Short Story Challenge: The Next Mission

Note: This is my submission into a writing contest. The rules are less than 2,500 words. I am in Heat 18 - Sci-Fi (genre), Delivery in 30 minutes or less (topic), a war veteran (character).

 

Brief Synopsis: Myra is finding that coping with peace can be as difficult as achieving it. It takes the insight from an unlikely source during a delivery to discover she still has a mission, even without a war.

Myra stepped from the elevator to the deck of the Pleasure Bot Express to begin her shift, but her mind was on the Dunes of Venisha. The blood of the last giant Gargola soaked into the sand, while her brother and sister warriors cheered. Three hundred years of war was over, and the scourge of the universe – the mighty Gargolas – were ushered violently into extinction.

Less than a year from that proud moment, she and so many of her brethren were dismissed, leaving her unemployed and left wondering what to do in a time of peace. She hadn’t known peace since her childhood, a childhood she couldn’t remember after three decades of killing. She worried that even without the Gargolas, she remained a killer and nothing more.

“Myra, you dunce, Myra!” A gravelly voice sounded in her earpiece.

“Loma, did I ever tell you that the last being to call me a dunce was Crasis, the Butcher King of Jenju?”

“Yeah, yeah, I am sure you cleaved his head off like all the rest. Unfortunately, you’re not in the head-cleaving business anymore. You’re in the Pleasure Bot business, and we guarantee delivery to any station in the district within thirty minutes.”

“Ridiculous, I went three days without food or water after the Battle of Wingo Pla, these perverts can wait five more minutes for their synthetic satisfaction.”

“Not with that nasty bug forcing a mating quarantine on the stations, and if we can’t deliver faster than the rest, they’ll use the rest. Now, you’re up. Bay 12, and Sharpe is loading an Eve X8 in your hull.”

“An Eve X8?”

“Yeah, a special order. This guy likes them big. Oh, and I am sending Sharpe along to keep you on track. You don’t get this one to Rip Station in time, you’ll be looking for a new gig.”

She pounded a fist into the nearest wall, knowing she couldn’t afford to lose the job, but hating to take orders from smut peddlers like Loma. Pleasure Bot Express housed its operation on a decommissioned war carrier. The bots were built on the second level, and quality checks were performed by the ship’s crew. The hull offered ample room for inventory, and the deck was designed to deploy fighter squadrons, but worked just as well as the heart of the shipping operation. In her past life, Myra jettisoned out of such bays in transports for ground battle. Now, she captained a small frigate designed for a maximum of three bots and two crew. The Eve X8 was likely large enough to fill the space for the bots.

            “Rip Station!” Sharpe said, his strange high-pitched voice unusually excited. The unique, usually quiet, boy-man had worked for the company for a few months and was normally delegated to loading ships. “I’ve never been there, and we will see Garas!”

“Big whoop, Sharpe.” The last stronghold of the Gargolas didn’t awe her, but she noted that Sharpe recoiled from her admonishment. She spent a year as a prisoner on Garas and returned years later to free the millions of slaves oppressed by the Gargolas’ underlings, the cruel dwarves from Asterbad.  “Is the bot loaded?”

“Yes, yes.” Sharpe snapped on a helmet, cringing as it pressed down on his enormous ears. Sharpe was a Mammo, a highly sensitive breed from an extinct planet. His hearing, as with all Mammos, was exceptional, and he likely heard Myra’s end of the conversation with Loma, even though she’d been on the other side of the ship and speaking at a normal decibel level. Mammos would have made excellent spies, except the breed was inflicted with a youthful innocence, which left them incapable of deceit. Sharpe had frail, boy-like features, but he was likely fifty or sixty years older than Myra. She understood little of Sharpe’s abilities, and she tried to guard her tongue around him.

The bay doors opened, as she activated the frigate’s navigation system. The ships hardly needed anyone to fly them, and she suspected most of her peers allowed the ships to do all the hard work, but she preferred taking the ship’s controls, at least once they slowed from hyper-speed near their destinations.

“Who was Crasis, the Butcher King of Jenju?” Sharpe asked, seated beside her in the cockpit. Like his ears, his eyes were about double the size they should be for his small, thin skull, and his pupils were tiny dots centered in a milky white sea.

