Pew! Pew! - Bad versus Worse Read online

  A few dozen kilometres below, heavy black boots crunched through ice-encrusted shale on an endless plain. Literally endless, the boots’ owner kept reminding himself. If he carried on trekking across this visibly curved but basically featureless grey plain for longer than twenty minutes or so, he’d find himself back in the ample shade cast across the rock by the Space Bastard’s blocky, functional hull. Circumnavigation? Just a load of old balls, really.

  He slowed his already measured pace as a shape resolved itself over the absurdly foreshortened horizon. It was, at first glance, just another ice-coated rock. But as the figure looked more closely, and his suit’s AR interface kicked in and magnified the chunky mass, it became clear that it was at least regularly shaped underneath the greenish-grey crust of permafrost.

  “I request an audience with the Frag Prince,” he called.

  There was a movement deep in the ice, that anyone else might have taken for a stray reflection of starlight. Krantor had caught their attention. He stood and waited.

  And waited.

  After a few minutes, he thought he saw another movement in the ice. Then he zoomed in on the stray gleam, and saw that it was on the surface. A thin rivulet of liquid running down the mass to the frozen surface. The ice was melting.

  Several hours later, he wished he’d brought a book to read. Or at least a folding chair. Liquid was streaming down all sides of the shape. The thinning ice revealed the shape of a two-seater sub-atmospheric hopper.

  A helpful display flashed up over Krantor’s left eye as he stared at the vehicle. It identified the hopper’s model, made a few comments about its current condition, and calculated how long it would take to thaw. Krantor blinked the display away with an impatient huff. Too long.

  The servos in his battlesuit whined in anticipation as he unslung the huge blaster rifle that he carried on his back. As he trained the gun on the hopper, dialling down the power to avoid vapourising the vehicle, he looked around the plain to check he was unobserved. This felt like menial work, unworth of Lady Chatterley’s power.

  A few low-level blasts hurried the defrosting along, boring through the ice, then superheating the hopper’s chassis until the water was splashing off it, and jets of steam were shooting from the roof as it emerged from the permafrost.

  In a few short minutes, the hopper lay in a vast puddle of icemelt, glowing cherry red, and Krantor swept Lady Chatterley back across his shoulders. He nodded in satisfaction at a job well done.

  “Very clever. Though now we’ll have to wait an hour for its hull to cool down,” said an amused voice behind him.

  Krantor spun around with his power gauntlets raised and glowing, his AR flashing into battle mode and scanning for the threat.

  After a moment, he looked down. A giant pink slug, the size of a large dog, was crawling out of a blowhole at his feet. The opening must have been frozen over, until the thawing process had started.

  Krantor kept his gauntlets powered up, but lowered them slightly. “You’re an unprimed frag.”

  “Well spotted, mate. Maybe a bit racist, but I’ll let it go this once.”

  “But you’re nothing more than a cell cluster of cloned genetic material. In your unprimed state you ought to be almost mindless, existing on pure animal instinct until the time comes for you to be imprinted with the genetic pattern and strategic knowledge of humanity’s finest warriors. How is it can you talk?”

  The frag rippled slightly as it hauled itself out onto the plain. “Blimey. Are you making a documentary, or just have a bad case of verbal diarrhoea? What do you want?”

  Lowering his hands, Krantor drew himself up to his full height. “I request an audience with the Frag Prince.”

  An uncomfortable pause followed. Eventually the frag seemed to realise the man had finished. “Yeah, we got that bit the first time,” it said gently, “but why? We don’t get many, if you’ll pardon the expression, cold callers. You’re not carrying fucking pamphlets, are you?”

  Every fibre of Krantor’s proud being squirmed at the thought of bandying words with this lackey, a being that by rights ought to be a mindless blank animal. But sometimes needs must…

  “I bring great news, of a bold new life for fragkind.”

  “No shit, a mormon? Where did you get this address?”

  “I am Joth Krantor, last scion of the Krantor-Huang corporation, and you have precisely three seconds to start being helpful.”

