By Stephen Woods
Shaken awake by the sound of the explosion the retired Général de division Pierre Ariel Bouchard had just enough time to soil his sleepwear before the door to his bedroom was blasted off of its hinges in an overly dramatic fashion.
“Mon chéri Pierre! Sorry about that, did we wake you? Your manservant decided to spontaneously combust I’m afraid, and he made a good bang,” William Stroker commented as he stalked into the room, smoking arc-rifle in his hands. Two luminoids followed him inside, indistinct floating blobs of conscious light.
William, or Willy as most knew him, wore knee high rubber boots and a military jacket with a red scarf that was long enough to loop from where it hung at his waist up around his neck and down his back to the floor. On his hip rested a green mask with big bulbous black eyes and a thin inscrutable mouth.
“This is the Frenchman?” one of the luminoids asked skeptically.
“Frenchman or henchman, the tally still surely grows, and soon enough all men experience the death throes,” the second luminoid intoned ominously.
Willy didn’t know why, but that one always spoke in rhyme. But the rhyming was also the only way to tell them apart, so he didn’t complain. Well… not often.
He called the rhymer Lester, and the other Moe.
“That’s Pierre Bouchard alright,” Willy said, nodding in satisfaction as the Frenchman clutched the duvet to himself. Willy chuckled as the man started to prattle off in French. The only words he could comprehend were swears that he had learned during a previous foray into the French province of the solar system, though he couldn’t recall which of the moons surrounding Uranus it had been.
“Feisty for a Frenchman,” Moe commented, hovering in front of the pontificating man.
“Stereotypes have made the French famous, and they only enforce them by living around Uranus,” Lester said, perhaps in agreement, it was difficult to say. Willy snorted a laugh regardless as he switched off his gun, the sparking, smoking, and vibrating could get irritating over an extended period, not to mention the soft whine it emitted.
“Let’s hurry up and get on with it Moe, Lester will stay this time. I don’t want a repeat of the Russian cock up,” Willy said, with a quick glance out the window. It was unlikely that anyone would realize what was happening to the retired Général until it was too late, but that wasn’t enough to reassure him.
“I thought I was being quite witty, I didn’t mean to upset the Russian committee,” Lester protested.
“Yeah, I’m sure you didn’t. Moe, how long will it take?”
Pierre started to push aside his covers and stand, but a curse-ridden shout from Willy, accompanied by a threatening wave of his rifle, sent him back under the duvet, if not in fright then at least in self-preservation.
“Anywhere from one to three hours,” Moe answered.
Willy gaped at the floating orb of light.
“What? Why so vague? You can usually pin it down to within five minutes.”
“I haven’t checked the distance between Saturn and Uranus in a while, but it’ll be within that amount of time,” Moe explained.
“Gah, you could have checked at any point in the last month! We’re trying to be professionals remember?” Willy moaned, shaking his gun in the air for emphasis.
“Whatever, I still get the job done,” Moe muttered before shooting out the window, already on his way to Saturn. One of the benefits of being made of light was traveling at the speed of it.
“You never give me trouble like that, eh Lester? That’s why you’re my favorite,” Willy murmured as he pulled out a chair from Pierre’s large desk and sat down. Pierre had stopped talking and now just smoldered silently under his covers. Willy wondered whether he understood English.
“Moe says that he heard that, and then something about you being a tw—”
“I hate you both,” Willy muttered, cutting him off. Moe and Lester were ‘entangled’, so they could experience what the other was experiencing, regardless of where they were in the universe. Or so Willy understood it, they never delved into too much detail, and he had never asked them to explain it in full. It worked, that’s all he needed to know.
Once Moe arrived at Saturn he would travel to Hyperion, one of its many moons, and easily its worst. Hyperion was not only nonspherical, an ugly peanut floating around the planet, but it also rotated chaotically, and was made up of sharp-edged craters. So it was basically a spiky out of control nugget. And so naturally it had become a hive of scum and villainy. A pirate haven of sorts, not ruled by any sort of regulated government. On Hyperion Moe would provide their clients with a live feed from Lester of the deed being done. Moe would then make sure that the payment went through as planned.
The luminoids were genderless of course, but Willy had given them male names, and ever since then it was impossible to think of them as anything but. They had even seemed to take on male characteristics since their naming.
