Six Scifi Stories Volume Two

One Awake In All The WorldOne Awake In All The WorldPass Candle could not see the creatures, except as winking blips of light on the flash-brain screen mounted in the flesh of his left arm. He didn’t need to look at the screen, however, to know that the creatures were all around him and his partner, Nona Stiletto. He could feel their presence. Could feel their eyes upon him, staring from the shadows of the darkened and fog-shrouded city. More than that, he swore he could feel their malevolence. Their savagery. He stiffened his right arm as he swept it from side to side, covering an arc of the gray fog with the snout of the warflower dark energy gun peeping from under the skin behind his wrist. He followed the arc with the single beam from his headlight—the round, white disk mounted like a third eye in the middle of his forehead. Candle narrowed his dark brown eyes and stared into the headlight’s beam, but he still saw nothing moving toward him in the fog. Maybe, his feelings were the product of his imagination, and the creatures in the shadows would turn out to be benevolent toward cybernetically enhanced humans like himself and Nona. But somehow, he doubted it. Stiletto said nothing to suggest she felt the same way, but the posture of her slender frame as she walked alongside him was as stiff and guarded as his. Her head ticked from side to side, flicking her golden ponytail to and fro in the darkness. The retractable sleeves of her slick black form-fitting flowsuit were all the way up, like Candle’s, leaving her weapon-and-instrument-studded arms free for action. She aimed her warflower directly ahead, and Candle knew from experience that she was ready to whip it around in a heartbeat and use it. “The humanoid’s twenty meters ahead,” said Candle, watching the readings on his flash-brain screen. “Distress signal’s strong and life signs’re steady. She’s surrounded by non-humanoid life-forms, like we are.” Just then, Candle smelled an odor like strong vinegar and heard a sound like claws clacking on the pavement to his left. He and Stiletto swung in that direction simultaneously, lighting it up with the beams of their headlights. Candle saw nothing in the newly illuminated area but a building’s stone wall and a scattering of what looked like splintered bones at its base. “Playing hard to get.” Candle nervously combed the fingers of his right hand through his wavy salt-and-pepper hair. “Let’s hope they stay that way,” said Stiletto. Candle started forward again, following the female humanoid’s life signs. “Seventeen meters to go,” he said. “Easy-peasy.” The sound of breaking glass echoed in the distance. Claws or something like them clacked not far away. “Guess again,” said Stiletto, sweeping her headlight toward the clacking, then forward again. Candle thought Stiletto had a point. In the darkness and fog, it felt like they’d walked several kilometers rather than the half kilometer they’d actually traveled from their spacecraft, the Sun Ra, which was parked at the edge of the city. Though Candle wasn’t the jumpy type, he was having his doubts about what a good idea it had been to walk away from the Sun Ra at all...or land on this planet in the first place. Trouble was, he just hated ignoring a distress signal like the one that’d brought him here; some of his best jobs had come via distress signal. He and Stiletto were first-class spacefaring exterminators, specializing in extra-nasty pests known as Squatters. Squatters ran people like puppets, remote-controlling them from somewhere beyond the Milky Way galaxy. Squatters reached out with their ultra-powerful minds and bonded people to them with overwhelming love and pleasure. Then, the Squatters sent these zombies, known as Wipeouts, on horrifically barbaric killing sprees. Rumor had it the Squatters and Wipeouts were building up to something big, and people were scared. Contractors like Candle could make a living hunting the bastards full-time. Wipeout hunting was pretty damned rewarding for a top pro like Candle, in fact...especially when he had a former Wipeout like Nona Stiletto for a partner. Sure, Nona was still messed up from years of being possessed by the aliens. She had committed more violent crimes than she could remember, and she was marked forever by scars on the inside and outside. But she knew everything about Wipeouts, and the Squatters had left her mean and strong. Just the fact that she had survived being separated from a Squatter showed what kind of a hardass she was. Candle had never heard of another Wipeout walking away from that ordeal alive. And he couldn’t think of anyone he’d rather have by his side today. “Fourteen meters,” he said, squinting into the ten-meter-deep cone of visibility that was the best his headlight could cut through the fog. Candle and Stiletto pressed to within twelve meters of their target, then eleven. Finally, their headlights picked out a form in the gray soup. At last, they got a look at the being they’d been seeking through the alien city...a being who, as far as they could tell, was the only remaining native humanoid on the planet. In size and build, she resembled a human child, five or six years old...a little girl with glittering purple skin, multi-faceted red insect eyes, and not a hair on her head.