  The frag took the information in its stride. Krantor supposed it still had no idea who he was, but the threat and the confidence with which he’d expressed it had obviously penetrated its doughy human-generic hide.

  “You were the one who lit up the transport,” it pointed out carefully, “so if you’re too busy to wait for it to cool down, you’ll just have to do your best Alice impersonation and use the tradesman’s entrance. Eh, so to speak. Breathe in.”

  With that, the frag undulated back into the blowhole, and vanished from view.

  Krantor glowered at the hole. Fanfuckingtasic. It was perfectly round, though its lip was still ringed with lethally sharp shards of ice, and even the AR couldn’t see more than a few feet down it. His suit’s best guess at calculating its depth was “bloody deep, take a snack”, and he dialled down its AI in retaliation.

  With a rueful glance at the hopper, which was making gentle pinging noises as it began to cool down, Krantor followed the frag’s advice. He took a deep breath, and stepped into the blowhole.

  The asteroid’s interior turned out to be a lot more interesting than its surface. After Krantor had hurtled down the smooth blowhole for just long enough to consider that he may have made a fatal mistake, the gradient began to level out. And the walls became transparent.

  It was a frag factory world.

  This was exactly what Krantor had expected, but its scale impressed him nonetheless. He shot past birthing vats full of incubating genetic material - or giant bubbling tubs of human gore, ran the thought that occasionally shot through his mind with a queasy echo. Each vat was fed by a cloning engine, which in turn broke down the raw rock of the asteroid on an atomic level, before reconstituting it as organic material, and imprinting it with the human reference genome.

  His wild slide whizzed him past at least a dozen of the vats in rapid succession. All were inoperative. That made sense. The frag engines generated stupendous amounts of heat, vented through the very blowholes carrying him now, which Space Bastard would certainly have detected from orbit. Still, a lot would hinge on how quickly they could be brought back online…

  Full of these thoughts, Krantor had little time to prepare for the end of his ride. No sooner had he noticed that the blowhole was getting a little wider, he found himself in mid-air, soaring into a small chamber full of frags, milling about apparently aimlessly.

  Krantor’s flight didn’t last long, and he found himself landing hard. Luckily, the ground seemed to be particularly spongy, and warm, and oh shit.

  “Mate. Buy me a drink at least, would you?” The frag Krantor had followed down the blowhole appeared undamaged as the human rolled off it and on to the plain metal floor. The frags littering the room shuffled away in a vague fashion, but seemed otherwise aimless and disinterested in his presence.

  “I request an audience with the Frag Prince,” he replied as he stood and made a show of dusting himself off. “I’m not going to ask again.”

  “Bloody humans, you’re all the same, you dirty buggers. You’ll try and stick it anywhere,” the thing grumbled, as it wobbled away across the floor.

  Krantor had had enough. He snapped one gauntlet up before his face and clenched his fist. A crackling blue glow suffused his entire forearm in moments.

  “The Prince. Now,” he said, and flung the pooled energy across the room, where it struck one of the wandering frags.

  The frag burst apart like a watermelon, and Krantor’s guide became very still.

  “You should not have done that,” it said after a few moments, its voice low.
r />   “Why not?” sneered Krantor. “Frags are mindless things. Look at you, with your speech and purpose, and you’re still just pathetic and snivelling in the darkness, alone in the universe.”

  Somewhere behind Krantor, a faint whirring noise and the faintest air current indicated a door had opened.

  “Not so,” said a new voice, young and confident. “Since the moment of my birth, no frag has ever been alone.”

  The newcomer was a tall, slim young man, in an absurdly ornate, blue officer’s uniform, weighed down by medals, braid, and a heavy ceremonial sword on one hip. His face was smooth and unlined, the part which wasn’t covered by a heavy walrus moustache, but his sunken grey eyes made him look older, the eyes of a man who had seen too much suffering.

  “I am Bouffard, sometimes known as the Frag Prince. You wished to see me, Joth Krantor? It had better be good, for you to assault my subjects.”