Willy sighed and stood back up. He had always hated waiting.
“Saturne… Américain?” Pierre mused before spitting onto the polished wooden floor. It must have cost a small fortune to bring all that wood from Earth.
“I’m British thank you very much, God Save the Queen and all that. Spent most of my life hopping around the solar system though,” Willy explained idly as he poked around the man’s bedroom, running a finger over the books that he displayed so grandly on the mantle above a false fireplace.
“I don’t think he means us, regardless, this is not something to discuss,” Lester grumbled.
“Oh, you mean our employers, Bouchard?” Willy asked, spinning on his heels and grinning.
Lester dimmed and bobbed in the air, as if sighing.
“Oui,” Pierre replied proudly, his nose high enough in the air that Willy could make out the forests of hair in each nostril.
“Well, you guess wrong. Saturn as in Hyperion, our employers could be anyone,” he paused, noticing a lump of flesh on his boot, which he flicked off with his middle finger.
Pierre’s little mansion was isolated from the closest settlement, so he had a good view of it as he looked out the window again, a lit up dome on the horizon. He would be able to see anyone coming along the dusty road outside, but for the time being it remained deserted.
They were on Ariel, the fourth moon that orbited Uranus, and it was nighttime. Uranus itself was a giant blue orb in the sky, not as impressive a view as Saturn was from Mimas, or Jupiter from Europa, but still, not an awful view.
“Why you would choose to live on this dump I will never understand,” Willy lied as he walked back to his chair.
“It is quiet. And peaceful,” Pierre said in heavily accented English.
Willy laughed uproariously. “A general who likes peace? That’s rich isn’t it, Lester? As for quiet, all of space is quiet, you know, on account of it being a vacuum.”
Pierre snorted and turned away.
“I would not expect you to understand,” he muttered moodily.
Willy shook his head and tapped a foot. After a moment he walked over to Lester, nudging him and nodding at Pierre. “What a guy, huh?”
Lester didn’t reply, but his light rippled, as though amused. Or at least Willy assumed it was amusement, though it could have easily been another sigh.
“So… have I ever told you the story about the Uranian on Titan?” Willy asked, leaning against the broken remains of the bedroom door.
“Is this the story of your first tattoo, or the one about space poo?”
Willy sighed. “It was the poo story, didn’t realize I’d told you it already.”
“You didn’t tell me though, you told Moe.”
“Ah, of course,” William yawned loudly, before moving Pierre’s chair so that he could sit down facing the window. He itched to be moving again, but he forced himself to stay seated for a while.
“You’ll want to reload, Pierre is sending Morse code,” Lester said a few moments later, sounding as alarmed as a bodiless luminoid could. Willy leapt from his chair, switching his arc-rifle on as he did.
“Back away!” he shouted, jumping onto the cushioned bench that rested at the foot of the grand bed, his arc-rifle smoking and sparking as it charged up a killer blast within its vibrating metal casing.
Pierre froze, his hands on a hidden telegraph key within the drawer of his bedside table.
“Hands where I can see them.”
His hands came out slowly, confidently.
Willy flicked a switch on the stock of his gun and then shot him, a bolt of electricity sparking across the distance between them and racking the smug Pierre in convulsions.
“May I remind you not to waste our target’s lives? At least until Moe arrives.” Lester muttered angrily, hovering over the open drawer.
“What? I set it to stun,” he said innocently. They took the telegraph key, and checked the other bedside table too. A quick turnover of the rest of the room found a nice looking coilgun and holster in his desk drawer, which Willy kept a hold of.
“Do you know what he managed to transmit?”
“I would guess that it was an S.O.S.”
“Damn. Alright, how far away is Moe?” he asked as he belted the holster on.
“Moe doesn’t know, but nearly an hour has passed; he should be coming up on Saturn fast.”
“Then we’ll just have to last. Ah, dammit, this is why I like Moe better! Have you checked the town yet?” Willy asked as he hurried over to the window. The road was still clear.
“I’ve checked twice, and we are definitely caged mice.”
“Well we already knew that! But I’ll take that to mean that they’re coming. Are they armed?” he asked, turning back to Lester. He disappeared, there one second and then just a blurry afterimage the next. A few seconds later he was back, just as suddenly.
