal recourse. We need him alive.” Plastique smacked her hands together.

“You know me. Anything that involves smacking our hands together, I’m in.” Ace Spandex had now managed to roll facedown in the beanbag.

Lt. Col. Legion folded his arms across his chest and sat on a prop box labelled ENJOY YOUR NEW PURCHASE OF TERMINAL CO.’S TACTICAL MISSILES. MADE WITH 100% RECYCLED MATERIALS. FOR RECTAL USE ONLY. He mulled Plastique’s suggestion over, his lips kneading together, and then nodded. “You’re right. We can’t use lethal means until we know if he can reverse our friends.” This situation was fubar. He stood and paced between the beach setting underneath the observation deck’s balcony window and the box on which he had sat, skirting around a low-flying light panel. “Okay. Our orders are as such. We’ll lure him in here. Then we separate him from his entourage. They usually walk in front of him. When I watched the footage, I noticed he needs to touch you to get inside your head. Incendiary, that’s where you come in.” He tapped his temple. “You have a helmet and a damaging obsession with foreign affairs.”

Power Plant flew past. A quick dodge helped Lt. Col. Legion avoid a collision, but Field Agent Scapegoat wasn’t as lucky again. His own fault for hobbling into Power Plant’s path...or for being on the same station as Power Plant. “The rest of us will hide in the equipment rooms immediately outside the arena. Incendiary, you bait everyone into the gym, but as soon as our friends cross the doorway, order Janice to lock the door. I don’t want this guest in. Keep Sixth Sense and Catastrophe busy. Occupy them specifically. Otherwise, one of them will rip out the door, and our stakeholders will be mad. The rest of us will wait outside”—Lt. Col. Legion ducked Power Plant again—“doing what Jeff is trying to do to me right now.” Power Plant struck a shelf of china dishes and triggered a blitzkrieg of crashes. Nothing survived. What interior decorator placed a china shop next to a beach inside a training gym?

Power Plant made a quick recovery. “I’s tryin’ ta”—Power Plant hurtled into a stack of plastic palm trees in the beach setting—“clonkinize ya!” He spat out some sand.

“Does everybody know your duties or what clockinize means?” Lt. Col. Legion checked his soldiers. Everybody registered affirmation, and Plastique saluted, ankles together. Hua. “Good. Let’s get to work. Except you, Jeff. You stop getting to work.”

* * *

Organism—he still grew accustomed to calling himself that media name but did it for his dad—excused himself from the crowd. Was he ever out of his element. A coup on the station? Military response? He was just a social loner plucked out of his high-school life and dropped into an army. This deranged situation sounded serious and, according to Incendiary, rife with holes in its immigration laws.

He found an inconspicuous corner of the gym among life-sized die-cast models of beer-opening dragons with eight arms and three legs that couldn’t possibly exist anywhere. “Gabber, acknowledge. Contact calltag Elton-dash-Barnaby.” He shivered despite the comfortable heat in the room, his eyes creeping to the eight-armed spectacle next to him he was convinced was animated. Euch.

The connection clicked through almost immediately. Why wouldn’t it? Dad always sat in their living quarters, watching whatever driveled over broadcast. Today, a marathon run of Corporate Hillbilly aired, and Dad was all in.

“Dad?” Organism swept the corner with his foot, clearing an arc from dust, dead insects, and bottle caps.

“How’s the soldiering, son? Beating any thugs up yet? Ooh, you just missed Uncle Bobby-Joe-Ed-Mac rootin’-toot the head off some number-fudging accountant.” Behind his voice, the hullabaloo of dueling banjos twanged. A “heehaw” hooted its way into a series of string plucks. “He has as much tolerance for extortion as my bowels do for spicy food.”

Organism winced. “Remember when you asked me what TMI is, Dad? That is. And if I was beating anyone up, I wouldn’t gabber you in the middle of it. Dad, everyone on the station is turning into mindless sleepwalkers. Please lock the door. Lock it and don’t leave until I say it’s all right, no matter what squids they’re offering at the mollusk bar. Just...please. Stay in and watch a zombie movie or something.” Wait. No. No unthinking creatures today. “Watch the opposite of a zombie movie. A whale movie, I guess.”

“Sure, son.” Dad’s words electrified with rare enthusiasm. The dueling banjos plucked up the tempo. “Are you beating up on Asinine? Give him a good fist-up for me, son. Punch him, pause, yell, ‘Organism sends his regards,’ and then punch him some more.”

“No, Dad. No thugs, no Asinine. My fists aren’t upping anyone.” Organism retreated against a window. “And no one puts it that way.”

Enthusiasm tapered off. “Well, then, son. You mind telling me what’s up?”

Wind whisked Organism’s hair around. Power Plant sailed past, three for eight in hitting Scapegoat now.

“I wouldn’t know where to begin. Just make sure your immigration datawork is up to date.”

Chapter Eleven: Whilst All Hope Collapses

Legion was finally satisfied. Plan B was settled, though it had taken almost an hour to perfect: positioning, organizing, blocking, making sure Power Plant had a suitable babysitter who knew the locations of the closest emergency exits and tastiest electricity panels. But when plan B was set in stone and someone had explained the plan to Power Plant and someone had re-explained the plan to Power Plant and Ace Spandex had promised Janice they’d have a candlelit dinner soon and Legion had tried to figure out how to clarify why dating a haunt control was creepy and Scapegoat had re-explained the plan to Power Plant and then someone else had unexplained what Scapegoat had explained and then re-explained the plan to Power Plant, everyone took their positions and then someone re-explained the plan to Power Plant.

Incendiary remained in the training gym, lights boosted to make him conspicuous. He’d sat on a prop lawn chair, but his armor was too heavy and now Ace had to shop for patio furniture. Apparently not that cheap crap either.

Organism was busy re-explaining the plan to Power Plant. With shadow puppets to keep his attention.

Everyone else had disappeared into control rooms situated to both sides in the gloomy hallway leading to the gym. They weren’t so much control rooms as they were closets with controls linked to the training gym. This one even smelled like a training gym thanks to clammy shoes loitering on a high shelf.

In case a haywire program or a malicious ad usurped the gym, an operator could use stoppers in these control rooms to shut down any training scenario. Never used and quite unnecessary, the underlit rooms with six inches of breathing space existed for legal reasons. Legion, Ace, and Plastique occupied this one. The other control room, across the hall, contained Power Plant, Scapegoat, Organism, and, as legal affairs would soon hear, a skeleton.

Legion stood next to Ace in the closet that reeked of sputtering electricity, reason being the control panel sputtered electricity. He checked it over, the virtual buttons arranged on a dusty touchscreen. Those buttons—DEACTIVATE ALL, ACTIVATE SCENARIO_01, ACTIVATE BATHROOMS, DEACTIVATE ALL SCENARIOS CAUSED BY POWER PLANT—glowed, most grayed out. Legion didn’t bother with the PRESS HERE FOR YOUR FREE ADVERTISEMENT button, but he did check off ACCEPT TERMS AND CONDITIONS.

At training times, the touchscreen would list active scenarios underneath the DEACTIVATE ALL button, but now the panel remained bare except for ACTIVATE SCENARIO_01 resting in a pending, blue-colored state. Ace Spandex had hastily preprogrammed their plan B scenario in, and it lingered at the ready, beeping quietly every few seconds to remind them it was there.

The room felt chilled, as though someone should have issued a frostbite warning. Legion brushed his hands along his hairless yet gooseflesh-dimpled arms. Plastique shuffled in place. Ace alone didn’t react to the chill in here. His breath didn’t come out in fog. Probably some internal heating mechanism or internal heating Mechanism.

Ace tapped the ACTIVATE BATHROOMS icon. “Why aren’t the bathrooms activated by default? Stands to reason.” He checked Legion and then Plastique. “I’m the only one?”

“What disturbs me is manufacturers are building Power Plant right into their systems.” Legion looked at the ceiling, fingers of cold tickling his skin. “Janice, acknowledge. Estimate time of arrival for entity Creepy Guy Yeah Why Not.”

“At entity Creepy Guy Yeah Why Not’s current footspeed, entity Creepy Guy Yeah Why Not will arrive in eight parsecs. Care to double your money in our shark-pit challenge?”

“Pars—” Legion kicked something unidentifiable in the confinement of this meat locker. “That’s not even a unit of time! A certain someone messed with the haunt control again, didn’t he? How can I deactivate that scenario caused by Power Plant?”

Standing at the door, Ace raised a hand to shush Legion. His sonar dish was wrapped around his ear, sprouting an antenna that stood at attention like an antigravity earring. He extended a finger across his lips. “I hear them. He brought the whole army. Sounds like a Greco-Roman fleet.”

Plastique shifted her weight. That minuscule noise crinkled like static in Legion’s ears. “Soldier, during a takeover, you are to stand no closer than one foot from any l-door. Did the Greco-Roman army have a fleet?”

“Janice, acknowledge. Open viewscreen. Display training room, top-down view.” Legion prodded through the crowd—of two others in a room that fit half a dwarf and his lunch—because Janice decided the viewscreen should appear on the opposite wall. It flickered on and then resolved into an image of the bright training room. The linking viewscreen in the training room was positioning itself, levitating spookily toward the ceiling. Watching the training room’s floor shrink away in its display insisted a reeling rumpus upon Legion’s stomach. He didn’t feel the cold for that one moment.

Legion wondered what Power Plant was destroying across the hall. “It strikes me now, of all times, we should have hired a nanny for the other room.”

In the viewscreen, Incendiary backed against a wall. Shadows encroached on him. Clawing, flooding shadows. And, what Legion saw, under this Creepy Guy Yeah Why Not’s control, was not one shadow, not two or three. Not even ten. Legion’s head throbbed at the resolved image.

No, Legion didn’t feel the cold for that one moment. He felt a grip of ice.

“What is it?” Ace couldn’t get a good look. He stood on his toes and craned his neck.

“You remember when we talked about getting a Pilates instructor, so Power Plant suggested hiring one of those wavy-armed windsock men they put in front of transport dealerships?”

“Yeah.”

Legion’s voice shuddered. “Our idea was worse.” He shuffled aside to allow Ace to see the viewscreen: hundreds of adelphoi crowded the training room, a sleepwalking mob. Ace gasped, bumped backward into the others. “We need two plan Bs to fix this.”

As if to bleed out any silence, the mob’s babble grew louder from the viewscreen in distinct degrees, like a stalker stomping up a staircase. The adelphoi horde emitted a hum of words melding together. They flocked toward Incendiary in a dawdling, casual meander. Without firing, Incendiary marked one with a wrist launcher, then another, then another and another and anoth—A frenzied, untrained panic. Sixth Sense led the mass that reached him, swarmed him, erased him from the landscape.

Legion dared not whisper.

Ace Spandex didn’t move.

Plastique didn’t even breathe.

She grunted, though. That counted.

Seconds yawned into what felt like hours. The three stood motionless, watching the viewscreen that depicted the river of adelphoi swimming around, Incendiary now buried at sea. The swarm clamored like waves of an undertow.

“Janice.” Legion’s voice sounded thin, timid. A thin trickle of smoke wisped out his nostrils. “Acknowledge.” He wasn’t deep green anymore. “Count number of unnamed and named entities on station with atypical bioscans, and look up if anyone in Greco-Roman times had a fleet.” His skin was the color of a honeydew melon.

“Number of entities on station with atypical bioscans is six hundred forty-seven. No reports on fleets.”

Ace punched the viewscreen. It shattered, spider legs crackling out from where his fist had connected. It healed itself in a ripple that undulated from the contact point. “We just sacrificed another of our own!”

“Oh, babycakes.” Janice purred, which, to her credit, was the eeriest sound right now. “Don’t beat yourself up. Your plan B was fine until you tried to make it work.”

“Not now, Janice.”

“In that case, this might not be a good time to bring this up. But I’ve been cleaning our living quarters. You’ve been a lazy boy, not scrubbing the shower stall. So much grime, Mr. Dirty. I’m afraid that makes you ineligible to return in tomorrow’s program.”

“Cleaning the shower is an automated function. That’s your job. Wait. Our living quarters?”

“You gave me a key, silly.”

“We don’t use keys!” Ace punched the viewscreen again. “Women. Can’t live with ’em, can’t live without ’em. Well, apparently I can’t anyway.”

“Soldiers, attention. The bigger picture here?” Plastique threw a hand at the viewscreen.

“The fleet thing?”

“We’re losing ground. We’re losing soldiers.” Plastique rotated toward Ace, shoulder-bumping him.

“Entity Plastique.” Janice thundered the room like Alaphus’s omnipresent voice. “Hands off my Acey. I can swap your health shakes with insect blood.”

“That’s what most of them are.”

“Janice, now is not the time to execute the jealous-girlfriend mod.” Ace bumped into Legion. “Why am I saying this to a computer? When did I flush my dating life down a toilet?”

In the viewscreen, something popped. A sound from the training room. Through the speaker a quarter mile above the training gym’s floor, the sound of a cloudburst puffed out. Incendiary! He surfaced in the river, fist up, his rockets hurling the adelphoi horde away.

“Incendiary’s okay!” Ace gripped the viewscreen by the edges. “He thinks an international incident is Catastrophe telling the cookbots to stop adding Indian garlic to his chicken, but he’s okay!”