  Bouffard ostensibly led the way through the frag plant, but Krantor made sure he matched the man step for step. His AR suggested the atmosphere was heavily oxygenated, so he had removed his battle mask, and shaken out his long black hair. He caught the prince staring every so often at the curved scar on his neck. But then, he’d openly taken in the prince’s odd gait. The man seemed to limp on both legs, but without any apparent discomfort, instead leaning forward slightly with each step. An old injury, long since compensated for, he thought.

  The corridors were hewn from the asteroid’s rock, and unadorned other than occasional support struts and the floor of riveted metal panels.

  The struts had lights embedded within them, not that either of them seemed to have much trouble seeing in the dark.

  Eventually, the two men reached a larger chamber. Unlike every other part of the production plant Krantor had seen so far, this room had real walls, rather than being lined with the asteroid’s bare rock.

  He couldn’t help smirking as he realised the chamber had been decorated as some kind of budget throne room, complete with a long dining table with a chair at each end, a crown on a display stand in one corner, and even tapestries draped over the walls, depicting hunting scenes and other highlights of medieval life.

  “You’re taking this Prince business very seriously, Bouffard.”

  The Prince raised an eyebrow as he busied himself uncorking a dusty bottle of wine from a cupboard next to the throne. Krantor noted the man needed no corkscrew, his forefinger instead elongating and twisting into a sharp spike, which he stabbed deep into the spongy cork.

  “I have all the memories and perfect genes of a Royal Engineer, even if I did steal them by usurping their original owner and chucking his corpse down a blowhole. I do feel I have certain standards to maintain, even if I was actually grown in a vat out the back. Cheeky one?”

  Krantor inclined his head. “Sure. It’s past six o’clock somewhere in the cosmos.”

  As the Prince poured out two large goblets of wine, he looked over his shoulder at the dark warrior. “In any case, Joth Krantor, at least one of us is true to our roots. Why is an entrepreneur’s grandson stomping around the galactic backwaters in grumpy battle armour, packing the kind of plasma cannon people used to carry in case of stray comets?”

  With a thin smile that didn’t get even close to his eyes, Krantor took a glass of wine. “Needs must. My family’s fortunes took an even bigger tumble than those of… both of your families.”

  With a dry laugh, Bouffard crossed to the largest of the tapestries with his own wine glass, and tugged hard on a cord by its side with his free hand. It fell away smoothly to reveal an alcove which was filled entirely with human bones.

  “The Bouffard family never had the greatest luck. In the end it turned out their best skill was dying. In alarming quantities. But the frags… we’re made of hardier stuff, Joth Krantor. We died in alarming quantities, but there were always more of us, biding our time. We’re good at biding.”

  Krantor stared at the collection of bleached bones, counting at least a dozen skulls. They looked ancient, and he wondered how old Bouffard truly was… but then shook his head.

  “OK,” he replied with a rueful grin. “When hyperspace travel supplanted the Wormery, I’ve got to admit no one in my family ended up with their femur sticking out of a cupboard. I might be down to my last trillion credits, but no Krantor is likely to go hungry this side of the Big Crunch.”

  He sipped the wine carefully, nanodevices in his saliva scanning it discretely for toxins. It wasn’t bad. It was clearly replicated, but it had at least been replicated some time ago, and left to mature in the bottle, which gave it a much more complex bouquet. Not many had the patience and foresight for that kind of organisation. Not any more. It certainly wasn’t the kind of thing he expected from a frag buried inside a frozen airless rock.

  To Krantor’s slight discomfort, Bouffard smiled fondly at the heap of bones. “I’d no sooner completed our revolution than we went out of fashion. Frags are force-grown fast, and can be fully primed in hours, but teleport clones can be whipped up in their thousands at the flick of a switch. We were made obsolete. The production asteroids were decommissioned, their ruling families recalled to Central.”

  “They must have had a shock when it came to yours.”

  Bouffard smiled, and shook his head. “Our revolution was a little too effective. The assimilation of the targets’ memory patterns was so perfect that the assassins forgot they’d ever been frags at all. They’d just carry on ruling the asteroid and subjugating us brutally, blissfully unaware of the irony. We carried out the same coup several dozen times before we got the hang of it. Wherever my royal brothers are, trust me, they’re more than passing for human.”