“They don’t seem to wish anyone harmed, but they do come well armed.”
Pierre groaned from the bed as he started to regain consciousness. Willy sighed, and then after a moment of thought forced a grin.
“Ah well, at least we won’t have a boring wait for Moe. Let’s tie up Bouchard, then we can deal with the yokels.”
“You say that as if I’m not a ball of light, but still, I can help you with the fight.”
“Seriously though Lester, your rhymes are starting to drive me crazy,” Willy muttered as he pulled out the old knife that he wore on a chain around his neck, using it to cut out strips from the bed sheets. He tied up Pierre as well as he could. Willy knew he’d escape from them easily enough, but he only needed them to keep Bouchard secure until he had dealt with the rescue troupe.
He picked up his knife again and then stared for a moment at its aged silver blade, the wavy lines imprinted in the handle, and at the gunmetal chain that it hung from.
“Have I ever told you the story of this knife, Lester?” he asked quietly.
“No, I don’t believe so.”
“Good.”
And hopefully I’ll never have to, he thought. He put the knife back around his neck, tucking it under his scarf. “How far out are they?”
“Not far, they’re just pulling up in a steamcar,” Lester said as he buzzed up and down. Willy forced a smile again and grabbed the green mask from his hip, securing it over his face. He let the smile drop and switched on both the coilgun and his arc-rifle.
“Shall we wait at the top of the stairs?” he asked as the sound of French voices rose from the ground floor, two levels below them. Lester didn’t reply, just flashed twice before disappearing.
Walking calmly out over the broken bedroom door, and through the puddle that had once been Pierre’s manservant, William came to a stop at the end of the hallway, where it opened out onto a landing that gave birth to the large spiral staircase. Lester hovered at the top of the stairs, floating up and down gently.
Willy waited patiently as the would-be rescuers reached the second floor and continued upward, their heavy clothes rustling to the beat of their clipping footsteps. He exhaled as adrenaline quickened his heart. He wasn’t really worried, Lester knew what to do, but that still didn’t stop him from being anxious.
Five Frenchmen reached the top of the stairs and froze, staring in wide-eyed confusion at the floating sun that waited for them there.
Willy peeked around the corner, watching as Lester flashed, bright enough to blind, and the Frenchmen cried out all at once, discharging their weapons in all directions. He chuckled as he watched one of the men trip over himself, falling back down the spiral stairs.
Willy’s mask had been designed so that Moe and Lester’s disorienting flashes wouldn’t blind him, and it came in damn handy.
Another man retreated back down the staircase, leaving just two at the top. Not including the one who had been caught in the mad crossfire of his comrades and now lay on the ground, staining the carpet an even deeper shade of red.
Willy flicked a couple of switches on his rifle and then stepped around the corner, shooting one of them on full power. The man turned into a red mist just as he began to see clearly again.
The other man blinked repeatedly, staring at where his comrade had been a second before.
“Merde, soupe de tomate!” he said before tripping over a stray limb and tumbling back down the stairs like the others.
“Not bad for your first time human bowling eh? What was that, a seven-ten split? So close to a strike,” Willy joked to Lester as they waited for the Frenchmen to regroup and try again.
“Yes, I’m thinking of going pro, just imagine the endorsements—uh-oh, they’re calling for reinforcements.”
“As suitable a career as any,” Willy murmured as he walked around to the staircase. He hesitated, and then with a shrug leapt onto the metal handrail, letting gravity slide him downwards, his arc-rifle pointed in front of him. He slid down the handrail and shot a man who was just starting to come back up the stairs, creating another explosion of red mist. He jumped off the railing onto the second floor landing; only to slip over and slide across the floor on the dead man’s gore.
The last two men screamed and opened fire, their eyes squinting as Lester flashed again. Willy raised his arc-rifle and pulled the trigger… and the gun just sparked and then fizzled weakly, out of juice.
“Ah, crap,” he muttered and dropped it on the floor. He had ramped up the power to turn the guy at the top of the stairs into a wet cloud, and had forgotten to lower it afterwards, using up the last of its power in two shots. The two Frenchmen, seizing onto the sound of his voice and the clatter of the rifle, turned their coilguns towards him and fired. Willy hurried backwards, further down the stairs, landing roughly against the metal railing. With a growl he pulled out Pierre’s coilgun from his holster, shooting off a volley blindly as he regained his footing.