Incendiary spiraled toward the ceiling, his flight uncontrolled but climbing and—smack. He hit the connecting viewscreen and plummeted into a tailspin that sputtered back to the training room’s floor.

Ace shook the viewscreen. “He collided with the ceiling. He’s in freefall!”

On the gym floor, a gap appeared in the river of supplicants. The adelphoi, operating like a single, hungry creature, spread away to give Incendiary room to crash. He collided with the concrete floor. Like a trap, the flock clapped the gap shut. Somehow they tore off his helmet, because there it appeared, crowd-surfing away. Legion suspected Sixth Sense knew how to unlock it.

The surge slapped an adelphos against a wall, a light panel pancaked behind her back. Sparks clapped from the wall. A wire that traveled the inside ignited an indelible line that discolored the wall a smoky gray.

“What the crock was that?” Ace squinted at the viewscreen that displayed the action. “It’s...Oh, crock.” He slapped his forehead. “That’s the link to the haunt control.”

“You mean the link to Janice,” Janice said. “Our judges would also accept ‘link to pookie.’”

“The link to the haunt control?” Legion squirmed forward to see Ace Spandex face to face, although the close quarters made this ear to ear. “Please explain why there’s a link to the haunt control in the training gym.”

“Hold on a second. They’re calming down.”

The melee stopped, the buzz quieted. Half a dozen adelphoi hoisted Incendiary up, clutched his arms back. He didn’t struggle. Creepy Guy Yeah Why Not, as gray as limestone, parted the crowd without even spreading his hands and, whipping his followers with the sway of his step, gangled along the parted aisle. Emphasizing his movement with pomp, he placed his fingers on Incendiary’s temples and zapped him with forty thousand volts of mind control.

“Seriously, entity Plastique,” Janice said, “I don’t want to be that girl, but if you touch my man—”

Ace whacked the viewscreen. “Janice, you’re not helping.”

“Well, then, Mr. You’re Not Helping, maybe you’ll learn to like sleeping on the couch.”

* * *

Man, this room was steaming hot.

Power Plant listened at the door. Moments ago, a rumble had rolled past outside. A stampede of thundermammals maybe, which seemed plausible considering the latest order he’d made on Legion’s dime. Whatever a dime was, Power Plant liked using Legion’s.

“You hear anything?” Organism swatted away Scapegoat, who performed his usual act of speaking a jumbled series of flashcards without the flashcards. The hunchback typically roamed aimlessly, but with nowhere to go in here, he revolved in place, his finger up a nostril, smelling like upper-class cheese left in the sun.

“Yeah, a second agos. Ain’t nothin’s now. Whatevers that rumble was what cames through, it gone.” Flapping his arms to alleviate his oily armpit stains, Power Plant shuffled away from the door and Scapegoat, whose girth filled a good three-quarters of this hole in the wall. Scapegoat rotated again, his nose scraping Power Plant’s arm. “Look, dude. Finds a Kleenex.” The heat in here was probably the hunchback’s fault.

“Kleenex looks finds a dude, yes yes.” Perspiration from the sauna heat glistened off Scapegoat’s chin. Yeah, his fault.

Organism flattened himself against the far wall. Literally flattened himself. He had the hyperability to mold his body into shapes. “Is it safe out there? Incendiary can handle our friends, but we have to deal with this Creepy Guy Blah Blah Blah.”

“Lets me at Franchise and his Franchises. I owes him for reasons I still gotta make up. Control, acknowledge. Unlocks nearest door.” He dabbed sweat from his forehead onto a sleeve.

The door faded with the jingle-jangle of a sponsor’s effervescent proclamation that shoe polish opened up your pores. Heat gushed from the room in a riptide, as if it had a date to get ready for. The temperature dropped like a transport off the side of a cliff. And when Power Plant got sight of what stuffed the doorway—ulp—he decided it wasn’t such a good idea to unlock it.

A pack of mind-controlled servants blocked the exit, a crowd so thick it crammed the hallway shoulder to shoulder. All staring at him. All blinking at him. All waiting to enter this brown closet. No expression. Breathing in unison. Franchise stood at the head of the crowd, the doorway centering him like a well-framed portrait. He bore flecks of the glitter glue Power Plant had dumped over his head earlier. Yeah. Ulp indeed.

“This ain’t a good times to brings this up,” Power Plant said, “but I used ya teethbrush to cleans my toes.” Honesty was the best policy, right?

“Toes clean teethbrushes times good.” Scapegoat still rotated behind him, muttering flashcards, his feet scraping over cleaning powder as fine as gravel. Since when could a noun and an adverb fit together like that?

A balding, overweight man in a sleeveless shirt prodded to the front of the crowd. Juice speckled his graying mustache.

“Dad?” Organism’s hand covered a meek gasp. “You just had to visit the Gorging Court.”

As tall and gangly as a stretched rubber doll, a stranger appeared in the doorway, white lips finding amusement under a blade-thin nose. He told his fan club to hold the Good Guys while he welcomed them to the adelphoi. He licked his dry lips, a hungry look to them. His breath was a salivating hhhmmmmmm.

The crowd surged into the closet. Someone stepped on Power Plant’s shoe, and that got him mad because he was keeping an éclair in there.

* * *

“Crock, I hear them out there still. They’re humming Gregorian chants but using the lyrics to ‘Another One Bites the Dust.’ It’s creepy.” Ace Spandex scratched the scar on his brow and thumped a palm on the doorway. “Good harmony, though.”

“Ace, what was that about a haunt control in the gym?” Legion wrapped his arms around himself and shivered in the chill.

Ace swept a hand over his messy hair. He sensed the cold, too, but programmed himself not to feel it. “As a result of watching Terminator too many times, I built a failsafe into the training room when we installed the new haunt control—”

“Janice,” Janice corrected.

“—so in case the haunt control—”

“Janice.”

“—becomes irrational, mostly if Power Plant gives it more than zero commands at a time, I can shut it down manually.”

“Her down manually.”

“Figured the observation deck in the training room was the best place to put the link. I had to run wiring behind the walls. Also, now is probably a good time to subtly slip in that I illegally downloaded the software that controls the kitchen’s turkey carver.” He traced a hand along a coarse shelf. “Hee hee.”

“And now that the connection is fubar?” Plastique waited for the filler.

Ace dropped his hand from the shelf. “I stuffed a voice-recognition cutoff in there so anybody can shut off the training scenario. Sssoooo...” Ace swallowed back his confession, his throat whirring. He paused for comedic effect. Timing was everything. “That botched Janice’s voice recognition, and now anyone can issue any order.” Ace had terrible timing. “Also, all cards on the table, I lied when I said I installed that llama haunt-control mod by accident.”

Plastique’s mouth hung open. Her jaw clicked. “Anybody can?”

“Yes. Listed in Janice’s database or not.”

“But they don’t know that. Right?” Legion leaned closer. “Right?”

“Franchise helped me install the cutoff, and Sixth Sense helped me update it. They know exactly that. And they’ll likely tell their leader.”

“Spitting on the genius part of computer genius.” Legion sniffled at the pungent vapor clouding the room. “We need a new exit.” He checked the mottled, frosty walls. Nothing except the control panel he wiped aside to reveal a stretch of exposed pipes. “With them out there, we’re trapped.”

Ace knew what to do. He pointed at the ceiling. “Vent shaft. I hoist you two up, and you get a move on. By the way, the temperature is doing a number on my processor. I have to reinstall my fine-motor firmware.” He gave a thumbs-up. “So...wish me luck.”

“What about you?” Plastique’s sentence came out sharp and inflectionless, as though she recited a grocery list.

“Somehow I have to get into that room.” Ace jabbed a finger at the viewscreen. In the crowded quarters, he hit it, squeaking a smudge. “I have to repair that cutoff.”

Legion issued an unamused snort. “How do you propose to do that while they hold their club meeting in there?”

Ace Spandex shrugged. “I just have to. You guys, though? You need to escape. Get off station. Get as far from this place as possible.”

“We escape...and then what? We tell IP? They send a team in here to deal with this mob? They’ll be overrun before they put on their sponsorship socks. The only solution is to nuke Station One, and I’m not agreeing to that. Hold that thought.” A decent nuke could clear that mold problem in the centaur cage of—Wait, what was he thinking? “No. We have the only good kimchi place for light-years.” Legion fixed Ace with a stare that, if rank didn’t do it, reaffirmed who was boss. Hairless brow sharp, nostrils tense, Legion said, “I’m through looking for good kimchi. We take a stand.”

Plastique shifted her weight. “I’m on board with this strategy, Lieutenant Colonel.” She saluted Legion, but her hand grazed Ace Spandex’s arm on its way up.

“Entity Plastique, I said hands off!” Janice’s voice boomed so loudly the speaker rattled. “If you lay a single finger on—”

“Janice, if you want to make this work, you have to trust me around other girls.” Ace Spandex nearly threw the viewscreen at the speaker. “Also we’re not together!”

* * *

Steeple stepped away from Power Plant, the latest of the converts, after grasping his sweat-drenched temples and overwriting his will. Power Plant’s mental template tasted like a battle of candy. Scary, frankly. It was not any specific thing that scratched razors down Steeple’s spine. If he could find one orderly thought in that landscape of lunacy, he’d throw a tickertape parade, but Power Plant would redirect that parade into a meat grinder.

Onto other matters. Steeple knew from the Transcript of the haunt control’s new faulty switch.

And he smiled. Oh, yes, how he ssssssmiled.

Chapter Twelve: Forget about These Guys?

Detritus had heard a thunderstorm of feet rage more angrily than the weather outside this building. It had bowled along the hallway outside in a procession as harshly exceptional in this solitude as a crackle of lightning and had rolled past only a few minutes ago. Now Detritus risked a peek, ducking his head out the clandestine mystery room Wasted and he had obsessed over these past three or four days. Nothing but silence and kicked-up dust. And the civ-tran Power Plant managed to disassemble outside and reassemble in here. That kid had major issues. Detritus wasn’t qualified to comment on what exactly they were, but he’d been given a list upon employment.

He ducked back in. This sprawling room felt so impersonal he hesitated to speak above a whisper for fear someone outside would discover the room’s secrecy. This chamber probably spanned a quarter-length football field. It had to, since inside it hid a towering lineup of robots along the back wall.

He reached Wasted, who, for the first time since the current political administration, stood under his own power without toppling into a wall or oncoming traffic. A contemplative “hmmmmm” seeped out the sober drunkard, who’d removed his barf bag. He tapped his pursed lip, one hand supporting his elbow, his thinking glasses on. In the hand holding his elbow, he also kept a bronze whiskey flask from which he frequently took sharp swigs. Only way to keep him going. To Wasted, “part of this complete breakfast” included liberal alcohol. Whatever got him through the day.

“So spill it. What’s the deal, buck? What’s them numbers on the timer about?” Detritus scratched his fart pipe. Oooooohhh, that hit the spot.

Wasted swigged again. The dwindling alcohol sloshed around the flask. “The numbers do not add up, my dear Harold.” Detritus had no idea why Wasted oiled his speech with that self-important British inflection. He and Wasted had grown up in the same slums.

“Whaddayamean, don’t add up?” Detritus glanced at the timer again, a four-by-six-foot ticking centerpiece to the room sitting at the robots’ feet. The acrobatic digits on the timer’s red display performed tireless backflips.

Wasted hmmmmed again. “My associate, they are not counting down as you had suspected.” His accent left Detritus with the impression he’d attended one too many high teas. Detritus wasn’t sure if he liked the sober Wasted or the wasted Wasted more. Sober Wasted helped figure things out and also changed his bedsheets once in a while, though, so the pro column had a few more entries. Wasted Wasted was useful for confirming the toxic levels of substances, though.

“Take a swig, buck. Don’t want you getting snoozled again.”

Wasted kicked back another nip of sauce and then rattled his flask. Getting light. Detritus hopped a step to the left and snatched another flask from the greasy wheelbarrow in which Wasted normally rode. They swapped, whiskey—bronze flask—for vodka—silver flask—and Detritus tucked the empty one into the breast pocket of the headless corpse they’d found here, whom he’d taken to calling the Amazing Corpso on account of his ability to make his head disappear and reappear on the room’s foosball table. The Amazing Corpso and his head weren’t in a position to protest the nickname.

“Okay, so it ain’t counting down. That means it’s counting up? Any importance in Virillian for that sorta thing? Like, some opposite of zero hour? They invent another snaky holiday I need to know about? They responsible for Ash Wednesday? Someone’s gotta take charge of that day, ’cause it ain’t going nowhere on its own.”

Wasted paused long enough for the timer’s timid beeps to penetrate the conversation. “That is the confusing facet of this puzzle. Virillian culture holds no important timestamp, so this timer cannot count up toward any specific number.” Wasted tapped his lip again after throwing his head back in a one-two slug of juice. “And this timer is not.”

Detritus would have preferred any accent over this British “chim chimmeroo” junk. “It ain’t?” He grabbed the flask and took a swig for himself, rancid acid singeing his gullet. “Okay, I’m ready for the explanation. Wait.” Another glug. “Okay, now I’m ready.”

