Slipstop Part Two

Driftspace
Aboard the Yghhul Snatt
Date Irrelevant

Fourteen basked in artificial sunlight and sucked on hallucinogenic gases half-submerged in a pot of bubbling clear fluid. They were great red-skinned aliens, the Guludeb, with immense round skulls packing an impressive series of murderous teeth, and their twin sets of six black eyes took in various wavelengths of radiation. They were predators, they were gangsters, they were warlords and they were businessmen. Fourteen basked in golden rays and phosphorescent smoke.

The greatest of them all, Hagrakadacz—Quarrelsome Prophet—hauled himself to his full height of nine feet, ten inches, and in his oddly euphonic native tongue said to the other thirteen,

“Twenty-one days and the hairy one will find it.
Eyes of green and teeth of few.
The hairy one, the hairy one,
To Tyrol’s Rock past a pusillanimous cretin.
The hairy one, the hairy one,
Secret.”

Kulsalanaghur—Son of the Usurped—rose after him and affirmed.

“Then we to Tyrol.
Should greed trump vile,
We to Tyrol.
Should the envious best the greed,
We to Driftspace once more.”

Only Nuknagarakpaltuu—Father of the Petulant—chose to disagree. He stood just a few inches shorter than Hagrakadacz with a translucent pouch holding his second son, nearly born, and screeched,

“Primal and unconcerned goblins
Cannot suffer unto Creators more than obstreperousness.
Give chase, with haste,
Slaughter greed and virulence both,
Lest Creators take hold of rebirth.”

“Bring unto me blasphemy
Then plead to the faithful?”

Hagrakadacz gripped Nuknagarakpaltuu by his pouch, wrapping his enormous fingers round the throat of his unborn son, tearing through the yolk. In agony the Father of the Petulant thrashed about, watched silently by the other twelve as Quarrelsome Prophet removed his second child and only chance at his bloodline’s exoneration. The boy was thrown into the hallucinogenic gas around the pool. It wailed miserably but Nuknagarakpaltuu had learned his place, he shed his pouch entirely, and let it dissolve in the hot fluid.

The fourteen discussed nothing further as their vessel transcended driftspace to appear just past Tyrol’s Rock.

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Driftspace
Aboard the Dubliner
Date irrelevant

Light curved and oozed from every surface, and every flashing panel on a console screen remained blurrily alive for just one moment too long. Eoin Mcfingan loved driftspace for one reason—he couldn’t comprehend it, couldn’t even begin to see what was going on with his normal matter in the ancient channels dug through reality for the sake of travel. It disturbed some people; his mother had hated the idea of quasi-limbo, always squealing that there had to be some other way to travel the galaxy that didn’t involve physically leaving spacetime on someone long dead’s highway.

But Eoin couldn’t get enough of it. He gazed longingly out his cockpit window bulb, into the green and fleshy and grainy and purple and thrashing and calm anti-universe beyond. At times, when he was feeling philosophical, he talked to his old mackerel tabby Joyce about what it must be like to live in driftspace. Perhaps there was something else entirely out there, so alien to someone from Mcfingan’s reality that he could only comprehend it as a flurry of conflicting, vague blotches.

Joyce listened intently, though he didn’t say much.

A hollow, distorted voice crept out of his onboard driftspace radio. It spoke in soft, cooing tones, as though nearing its graceful death. Eoin couldn’t quite understand what it said, but he dropped out of driftspace just past the orbit of a greenish blue gas giant, Marret XI. Simultaneously, so did a ship shaped much like a fused hand, striped with the color of bile and a blinding white. Joyce hopped off his lap and hid in his safe spot, a little cat bed suspended in an antigrav beam to protect it from jarring.

If Joyce expected a fight, that probably meant there was one coming. The hand-ship spoke once again, faster and more comprehensible this time, but still decrepit, on the verge of death.

“Surrender the tank of organoplasm or brace yourself for death.”

“What, that organic sludge? Are you mad? That could fetch me more than the platinum!”

“This goes beyond the desire for cash. Surrender the organoplasm.”

“Beyond cash? You really are out of your tree, aren’t you? There’s nothing more to the universe than cash, lad.” Eoin lit up a marijuana cigarette, activated his immaterial shields, and deployed the quadruple automatic cannons mounted on either side of his cockpit. A torpedo was automatically loaded into the lone launch tube underneath his ship hold, as well. “Now here’s the deal. I tell you where you can get some real high-quality organoplasm, and you go happily on your way safe in the knowledge that you’ll have the stuff in a day or two. Or, I kill ya with more firepower than God.”

There was no response. A rocket flared up from behind the hand, zipped backward about ten miles, and then circled round—a flashing warning light told Eoin it had locked onto his hold. He reacted instinctively; he hadn’t been in many battles in his old bird, but he’d gone through the motions enough. First, he pushed down sharply, taking away the painted surface from the missile’s mechanical eye, and then he powered up the EMP emitter dish. It blasted an invisible beam at the rocket, and shut it down for a moment. When it rebooted, with the completely non-electrical arming mechanism in place…

The missile exploded about halfway to its target. Eoin fired the fusion reactor, and pulled to a few dozen times the speed of sound before the hand could paint his surface for another missile. He nosed up, put the ship back into view, and fired his torpedo. Unguided, mechanical, and unexpected, the little silver tube closed the distance in a matter of seconds and nailed its target amidships. There was a blossom of fire and a bubble of molten steel, and the hand broke right in half. He slowed to a halt in front of it and scanned the inside.

It was an enormous vessel, and most of its size had been the hold. The small space for a crew appeared to house no life forms, though there was no sign of atmospheric venting; chances were the lone pilot had been thrown about and killed. Eoin stood, Joyce hopped off his bed, and to the back they both went. He was going to suit up to board and see just why and how he’d been followed, and the kitty cat was going to watch with the typical stoic bemusement of his sardonic race from the airlock window.

Again he felt the strange eyes of something very much dead, very much ancient, watching him from the periphery.

He finished his cigarette, filled his suit’s smoker with a few large buds, and out the door he went.

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