The two men ducked and ran for cover, in opposite directions. They hid behind furniture, waiting for Willy to step forward onto the landing.
“Watch this,” he whispered with a grin to Lester before dashing across the landing, the two blinded Frenchmen shooting in the direction of his footsteps. Their bullets connected, only with each other rather than Willy.
“Ta dah!” he exclaimed and bowed as the two men dropped dead.
“That was stupid, you could have been wounded.”
“It worked didn’t it? Besides, I think luck is with me today,” Willy said as he kicked a gun down the stairs. “So are reinforcements coming? Oh, and is Moe there yet?”
He picked up his arc-rifle and loaded in a new jar of electricity as he walked back up the stairs, Lester following.
“No reinforcements yet, and Moe is nearly there, no need to fret.”
“Hey have I ever told you how I got my first pistol? Named him Soap, cause whenever I used him there’d be a big mess to clean up. Not because it blew people up mind you, although it did that too, but because it would leak fuel whenever you shot it. I gambled for that pistol, and it turned out to be a poor investment. Anyway, long story short, I’m not in the mood to make another gamble, so give me a proper time estimate, yeah? When will he get there?”
“Twenty or so minutes, he’s already traveled nine astronomical units.” They turned the corner and reentered the bedroom, where an unbound Pierre was frantically searching the drawers of his desk.
“Looking for this?” Willy asked, grinning underneath his mask as the man spun around in fright. He waggled the coilgun teasingly in the air before holstering it.
“Merde,” Pierre muttered, before dashing for the fake fireplace on the far end of the room. Willy just chuckled; he was cornered, after all, with the mantel of exotic books behind him, and Willy’s sparking gun in front.
“Don’t worry, it’s not quite time to say adieu—” he started to say, cutting off as Pierre pulled on one of the books, triggering a hidden mechanism.
Willy was just about to call out the horrible cliché when the wall behind the bed dropped down. It crashed down on hinges, and three steaming and whistling Silverthorn Co. first generation automatons stepped out from within the hidden recesses there.
Well, the first stepped directly out onto the bed, where it lost its footing and floundered on the bed sheets helplessly, but the other two stepped forward and raised their single gatling-gunned arms.
“Aw, really?” Willy managed to whine before leaping behind Pierre’s thick wooden desk. Pierre laughed maniacally as the bullets thunked into the desk, at least until Lester flashed him in the face, at which point he fell to the ground clutching his eyes.
With his back against it Willy could feel each of the bullets as they thwacked into the wood of the desk. He briefly wondered how much ammo they must have, before deciding it would be more than enough to make doubly sure he was dead.
“Hey Lester, I think I can hear the pitter-patter of rain,” he shouted over the impacts of their bullets. Switching his arc-rifle back on, feeling its familiar weight and vibration, and hearing that whine and hum as it readied itself, he grinned.
He shot it blindly over the top of the desk, and two satisfying pops later, like lightbulbs exploding, the automatons collapsed to the ground. A quick glance around the corner of the desk confirmed that they were down for the count.
“Well, that was easier than I expected. These old models are all bluster, huh?” Willy commented as he stood back up. He chuckled at the automaton still stuck on the bed, wriggling amongst the bed sheets. Pierre took that as his chance to ‘escape’, blindly staggering from the bedroom.
“You really think you can run, old man?” Willy asked with another laugh.
“Well, actually the reinforcements have arrived, so pursuing him would be advised,” Lester informed him.
“Well that’s just brilliant,” he muttered with a sigh and then hurried out the door. Pierre was already stumbling down the staircase, and as Willy looked down over the railing he could see the reinforcements just reaching the staircase on the ground floor. He sighed and looked at Lester as he pulled himself up onto the railing.
“Shall I try out Dr. Wang’s new add on?” he asked, glancing down that three-story distance to the ground floor.
“I don’t think—”
“That was a rhetorical question.”
He fell forwards, over the edge, and flipped in midair. He laughed as his coat and scarf trailed above him as he plummeted. A moment later he crashed into the ground, before standing upright with arc-rifle raised.
“What a rush!” he said before shooting the first of that second wave of Frenchmen.
