Space Weasels (Dirk Beretta (ex) Space Marine)

  SPACE WEASELS

  Edward M. Grant

  Banchixi Media

  Canada

  Copyright © 2011-2013 Edward M. Grant

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission.

  Second Edition, 2013

  Paperback

  ISBN-13: 978-1-927549-17-9

  eBook

  ISBN-13: 978-1-927549-16-2

  Published by Banchixi Media, www.banchixi.com

  SPACE WEASELS

  “Mr Beretta. Mr Beretta, sir.”

  Dirk Beretta’s shoulder shook. Not long ago, before Din Bin Foo, his reflexes would have swung into action before he even knew what he was doing, and broken whatever limb, or limbs, or tentacles, the creature was prodding him with. But now, just opening his eyes was a struggle, as months of hard drinking weighed heavy on his eyelids.

  He lifted his head from the rough wooden table and stared ahead. His vision wobbled, and, for a moment, he wasn't sure whether the alcohol or the fool at his shoulder was responsible.

  “What's goin' on?” he muttered.

  All he could see was the table, an empty beer glass, and some hazy, half-naked, dancing girls in the background.

  “For you, sir,” a voice said in a polished English accent.

  Dirk twisted his head. A bonsai human in a black suit and top hat stood sideways on the wall.

  The bonsai held out the phone. “Telephone, sir.”

  No, the bonsai was standing quite upright on the floor, and Dirk’s head was sideways.

  “Yeah, that's a telephone.”

  He let his face fall back to the table. He wanted oblivion in an alcohol-sodden sleep free of nightmares, not to be prodded by strange dwarfs who wanted to show off their phones.

  Besides, it was an old zPhone 74. He wasn't impressed.

  The bonsai shook Dirk’s shoulder again. Dirk willed his eyes open against the odds. The bonsai was still standing there, a forced smile on his face, holding out the phone.

  “If you don't piss off,” Dirk mumbled, “I'll shove the phone where only your proctologist will ever hear it ring again.”

  “It's for you, sir. Priority ansible call from Earth. They said it's urgent, sir.”

  Dirk sighed. Someone was determined to interrupt his quest for inner peace, and he could either punch the bonsai in the face or take the phone. He didn't think the odds of hitting the bonsai were good, so that only left him with one option. He struggled to raise a thick, servo-assisted, ceramic-musculature-enhanced arm from the table, and took the phone.

  “I'm gonna find you, wherever you are, then I'm gonna kill you,” he explained to whoever was at the other end.

  “Is that Dirk Beretta, Space Marine?” a faint male voice asked from the phone.

  Dirk had been the Space Marines' poster boy for so long, people seemed to think it was part of his name. But no more. After Din Bin Foo, they offered him whatever he wanted. He chose a discharge.

  “I don’t know any Dirk Beretta, Space Marine. Right now, all I want is my beer, and you're getting in my way.”

  He moved his finger towards the 'Terminate' button.

  “Please!” the voice from the phone yelled. “Mr Beretta, you're my only hope. My daughter was kidnapped by the Flaming Space Weasels.”

  The Flaming Space Weasels. Before Din Bin Foo, Dirk would have ripped out their throats with his teeth, but now... the Space Weasels had wiped out most of his battalion that day, and taken his self-esteem with them.

  Dirk raised the phone to his mouth again. “Then forget you ever had a daughter. You'll be happier that way.”

  “She's still alive. I know it.”

  Dirk had seen what the Space Weasels did to prisoners. He'd seen what they did to his own comrades the day he won the battle of Din Bin Foo and lost everything he cared about, all for a patch of worthless jungle.

  “Your daughter is weasel bait, mister. By now they're spit-roasting her, and tomorrow what's left will be packaged as Weasel BitesTM and kibble.”

  “Mr Beretta, you're my only hope. The hero of Din Bin Foo can save my girl from the Space Weasels. I know he can.”

  “Maybe the hero of Din Bin Foo could save her, but I can't. Find some other foo’.”