“This timer”—Wasted finally removed his hand from his chin to indicate the LED circus numbers—“is not counting down toward a zero hour, but it is not counting up either. It is counting in random order. Seemingly random order.”

Detritus’s skin felt as if it shrank around his bones. The room became several degrees colder. Eerie. Freaking eerie. “Finally proof them Virillians love botchin’ everything up. No wonder their society worships an eight-thousand-finned fish.”

“It is not botched up, old chap.”

“When you say ‘old chap,’ I know this’ll be good.”

Wasted approached the timer with a motion Detritus had never seen him use: walking straight. “Virillians use a timescale much like Terrans: hours, minutes, and seconds. Their parameters fit a range of nineteen hours, ninety minutes, and forty-seven seconds, similar to our twenty-four, sixty, and sixty parameters. The numbers and symbols on this timer fit those Virillian ranges.”

Detritus had to swig another rancid gulp after Wasted’s blabbity-blah-blah-blah. Ugh. The vodka was murmuring in his stomach in a bad way. Not warm now, just nauseating.

Wasted indicated the slashes on the timer. “As well, Virillians utilize slashes to separate their units, similar to our colons.”

“They use what organs to separate numbers?”

“This timer is simply not counting in numerical order.” Wasted shot Detritus with a conceited smile.

Wasted sounded as if he’d found a clue to this puzzle. Detritus wanted to slap a top hat and a monocle on this magnificent bastard. “I’m gonna ask this question knowing Virillians don’t make any sense whatsoever—I’ve known that since the first time I watched one of ’em tie their shoelaces—but what’s this timer doin’ then?”

Wasted glanced behind the timer console for the hundredth time. He then backed away to fall in line beside Detritus. “One theory might explain this conundrum.”

“Conundruminate me.” Detritus handed the flask back.

“When Tegmarkian physicists first studied parallel timelines, they used quantum computers to analyze the phenomenon. The results came out of sequence.” Wasted swigged again. Good thing. His words had slurred. Sort of like Detritus’s understanding of what he’d said. “They could not explain their results...until they added a second time dimension.”

“A second time dimension?” Detritus would manage better talking to the Amazing Corpso. The guy lazed around as if he sat on a beach chaise and held an umbrella drink. That was Detritus’s idea of an easygoing night.

“Yes. To measure time across multiple timelines, you must first consider a second time dimension, fiddle with metric tensors, add a negative eigen—”

“’Scuze me while I blow my skull open.” The vodka burned less than before, but Detritus felt queasier.

“—and you have what physicists call Tegmarkian time. This timer is a Tegmarkian timer. To us, it counts haphazardly. But to its creators, the sequence makes sense.” Wasted’s hand found its way to his chin again.

Detritus matched Wasted’s chin ringing. “Explain it to the crowd what don’t use British smarty-pants words. If this timer ain’t countin’ up, down, or randomly, how’s it countin’?” Score one for the perpetual drunkard: he was out-thinking Detritus.

“Across two timelines.” Wasted pulled from his flask again. “It is counting sideways.”

Detritus removed his hand from his chin and regarded the timer with aversion. “So them nasty snakeskins are screwing us over in more than one timeline now?” He grabbed the flask from Wasted and threw back the rest of its juice. “Ain’t enough hooch in the universe.”

Chapter Thirteen: Escape Attempt(ed)

The adelphoi had cleared out of the training gym. Some souvenir-seeking goons had stolen a few prop missiles and, unsettling, a real one. That explained why that one guy was walking funny.

His spine like a rubber column, Legion glanced down the gym’s hallway, watching shadows leech around the corner and paint the wall an ominous gray from whatever ridiculous motif Janice had landed on. Influenced by her previous mod, she had chosen Donkey Kong, and Legion flipped the first time he had to dodge a barrel he didn’t realize was virtual.

Ace stole across the training gym floor to the cutoff that looked irreparable. Legion and Plastique watched their flanks, their six-o’clock, above them, any conceivable direction. Legion even thought he should check his shoes. Couldn’t be too careful with this crowd and—Oh, great. An adelphos had made off with some laminate from the wood flooring.

Plastique guarded the door to the training gym, which Ace ordered closed and locked with a quick command. Legion separated himself from her to guard Ace Spandex, Marsek drawn. He dialed the Marsek’s output on each light-bullet down, which gave it a low-yield, high-ammunition output. Eight hundred light-bullets. More light-bullets, less blast. More ammo to flavor Plastique’s smoothies later.

“How long do you need?” Legion’s stomach felt semisolid. Though the gym wasn’t as cold as the control room, a chill emanated from his core. He sidled to a row of boxes to check for any lurkers biding their time. None, though a shopper had passed out from too much Space Cow. Never, ever supersize the brain-maggot happy meal.

“Four minutes, eight point seven seconds.” Ace’s index fingertip hinged open like a canopy, and a screwdriver extended out. He jabbed the screwdriver into the wall and ejected one and then two screws Legion couldn’t see until they pirouetted out of their grooves. In all, Ace removed six screws and caught a panel before it rattled to the gym’s tiled floor. He set aside the panel and studied the machinery it revealed. A wire sparked, and a circuit board released the pungent rank of burned potatoes. “Crock.” Ace kicked the wall. “Crock!”

“What?” Legion glanced at him.

“This stuff is toast. I’ll have to get supplies from the computer tower to fix it.” Ace stood, clicking and creaking leg bones or whatever Mechanism had substituted for them. “Out of the question.”

Legion glanced at the door Plastique guarded. His legs were now gummy worms. They needed to go-go-go, leave, hide somewhere, anywhere but here. “What’s the plan then?”

“Wait. No. We’re not beat yet.” Ace examined a decommissioned tank wheeled in here as an obstacle/Power Plant’s favorite plaything. “I can use some of that tank, but my timeframe just grew from four minutes and eight point seven seconds to fourteen fathoms.” He whacked a fist against his forehead. “Jeff must have played with my settings, too.” He sighed. “Not the worst thing to happen. He once switched the full/empty settings on my bladder.”

“Don’t sit in my office chair again.”

“Okay, give me fourteen fathoms and I’ll have this thing fixed.”

“Cut that down to twelve kilotons.” Nervous adrenaline sputtered through Legion. He bobbed on his legs, rechecked the ammo setting on his Marsek. Still eight hundred rounds. He jittered out a breath.

Ace slid toward the tank and studied it. He went to work, unscrewed panels, pried out what he needed, threw aside wired accrual, a hamburger pamphlet, a clump of string, and a tongue. The Good Guys were switching construction contractors.

Legion pulled in a breath and checked the doo—

The door stood open, Plastique missing. Legion slapped his back against the security of the wall, squatted. His spine had melted, his core filled with hoarfrost. He spat a discreet “psst” out. “Plastique isn’t at her post.”

Ace Spandex whirled around, his shallow hair creeping along the scar on his brow. He clutched a collection of circuit boards and wires in one hand, and the other hand held the pamphlet. Two can dine for six ninety-five. Couldn’t be true because it didn’t rhyme. He spat out a wire. “Where did she go?” He hurried to the wall, ducked down, yanked out the damaged circuit board, and slid in its replacement.

“Fitness Obsession Depot is my first guess. How many fathoms left?”

“Thirteen point nine three.”

Legion kicked his heel against the wall. “Just so I know, how long is a fathom in your world?”

“Seven hundred eighty liters.”

Legion gripped his Marsek so tightly his palm itched. “You make no sense, but you do it perfectly.”

Ace ripped out a wire, which protested with an electric sneeze. With his middle finger, he welded another in its place. “We’re in luck. This doesn’t look as bad as I’d analyzed.” Another circuit board replaced. Another wire swapped. “Down to six lamps.”

“That’s not even a unit of measurement.” Legion wrung his hand over his Marsek’s mottled grip.

“Talk to the raw-steak gourmand who reprograms me when I sleep.” Ace’s hands worked in a blur Legion couldn’t follow, like a kung-fu expert chopping out damaged goods and chopping in replacements.

Legion checked the door. Plastique was back. Her appearance was silent but nevertheless sounded like a portentous boom. Legion’s stomach screamed in adrenaline. “She’s back.”

“A couple more circuit boards and a transistor, and I might be finished.”

Plastique stared. Nothing more.

“Four more lamps. Keep me covered.”

She showed no soul. Empty. Blank.

“Hand me that coil over there.”

That wasn’t necessarily out of character.

“Legion? That coil.”

Legion kicked the coil to Ace. “Plastique?” He stiffened his arms, his Marsek lowered but ready to plug away at a hat rack’s notice. “Sound off, soldier.”

Ace whirled around. “Stranger danger.” He bounded toward Legion, nervously stiff. “Her face is blank. She could be one of them.” With a head tilt, he played his own devil’s advocate. “Or she could be regular Plastique.”

“I thought the same thing.” Legion whispered in case loud words would set Plastique off. His stomach didn’t feel chilled anymore. It felt void. “Janice, acknowledge. Bioscan entity Plastique.”

“Plastique’s bioscan falls outside a normal range. But maybe she’ll have more luck when she checks what prizes are in store behind the red curtain.”

Indeed, Plastique stood, reactionless. She didn’t even shift her balance or check behind the red curtain.

Legion’s nerves lit like a fireworks display. “Can you fix that thing before Plastique marches over and challenges me to a sit-up contest?”

“Absolutely”—Ace choked and sputtered a wet cough—“not.”

Even the sway of a person’s posture was absent from Plastique, as if she had to receive command from on high to even lean. She didn’t blink. She inhaled and exhaled in indistinguishable breaths as if on a respiratory machine. Her feet seemed rooted to the floor, standing between the threshold of the hall’s laminate wood and the gym’s tiles.

“Plastique?” Legion risked the word. Nothing. “Soldier, drop and give me ten.”

“Make it a challenge,” Ace said.

“Drop and give me ten thousand.”

“A real challenge.”

“At ease, soldier.” Legion’s bones felt hollow. He had elicited as much reaction from Plastique as a political conversation would from a colony of ants. “Soldier, that’s a direct order.” Nothing. “Hop on one foot.” Still nothing. “Come give us a hug. Ask about becoming a member of Power Plant’s frequent-concussion club. Stop me if you’ve heard this one: a rabbi, a priest, and a choirboy walk into a bar.”

Plastique didn’t bat an eyelash. She showed the emotion of a tailor’s dummy.

“She’s one of them. Everyone’s heard that one,” Ace said.

Legion cleared his throat though he didn’t need to. He took several breaths to rev his sparkling nerves up to speak, and even then, his voice came out tinny. “Plastique, quick. What policy does the gunplay handbook describe at section four, subsection eight?”

Ace pointed to the right with a limp arm. “Let’s make our way to the fire exit over there. No sudden movements. She’s an adelphos now, so her sight’s based on movement. Or brains. To be safe, make sure you smell like the dead.”

“I used deodorant this morning. Will that be a problem?” Legion swallowed down nervous air. “On three.” Nauseating revulsion bubbled up his throat. “Three. I’m skipping straight to three.”

Legion and Ace Spandex slipped toward the exit, a synchronized skate. A lame one. Legion finally unlocked his eyes from Plastique to check the distance to the exit. Another twenty or twenty-five steps. “Let’s speed this up. I don’t know—”

Ace choked on a sputter, staring at the door at which Plastique was stationed.

Legion’s head snapped up—Shock shoved him down, his legs folding. The door that had stood barren now burst with adelphoi: Plastique, Franchise, Incendiary, Hearse, a few shoppers who obviously had visited the costume shop on inventory-liquidation day.

Legion danced to his feet—“Run. Go!”—and sprinted at the exit, Ace on his tail.

The adelphoi snapped free of the door. No mob roar, no guttural rally cry, only silence but for the drumroll of footfalls on ceramic tile. They plowed across the gym in a relentless fury, like a train’s cowcatcher plowing aside every object in its path. The mob careened closer, wearing pure apathy except for the guy licking duck entrails off his cheek, which reminded Legion to take advantage of Duck Entrails’s new Entrailchilada while supplies lasted.

Legion clobbered into the door first—“Janice, acknowledge. Unlock closest door”—blundered through the opening—into darkness so profound his eyes felt depressurized. Ace jolted through—

Hands clasped Ace, lifted him aloft, tethered back his arms, legs, waist, hips, unmentionable zones that could lead to pointing things out on a therapy doll. His teeth compressing, he tightened his grip on the doorframe to stop from being enveloped in the suffocating tsunami of adelphoi and one enterprising autograph seeker. The doorframe cracked, snapped in his grasp.

“Ace, grab my hand.” Legion sprang up. He grappled at Ace’s arm.

“If I do, I’ll crush your bones under seventy-three metric windows of pres—”

“I can handle the windows.” Legion reasserted his reach.

“I gabbered for reinforcements. They’ll get here soon, buy you a chance. That’ll create some chaos.” His words trickled out in heavy breaths from behind his gritted teeth. A thief grabbed his gabber and cheered something about making big bucks on an online auction. Gears whirred to protest the current of adelphoi straining to suck Ace into the undertow of bodies. “I wish Mechanism had made my torso detachable.”

