The Kill

The incense was the secret. It was a tricky situation, since Glory’s employer never slept there, never ate nor drank anything there. He showed up to give her assignments, to get data, and to fuck her if she was willing, which usually she was.

Glory nearly always had incense going. Sometimes the breeze was wrong and the aroma from the exhaust end of the vat wound up in the house. At those times, the smell of incense was most welcome. The rest of the time, she did it just because Karina liked it. It had been an incense day that time Karina came to look at the house.

It was merely a matter of swapping it out. The opiate infused stuff was marvelous for inducing drowsiness.

Lionel watched safely from the fire escape. When his cue came, there was a hatch for the dryer exhaust hookup where the grille and hose were really loose. He’d already tested this as a manner of entering and exiting the house at will. He could stay out here and keep to a minimum how much smoke he might get into himself.

Time.

Lionel was a visceral killer, harboring no illusions as to his nature. As he wriggled through the exhaust hatch, he went over again the plan, looking forward to the kill. Too bad he couldn’t play with it.

Gently he sprang onto the bed, where Glory was snoring softly, curled away from the guy, who was splayed out like a crucifixion, drugged out of his gourd. Prissily, Lionel licked the spot on the healthy throat that he’d picked, pulse throbbing lazily. Sweaty.

A cat’s eye teeth are already impressive weapons. A cat agent’s eye teeth are sometimes filed or built up, depending on the cat’s own distinct dental structure, so that a sharp edge runs along the inner side of the teeth. Carefully, Lionel placed his teeth in the chosen locations, then licked about for the pulse to make sure he’d got on either side of it.

The guy was making noise, a frown crinkling his face. If this took much longer, he might wake up. No worries, this wouldn’t take much longer at all.

A kill of this type definitely carries personal risk to the agent. If there’s enough thrashing about, a neck can get broken, ribs can get busted, even all the legs could get fractured. There’s a big body weight disparity, and a human can thrash a lot while dying.

But Lionel was a brave agent, that or stupid. Mentally counting down, on three, he thrust his teeth together.

Despite the opiates, the boss came bolt upright in the bed, eyes bulging, face a rictus of pain. Out of reflex, he grabbed Lionel and yanked.

Thus cutting his own throat.

He flung the cat and threw his hand around the flooding wound. He rummaged around the bed for his shirt, but as he bent, he began to go over. He tumbled, bouncing off the edge off the bed and landing with a rubbery thunk on the floor.

Glory was partially awake from all the jiggling of the bed. Lionel turned to her.

“Honey, go open a window, okay? We’ve got some people coming over to clean things up and we don’t wanna knock them out.”

She was staring at the boss, a bloody wreck on the floor, the expression on her face seeming to say that this had to be some weird dream. Too bad for her it wasn’t.

Oh, well, thought Lionel, the change of jobs will do her good.

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Chances

Tom began rummaging about in the shuttle, his hair now floating about him in the absence of artificial gravity. He was getting bumped about as Emily fooled with the attitude thrusters, trying to halt their spin. He bumped his head as the craft jigged, and swore explosively.

“What are you doing back there?”

“Looking for weapons,” although at the moment he was looking at his fingers to see if his scalp were bleeding.

“Are you nuts? What kind of use would hand weapons be in this kind of mess?”

“Well,” he said, moving on to the next locker, “if it happens to be an energy weapon, we might be able to slag the breach and buy a little time.”

“And maybe create some smoke and noxious fumes while we are at it.”

“Oh.” He said, embarrassed. He was, after all, the EMT. “Well I don’t see an easy way out of this, and we’ve got to do something about our oxygen. It kills me that they don’t have suits.”

“Probably part of their evolution. They likely don’t need suits. Remember, it’s only their shape that’s human.”

“Hey! Look what I found!” He tore a big sheet of plastic, honest to goodness old fashioned clear garbage bag style plastic, from out of what was probably the refuse bin. He let it go, and it drifted about the cabin aimlessly. They all watched, Glory mostly in delirium, as it floated about lazily until it hit a current. Then it began to move with purpose aft, gaining speed until it stuck itself fast where a bulkhead adjoined the inner hull near a hatchway. It emitted a thin whine until Tom got back there and rearranged it. “Think I’ve got a pretty good seal now. How much time do you think that buys us?”

“Well, without temperature control, it’s hard to say, but it’s nice to know we’ll keep breathing for awhile.”

Glory seemed out again. Tom drew near Emily and said softly, “She looks pretty bad. I think we need to get her out of here before it gets that bad. Francis said that courier ship holds two; maybe we can dock with him and get her across.”

“We’ll lose some air in the process, cycling the locks.”