Willy had lost both of his feet to frostbite while escaping a Martian penal colony a year ago. It turned out that hitchhiking across Mars really wasn’t advisable, as it got quite chilly. Luckily for him, Dr. Wang had been willing to save his life.
The good doctor had been thrown out of university for ‘malpractice’ and a ‘breach of ethics’, though they seemed like exaggerated charges to Willy. After all, what was wrong with sawing off his calves and replacing that with metal springs and gears?
Wang’s mechanical prosthetics had worked of course, but that hadn’t stopped Willy from raging for the first few weeks over being experimented upon.
In fact the prosthetics had worked so well that just two months ago Wang had ‘upgraded’ them, adding even more machinery and springs. She had claimed that they would now allow him to run faster than any normal man, and fall from greater heights.
He didn’t have time to marvel at the fact that they actually worked though, as after he shot the first Frenchmen he had only a couple of seconds before the others started shooting back.
Lester flashed and Willy shot off another charge before running for cover. Pierre was just reaching the bottom of the staircase as they returned fire, forcing him to retreat back to the second floor, spraying curses from his lips as he did.
“That wasn’t the smartest thing to do, but at least this proves that what Dr. Wang said is true,” Lester admonished beside where Willy cowered behind a marble statue of a scantily clad woman.
“Luck is with me today, Lester, I told you, I can feel it!” A bullet shot one of the arms off of the statue seconds later, which landed in his lap in a cloud of dust. “See? What a stroke of luck, I was in need of a hand!”
He slid the marble arm across the floor and, after turning his rifle back to full power, shot it. It flung forward, knocking one of the shooters off his feet. Using the distraction, Willy backed up around a corner and into a parlor, where he reloaded his rifle as he walked.
“Do you mind keeping them distracted for a bit, Lester?” he asked as he walked towards the open double doors that led into some sort of study or library. Lester disappeared and Willy walked confidently forward… and then froze as he felt a pistol barrel press against his side.
“What are the odds, a little green man. What brings you into Uranus territory?” a familiar voice asked in twisted amusement. He twitched, he knew that voice well, and for a second he had thought she recognized him, but his mask seemed to do its job well. Chloe Auclair yanked his rifle from his hands and shoved him against a bookcase, never taking her pistol off of him for a second.
“I’ve never been to Uranus, but I’ve visited the general area several times,” Willy retorted. The gun stiffened against him as her verdigris eyes widened in recognition. Should’ve kept your big mouth shut, he chided himself with a long sigh.
“Willy? William bloody Stroker?” Chloe exclaimed, punching him in the stomach before ripping off his mask. He wheezed, he’d forgotten how strong she was.
“Petite merde! What are you doing here? You’re involved in this mess? What am I saying, of course you are. Mess is your specialty after all.”
“Not to be rude Chloe, but, uh, would you mind pointing that barrel somewhere else? No? Well, it has been a while, huh? How’ve you been?” he asked, feeling suitably stupid with his hands raised helplessly. He knew he shouldn’t be winding her up, she was a dangerous woman after all, but he never had been able to resist that temptation.
“Fermer votre trou de muffin! I’m the one asking the questions here!” She spat out angrily.
Willy tried to take her seriously, but it was just too much to ask for. His laughter was involuntary, at least until her fist connected with his jaw.
“Yowza,” he managed to say before spitting blood. Note to self; never get punched with your mouth open.
“You should know better than to spit in the presence of a lady.”
And she would have looked like a very regal lady, had she ever worn anything other than men’s clothing. Not that Willy was complaining of course.
“Come on, Chloe, you and I both know that you stopped being one of those a long time ago,” he said under his breath, over the sound of gunfire coming from back in the foyer. She punched him in the side and he let out an involuntary groan. Scratch that last; never get punched by Chloe. Period.
Her high cheek bones, and tendency to glare up at people, would have made her quite a petulant lady of course, if it weren’t for the actual malice in those eyes.
“How’s the tattoo?” she asked, grinning devilishly, while somehow managing to scowl at the same time.
“It’s unchanged. I have a couple of new ones too though, you know, on account of being sent to prison? Thanks for that by the way, never would have learnt what that old joke about dropping the soap was all about if it weren’t for you.”