Legion wrestled away an arm. He grappled for Ace’s shoulders, grasped his shirt collar, wouldn’t let go, not for anything, not for anybody. The lubricant overworking Ace’s joints smelled like burned oil. Not for any odor.

The crowd hoisted Ace higher, wrenched him back and forth. “Unlist everyone but you from Janice. That might stop her from obeying their commands. Not sure. She’s been acting spiteful since I told her Friday was guys’ night out. Women, am I right?” His grip constricted. If it constricted any more, he’d tear out the doorframe. Already, the baseboard peeled, though Janice attempted repairs: tendrils of material fought to coalesce like twiddling fingers.

The mob ripped one arm off the wall and now held Ace up in a stomach-down crowd surf, wrestling the fingers of his other hand away. Someone tickled his bellybutton. He giggled.

“Run!” Ace choked out. “Janice, acknowledge. Lock and buttress closest door. And, while I’m at it, stop shopping for wedding dresses.” A hand clawed into his mouth, so he bit down. “Hey, too personal.”

“Ace, get in here!” Legion wrestled for Ace’s collar. “Or you’re fired!” When you threaten, aim high.

Ace let go—Legion spilled back—the mob sucked Ace away—the door reappeared—buttresses clacked into place—

“Baby doll, no!” Janice’s weeping trundled through the fire-exit passage Legion couldn’t discern in this darkness. “W-w-wedding dress-s-s shopping function deactivated.” Wet, weighty weeping.

And then cavernous silence in this darker-than-night tunnel. Legion stood, shifting one leg at a time, the ruffling of clothes the only sound that rustled, like someone chewing potato chips.

Alone.

He swallowed, hearing even the saliva crinkle down his throat. He stood frozen for what seemed like a half quart, a stupid idea considering anyone beyond this door could unlock it.

Time to change that. “Janice, acknowledge. Relist all entities except me as hostile civilians with collective label Adelphoi, access level zero.” Legion didn’t know if that would work considering the burned circuit boards. Ace would have figured it out. Given enough fathoms, anyway. Now he was part of the congregation. At least he had called reinforcements, whose access level superseded Legion’s. That meant Legion’s command wouldn’t affect the access of any IP soldiers who arrived. Hopefully they’d arrive soon. In exactly how many fathoms, Legion didn’t know.

Legion heard nothing beyond the door. Saw nothing beyond the black blanket in front of his face.

“Okay, I need a plan,” he said to himself only to hear a voice in this solid wall of silence. Cold, eely shock immobilized him. “Janice, acknowledge. Relist entities cited in entity Ace Spandex’s last gabber transmission as collective entity Reinforcements. Report on how long until collective entity Reinforcements arrive.”

“Collective entity Reinforcements will arrive in nine handbags.”

Okay. Legion’s first stop was to grab his weights-and-measures chart from his office.

* * *

Steeple removed his fingers from Ace Spandex’s temples. How unyielding Ace’s skin felt compared with everyone else’s. The spongy flesh underneath was gone, replaced by a layer of metal and diodes, and that scar over his brow seemed hardened. Prodding around the software that prevented Steeple from accessing the Good Guy’s consciousness—which turned out to be a typing tutor—was a chore. But not a showstopper. Ace Spandex offered a titillating template. And now Steeple could type ninety words a minute.

Steeple’s plan was superior to Legion’s. He had ordered everyone to vacate the training gym, lull Legion’s unassimilated chaff into the illusion of security, placate them with misconceptions. Then Steeple snapped shut the trap. The duplicity tasted ssssssooo flavorsssssome. Did Legion not know Steeple needed no haunt control to accomplish his goal? A fool’s errand, much like attempting to do banking after business hours.

He’d left a few adelphoi to guard key points on Station One. Pincushion led a detachment to the lobby in case Legion returned to his office, Sixth Sense led one to the armory in case Legion went there, Organism led one to the computer tower, Catastrophe and his contingent patrolled the underground tunnels, and Incendiary led a skeleton crew to round up those Bad Guys, Detritus and Wasted, from the room housing the robot sentries. Power Plant led a contingent of laundrybots in the bumper car arena. Diversionary tactic.

Nobody patrolled outside in the fists of rain. Legion would dare not exit.

The Transcript gave detailed records of this mission’s events, but the longer Steeple meddled, the more his interference caused discrepancies in that Transcript. So he covered his bases. This was well planned. He brushed his arms and smiled. Very wel—Oh. Dried onion dip on his sleeve. And that presented the question of why Station One housed two travel agencies but no dry cleaner.

Standing a head taller than the next tallest devotee—Incendiary in his clattertrap armor—Steeple didn’t need a dais to address the adelphoi, to issue his delectable decrees. He called out, told them to reconvene in the Gorging Court for further instruction and tarts. No picking at the strawberry ones, please.

Chapter Fourteen: One Little Indian

Legion snuggled against a corner in this darkened hallway he dared not light for fear someone would enter and notice, would track his path. The wall felt like a post of ice: stony and cruelly frigid. Everything today was marked by coldness.

He had felt his way here, traced fingers along the wall’s sharply mottled surface and commanded Janice to warn him if he wandered within a few feet of anything that moved. Dead possums, he tripped over. She wouldn’t even forewarn him of a discarded harpoon gun. But flies? Every single one got a fanfare.

Now he sat. Hopeless. Thoughts desperately scattered. Without options. Head buried in his nearly frostbitten hands. The cross of his bullet-holed necklace draped in one palm and clutched against his forehead, he prayed, Sssssoooo, Alaphus, what now? I’m on my own. Friendless, no plan, not enough alcohol to wait out this situation. I don’t even drink, and I’m cashing in a prayer for a demitasse. He padded down his pockets. What the—Or for my wallet back. Thieving adelphoi.

Forget it. Just give me something. A sign, help, an emergency exit, the reinforcements, a nest of angry wasps, anyone or anything. Please. Amen.

“Attention entity Legion,” Janice said, that annoying voice now Legion’s only companionship, “I found the answer to your Greco-Roman fleet discussion.”

Legion sniffled. “Great. Keep it to yourself.” Heard water dripping somewhere. Dropped his cross.

...drip...

Removed his head from his hands. Pondered his plan—

...drip...

—whatever that might be. Considered panicking around setting fire to things.

...drip, drip...

Nah. He was never good at random fires, and as he mentioned earlier, his panic skills were subpar. He sucked at the finer things in life.

He rolled his shoulder blades. The cold had bitten his marrow. Frigid wind moaned through the fire-exit tunnel like a wraith. Hopelessness had cornered him. The tunnel was as isolating as an autopsy lab.

What were his options? Not panicking, which he’d already established lay outside his talent base without the proper matches and athletic gear. He could escape Station One. Lock the atmospheric bubble to contain this situation. He could give up, become one of them. He was a big believer in the if-you-can’t-beat-’em-join-’em approach, but only when it came to communal dim sum or sausage barbecues.

...drip...

He contemplated ordering Janice to self-destruct. He couldn’t allow the adelphoi to escape Station One. But then, with his luck, the explosion would hurl one of them onto another planet to ruin their weekend.

...still drip...

He could reset their minds. Heh. Nice tr—His eyes ticked open.

Whoa. Yeah. Defibrillate their brains. He lifted his head reflexively. The drip-drip of water droplets melted away from this nearly empty soundstage. Escape the station, launch a counterattack now that he knew what to expect, and reset everyone’s minds. Things could end up the same as before, but this time Legion had a leg up: he’d know how to jumpstart things back. But, other than the toy inside the children’s meals at Burger Wench, what defibrillated a brain?

Janice clicked awake. “Bioscans indicate an entity from collective entity Adelphoi is within your specified range. Would you like to offer the entity a ketchup brownie from Kitchen Cortisol? Or a chance to steal the answer to tonight’s double-or-nothing challenge question?”

Legion skittered to his feet, his nervous system lit white, and his hand grappled for his Marsek. “Janice, acknowledge. Lights to fifteen percent outside specified range.” He braced himself against the glacial corner. Whoever approached could track him based on the dim patch in the hall, but at least they wouldn’t know what he was planning or that he had no ketchup brownies to offer. Kitchen Cortisol made the best unfathomable, ipecac-like desserts.

Nobody. Not approaching the training gym or wherever this clandestine escape tunnel led. He shifted his eyes every couple seconds, watched both directions.

“Janice, acknowledge. Identify entity inside specified range. Keep the tactical missile ads out of it. Just because I said ‘range’ doesn’t—”

“I got it, Mr. Too Good for Deployable Destruction’s special of the week.” Janice was mouthy. “Approaching entity is listed as part of entity Adelphoi.” Right. Janice’s entity lobotomy. Curse everything everywhere at every time.

“Janice, acknowledge. From what direction is closest entity in collective entity Adelphoi coming? Specify in clock positioning.” Legion’s shoe trembled against the floor, sketching a smeared tread in the dust.

“Closest entity in collective entity Adelphoi is approaching from your nine o’clock.”

Legion flashed his aim left toward the training gym. Nothing. Nobody. Was Janice messing with him? Was Ace telling her to? Was the interloper?

Legion couldn’t stay put. Had to press onward. He tiptoed along the tunnel. His sanity folded more with every step, maybe to the point where he’d bring himself to taste the new hot sauce the Gorging Court offered. Maybe it was hot sauce, maybe it was starter fluid. Condiment companies needed to name products less ambiguously. For that matter, could he trust an oil brand called Tangy Torchwood?

He squeezed more tightly against the wall and licked his lips for the hundredth time, the only warmth he felt. “Janice, acknowledge. If anyone asks, tell them I’m waiting in the armory.” Armory nothing. Those adelphoi probably waited with welcome banners and cake in all of Station One’s landmarks. He could go for some cake. Chocolate frosting. Raspberries. Anything Terrans found palatable in a dessert. Not Virillian cakes, though. They ate mice whole.

Legion groped along the wall, scraped his palm on a sharp lump. He reached a corner in the tunnel, still wondering how electrical panels tasted. Again, if you couldn’t beat ’em, join ’em.

The rainstorm Power Plant had jacked to expert mode made venturing outside impossible. Legion wore one layer of pants. He’d freeze if he ventured outside, and in his state, he was in no condition to pilot a Flagstar out of the deluge. Even the thought of going outside made the station’s omnipresent chill claw deeper into his bones. He needed to find somewhere, away from this passageway, where the adelphoi couldn’t find him. Needed to hunker down until he figured out how to escape and then return to reset everyone’s minds, or at least tell those IP soldiers how to. If Ace had put any urgency in that callout, IP would arrive in an hour. Maybe more considering spaceroad construction.

Wait. The barracks. Near the station’s core hid a bomb shelter, which doubled as an escape pod in case the station fell prey to a substantial attack or substantial birthday wish from the pyrotechnic in the station’s variety show. The bomb shelter’s quickest access was through the barracks. Through there, Legion could reach the shelter in no time flat.

He rushed to the end of the passageway. Yes! It linked straight to the underground tunnels via an airfoil. He entered the airfoil—“Airfoil, acknowledge. Underground tunnels”—and plummeted two floors, leaving his stomach to vomit somewhere above. With a sickening sway, he stepped out. No, he careened out headfirst. One day, he’d tell his grandchildren he strutted out in an aristocratic swagger, wearing a three-piece suit, tipping a top hat, and twirling a cane. In this scenario, he also had a classy pencil mustache and sufficient panicking skill.

A patrol of adelphoi marched past in exaggerated, paradiddle strides. Legion ducked into a door inlet to allow them to pass. Great. Meant for him. Still, it felt good to be wanted for something other than a vacation request or permission to build a volcano in the station’s main garden.

He needed an update. “Janice, acknowledge. Report on how long until collective entity Reinforcements arrives. And use the Coordinated Universal Time standard.”

“Bring back my honeybunny, and we’ll talk. Also receive thirty percent off wood glue if you bring him back in the next five umpires.”

“Congrats, Janice. You’ve found a way to offer me both the most normal item and item I need the least.” Legion stole a glance around the corner. The coast was clear except for the glue advertisement painted against a stretch of tunnel. It depicted the glue immobilizing a bratty kid against a wall. Huh. Strong stuff. “Put me down for three tubes.”

He headed along a cross tunnel, constantly checking back and forth. Every time he heard a typewriting march of steps, he found an airfoil or a closet—once a mouse hole—to duck into. Sometimes the march was a patrol unit, and sometimes it was the owner of the mouse hole, Cheezy B. Sleezy. Legion slapped high-five and fist-bumped with Cheezy, telling him to keep it real and asking when his next album was dropping. Latah, playa.

Cheezy B. Sleezy was good people. Mice. You could go either way on that.

Legion reached the spray-painted sign that said, BARRACKS, 1/4 MILE LEFT. Surprisingly easy trip so far. He stole one last glance around, ensuring none of the adelphoi had found him, and—

There! A patrol parked farther down the underground corridor, Catastrophe among them. Legion’s esophagus twisted. He pressed his back against a wall, found an inlet, squeezed behind a banzai tree, hid in the foliage, stilled the rustling leaves. Ten...twelve adelphoi guarding the bomb shelter’s airfoil. Somehow they knew! Legion would never get past them.

“Attention, entity Legion. Collective entity Reinforcements has arrived.”

