Steven Campbell - Suck My Cosmos

I blinked a few times.

“So, her?” I asked.

“Malla. Yes. She is now in possession of his entire fortune and is free to do whatever she wishes.”

“So should I just arrest her?”

Maris-To looked surprised.

“She was a powerful and dangerous woman before, but now she is exceedingly so. I would stay well away from her if I were you.”

I was confused.

“But why would she hire me if she killed him?”

Maris-To seemed bored with the subject that I had supposedly come here to talk about.

“You are her proof that she didn’t kill him. She hired a renowned cutthroat to protect her husband.”

Did he just call me a “renowned cutthroat”? Is that how these people thought of me?

“But I still get the contract, right?”

“Yes. But you will be working for me performing assignments. Submit a report now and then on the Ray’Ziel issue.”

“But…don’t actually do anything?”

He gave an exasperated smile.

“That is correct. No one needs proof Malla murdered her husband. Those of us in power already know it as fact. If she is wise she will stay relatively quiet and not make us pursue this ugly matter.”

Man, remind me never to get murdered as a politician. What was that show in the City Council chambers if they didn’t want me to actively pursue it? Was that just for public consumption? Whatever. If I got paid, I didn’t amazingly care.

“My servant has the details of what you’ll be doing,” he continued, and he rose from his chair.

I did as well, though I felt very little had been resolved.

“Thank you for coming by.” He turned and walked deeper into his cavernous office.

“Do you want the contract? I signed it.”

He didn’t quite face me, though he paused walking.

“Leave it with my servant. Good afternoon,” he said.

“Good afternoon,” I echoed.

Though I wasn’t entirely sure it had been.

I hadn’t opened the sealed documents from Maris-To. I was trying to figure out the stuff I was already involved in before starting anything new.

It was not totally unreasonable that Malla would hire me with instructions to keep an eye on her husband—with the added clause of looking for anything dangerous. That second part was odd at the time and I should have taken more notice.

There was no way I could have known about that bomb, let alone stopped it. But if Malla ever got dragged in front of a criminal court, she could say she did her best to try and save her poor husband by hiring me.

What a virtuous woman.

Garm had mentioned the Quadrad were also hired to protect the City Councilman. I had a harder time seeing Malla enlisting those guys if she really wanted to off her husband. They were actual professionals. They had a decent chance of stopping an assassination, unlike me.

So probably Ray’Ziel had hired the Quadrad, maybe even suspecting his wife was out to get him. That must have made for a lively home life. Then again he was a City Councilman and they had a lot of enemies, so he might have hired the Quadrad as a matter of course.

In any case, Maris-To was right. I didn’t want to have anything to do with Malla, who was now one of the wealthiest women in the System and maybe a murderer and maybe didn’t want me to know that.

I looked at Tamshius’ will and soup recipe. I needed to do something with that. I couldn’t afford to keep his restaurant.

I mean, I could keep it if I kept getting jobs like this one. Where I was supposed to search for a killer I already knew, yet was not supposed to do anything about it.

I took a cab back to the dingy soup shop and opened it up.

The recipe was thorough .

There were countless steps and at each junction, it had pictures and detailed calibrations to let me know if I was doing it correctly. I had to sample the viscosity at fifteen minutes, the color at twenty-five, sieve out the film floating on top, use gauges and measures and filters.

After I had thrown out my sixth batch I decided I would do one last attempt and then Tamshius would just have to deal with me not souping to his memory.

After hours, I was left with a bowl of soup that passed all of the rigorous standards in the recipe.

I took a sip and almost spit it on the floor. It was horrible!

I reread all the instructions. I looked at the final picture and my results. It was a match. Was Tamshius just a completely spiteful person? Had he saddled me with this debt and was now trying to poison me?

He was probably having a good belly laugh in whatever afterlife he occupied.

I held my nose and downed all the soup.

It burned my throat and stomach and even my sinuses. Nothing did that! I was a mutant. Was this stuff toxic?

I rinsed my mouth out for a long while over the sink.

“Screw you, Tamshius,” I said to the restaurant.

I then headed home to try and sleep off the nasty taste.

I woke sometime in the middle of the night to a weird noise.

I hurried to my front door and threw it open. I was about halfway down the street when I realized the noise was me.

Screaming.

The city was a blur as I ran by. Whatever I was doing, it made sense. Kind of like when you have a bad fever. You don’t second guess your hallucinations because the thing you would use to second guess them, your brain, was malfunctioning.

I was just running down the street screaming, flailing my arms, minding my own business.

The police appeared at some point seeing as it was late at night in a nice section of the nice space station.

This suddenly enraged me.

I was so angry!

There were about five Manufacturing District police cars and a van. I saw a lot of security forces, a lot of guns. It made me furious. I don’t know why.

I ran straight at the police van and hit it head first and knocked it over.

The security forces, with nothing better to do, began firing at me.

Why?

I jumped at one bastard who was wearing full body armor. My primary mode of fighting, when I didn’t use a gun or grenades, was to wrestle. I was simply too slow to throw a good punch or kick and my vast weight usually provided a tremendous advantage in grappling.

But I punched this guy. An uppercut. Probably something I had never done in my life.

His helmet shattered like an egg and I saw him fly up into the air like he had springs for legs. I dashed forward and punched him again before he hit the ground.

There weren’t so many people firing at me after seeing that. There were a lot of people running away, however.

This also made me mad.

I took off after one of them. He flung his rifle behind to try and trip me. I caught it and broke it in half over my face without slowing down. I hated rifles! I hated this road! I hated this city!

I caught up to the policeman and he looked at me in horror. I was vaguely aware that I was still screaming. I’m not sure if I had ever stopped. He screamed too.

I ran past the man. I hated slow people. They were so slow.

I skirted around a corner and saw the C.O.’s. The Central Authority with their armored vehicles. MTB was in front.

That guy was always following me even though I never did anything wrong! I headed straight toward him.

He made a signal with his arm and then he hurled something. It bounced on the road in front of me.

I hated grenades.

The device didn’t exactly explode, but it ruptured, and thin wires crisscrossed my whole body, particularly my legs.

I struggled onward, snapping and bending and twisting the constricting wires.

He threw another at me and it landed in front and to the right. It not only reached out and grabbed me, but it was anchoring me to the spongy surface of the street.