She chuckled and leaned close. “It’s all part of the game, Willy. If you can’t deal with the losses, then you shouldn’t even try for the gains,” she whispered to him, emphasizing ‘losses’ by jabbing the pistol barrel into the soft area between his legs. Willy doubled over, his head in her hair for a quick second before she shoved him back against the bookshelves, the musky scent of coconuts and limes strong in his nostrils.
“Ah, so that’s where my cologne went,” he commented wheezily.
“I’ve told you many times before, it was never a cologne, it’s a perfume.”
“Sure it is,” he muttered, squeezing his eyes shut. “Any time now Lester.”
Lester appeared between them and flashed, Willy pushing her pistol aside with his right hand, narrowly missing the two shots that she fired. His left hand came around and punched her in the stomach. Usually he tried to punch people on the temple, or in the throat, maximum damage areas like that, but he couldn’t bring himself to mark her pretty face.
He kicked her off her feet and wrestled her gun out of her grasp even as she fell. Her head banged against the wooden floor and she didn’t rise, Willy tossed her gun away as he picked up his own.
“Do I even want to know? Also ‘Just coming up on Hyperion’ says Moe,” Lester asked as he bobbed up and down.
“She’s the Uranian from my tattoo story. Well, and a dozen others,” he murmured before squatting down beside her, checking that she was still breathing. “She’s the reason I lost my legs… but enough of that, let’s get on with business.”
“The Uranian in your story was over six feet tall, not this small,” Lester said in amusement, hovering over her.
“So I exaggerated a bit,” he muttered as he picked up his mask and switched his arc-rifle to stun. He couldn’t leave everyone dead except for Chloe; they would think that she had been a part of the assassination. Of course, that wouldn’t be so dissimilar to what she had done to him, and without a second thought, but he wasn’t going to give her any more reasons to make his life hell. Because he didn’t doubt that she could if she put her mind to it.
Stepping out into the foyer he saw that there were three Frenchmen left, all heavily armed, and all facing away from him. One of the benefits of using the stun setting was that it took less power and had a speedy recharge, which meant he was able to take down the men in quick succession, before they could even fire a bullet or bolt back.
“Is Moe with the clients?” Willy asked as he walked up the stairs.
“He’s talking with them as we speak, and Pierre is hiding upstairs, behind an antique.” From above them came a startled cry, quickly followed by hurried footsteps along the upper landing, towards the bedroom.
“Lester you snitch, you don’t understand the rules of hide and seek at all, do you?”
When they got to the third floor Willy hesitated, Pierre’s shadow was sharp against the pooled blood in front of what remained of the bedroom door.
“Come out—” A bullet thunked into the wood of the wall opposite the doorway.
“Don’t come a step closer!” Pierre shouted with his heavy accent. Willy groaned, realizing that he must have taken a gun from one of the bodies on the second floor.
“William, I don’t mean to scare, but—”
“Don’t worry Lest’, you can’t scare me,” Willy said confidently.
“But that isn’t Pierre,” Lester finished and the grin slid from Willy’s face.
The surviving automaton stepped through the doorway with its gatling gun firing, the projectiles whizzing through the air like darts, but packing a lot more punch. Willy’s reflexes were quick though, and he fired a shot directly at its chest. It connected in an explosion of sparks, but didn’t even faze the mechanical monstrosity.
Willy blinked in surprise; the other two automatons had gone down from a single shot spread between them. He only had time to curse before running for the only cover available, into the only room near him. The bathroom.
“Ah crap,” he said, rather appropriately. He realized where he had gone wrong; he hadn’t switched his rifle off the stun setting, which was clearly not enough to take down an automaton. Not that it would have mattered, since the rifle was out of power anyway.
A quick check showed that he had avoided being shot, though three bullets had messed up some of the mechanism in his left leg, not to mention ruining a good pair of boots.
“They’re pressuring Moe, we’ll soon need to start the show.”
The automatons shadow appeared from the crack under the bathroom door. Willy flattened himself against the wall just seconds before bullets peppered the door.
Oh no, please God, I don’t want to die on the toilet, anything but that. As if in reply the toilet shattered and started to sputter and spray, drenching him in seconds.
“Sorry Lester, I didn’t realize that Moe was in such a predicament, you know, on account of the toilet fountain, the empty gun, and the automaton trying to kill me!” he shouted over the hail of bullets. He pulled Pierre’s coilgun from its holster, now his only means of defense.