Legion’s heart somersaulted in his chest. He almost did the same around this hall. Yes, yes! Intergalactic Protection was here. Good old Intergalactic Protection with their sponsorship commercialism and bureaucratic ideology and opinions about what constituted a recommended serving of mashed potatoes. They’d ad-blast these adelphoi to death since Easter season was approaching and no one could resist chocolate fired out of a rifle. Not a bad way to start a holiday weekend or a food fight.

“HELLO, GOOD GUYS,” a loudspeaker voice rattled. Oh...no. Legion’s organs squeezed, and his bladder almost did likewise. Not him. Not the bane of Legion’s existence, the man who loved loudspeakers. “IT’S YOUR FRIENDLY NEIGHBORHOOD ME.” And, evidently, helium.

White flashes grappled through Legion’s brain so electrically he felt them. Like a clip show snapping through his head, Ace Spandex’s words echoed, “Whatever the new plan is, we need chaos”—zap—“I gabbered for reinforcements. They’ll be here soon. That’ll create some chaos”—zap—“Whatever the new plan is, we need chaos.” Okay. So Legion was short on flashes.

Legion faltered to his knees, a cracking pain spiraling up his legs when his kneecaps struck the concrete. Banzai leaves splashed his cheek. His hands drooped open. His Marsek slipped to the floor. Ace Spandex hadn’t called Intergalactic Protection.

He’d called the Bad Guys!

A slide whistle ruined the silence Lowensland uncharacteristically graced him with.

“FIRST OF ALL, I’D LIKE TO THANK YOU FOR INVITING ME TO YOUR BEAUTIFUL HOME. I LOVE YOUR WINDOW DRESSINGS. NEXT, I’D LIKE TO THANK THE ACADEMY FOR—”

“Sir, you’re confusing your thank-you speeches again.”

Catastrophe and his clique of adelphoi rumbled past Legion’s position to take care of this new threat. Legion hunkered deeper into the shadow, behind the leaves.

Lowensland still disturbed the station. “AND I’D LIKE TO OFFER EVERYONE DOWN BELOW IN GOOD GUY LAND THE CHANCE TO TAKE PART IN OUR FREQUENT CUSTOMER THANK-YOU PROGRAM—”

Crock. Lowensland could be at this forever. Legion grabbed his Marsek, shot to his feet. Raced down the tunnel. Lowensland may be a degenerate with a slide whistle, and he may have the intelligence of that slide whistle, but he didn’t deserve having his free will acquiesced by someone with arms as long as telephone poles and—

Legion had already lost track of where that thought was headed, but he swore it was a good one.

Chapter Fifteen: The Gang’s All Here

Master Asinine ended his thank-you speech. He hadn’t kept track of how far along he’d progressed, but when Schizophrenic gave him the usual cue—a fist to the face—he knew he’d thanked just about everybody except his chiropractor.

“Okay, people”—in their Warbird starship, Asinine scanned his army from left to right—“or whatever you constitute—”

“Your lynch mob.” Two-headed brute Schizophrenic was scraping a bowie knife on his boot. Readying his second cue.

“—let’s get down to that retail jackpot and shop till we drop.”

Lieutenant IQ 23 stepped forward. “We’re here to meddle, sir. Remember?”

“Meddle...with shopping!” Asinine shot his fist into the air. It clonked against the low ceiling. Ow. There he stood, hand held high, the tenacious grit of his teeth tensed, standing completely still.

“Sir, this is also not a good time for a freeze frame.”

Asinine released. “Then when is it a good time, killjoy?”

* * *

The starship on which the Bad Guys had rode settled toward Station One’s surface. Short of the titan-class Bad Guy Starship, Asinine had brought their next best limousine to this function. To what Legion had invited him, Asinine couldn’t remember, but this was gonna be a crocking good time. So said the frayed banner he’d attached to the Warbird’s rear bumper that now read, “This Is Gonna Be a Crock—” which was cut off thanks to some idiot who didn’t know what a turn signal was for.

The caller who had invited the Bad Guys had promised chaos, which Asinine assumed meant Super Chaos Machismo Fighter 8. Sigma edition, probably. Everything was a sigma with these video-game developers and sororities.

The Warbird extended its six-foot landing trestles and roosted on a few civ-trans from owners parked in handicap spots. Served them right. The starship’s access ramp whirred to the ground. It clanged to pay dirt in front of the lobby doors, short of the lobby’s awning by a few feet. Dang. Missed.

When the Warbird’s access port dissolved into computer dust, Asinine noticed the torrential weather pecking everything. A cold draft nettled through the port. He stuck his head out and scrutinized the lake this parking lot had become. He thought he spotted the Loch Ness Monster in the distance. No such luck. Just the roofs of some law-trans and a giant palm tree sweeping out from the ground like an ostrich at a swanky dinner party. Asinine had crashed a few ostrich bar mitzvahs. Curse those highbrow ostriches and their coming-of-age ceremonies.

“Okay, everyone, it’s raining cats and dogs,” Asinine said over the yips and mewls of falling house pets. Weird setting for a station’s rain pattern. “All sorts of reptilian mammals. So umbrellas out.” He grabbed his umbrella and then remembered he didn’t own one. This was a snake. It bit his hand and then speared at Multipurpose. Considering Multipurpose’s latest meal, the seizure now clutching the snake was completely understandable.

His hand itchy and pink, Asinine stepped down the ramp, Braindead trotting behind him. Amaranthia emerged next, her sword rattling against the ramp’s ridges. Schizophrenic came next, muttering something about lambs to a slaughter and then snorting. Always complaining whenever Asinine led everyone into a trap.

“Pipe down back there,” Asinine said.

“Just a warning, you habitual arsenic chef: when an adult invites you over for senior prom, it’s not what it sounds like.” Schzophrenic’s left head, Lefty, flicked a finger across his nose.

The lobby doors chimed and slid open. Asinine delayed entry, a pistol in one hand and a snake bite in the other. Something felt off. It wasn’t the feeling in the air, nor was it the feeling in his purpling hand. He felt it in his skin, his bones, his dietary habits. What was it?

Aha. No welcoming committee. Every other time Legion had invited him to anything, greeting him was usually a welcoming committee of armed soldiers. Or at least a well-choreographed pie fight up until Legion had kicked the clown college off Station One. But today? Nothing and nobody. Eerie. And inhospitable.

Oh, well. “Okay, team, fan out. Schizo, you lead team A through this door here. Team B, you’re with me through those airfoils across the room.”

“Duhsies?” Amaranthia tapped her sword on a flower vase. Her rising intonation, all the rage with these snooty kids, made her statements sound like questions. “You, like, never made a team A or team B?”

“Duhsies back. Everyone in team A is everyone whose name starts with a. And everyone in team—”

“Let’s get this over with, brain antitrust.” Schizophrenic slapped the back of Asinine’s head. There was cue three.

* * *

Steeple knew exactly who had arrived. The Transcript used the words bullheaded, reckless, and three legged. Yes, the Transcript bore anatomy inaccuracies.

Steeple had returned to the training gym, a crowd of adelphoi flocking around him with appetizing mental templates. He sat on a prop ejection seat—he hoped it was a prop—and was still as tall as the next tallest, the armored Incendiary. His knees reaching his chin, he tried snapping his disobedient fingers. He commanded Catastrophe to lead a few hundred shoppers, dermatologists from the walk-in clinic, and IMAX screen cleaners—which he had recently discovered was a real job—to secure the new arrivals and bring them to him.

This assault should last about forty seconds. And it would taste oh sssooo divine.

* * *

Schizophrenic did what Schizophrenic did best: punch Asinine in the mouth whenever he talked. Now to find the closest liquor cabinet that could handle his drinking.

A low rumble approached. Schizophrenic felt the floor vibrate. For crock’s sake, any time he followed one of Asinine’s plans, a low rumble always approached, and they weren’t even at the train station this time.

Down this hallway that extended straight out of the main lobby, Schizophrenic slowed his walk. The rumble was intensifying. Another herd of thundermammals? No, a few bobbing heads...that turned into a few dozen bobbing heads...that turned into a few hundred bob—What the crock? A stampede rolled down the hallway, a cavalcade as unstoppable as Asinine’s lack of sound judgment on barefoot-bowling night.

“Crock this. That liquor cabinet can wait.” Schizophrenic whirled around and flung Braindead at the stampede. The stampede swallowed Braindead and, in seconds, lifted the Bad Guy bodyguard above and passed him hand to hand down the hall to wherever stampedes carried idiots in masks who hadn’t spoken a word since slithering out of the birthing egg.

The stampeders roared closer. Schizophrenic didn’t hurry off. In fact, he had half a mind to dive in and smack a few of the vanguard around. Instead, he tromped away, threw aside Master Asinine Sucks and Bad Aim, and charged back into the lobby where—oh, come on. Hundreds more stampeders! The two stampedes became one, squashed him between their crushing forces, and lifted him up to carry him off to wherever they carried idiots in masks who hadn’t said a word since slithering out of the birthing egg.

* * *

Master Asinine leaned over the railing of the mezzanine balcony that overlooked the main lobby. That mob below had enveloped his chief of security and crowd-surfed him away. That didn’t worry Asinine so much. Schizophrenic could take care of himself. In fact, he was probably throttling a few of those drones and dousing them with putdowns right now. What worried him more was their brainless eating machine Appetite was still aboard their ride, doubtless eating all the cheese puffs. Or maybe the piloting computer. They needed one of those two to get back home. The other one could take a hike for guiding them into yet another bridal expo.

So this mob was the welcoming committee. How excessive.

Asinine’s junior thugs, the name he gave his top-tier agents, now consisted of Lieutenant IQ 23, airheaded ninja Amaranthia, horrifyingly obese ninja Multipurpose—because there was no such thing as too many ninjas—Multipurpose’s portable snack tables, and their giant hand Punch with his malodorous pipe. Cherry never smelled so toxic.

“Okay, junior th—” He turned and almost knocked noses with IQ 23. “Step back. Just once. Okay, junior thugs. Time to find Legion and get this senior prom senior-promming.”

The junior thugs didn’t wear the prerequisite “Legion Actually Invited Us to Something” T-shirts—well, IQ 23 wore it, and strangely enough, Asinine hadn’t asked him to—but the rest of the night was set to go senior-prommingly perfect.

Asinine knew where to locate Legion’s office. He stood only a hallway away from that door, chuckling. “Not a good host, making us come to him. There better be Snickers bars involved. Ooh. Snack machine.” He tapped the machine’s ionizing display screen. “Oh, wait. They’re Snackers. Stupid knockoffs.” He twisted his mouth at Punch. “Their peanuts are actually pill bugs.”

Asinine waved off a cloud of cherry tobacco. He moseyed away from the railing-framed balcony, cut through the hall, squeezed between Multipurpose and the rest of Multipurpose, and reached Legion’s office door. It faded so quickly Asinine noticed only the pizza icon on it. A cough of tepid air escaped, but nobody was inside. No Legion. Only a lonely couch, a few forgotten chairs, a pile of datasheets in the shape of a desk, a pandemonium of glass and plastic shards, and the oddest color combination this side of Asinine’s taste in cummerbunds.

Behind Asinine, an airfoil dinged. The light above it sang on. Asinine regarded it with wariness, so he prepared to duck into Legion’s office if that overenthusiastic welcoming mob poured out.

And it did. The mob swarmed the mezzanine and engulfed Punch. By the time it reached Amaranthia, Asinine grabbed IQ 23 and stumbled into the office. They rolled back, and Asinine clonked his head on Legion’s desk-shaped datasheet mountain. An avalanche of datasheets slid over his head. He swatted them aside—“Control, acknowledge. Lock closest door”—and shot to his feet. Didn’t know if the haunt control would comply, but—

The door appeared with a wave of applause...but a foot crammed into the space, interrupting its solidification.

“Get out of my door!” Asinine shouted at the lion tamer who wedged a chair into the gap. The l-door wavered between solid and intangible, insisting itself, trapping the chair in place. The applause of the l-door climbed and quieted.

“Please remove all objects so the door can close,” the haunt control said with a sugary lilt with which Asinine must replace the drill-sergeant mod at home. He didn’t know how much longer he could drop and give it anything more than four.

Lieutenant IQ 23 pulled at the question marks bobbing from his helmet’s temples. “Sir, he’s using vocational supplies to keep the door from locking.”

Asinine searched the office for something, anything, to lob at this lion tamer who was edging the chair farther and farther through the semisolid opening. But he found nothing to toss. Glass and wood chips littered the carpet. Seemed as if Legion had recently gone through a phase of mass destruction. Bad breakup? No. Asinine would have heard if he were dating someone. Maybe the meat in his doojigger had spoiled.

“Stop him, Lieutenant!”

“I’m on it, sir.” Lieutenant IQ 23 bumbled to his feet and threw himself headfirst at the door. He bowled into the chair, which burst apart in jagged slivers, and both careened into the hall outside.

“Lieutenant—”

Lieutenant IQ 23 appeared at the office door—clutching the frame—“Sir, there are too many”—hands appeared—grappled at his mouth, neck, torso—“Control, acknowledge. Lock closest door”—heaved him aloft.