  Dirk clicked off the phone. As he handed it to the bonsai, it began to ring again.

  “Ignore it,” Dirk said. He stood and stepped past the bonsai, who was answering the call.

  Dirk wobbled towards the door. There were other bars on Wherearewe, and most were more private than this one.

  A topless blond girl dancing in a cage glanced across at him. Dirk looked at her chest, where six breasts jiggled as she moved. From the corner of his eye he could see her big, red lips smiling at him. Perhaps he could find other ways to drown his troubles.

  “How much for a good time?” he said.

  “I can give you fifty bucks, Mr Beretta.”

  Dirk shook his head. “Too much. Twenty is my final offer.”

  She opened the cage and grabbed his arm. “Oh, thank you, Mr Beretta. Or can I call you Dirk?”

  “Call me what you like, darling. I don't plan on us doing much talking.”

  He stepped out of the bar into the dark, wet street, leaning on the girl for support when his legs wobbled too much. Rain dripped from the hypertrees that towered above them, bars and brothels dug out of the lower trunk.

  Humans and aliens passed by, making their way through Wherearewe's red light district. A squidoid hooker flashed its tentacles at Dirk, but he looked away. Mostly because he didn't know whether it was male or female.

  He lead the girl down an alley towards his flophouse room in the more squalid end of the air-breathing biped sector. It wasn’t much, but it was better than sleeping in the street.

  “Look Dirk, it's you!” the girl squealed, then squeezed his arm and pointed toward the wall.

  He looked, his eyes pausing at her chest before moving up to her shoulder, then following her arm out past her elbow, to her finger and beyond.

  There he was. Chin thrust out like a spear, enhanced arm muscles bulging beneath the armour of his powered kill suit like a pack of weasels fighting in a sack, huge weapons of rapid and violent death on his back, Marine flag in his hand.

  Dirk Beretta, Space Marine. The words filled the bottom of the poster in blood red ninety-six point comic sans, illuminated from behind by animated flames. Memories of the long hours he had spent convincing the Dirk Beretta Space Marine Poster Committee to add the flames brought tears to his eyes.

  But the poster had been there for years. The corners were torn, the colours faded by the sun and smeared by the rain, the animated flames now slow and dim. Someone had drawn a moustache and glasses on his heroic face with a crayon.

  It was rotting away in the dark.

  Just like him.

  He couldn't just hide from the world to mope over Din Bin Foo. If he did, in a few more years he would be as decayed as the poster.

  He'd rather be dead.

  He owed a debt to the men, women and strange alien creatures who had fought at his side. Even though they were all dead, and most had been eaten by weasels as snacks, he had to honour their sacrifice, to keep their memory alive.

  “Sorry, babe,” he told the girl. “Destiny calls.”

  He looked back towards the bar. The bonsai was running after them, holding the phone high above his head. Which, given his short stature, was barely above Dirk’s knee.

  Dirk waited for him to catch up, then took the phone as the bonsai collapsed, panting, on the sidewalk.

  “What's in it for me?” Dirk said.

  “A million bucks if you bring her back alive,” the voice said.

  “It doesn't sound like you love your daughter very much.”

  “And all the nachos you can eat.”

  Plate after plate of hot, steaming nachos, covered by cheese, piled high with jalapenos. He could almost smell them.

  “That's an awful lot of nachos.”

  “It'll be worth it if you bring my baby back to me.”

  Eog was hunched over in the docks, with his primary head in the plasma exhaust of his ship. Wounded providing space and air cover for the Marines at Din Bin Foo, they’d rewarded him by invaliding him out of the service. At least he had the rusting hulk of the Bad Boy to show for his time enlisted, rather than an alcohol-sodden black hole where Dirk’s memories of the last few months should have been.

  “Hitting the chlorophyll again?” Dirk said.

  Eog's head turned, a straw stuffed up his third nostril, white powder stuck to the other end, a pile of it on the warm metal of the exhaust.