“A massive Gargola, who gave me this.” Myra tapped her left leg below the knee. A robotic calf and foot gleamed below her form-fitting uniform shorts. The uniform, which included a top that barely covered her breasts, was supposed to appeal to the clientele. She suspected her green, scaled skin ruined the aesthetic. No one had cared about her appearance when she was cleaving the heads off of Gargolas. “He severed my leg, and I severed his head from his neck.”

“Wowwy, wow, wow, wow.” Sharpe said. Myra steered the frigate past the clearance zone of the Pleasure Bot Express station and then prepared its navigation for hyper-speed to the outer rim and Rip Station. “I hate Gargolas. They captured my brother and sister many, many years ago and ate them.”

“Yeah, Gargolas would do that.” Myra and Sharpe snapped back in their seats when the frigate skipped into hyper-speed. “Crasis was huge, even for a Gargola. It’s amazing he wasn’t added to the Group of Eight, really. Well, he was insane and a cannibal, so that was probably why they left him out.”

“He ate his own people?”

“When he felt like it, I’ve been told. He broke from the Gargola Alliance and started a band of particularly despicable wretches that terrorized the outer rim. They lived in the ruins of an ancient Gargola castle on Jenju, and that’s where we found him.”

“You fought him alone?”

“No, Gargolas usually occupied the better part of a battalion, and that’s what we took to Jenju for Crasis and his henchmen. I was one of the few that walked out, well I didn’t really walk, more like crawled. That was a great battle. For four days, we advanced through the giant castle, engaging a mighty bunch of Gargolas. You see, Sharpe, a Gargola’s skin is thick, too thick for blasters, and it takes several hacks with Merlyian Steel to draw blood. They have huge forearms and calves, and I think you could land a ship on their chests. And their strength, my gods, were they strong.”

“I know. I seen them. I ran when I did, I did.”

“Well, Crasis was one of the strongest, and he ripped my foot off with his bare hands. Luckily, he flung me away and forgot about me, and that’s how I got behind him and cut off his head.”

“Because Gargolas are dumb.”

“Dumb? I don’t know if that’s true.” They came out of hyper-speed and before them was Garas, a blazing red planet with swirling white storms spotting its atmosphere. She’d heard Garas had turned into a cesspool of crime since the slaves were freed. The government, which in its wisdom relieved ninety percent of its fighting men and women from duty when the Gargolas were defeated, didn’t have the capabilities to police the planet. Rip Station simply monitored the movements of any possible dissenting factions among the remaining few allies of the Gargolas.

“I’ve heard it said the Gargolas were once among the most advanced races in the galaxy. They built complex, yet beautiful, cities made of impossibly heavy stones. Well, when you’re ungodly strong, you can lug around blocks of stone, I suppose. They also wrote epic poems and painted enchanting murals. I saw the remains of one in Jenju. It had a mountain scene in the background with a field of brilliant red roses in the foreground.”

A buzz in her earpiece was followed by Loma’s noxious voice.

“You have ten minutes to reach Rip Station. Report your position.”

“We just exited hyper-speed. Rip Station is on the far side of Garas, but we’ll be there in no time.”

“Loma, Loma,” Sharpe interjected, “Myra is talking about Crasis, the Butcher. Myra, tell Loma about Crasis.”

“Shut it, Sharpe. Myra, you shut it, too. You don’t have time for old war stories.”

“You know, Loma, there was a time when I would have cut you in half for talking to me like that.”

“Ha. Well, maybe there was a time when you would never have considered doing such a thing, too.” Loma’s words struck her hard. Since the man employed so many veterans, he understood how to expose their insecurities, and Myra certainly dwelled on the war and its violence. Gods, what was a warrior without a war? “Here’s what is important. You are to unload at Bay 34. Do not, I repeat, DO NOT make a scene. Our client would prefer some anonymity.”

The line went dead, and Myra watched the red surface of Garas. Sharpe sat quietly, still obeying his boss’s orders to shut it. She supposed running from attacking Gargolas was the bravest thing that Sharpe had ever accomplished. She, on the other hand, had always ran toward danger, and yet her and this frail little being had ended up in the same place – delivering sex robots in less than thirty minutes for a minimum wage. She sighed. In some circles, she was still recognized as one of the finest and bravest of the entire Gargola Campaign.