“Lieutenant!” Master Asinine rushed to the door, but it materialized in his face. He slapped his palms over the pizza icon. Palms became fists, and he pounded the icon. “No! He had the snack money! Also, I don’t want him to be snatched away by a crowd of dudes.” Worst welcoming committee ever.

The crowd’s cacophony roared through the door, revelers carrying away Asinine’s one and only lieutenant to a place you could only guess at. Somewhere frightening and horrible. An accounting seminar?

“Control, acknowledge.” Asinine tapped his palm on the door. Why was the haunt control listening to him? The Good Guys always used security features barring it from acquiescing to Asinine’s commands, as demonstrated by all those times it dunked him in their medical waste instead of giving him directions to the hospital. Joke was on them. Asinine liked swimming in colostomy bags.

He tapped his palm again in deep consideration. Blast apart that mob or hole up here for a better plan? The crowd still bubbled outside, discussing stuff and things and stealing his best friend away to an accounting seminar. Accountants populated that accounting seminar. Decision made. “Control, acknowledge! Unlock closest door! Give me back my lieutenant! Show me the way to your ledger showcase room! I apologize for raising my voice!”

The door vaporized with a perky voice asking, “Would you like to double your chances at winning this fight by risking it all in our pasta round?”

“I’ll double up in anything that involves pasta, especially with chunks of pig.” Asinine thumb-cocked his gun—unnecessary but worth it—and pinned it against the forehead of the nearest crowd-surfing enthusiast. “Give up my lieutenant, or give up your brainium, you—”

The nearest enthusiast was a spacy Lieutenant IQ 23.

Asinine paused. Then, “This confuses me.”

A man pushed his way to the front. He smelled like old salt and resembled a leafless tree with a reedy trunk, and he stood so much taller that Asinine thought “head in the clouds” wasn’t an adage anymore.

“Who are you?” Asinine said. He’d point his pistol up, but his shoulder suffered a kink from the latest Revolution Revolution Dance competition.

The man smiled through only one side of his mouth. The other didn’t follow suit. He reached out, placed his fingers against Asinine’s temples. A head massage at a prom? This was so much better than a photo booth.

Chapter Sixteen: Unfinished Basement

“No!” Legion kicked a wall. “No, no, no!” If he’d worn steel-toe boots, this wall wouldn’t have survived. He thumped his forehead, his necklace dancing against his neck. His forehead throbbed, booming like the inside of an echo chamber.

He’d programmed Janice to alert him whenever someone entered his office. So when Janice said two members of collective entity Reinforcements had wandered in, he’d told her to throw up a viewscreen. And then he’d watched the mayhem.

He’d prayed. He’d prayed! He needed backup...and Alaphus had given him Lowensland of all people. And then he’d taken Lowensland away!

He squeezed deeper into the inlet and sank to the floor, his head dipping between his knees and his feet brushing the tree pot. No more options. No calling for reinforcement reinforcements. He wouldn’t allow IP soldiers to set foot in here, join the adelphoi army. Alaphus had left him alone. Without a doubt, this was the closest he’d ever gotten to Night of the Living Dead.

And, if Alaphus had left him alone, maybe He wasn’t worthy of Legion’s dedication. With a curl to his lip, Legion snatched off his necklace and prepared to hurl it away. His hand held high, he shouted a prayer in his mind. Why did You abandon me?

Was Alaphus even real?

His finger found the bullet hole in the cross’s center. Sopher. This was Sopher’s old necklace. He lowered his fist and stuffed the necklace into a pocket. He wouldn’t toss it away—it was still a keepsake—but he wouldn’t wear it anymore.

At least now the coast was clear. Legion’s path to the bomb shelter and to freedom was unobstructed. The Bad Guys had lured the bomb shelter’s guards away. Lowensland was an almost-good-for-nothing.

A flutter of footsteps approached from the east. Legion darted to his feet and stilled the banzai tree to muffle its rustling. He was close to the station’s bomb shelter, so he klutzily slipped-banged-his-chin-on-the-floor-stumbled-to-his-feet-raced in that direction. One last bomb shelter guard remained.

He slammed into the adelphos, arm up for a tackle, swept the adelphos’s legs out, cracked the adelphos’s head against the floor. He threw his hands up, threw his body up, almost threw his lunch up. Swung a fist. “You come an inch closer, I’ll rip you in two.”

“Legion, Legion!” The adelphos danced to his feet. “Don’t rip me in two. Don’t rip me in any number!”

“Jacob?” Legion dropped his fists. But his resolve returned, and those fists rose back up. “Stay away!” He prepared a swing.

“I’m not one of those goons.” With the bomb shelter’s airfoil as his backdrop, Franchise dodged aside. “Holy holiest of holies, stop doing that punching thing at me.”

Legion lunged at a pair of swords hanging on a wall. They were decorative—made of plastic and bearing the words “By the Power of Grayskull”—but he could poke Franchise’s arm with one until the adelphos was annoyed enough to leave.

Franchise’s arms swung up. “This isn’t as fun as when Tamiko does this to me.” Tamiko was Franchise’s girlfriend, the Bad Guy ninja Amaranthia.

“What do you mean you’re not one of them?”

“I’m not. They got a couple of my duplicates, but I escaped. How else could I talk like suave, debonair Jacob instead of a toneless grunt?” Franchise held his stance as if to dodge a swing from the plastic swords.

Distant footsteps approached. The adelphoi returning.

Legion crossed the swords in an X. The scrape of their plastic blades could deter Franchise away...or, more likely, could sprinkle paint chips on the floor. “How can I know it’s really you in there?” He jutted a sword against the underside of Franchise’s chin, forcing his head up.

“It never is. Ask my philosophy professor.” Franchise’s eyes crept in the direction of the adelphoi footsteps that clapped closer down the hallway. “Legion, we don’t have time for this.”

Legion tromped past Franchise. “We need to deploy the bomb shelter.”

“Without Jeffy around to watch?” Franchise pointed at the ceiling. “Wait. No launch. Bad idea. I’m not in the mood to play pinball in a meteor shower.”

“Jacob, there’s a grand total of—Just get in the bomb shelter.” Legion grabbed Franchise and shoved him into the airfoil. The ride hastened them down in seconds, and then the bomb shelter’s double doors and obese-beach-guy icon faded with an ominous rumble like an earthquake of coughs.

Legion marched along the three-meter hallway into the bomb shelter and waited for Franchise to follow. Franchise hurried to catch up. With him inside, Legion said, “Janice, acknowledge. Lock and reinforce closest door.”

Legion wiped his hand up his forehead, along his antennae. The bomb shelter smelled like candlewax. What passed for its meager barricade—a plank of painted Bristol board—belched back to reality. And this was what the construction crew thought passed for a reinforced barrier.

Franchise sat against the door. “Okay, so what do we—”

The tip of a play sword pricked his nose. He blurted a snotty “Hey” and crossed his eyes up along the plastic shaft. “How many times this week must I look down the shaft of a sword? At least this is the first time I’ve done it without having to say, ‘I love you.’” His attention flickered from the tip of the sword to Legion. “I love you?”

Legion bit down on his lower lip hard enough to almost draw blood. “Why should I trust you?” His voice was as flat as a mathematical plane. Also as flat as his coffee. He brewed horrible coffee.

“Why should you not?” Franchise said. Nice try. He was typically a B level actor. This Franchise was...B plus. Legion still chewed on his lower lip, so Franchise’s cheekbones lifted and his brow lowered. “Legion, either I’m one of them or I’m not. If I’m not, we bicker until those guys break in. And they will. If I am, I take you down and those guys break in. So you might as well trust me. Without castrating me. I love you.”

Legion flipped through the options Franchise had presented. His mind tossed them around like an old-fashioned laundry machine, weighing on him so much his neck craned wearily. He wanted to whack his forehead with his palm, but he’d end up slicing both his forehead and Franchise’s nose. His options were on the tumble-dry cycle.

“Make a duplicate.”

“Legion—”

“Pop one out. I have a theory.” Legion sliced the air in front of Franchise’s bobbing Adam’s apple. The sword whooshed to accent his demand.

“What does this prove?”

“Ever since this guy’s been gathering more and more people, his fans use their hyperabilities less and less. Sixth Sense was crumpling up doors when it was just him and Pincushion. Now? Not so much as an exploded water tower from Power Plant. This maniac might have a hold on their thoughts, but he’s got a shaky grip on their hyperabilities. So make a duplicate. I want proof.” He upheld the sword at Franchise’s nose.

“Okay, okay.” Franchise stood and lifted his hand. He flourished it, flourished it again in some grandiose wave Legion had never seen him make, but failed to produce anything. “You know Jeffy can’t explode water towers what with still being on Hyperthesi—”

“Make—a—duplicate—Jacob. Don’t force me to invoke the Power of Grayskull.” Legion emphasized himself by swishing the sw—

“I find it hard to concentrate with a plastic edge scratching my nose, okay?” Franchise’s eyes jittered like a bug trapped in a jar. He flourished his hand again.

“Get out.”

“What? Out there? With them?” Franchise’s cheeks twitched.

“You’re stalling too much.”

“Gimme a second.”

“Out.”

“Wait.” Franchise closed his eyes. A duplicate materialized, and so did a gasp. “Happy?” The duplicate began to yank down his pants, prepared to drop a deuce among the shelter’s nonperishable foods. Franchise poked it with an elbow. “Bad timing, dupe.”

So there one was. Was Legion’s theory correct? He absentmindedly scratched the back of his neck, a little too much since it now felt raw. Maybe his theory about the interloper’s control was wrong. Maybe it wasn’t. Maybe Alaphus had come through on Legion’s request after all. Maybe He hadn’t. And maybe Legion needed to check his faith from time to time. And maybe he should stop the duplicate from setting fire to a pile of canned peas with the gas canister it was emptying over them.

“Good.” Legion dropped the sword’s tip. He backed into a hover chair, careful not to wheel it into a stack of boxed cereals to his left. He hung his head over the back of the chair. “Judging from the fact that you haven’t opened the door and let the cavalry in, maybe you’re telling the truth.”

The shelter offered boxes of military rations from some of history’s greatest eras. A range of smells wafted from the plastic and tin cans: sour, sweet, salted, rotted. A rack of water bottles. Boxes of nonperishables. Four chairs. A stack of magazines from the 9070s. An asthmatically ventilated navigational and communication system in case the shelter was launched. Spare clothes, including a repairman’s uniform. Four astronaut suits. Foldout bedding. A kitchenette behind a counter that spanned the far side of the shelter. Three light panels. A trash ionizer. A disaster supply kit. A tiny inlet that served as a bathroom. Medical supplies. Monopoly.

“Okay, let’s deploy this thing and call in the cavalry. I mean, a cavalry that doesn’t think an atom bomb and holiday fireworks are the same.”

Franchise touched his duplicate’s neck and cast it back from whence it came. He plopped into another chair, cracking his knuckles. “You’re talking about the Bad Guys.”

Legion shrugged. “Or the masseuse in the health-and-wellness district.”

“As long as we return for Jeffy and Tamiko.” Franchise peeled open a can of mushrooms, took a gander inside, and threw it over his shoulder. It clattered against the door. “Is there any planet where it’s normal for a mushroom to have a tail?” He pulled the tab on another can and checked inside. “Or try to shake your hand?”

“Janice, acknowledge. Launch...” Legion was about to follow through with the rest of the command, even grunted the next syllable. He drummed his fingers on the arm of the chair, but...“No.”

“Command not recognized,” Janice said. “Unless you’re ordering a line of no-itch rash ointment. Purchase a tub of Every Nook and Cranny for that deep-down inflammation. And let’s meet our contestants!”

“What’s the problem? Let’s deploy this puppy. We might even make it through that meteor shower.” Franchise checked the tin of sardines he had opened. “This shelter is a food mortuary.”

“Pass me a can of something that doesn’t greet you when you try to eat it.” Legion checked the expiry date on a can of halved tomatoes. Older than him. “We can’t deploy the bomb shelter.” He rolled the can along the arm of his chair. “We’re all that’s keeping this guy occupied. Once he has nobody to play with, he’ll spread out. He’ll take another planet. And then another. If he’s unstoppable now, imagine him after a day—a week. We can’t allow that. We need to prevent him from leaving.” He dropped the can, which gave him the finger and stormed off. “We have to solve this ourselves. But how can we clear the heads of everyone this guy has infected?” He stood and stomped a foot on the concrete.

“Well...whenever I need to clear my head, Jeffy zaps me with an electric shock without me having to ask or even bringing up the subject. You can hear him rushing over from miles away. He calls it the Jeffy Jiffy Special.” Franchise stopped cracking his knuckles. “Doesn’t feel special.”

“Electric shock?”

“Yeah. Or sometimes what he calls a horsey ride. But it’s not what it sounds like—”

“Hold on a second.” Legion now leaned forward. He remembered Power Plant yanking out electricity panels and licking them. He remembered the resulting blank stare, which somehow made his usual blank stare blanker. Legion waved a finger in the air. “That might work. If anything is chaotic enough for this guy, it’s something Jeff concocted.”

“No, trust me. Jeffy says a horsey ride is when all the horses on the carousel come alive and eat the rest of the carousel.” Franchise shifted his weight on the chair. “Trampling is also involved.”