  Dirk crossed his arms and leaned against the wing of the ship. “You know what that shit does to you?”

  Eog’s branches flailed. “Of course I know. That's why I do it, dumb-ass. Why would I do it if I didn't know what it did?”

  “Keep at it and pretty soon they'll be throwing you on the compost heap.”

  Eog's scalp branches fluttered. “Look who's talking. Drunk Beretta, hero of the titty bar.”

  He turned back and snorted more of the powder. Dirk strode forward, his feet still unst
able from the Mother Of All Hangovers.

  He put his arm on Eog's branch. “I need the best ship I can afford. And, unfortunately, that's yours.”

  Eog twisted one of his eye stalks to look at Dirk, and his dorsal flaps emitted a passable impression of laughter. “You couldn't afford Bad Boy after what you've been spending.”

  Dirk reached into a pocket and pulled out a roll of bills. His advance for the job. At the sight, all of Eog's eye stalks spun around to examine the money.

  “If you got that, why hire me?” Eog said.

  Dirk leaned on the exhaust. “Dirk Beretta doesn't forget his friends. When I have money, I spread it around. And that Space Whale fishing gig of yours isn't going well, is it?”

  He didn't add that he'd already asked every other ship in the dock, and the few captains who hadn't laughed him away had reluctantly decided to take other contracts which didn't involve almost certain death followed by rebirth as tasty protein snacks.

  The girl was Felicia Winterbotham, the sole heir to the Winterbotham Nachos fortune. She'd been touring the galaxy when weasel pirates fleeing the war had captured her on the outskirts of the Wherearwe system. If the crew hadn’t damaged the weasel ship, they might well have continued from there to Wherearewe, and he could have been up to his armpits in weasels that night.

  But she didn't have long. The weasels might be collecting humans for their kibble factories, to be turned into rations that would keep their troops in the front lines, but if they were stuck here they'd settle for a bit of old-fashioned home cooking over an open fire.

  He'd tangled with the Flaming Space Weasels many times before. Vicious, congenitally bureaucratic, and proud of their resplendent flame-red uniforms which gave them a five minute life expectancy in combat. But the same suicidal denial of reality made them dangerous, because 'fight or die' was a way of life for them, not just a motto.

  “Where we going?” Eog said. Then he snorted up the last of the chlorophyll, his branches twitching.

  Dirk stood on the bridge of the Bad Boy. Eog's tentacles and ventral branches played over the controls like a drunk pianist as the ship raced towards the outer fringes of the system.

  “Can't this thing go any faster?” Dirk said.

  “Wanted faster ship, you should have hired it.” Eog’s third tentacle flipped the ansible to channel fourteen, and a zero-g hockey game flashed up on the viewscreen.

  “A girl's life depends on this.”

  Eog chuckled. “Then girl shouldn't have relied on drunk to save her.”

  Dirk stared into space through the bridge windows. If he was a weasel, where would he go?

  “Don't know what you see in them anyway,” Eog muttered. “No leaves, that ugly smooth bark, and those big wobbly blobs flopping around. Thought of mating with them makes my bark squirm.”

  “What?”

  “Girls. You humans go to so much trouble for those ugly creatures. Should find yourself a nice Arborean sprout, plant some seedlings.”

  Dirk crossed the bridge and examined the radar display. It was black. He flicked a few switches at random and it stayed black. He flicked some more. Red lights lit up, but the screen remained black.

  “What's on the radar?”

  “Nothing. Broke last month, no money to fix.”

  “How the hell do we find her with no radar?”

  Eog's branches shrugged. “No idea. You didn't say wanted radar.”

  Dirk was going to have to rely on his killer instincts and hard-won knowledge of weasel psychology. They'd served him well before, when his brain was at peak performance and his sensor implants weren't addled by alcohol.

  Weasels were sticklers for bureaucracy, and standing order forty-seven stated that in times of trouble a weasel should run and hide. But there weren’t many places to hide in deep space.

