“You know what’s stupid?”
“What?”
“This ship,” Bruno screeches as the shuttle shimmies in response to a psionic shock wave. He jerks the control stick to avoid a cephalopod tentacle and the Errant Knight barrel-rolls to the starboard. “Any other design we’d be invisible.”
“But we’re not and go fuck yourself.’ For Lei, this ship represents how she sees herself in the Universe. A hunter, a person always searching for satisfaction. “This ship is a representation of me, insult her, and I kill you, got it? Now steady flyboi, I need to concentrate.
Bailey leans her head over the small green light and whispers words that Bruno can only guess will conjure and mystify and make them safe.
Momentarily distracted, he almost misses another cosmic squid’s tentacle careening out of the vacuum to end their existence.
He barrel-rolls again, this time to port, which frees them temporarily from danger. He presses the stick forward. The artificial gravity pushes back as the ship accelerates to 9000 G’s. The ship’s perfectly fitted joints vibrate menacingly.
An explosion of red sparks lights up the corner of his vision. “There, now stop.”
“What?”
‘Stop the fucking shuttle, dipshit,’ she screams.
Bruno lets go of the stick, and all forward movement ceases.
“Turn her around.”
He gingerly maneuvers one hundred and eighty degrees. Through the canopy he sees twenty squids squirming like a mess of tentacles and beaks writhing in bloodlust a dozen or more kilometers away.
Tens of thousands of meters each, the sight is ball-shrinking.
“What are they waiting for?”
“Not waiting. Scared”
“Scared of what?”
“Their daddy.”
And from seemingly nowhere he is there, the nightmare of the universe. The end.
The God Entropy.
“Mother of whores, what have you done?”
The being is hundreds of millions of leagues tall, half that wide. Bulging muscle ripples through its sleek, vaguely humanesque form. A mass of a thousand tentacles flow from his face. His enormous eyes glow hotter than a newborn star.
He and his masculinity is apparent, reaches out a speckled pincer.
Then the second one and finally, the hands on the ends of his other set of giant arms.
He snatches squids and shoves them into the center of the swirling beehive of suction-cupped tentacles dancing around his mouth. Four squids devoured, he reaches for more while the giant scorpion tail behind him strikes out, stunning those that try and escape.
Lei clicks her mouth shut, remembering she’s supposed to be a bitch. “Sold my soul didna I? Now we go back to their nest. We came for eggs, we get eggs.”
And he does as asked but not before glancing at the women who hired him to pilot her craft wondering if it was an employment contract he signed or a death warrant.
Stories 