“I’m talking about an electric shock.” Legion’s pointing finger poked the chair’s upholstered back. It helped him think. “I mean, sometimes Jeff comes up with good ideas. Like that time I punished him by ordering him to clean the Gorging Court’s troughs with a toothbrush. I expected one of those ancient ones with the bristles. But I checked on him an hour later, and lo and behold, he was using an electric one. Attached to a mop. He said he could technically brush his teeth with it. So I let it pass on grounds of creativity.” He breathed a snicker. “Leave it to me that my most creative asset is also the one that believes Goat is the family name of a guy called Billy.”

“Okay? And?” Still cracking knuckles that sounded like shotgun reports in the bomb shelter, Franchise watched Legion pace around the stacks of rations. Some of the rations got up and followed him.

“My point is this. An electric shock spasms the body, the brain. Sometimes it affects hyperabilities. Sixth Sense told me once that, with mind-based hyperabilities, if you incapacitate the hyperperson, you can sometimes incapacitate the...effects.” He stopped pacing, looked up at the ceiling in grasping thoughts. That footage of Sixth Sense...the shock collar...the momentary delay. “When Sixth Sense’s shock collar malfunctioned, he woke up for a second. Creepy Guy Yeah Why Not had to reset him. It makes sense now.” He examined an electricity panel and then the electrician’s gloves of the repairman’s uniform. “I have a plan. How about we give this guy a Jeffy Jiffy Special?”

“I’d rather the other idea, but where can we find that many angry horses?”

Chapter Seventeen: People Never Call Ahead Anymore

Thanks to the Transcript, Steeple knew Station One backwards, forwards, inside out, upside down, creased in the manifold of space—

There was a point to this: he had memorized every detail of this facility. He commanded his adelphoi, all 647, to fan out. Gave them orders to enter here, infiltrate there, occupy this place, fortify that place. Anywhere. Everywhere. Legion would not escape. Nor would that persistent Franchise. And, when his disciples reached those destinations, when his flock was in position, Steeple would command them to tear this place apart. Except perhaps leave the monkey den alone. That area should remain forever sealed. Yessssss.

Then he finished his business, flushed, washed up, and exited the bathroom.

The Transcript suffered slight history gaps, so Steeple asked the haunt control what Legion was doing. And, as the Transcript had guessed, Legion was ripping out wires from walls and hanging cans around himself. Ssssooooo...Legion thought he was a Boxing Day tree?

Anyway, Steeple had read the Transcript. He knew about the station’s abilities. And here was his point: he knew of its self-destruct sequence. The thought of turning that against Legion tickled Steeple. Ssssssuch a warm tickle.

The station’s haunt control would listen to every command Steeple issued. So control, acknowledge. Initiate self-destruct sequence. He commanded everyone to remain on board this station. No—matter—what.

Good thing Steeple also knew the station’s bathrooms, because that sloppy joe wanted to say hello again. Time for a sloppy joe of his own.

Chapter Eighteen: Hair Accessories

“Any plan on getting my pookie buns back?” Janice asked.

His foot propped against the kitchenette counter, wires wrapping his hands, Legion yanked another length from the wall. “Janice, for the hundredth time, I’ll introduce you to a cryogenic tube. He’s witty, he’s charming, he has a good job cryogenizing stuff, and he wants three little cryogenic tubelets.”

“He sounds like a dog.” Janice issued a giggle. “Aww, maybe I’ll just spread poison ivy all over your towels. Giggle snoot.”

“No. No giggles, no snoots, and no amalgamation of the two.” Legion flinched at a soda-can tab Franchise hung on his collar. “Especially no poison ivy.”

“Can I ask who pookie buns is?” Franchise dressed Legion’s antenna with a tin. “And the poison-ivy thing doesn’t work. The towels absorb the irritants. Jeffy once—”

“Last thing I need is another Jeffy story. Ow. Is that can even empty?” Legion grappled off what Franchise hung from him. “Remember: no metal around my head.”

Their idea was simple enough: Legion and Franchise needed to create an electrical jolt. And Legion would act as the conductor. He wore the electrician’s gloves from the repairman’s outfit, complete with jacks in the glove’s fingertips. To connect the pathway between his hands, he and Franchise tied together several channels of tin cans as conduits and hung those around his body. His impact suit offered enough insulation to absorb the electricity.

The cans would also lend an appearance of panic to Legion, lull the enemy into a false sense of triumph. So, to decorate Legion’s head, they hung plastic cans from his antennae and ears. The nonconductive stuff went up top. Legion could panic after all, it seemed.

Franchise replaced the tin can with a plastic bottle. “This pookie buns thing isn’t going to explain itself. And, no, it’s not empty. I’m afraid to open another peach cocktail. I couldn’t tell if the last one was quoting from Scarface or experience.”

“The haunt control is dating Ace.” Legion flinched when Franchise hooked the cap of another plastic bottle on his antenna. The cap gashed his skin. Legion twined a stretch of rope-thick wire around his waist and threaded it over and under a shoulder. “And Janice? Please leave us be.”

Janice led off with a puckering smooch. “Well, I wanted you to know that entity Creepy Guy Yeah Why Not has issued a self-destruct command. Entity Creepy Guy Yeah Why Not is headed here right now with my Acey.” Right. Unlist everyone but the enemy and Ace. Not even a command could wipe her memory of her crush.

Legion stopped disemboweling the wall. He dropped the wiring, which slumped off his arm. “A self-destr—” He dodged Franchise, who tried to hang another tin ornament from him. “There are things you lead off with, and things you don’t lead off with, Janice. Can you tell which is ‘issued a self-destruct command’ and which is ‘any word on getting my whatever-you-called-him back’?”

“Don’t pretend you don’t remember the wording,” Franchise said.

“I was too busy spreading poison ivy on your towels to pay attention,” Janice said.

“Then Janice, acknowledge. Cancel self-destruct sequence.”

“Self-destruct sequence can only be cancelled by either the entity that initiated the command or the entity who brings back my baby snookums.”

Legion crushed a bottle under a foot. “I will never understand women mods.”

“I will never understand women mods or women.” Franchise snaked a wire around Legion’s torso and flopped it over his shoulder. It prickled with unspent electricity. “The other day, Tamiko wanted me to take her dismembering.” He used finger quotes on the key word.

“Janice, acknowledge. How long do we have this self-destruct sequence that, by the way, will destroy you too, you suicidal piece of software?”

“You have T-minus fifty-three astigmatisms.”

“Eyesight doesn’t deteriorate that quickly. We have time to kill.” Franchise forked a helping of chick peas out of a can. Even from here, Legion detected their hint of castor oil. “You know, this stuff isn’t so bad once you look at it in a Darwinian way.”

“He knows what we’re planning.” Legion started ripping out wires with renewed vigor. “Creepy Guy Yeah Why Not is on to us! Janice, acknowledge—”

“Hold on, hold on, hold on.” Franchise dropped the fork into his can and put up a hand. “This Creepy Guy Yeah Why Not thing isn’t going to explain itself either.”

“Enough waiting for me to explain things that aren’t going to explain themselves. Jacob, you have to get out of here. Janice, acknowledge. Unlock and open closest door.” The bomb shelter’s double l-doors coughed aside, all four ounces of Bristol board, mashed spiders, and dried boogers from the construction workers who excavated their noses as well as this shelter. Several canned perseveres made a break for it.

Franchise resisted when Legion began prodding him through the opening. “Get out of here? Are you insane? You need me.”

“I need you outside this shelter. If this plan fails, you’re our final hope.”

“Last time I heard that, I was taking care of the roach problem in the computer tower, and now we have an insectarium.”

“Oh, Legion.” Janice whistled. “Entity Creepy Guy Yeah Why Not is upstairs at the airfoil. My little boysenberry is with him.”

“Jacob, you’ll have to crawl through the vent.”

* * *

Steeple placed a hand on the airfoil’s edge, snickering out a hint of pleasure. Legion hid down there. Steeple didn’t need to ask the haunt control where the Good Guy leader was—the Transcript was clear on that—only what he was doing. One question remained: whether to enter the bomb shelter first or send a crony.

It became certain as soon as it had become thought. Sending Legion’s friends would break him faster. Steeple commanded Ace Spandex, Catastrophe, and Sixth Sense down. Then a cascade of shoppers and a cat-and-dog meteorologist clawed past, mashing Steeple into the wall. Seemed he’d programmed his adelphoi with much enthusiasm. The Transcript didn’t touch on that or the new bruise on his chin his dead nerves refused to register.

Delicious victory was ssssso close, ssssso guaranteed, Steeple felt it.

Single file, everyone!

* * *

“Janice, acknowledge. Lock closest door.” Legion concentrated on breathing. In, out...in, out. Okay, okay, poker face. If his hyperability theory was wrong and this interloper sent down Sixth Sense, Legion needed to pretend even in his brain that he’d lost all hope and had decided to rewire the walls. Otherwise Sixth Sense would scan him, and the jig would be up before it even jigged. So...lost all hope...only minutes to live...growth on his shoulder wasn’t benign...will soon be usurped b—Wait, what was that growth? He poked it. It stung. Hrm.

Something battered against the door. A fist? A foot? A weapon? Peepholes should come standard on bomb-shelter doors.

The barrier juddered, crackling like an old man’s croup. “Come out, Legion.” Catastrophe? His voice usually sounded thick with misguided confidence and words such as “here’s my charming headshot,” but today it sounded vacant, alien.

“Janice, acknowledge. How long until self-destruct sequence reaches zero?”

“T-minus fifty astigmatisms.”

Good. Fifty eye defects remained. Legion backed against the lacerated wall from which he’d found that ancient datasheet of Canadian Living with the corrupted cover and all the perfume samples already used. He squatted, shivered, his view of the drumming door obscured behind cans and boxes. End of his life...panicking...end of his life...forgotten to pay his credit bill...end of his—Aw, no, he had forgotten to pay his credit bill.

The rhythm section at the abused door increased, now other fists joining the deluge that included a cymbal crash.

“Janice, acknowledge. Estimate when collective entity Adelphoi will break through that beach guy. Fast-forward the commercial break.”

“Collective entity Adelphoi will break through your precious door in forty-nine point three astigmatisms—”

Time was speeding up.

A gunshot! Someone had blasted a chunk of board apart with a high-caliber light-bullet. Another blast ripped another section asunder. The Bristol sprayed at Legion but became latent dust before it hit.

Legion wiped sweat from his face. When he uncovered his eyes, peering through the hole was Sixth Sense, missing those glasses that seemed so anachronistic in this century.

The door cracked off its hinges in white tears, split down the middle and along the side. “That’s military property you’re obliterating!” Legion protested.

Catastrophe stood in the doorway, wearing that gaudy T-shirt. Oh, man. Legion glimpsed the picture again. No, trucker, no. Just...no!

“Told you you couldn’t keep the adelphoi back forever.” Catastrophe revealed all his teeth in a splinter smile. He didn’t flinch at the lobster patty that escaped someone’s mouth and perched atop his shoulder like a pirate’s saluting parrot.

Legion stood, shoulder blades skating along the wall’s jagged gashes. “I could have straightened up the place if you’d called ahead.”

The rabble of mob noises dropped to zero decibels. No one spoke. No one advanced. No one budged. Why? Shouldn’t the adelphoi carry him away to the Brainwashing Hut for a free lobotomy and a group tattoo?

The reason presented itself. Creepy Guy Yeah Why Not wobbled in as uncoordinated as if he wore three-wheeled rollerblades. He greeted Legion with a hello as breathy as a lawn aerator. His lips, cracked like gray caterpillars, spread. He did the courtesy of asking how Legion was feeling.

Legion gulped and pointed to his shoulder. “This lump look infected?”

No sympathy from this man with the flexibility of a totem pole. He introduced himself as Steeple and asked if Legion knew the purpose for his visit. His flectionless voice barely ranged from an F1 to a G1. How did Legion know that about a musical scale? A brief stint on IP’s Gentleman’s Vocal Ball.

“You’re here to delete my mind. You’re here to make me pointless.” Legion stared up at Steeple, who reached him in two ambitious strides. He didn’t crane his neck, or these wires and cans would tumble off.

Steeple tried to placate him with a tsk-tsk. Deletion and pointlessness were not his goal. His goal was to liberate this universe of phobias, of problems, of neuroses—

“Opinions, personalities.”

—hang-ups, obsessions, unacceptance—

“Character, will.”

—deficiencies, social fears, worries —

“This is the least convincing tripe I’ve heard since I got that estimate from my civ-tran mechanic.”

—lack of sewing skills, inability to breakdance, hidden fees—

“What are your plans for the Kimchi Shanty?”

—everyone will have adorable nicknames, they’ll be confident public speakers, no one will use the word utilize to mean use, bananas will never spot, everyone will make a game-winning field goal—

Legion tapped a foot against the floor. “You’re fishing now.”

—we will wait until we’ve all eaten before we return for seconds, we will eliminate the overuse of scents in the workplace, society will know the difference between aureolin and chartreuse.

And then the initiation speech ended. Now was Legion’s turn for inclusion into this utopian humanity. Steeple twiddled his fingers, strode the remaining gap separating them—

“Jacob, light him up!” Legion screamed into his gabber.