  He peered out of the windows again. Something shone against the darkness ahead. A star? It was slowly twinkling, and stars don't twinkle in space.

  “What's that up to the right?”

  One of Eog's eye stalks looked at him. “How would I know? I just fly this thing.”

  “Then let's take a look.”

  “Weasels?”

  Eog's eye stalks twisted like dancing snakes on acid. “You never mentioned weasels.”

  Dirk pulled the space suit over his legs. "You didn't ask."

  "If you'd told me, wouldn't have come within light year of this rock."

  "Don't worry. They don't eat Arboreans.”

  Eog's head-leaves shrivelled. “No, won't eat me. Just kill me and make fire from my branches. Then use it to cook you.”

  “Where are the guns?” Dirk said.

  “What guns?”

  “The guns I gave you to look after when I left the Marines.”

  “What you think I swapped for chlorophyll? Not made of money.”

  Dirk stomped across the bridge towards Eog. “How the hell am I supposed to rescue a girl from Space Weasels with no weapons?”

  “You hired me, you handle that. I just drive.”

  Eog flipped the channel on the display. A squidoid wrapped its tentacles around an arborean.

  “Oh yeah, baby,” Eog said.

  “Fuck it, I'll improvise.”

  Eog snorted the last of his chlorophyll off the console. His branches writhed, and he shivered. “I go in an hour, you back or not. Be late, I not be here.”

  Dirk pulled on the rest of the suit, and adjusted the helmet. Air hissed in as he stomped towards the airlock. The door closed behind him, then the red light lit as it decompressed. The outer door opened, and he pushed himself out into space.

  They were on the night side of a comet, and the weasels were hiding on the other side. Fortunately Eog had approached that way, out of view of the weasel ship's sensors. Behind, he could see the lights of the Bad Boy's bridge, above him the first wisps of the comet's tail floated out into space as Wherearewe's star began to warm it. Below was just the solid blackness of deep space shadow on the comet's surface.

  He fired the suit jets to lift himself around the comet, and began to see light past the peaks of the ice pinnacles that rose above the horizon. A few minutes more, and he saw the tips of the dorsal fins of the weasel ship.

  Dirk slipped out of the suit in the depths of the weasel ship's engineering section. He'd considered sneaking through the hole that someone had blown through the wall of the hold, but they'd have sealed that off from the rest of the ship. Instead he'd come in through one of the maintenance panels.

  They'd used that trick before, to get into the weasel flagship What's For Lunch? at the Battle of the Philistine Nebula, and since his men killed every weasel on board before any could send a warning, they hadn't changed their authorized security procedures to prevent it.

  He heard squeaking on the far side of the nearby machinery, and welding sparks flashed between some of the pipes, which were leaking luminous green liquid from cracks. The weasels were so close he could smell them.

  And they smelled bad.

  He needed a weapon, or he'd have to take them with his bare hands. He wished he had a Shredder and Power Armour, but, right now, even a pointy stick would do.

  As he looked around him, he built up a mental map of the engineering section. He hadn't had time to study the ship from the outside, but what he'd seen there combined with what he could see here looked like a Jameson Mark 13 Deep Space Freighter, probably hijacked at fork-point from a trader who was now in their cooking pot. That meant about a dozen in the crew. He could handle that many weasels by himself, if he dealt with them in small groups.

  He crept between the machinery, listening to the weasel squeaking echoing off the pipes. He hated their vile, high-pitched language, but he'd learned enough to understand much of what they said, particularly the more common phrases like 'Mommy!' and 'No! don't cut that off!'

  “I say we ought to cook that human, not feed her,” one weasel squeaked. “Why should she eat better than us?”

  “I haven't had fresh meat in weeks. I say let's roast her, to Heck with what the captain thinks,” another added.

  “Don't let him hear you talk like that or he'll cook you and feed you to the girl. She's for the executive food processors, not for us.”

  The first weasel squeaked again. “Ah, let's get this job done and we can be back home in two days with medals all round. But if I get the chance, I'm going to cook that girl myself.”