“Do you think you can distract it?” he asked as the barrage continued. “Simulate some muzzle flashes maybe?”
“I can try, so long as you promise not to die.”
“Me? Die? Don’t be ridiculous! Today’s my lucky day, remember?” he said with a near hysterical laugh. Lester disappeared and he breathed out slowly, his heart was racing and he could feel himself starting to run out of energy. One screw up and he was dead. But one thing was for sure; he refused to die in a bathroom.
Hand on the doorknob he waited, the door had more holes than Swiss cheese, so he was able to safely glance through to see what really did look like muzzle flashes coming from over by the staircase. He heard the whizz and clunk of gears as the automaton swiveled towards Lester. He counted to ten as the automaton took a floor-shaking step forward.
Yanking the door open he stepped forward shooting. His first couple of shots just dented the automatons thick metal shell, the bolts ricocheting off dangerously. So he aimed more carefully, shooting its joints, and anywhere that glass or gears were visible. The whole thing spun back around on its waist, forcing Willy to duck to avoid being knocked out by its long gun arm. Rising from his duck he stepped even closer, sticking his gun over the rim of its thick chest piece, firing off shots directly into its well oiled innards. Gears whined and it tried to step back, to get away from Willy, but he just used that to his advantage.
He shoved it backwards, pushing with all his might, sending it crunching through the wooden railing and off of the landing. It plummeted to the ground three stories below, landing with an incredibly satisfying crash.
“Haha!” he shouted and licked his lips in satisfaction. “The taste of sweet victory… wait, no, that’s toilet water,” he spat over the edge, the automaton a fidgeting crumpled mess at the foot of the stairs, and pulled his mask from the clip on his hip.
“Alright Lester, are we ready to go now?” he asked.
“Moe will stream my sight to them in ten. Now be careful, remember you’re entering Pierre’s den.”
He nodded and took a deep breath to allay his nerves before securing his mask.
“Blind him.”
A bright flash of light outlined the doorway in front of him, accompanied by a stream of curses and randomly fired shots.
“It’s done, son,” Lester said. Willy grinned.
He walked into the mess of the bedroom, dripping toilet water and blood, and wearing his eerie mask. The retired Général de division Pierre Ariel Bouchard cowered behind his bed, shooting at where he thought the doorway was. Lester changed color, indicating that their clients all the way back on Hyperion were now watching. William stepped silently closer, gun aimed at Pierre’s hand. He shot and Pierre cried out, his gun flinging across the bed as he dropped it.
He took aim for the killing shot as the man started to beg.
“Au revoir,” he said softly before pulling the trigger.
As Pierre collapsed lifelessly to the ground Willy couldn’t bring himself to do anything other than turn to Lester and nod through him to their clients, who were no doubt sitting comfortably on cushioned chairs at some expensive club even as Willy dripped blood and sweat onto the carpet.
He felt cold and empty as he left Pierre’s little mansion, leaving behind four unconscious bodies, and more than half a dozen dead.
He stared out of the steamcar window up at Uranus as he drove away, admiring that startlingly blue orb. The further away he grew from those corpses the less he felt them weigh him down. Soon enough he could imagine the money that would be waiting for him. With that gold, which Moe was securing in their bank account even at that moment, he could replace his arc-rifle, and even buy a spare. He could buy a whole armory with all that gold.
With it they could explore the nether regions of the solar system. With it they could stop being contract killers.
Well, at least until they spent it all.
First though, he needed a ship off of Ariel, and he already knew where to go looking for one.
He grinned, thinking about how pissed off Chloe would be when she woke up. In a way that thought was almost as pleasurable as the money he had just earned.
The bizarre crossbred genre-baby of Sci-Fi, Comedy, and Steampunk, the William Stroker universe has grown to be an ongoing side project of mine since writing the first short story in 2015. What started out as a simple short with only three goals, to be funny, to follow a general rule of ‘What else could go wrong?’, and to be entertaining, (yes that’s different from funny, shut up) has grown into a planned anthology of five or six short stories and a novella or two.
A Stroke of Luck is the first one I wrote, and while it technically takes place somewhere in the middle of the overarching chronology of Stroker’s universe, it’s still really the best introduction to this crazy scientifically impossible world that my brain pooped out.