When she killed Crasis, scaling a statue while dragging one bleeding stump of a leg to reach the Gargola’s head, she was certain she was going to die. When she hacked away at his neck, and he stumbled around in sudden, angry pain, she prayed not to lose her balance before finishing the job. It took four hacks to break the skin, and three more to remove his head. The blood spurted like a geyser as she rode the body to the floor, and she feared she might drown in his blood before being able to swim away from his huge corpse. It was her finest moment, and sometimes she wished it had been her last.

“There it is.” Sharpe sprang forward in his seat. “Rip Station!”

“Yeah with two minutes to spare. Begin the boarding process, Sharpe.”

Unloading went smooth, as some being stood in the shadows watching them and transferred the charge to the company’s account, acknowledging they had met their deadline. She supposed that meant she got to keep the job, but she didn’t know how to feel about that.

“The only thing that would have made this big girl better, would have been if it was free.” The man’s greasy voice teased acrid bile into her throat. No amount of blood or battle made her want to vomit as much as meeting the creeps that enjoyed the physical company of soulless robots.

“We’re the best, Mister.” Myra forced a smile. “Be sure to tell your friends.”

“Oh, I will.” He crept away, and the bulbous robot – having been activated upon arrival – shuffled behind. The Eve unit resembled female humans, and this one was the most obese version. Watching the bot follow the man reminded her of Crasis before she jumped to decapitate him, and Myra had the impulse to remove its head as a mercy killing. Gods knew what the client intended for this Eve X8.

“Come on, Sharpe, let’s head back.”

She circled Garas twice before even considering navigating back to headquarters. Sharpe watched the world from his seat, and she wondered exactly how much he could see with those tiny pupils.

“What was your home like?” she asked.

“Sometimes it was cold. Very cold,” Sharpe paused to consider the question more. “But sometimes warm and the air smelled sweet. I miss air you could smell.”

“What were the Mammos like when they were all together?”

“Quiet. When you have big ears, you don’t have to talk loud. I could hear almost every shift in the wind. I could hear when things were good, and when they were bad. When the Gargolas invaded miles and miles away from my home, I could hear it, all of it. It was...”

He dropped his chin to his chest, squeezing his eyes shut.

“I’m sorry.”

“All I did was run.”

Sharpe was likely one of the very few of his species left. Myra sometimes forgot how much was lost in the war. Before she could start punching in the coordinates to jump them into hyper-speed, Sharpe touched her wrist.

“Why did the Gargolas turn mean?”

She paused, considering the question.

“I think at some point they started killing, and then that’s all they grew to know and couldn’t stop themselves.”

“Even from killing folks that didn’t hurt them.”

“Yes, sometimes it stops mattering who it is.”

“Yikes.”

The frigate burst ahead and the galaxy raced by in a whiz of passing lights. Myra noted how each light seemed to fade before disappearing. Sharpe didn’t take his eyes off of her, making her feel naked. When the ship slowed and the Pleasure Bot Express appeared before them, he reached over and rested his frail hand on hers.

“It’s not all about killing.” The little man forced a smile. “You’re not just a killer.”

She put her hands to her face, covering the sudden rush of tears. How had he zeroed in on her worries so much?

“How do you know?”

“I hear more than words, I do. I hear whispers from your mind, your heart. There is more than killing there.”

She shivered as they approached the station, suspecting she’d never make another Pleasure Bot delivery again.

“What do you hear?”

“Hope,” he smiled. “Do you not hear it? Just listen.”  

She thrust her head back, trying to sift through all the battles and the blood to anything else, any sort of hope.

“You have to listen to the person inside you, Myra. Listen.”

She racked her mind.

“Hush, let all the rest go quiet.” Sharpe put a finger to his mouth.

Tears streamed freely down her face.

“When I was little girl, I remember staring up at a star-filled night. I promised myself then that I’d visit all the stars and help someone on each one of them. I became a warrior to see the universe and to help fight the Gargolas.”

“Hmm, and now that the war is over, you think your job is done?”

“Yes.”

“You are wrong. You need to help me find my courage, and I need to help you find yourself. We can do both by helping others in real trouble. Don’t you think that’s brave? That sounds like hope.”

Her gaze shifted toward the station.

A moment later, Myra ripped her earpiece out, took the controls of the frigate, and turned it away from the Pleasure Bot Express, directing them into open space. Millions of stars shined before them.