“If we can save just one of us, it’s better than all of us buying it.”

“Faulty reasoning,” she accused. “If we want optimum chances of saving any of us, we should send over the one most likely to survive.”

“Well, now, that might be faulty, as this more desperate environment would call for robustness and ingenuity. If we send our weakest one across, and keep our strongest ones to try and make the best of it, we might get three out of three.”

She smiled. “In any case, I agree with you. Just for different reasons. Let’s hail him and make a plan.”

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Girlfriend

His computer chimed. There it was! Well, he thought that was it, but looking at the signal, he was not so sure. He took a moment to evade a trio of dogfighting combatants, then turned his attention to the signal again.

It was her signature, for sure. But what was she doing? She sounded like a robot, repeating the same pattern over and over. He’d turned off the comm channels sometime before, having gotten nothing but nonsense from either party, likely because they were scrambling communications, but he had a hunch that there was something to this signal.

Yes. The same signal was coming from a bit of wreckage near the transmission ship, spinning free of it as the ship took its place at the broadcast point. Probably a distress beacon. Someone must have scored a hit while he was otherwise occupied, judging from the flotsam, but one big piece of it was emitting the pattern, and although he couldn’t get a direction on Glory’s signal, he bet she was there too.

He wasn’t the only one getting the signal. Several of the fighters were breaking off their current engagements to rally around the junk, already beginning to defend it from the other fighters. So far, nobody was broadcasting in the clear. He guessed that the wreck didn’t likely have the right scramble codes, so that meant that the pattern was so far the only message to have been exchanged.

Of course, he didn’t have any scramble codes either. Francis decided to risk it.

“Hailing wreckage with distress beacon. This is courier Francis. Do you read?”

He half expected somebody to fire on him, but nobody did. Also no one answered. This was beginning to be annoying, and it’d been some hours before he’d absorbed anything. Francis was irritable.

“Hailing wreckage with distress beacon. This is courier Francis. I believe you have my girlfriend aboard. Do you read?”

This time there was an answer. The voice sounded tense, but there was a hint of laughter. “Francis! We are so glad you could make it. Your girlfriend is aboard with two others, and I think we need a bit of rescuing. Can you help?”

That was a very good question. Could he?

“I’m not sure. This is just a courier ship, so it can only hold two, and there’s the matter of transfer to consider. Meanwhile the fighters are busy, well, fighting, so I don’t expect they’ll be able to help at the moment either. What’s your situation?”

“This was an intact shuttle until about seven minutes ago. Now we’re losing air and climate control. It’s hard to say, but I think we’ve got between ten and twenty minutes before living becomes very difficult.”

“Okay, stand by, let’s see what we can do.”

What could they do?

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SWAK

Dear Francis,

For the first time in many years, I’m shy. There is something I need to discuss with you, but don’t know how to bring up. It’s even hard to write in a note.

I’m beginning to feel things about you, to think things about you, that people generally think and feel about people with whom they wish to mate. I made that sound so cold! I’m sorry. But I didn’t know how to express it across our species gap.

I like and respect you very much already, and am beginning to feel a great deal of affection for you too. It’s not fair to let you be ignorant of this; it could affect our working together, and it could harm our friendship to have a secret like this one.

If you would like me to never mention this again, please let me know. I don’t want to hurt you with unwanted feelings.

Hope I haven’t botched this up too much; hope you understand what I mean.

Affectionately,
Glory

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Severing Ties

Lionel had another mission. He didn’t like it when missions mixed – it could be messy, and more extreme measures might be called for than when missions were entirely separate.

The guy Glory was working for was allied with Them. Other spies, mostly animal, had tracked him and found him doing important footwork for the as-yet-unnamed infiltrators that Lionel’s cohort were tracking.

These were perplexing people. As infiltrators themselves, his organization knew a few things about diverting resources and performing difficult to detect acts of subversion. They weren’t the only ones, and they were only mildly surprised to discover someone else doing it in much the same way they did. But it pays to keep an eye on the competition. They had.

These new infiltrators were going after the power, and they seemed to have some tool that none of the others had. Either it was some powerful form or persuasion, or it was hypnosis, or it was remote control, or something. Whatever it was, the powerful ones that were contacted were compliant with the wishes of those who contacted them. Policy was being reshaped, and new rationales were being thought up after the fact to justify them.

These infiltrators were taking over the government. This was causing some alarm. And one of their best sources of information was Glory.

Of course, Lionel’s crew couldn’t have this. But they needed Glory themselves for Karina’s mission. This meant severing Glory from her current ties.

Given the nature of Glory’s employer, that could only mean murder. Lionel licked his fangs and began to plan.

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