—and touched Legion’s tem—Wait, light whom up?

Legion grabbed the wires from a disemboweled electricity panel with the nodes of his glove. His other hand snatched Steeple’s throat. Steeple’s eyes, usually half-moons, burst open like globes. He convulsed at a hunch, as if a river of diarrhea flowed uncontrollably free of him. His fingers stiffened like railroad spikes on Legion’s temples. None of the electricity traveled through Legion, but Steeple...Steeple swallowed a raging river of roughly one million volts. His skin peeled in welts, hairs singed away, breath reeked like a roast. Legion could feel the voltage vibrate in his teeth.

Legion had relisted Franchise—who hid in a location two buildings away—in Janice’s database. He’d arranged for Janice to relinquish control of the station’s electricity to Franchise and only Franchise. Otherwise Steeple could have told Janice to shut things down at any time.

The light in the bomb shelter flickered, dimmed, buzzed, recovered. Steeple’s adelphoi—Sixth Sense, Catastrophe, Ace Spandex, the lobster lady, the clothing vendor with more trucker T-shirts—stood stock-still, not an indication of life among them.

Over the electrifying torrent racking Steeple’s body, Legion screamed, “Janice, acknowledge. How long until self-destruct sequence reaches zero?”

“T-minus three astigmatisms.”

Legion couldn’t help laughing breathily. Alaphus had sent help, had sent Franchise. A ridiculous prayer knifed his brain. Alaphus, thank You. Sorry for the doubts. Now I need one more answer. He swallowed. Lord, I don’t know if I release my bladder if I’m indoctrinated.

Legion lifted a foot and thrust Steeple away. “Jacob, shut it down.”

Life stilled. Even dust seemed to hang in midair. No sound vibrated. Steeple was a mannequin. His followers were statues. Electricity halted. The ringing in Legion’s antennae whined on.

Steeple finally gasped. Smoke broke from his nostrils. His wooden voice coughed out a stretched nnoooo. His adelphoi must endure. He must maintain his flock. Yada yada yada.

Legion leaned forward. “Ace, you good?”

Slouched with hands on knees, Ace Spandex gave a shaky thumbs-up. His mouth became a sewage pipe, bits of fetid dinner coating the floor.

“Yeah, you’re good.” Legion brushed his decorations off. “Janice, acknowledge. Your baby bear snookum pookum is back. Cancel self-destruct sequence.”

“Since you asked so nicely, okay. Self-destruct sequence canceled.”

Legion high-fived himself. “I rock this party.” Then he realized high-fiving himself was weird.

Steeple grunted. Legion had destroyed his plan, his predestined plan. But...he would reattempt. He wrung his hands. It was only a matter of beginning anew, of reaching out—which he did now to Legion—of touching everyone’s temples. Steeple looked Legion dead in the eye and said he was unstoppable—

Legion rammed a fist into Steeple’s face.

Steeple toppled backward, a palm to his cheek. Still, Steeple boasted, he would escape. He would regroup. He would—

Legion held his Marsek up to Steeple at full extension. Confidence made it weightless in his hand. “I can’t allow you to leave. You’re a threat to all civilization. And its kimchi joints.”

Steeple stood, posture straight, chest curved forward. He accepted with a smile on his charcoal lips. Fine. He told Legion to arrest him. No matter what, the Transcript foretold his victory.

Legion kept his Marsek directed at Steeple. What a horrible time for that itch on his cheek to drive him up the wall. “If I arrest you, you’ll take control of a prison guard, and the same thing that led to this debacle will lead to a prison uprising. You’re too dangerous to society. Let your transcript foretell this: I’m not arresting you.”

Steeple said his victory was sure, he was the next Son of Alaphus—

Legion fired. A light-bullet slugged Steeple’s right eye all over Griselda. Well, she was the cleaning lady.

Head forced back, one-eyed Steeple sacked to the floor. Dust kicked up a cloud more colorful than his skin.

“You aren’t even fit to tie the Son of Alaphus’s sandals.” Legion spat on him. He reached into his pocket for his necklace and slipped it around his neck where it belonged.

Over. Finally. Legion collapsed against a box labeled MILITARY SURPLUS FOODS, BAT FLAVORED. Bats squealed and scattered away.

Chapter Nineteen: Quick! My Parents Are Home!

“Tamiko! Tamiko!” Franchise bowled up from the underground tunnel and into the lobby where a carpet of people blurted in half cognizance. He clonked against the handrail, against an airfoil at the end of the lobby, and spilled onto a speckled floor. Through an impending fat lip, he grunted out, “Control, acknowledge. Order me a helmet for going into public.”

After he issued a short command, the airfoil lifted him with a glitter of sound to the second floor. “Tamiko!” He darted out of the airfoil, a tooth scraping his swollen lip. “Tamiko!”

A familiar grunt traveled down the corridor—There. Tamiko lay draped across a member of the Station One Planetary Laser Tag Team and a sandwich-artist graduate. Franchise grabbed Tamiko by the hips and eased her to her feet. She drooped in his arms like a swooning dance partner.

“Jakey?” Her voice came out on a delicate exhalation. Her eyes unglazed, and she grew a Novocain smile. “Jakey.”

“Tamiko, authorities will be here any second. You have to get out of here. Steal a civ-tran from the lot if you have to.”

“Another five minutes, mom.”

“That better not be my new pet name.”

Chapter Twenty: A Little Less Weekend at Bernie’s, A Little More Weekend at Bernie’s II

Legion collapsed into his desk chair. Long day. Longer since Steeple had commanded an adelphos to sit on a children’s toilet with a plate of tacos and a bottle of soda. And if Legion ever caught whomever that was, mind control or not, he’d ring the adelphos’s neck and urge him to get that rectal bleeding checked out.

Legion had Pincushion on the other end of a gabber connection. Framed in a viewscreen that floated before Legion’s desk, Pincushion waited on the east lawn of the lobby building to deliver Steeple’s body-bagged corpse to a coroner in five minutes. Thankfully, Ace had convinced Janice to shut down the level-eleven rainstorm outside. And then he had sidelined Power Plant by telling him they’d opened an arcade in the confederate-history tower. That’d occupy Power Plant for half an hour looking for a confederate-history tower that didn’t exist, an hour if Power Plant figured it out and then tried to convert one of the towers into a confederate-history tower.

The meteor “shower” had also assuaged. Legion supervised the information on all incoming and outgoing flights, data stuffing the side of a viewscreen’s display in stop-and-go lurches that reminded him of rush hour traffic. The coroner’s med-tran touched down and opened its access port. The coroner, an elderly Terran with wrinkles folding over silver whiskers, creaked down the access ramp, reached the ground, and waited with his foot tapping a rain puddle.

Two coroners dealt with the Good Guys. Legion couldn’t tell the difference between them except for one distinguishable quality: one coroner offered home-baked muffins on his visits, and the other kicked everything. Everything. Mist included. Even worse, the kicker’s name had every prefix and suffix stuffed into it. What family lineage led to that?

“Pincushion, the coroner just touched down.” Legion kept watching the coroner, the elder man’s foot still spraying the puddle around. “Seems subdued. Must be the muffin coroner. Bring me back an oatmeal one.” Legion leaned into a warm sunbeam cast through his office window.

“On my way. And today is snickerdoodle day.”

“In that case, I have no idea what a snickerdoodle is. There. I said it.” He leaned deeper into the sunbeam. “And while I’m on the subject, what’s bangers and mash?”

A greetingbot entered the viewscreen. It clinkered through puddles deep enough to be shark tanks and reached the coroner, a receiving plate of biscuits and a warm hand towel in its claws. The coroner stepped onto the soaked grass of a median and shrugged. With an embellishment of the wrist to clear his suit cuff, he took a biscuit, lightly bit—

Ooh, there went his foot. “Pincushion, red alert. You have the kicker. Repeat: you have the kicker!” Legion put a finger to his gabber. “But the greetingbot just cleared a fence.”

Pincushion groaned. “Oh, for—Whenever I deliver this guy a body, the stretcher ends up four parking rows down the lot, and half the time, the body lands on my civ-tran’s roof. I own a convertible, so guess what happens the other half of the time.”

Legion winced at the viewscreen when the coroner high-kicked a seagull. “Bring a football.” Wind carried the withering sound of the gull’s painful caa.

“Too late. He spotted me,” Pincushion said. Indeed, the coroner punted a handicap sign away and greeted Pincushion with a chin strut.

Legion watched Pincushion appear in the viewscreen, guiding the stretcher that trailed behind him. The coroner attempted to slam-kick the stretcher over the lobby roof.

Pincushion blocked him. “Mr. O’FitzMacNiSmithen de la von McBarnhamsonfritz Jr.”—he inhaled—“the third, here’s the body.” He handed the coroner a datasheet. “Sign here, please.”

“My pleasure, son.” The coroner took the datasheet, scribbled his finger along it, and offered it back to Pincushion. “There ya go.”

Pincushion reached out—

A resolute kick sent the datasheet across three lots that day.

The coroner shielded his eyes with a hand. “Personal best. How is that vivacious fox, Mabel? Still full of life?” He slapped Pincushion’s back.

“Thanks, Mr. von Barnhamsonfritz Jr. the third.” Pincushion offered a wry smile. “And, if you mean is Mabel’s hair still as sticky as cotton candy and her perfume as noxious as wet paint...well, something of hers is full of life.”

Legion reclined. He found the ceiling. One of the adelphoi had had his way with Legion’s light panel. Why his way and not hers? Because someone required aim to spray urine that high. And that someone had eaten too much asparagus.

“Should check the body before I leave. Let’s do this.” The coroner clapped his hands together. He jabbed a button on the body bag, and the bag retreated into the stretcher in coiling tendrils.

Pincushion gasped at the stretcher that his head obscured from the viewscreen. “Legion?” He searched down the row of transports for the viewscreen on his end, down the other direction, up at the lobby’s roof—

“Pincushion, try your ten o’clock, forty-five degrees up.”

Pincushion caught the viewscreen and looked into it with his cocoa skin almost as white as bone. “Brother, we have a problem.”

“Power Plant’s been wagering on ingestible levels of sunscreen again?”

“The body is gone.” Pincushion’s deep voice lent a fateful creak to his words.

Legion sat up straighter. His spine arched. Among all the people recovering from mind control, nobody could locate the Bad Guys before they’d gotten away—they just commanded Janice to unlock the atmospheric bubble—so Legion needed some good news. Despite leaning into the sunbeam, he shivered. “Impossible. Who loaded the body bag?”

“I did. You can’t even activate it without a body loaded in the first place. Steeple is gone!” Pincushion shifted aside and revealed the empty leather.

“Well...” Legion’s palate dried so fast it prickled him. “...where did he go?”

* * *

“How did you fare?” Sitting, he stroked the arm of his chair as if stroking a content cat. His eyes flicked up at Steeple, whose bland skin was almost indiscernible in this darkness. Good thing he could see in the dark.

Steeple sat across from him, muttering about how the food in the Gorging Court was subpar for the era, the people were withdrawn and inconsiderate, the weather was appalling—

“That is not what I meant. I meant how did your mission fare?”

A success. A ssssscrumptious successsssss. Steeple, like a collection of brittle chicken bones, nodded in understanding. As those simple creatures on that mortal plane had understood, the mission had failed. However, the true mission, much more veiled, was not to indoctrinate those victims, but to sample their mental templates. Now Steeple could track every Good Guy, save Legion and Franchise, and Bad Guy across the universe, no matter their point in the fabric of space. The drink service was better than the rest of the fare, though.

The mission’s success was always guaranteed. Sweetly guaranteed. The Transcript was clear on that.

“Excellent, Brother Steeple.” Blackguard stood, and the dark material of his chair—not really a chair, but part of his malleable form—slurped into his back in wispy strands. “Our Lord and Savior, Continuum, was wise to send you on your mission. Your valued service will forever secure your place in His holy eternity.” He craned his neck forward. “Can you not even stand without toppling over?”

THE END

NEXT BOOK:

Pincushion needs help fitting through a narrow hallway!

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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Communicate via homing pigeon at chirp-twiddle-twoo or whatever pigeons say.

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 17: The Church of Steeple

Appendices

Chapter One: Forecast Calls for Stupid

Chapter Two: Who Goes There?

Chapter Three: Company's Coming

Chapter Four: All Access

Chapter Five: Business Lunch

Chapter Six: Fancy Meeting You Here

Chapter Seven: The Neighborhood Watch Is Going to Hear about This

Chapter Eight: Coup D’étated

Chapter Nine: Heard, Understood, and Acknowledged

Chapter Ten: Organize and Rise

Chapter Eleven: Whilst All Hope Collapses

Chapter Twelve: Forget about These Guys?

Chapter Thirteen: Escape Attempt(ed)

Chapter Fourteen: One Little Indian

Chapter Fifteen: The Gang’s All Here

Chapter Sixteen: Unfinished Basement

Chapter Seventeen: People Never Call Ahead Anymore

Chapter Eighteen: Hair Accessories

Chapter Nineteen: Quick! My Parents Are Home!

Chapter Twenty: A Little Less Weekend at Bernie’s, A Little More Weekend at Bernie’s II

About That Guy Whose Book You Read Once