  Krantor drained his wine in a single swig. “But you’re not quite, are you? Human, that is. The unusual properties of an unprimed frag… they can survive in vacuum, withstand all sorts of environmental extremes... you’re not telling me all that goes away just because someone jams Napoleon’s DNA and Sun Tzu’s Art of War in you?”

  The ensuing pause was long enough for Krantor to see he’d guessed right, but also just long enough to suggest he’d broached dangerous territory.

  “Perhaps that’s why our obsolescence was embraced so eagerly,” Bouffard said with a little too much brightness in his voice. “Sometimes soldiers have the audacity to survive battle, and I’m sure there was confusion over how to treat veterans who were, as you say, not quite human. Better the mild confusion of a neighbourhood full of clones, than an underclass of genetically engineered freaks with potential superpowers.”

  The Frag Prince’s bitterness was palpable and, to Krantor’s jaded ears, frankly a little boring. Prior to this trip, he’d personally tortured eight frags to death to assess their physiological differences from baseline human, he didn’t need to sit through the undergraduate sociological commentary into the bargain. If he had a ship full of victorious homebound soldiers on his hands, he’d steer it straight into a neutron star regardless of whether it was carrying clones, frags, or the original cast of Dad’s Army. Company pension funds had brought down bigger outfits even than Krantor-Huang, after all.

  “Please let’s not get diverted by ancient history, Prince Bouffard,” he said smoothly. “Your race, and my family, were both rendered obsolete in their different ways. But the great wheel of history never stops turning. You’ve skulked down here too long, watching over your mindless people and getting drunk on replicated wine. You need a new purpose… and I need an army.”

  The Prince flushed. “Well, it was the obvious request. But my people have been nothing but soldiers. Programmed. Slaughtered. And discarded as soon as technology allowed. I know that’s why all frags are programmed to look caucasian. It would have offended humanity’s finer feelings to create a slave race that looked too much like members of a race they’d previously enslaved. Why would we serve in your army, to meet the same fate?”

  Here goes. Krantor took a deep breath, before trying to sound as casual as possible. “Because I know your hist
ory and I respect your cause. And… I’d only require an army of frags primed physically. Once our war has been waged, your minds would be free to fully develop a frag culture. And take your place among the stars. Is that an offer you’ve ever had before?”

  For all his superficial sophistication, Bouffard clearly wasn’t used to interacting with humanoids, and naked greed etched itself over his smooth face, before being chased away an instant later by a suspicious frown. “And why would Joth Krantor be the only one to offer this?”

  Krantor clenched his fist, letting the blue plasma field build around his knuckles for a few moments before opening his fingers and compressing the energy into a violently fizzing ball of lethal energy, that hovered inches above his gauntlet.

  “I think we’re both well aware I’m no philanthropist, frag, so I’ll be open about the catch in this deal. I am not a pleasant man. Your people will be doing my bidding, and our work will not be pleasant. There are legends of the first starfarers having access to a means of travel even swifter and more efficient than hyperspace. I mean to track down whatever remains of their civilisation. I mean to uncover their secrets. I mean to have the galaxy falling at my family’s feet once more. There’s killing to be done.”

  Bouffard stroked his chin, staring at the energy ball in the human’s hand. Its harsh light brought out every contour of the prince’s face in stark contrast, and every trace of the louche young aristocrat was wiped away. He stepped forward.

  “Frags were bred to be soldiers. To follow orders. There’s always killing to be done.”

  With a savage backhand blow, he smacked the energy ball from Krantor’s gauntlet, sending it careering across the chamber with his bare hand, until it ploughed into the alcove containing the royal ossary. The ancient skeletons burst apart, the splintered bones tumbling over the ground wreathed in flickering blue tendrils of raw energy.

  Bouffard grasped Krantor’s gauntlet, and gave it a firm shake. “We will fight to the death, and we’ll fight all the harder to finally fight as frags.”