The Gunzerker Chronicles Vol. 01 Ch. 02

"Oh, you're gonna pay for that," Brüt growled.

He dropped Rack at his feet and reached for Slut-Shamer. Except she wasn't there. He'd left her out with the horse. Figured. After all that mess with the Bimbopires, now he was going into a railgun fight against an unkillable, ultra-violent enemy with the firearm equivalent of a paring knife. It was like his pappy always said, 'Never bring a knife to a nuclear arms race.' He dropped to one knee, steadied Ruin with his other hand and fired at the bug's hind legs, hoping to hobble him. He emptied the magazine, but not even one shot landed.

It twisted and lunged toward the dancers' dressing rooms, chittering some nonsense in its nonsense tongue. If you could even call it a tongue. As far as Brüt knew, bugs didn't have tongues. Or ears, for that matter. He recalled being told as a boy that pulling the antennae off ants was worse than burning them because they lost their way, unable to see, smell, or hear without the hyper-sensitive antennae to guide them. There was something there, some crucial-but-hidden bit of data in that memory that might come in handy later, but Brüt didn't have time for thinking. He had the bastard on the run and that was a start. He dropped Ruin beside him on the floor of the club and ran toward the fleeing Mantis, drawing Pain and Punishment from their holsters as he went. If anything in his arsenal could punch through that thick exoarmor, it would be his shotguns. Or the chainsaws attached to them. Or maybe six of one, half-dozen of the other.

Daisy's pitiful mewling trailed the Mantis as he scurried behind the curtain into the dressing rooms. "Please," she cried, "please don't hurt me?" Brüt hated it when women cried. Even more so when gorgeous women cried. Unless there was a sexy reason for the crying, like being tied up and whipped as part of a BDSM orgy full of super hot babes. But this was no orgy. This was something else. And Brüt wouldn't stand for it.

Screams of surprise and distress followed by a loud crash signaled the bug's arrival in the dancers' private dressing area. Brüt yanked the ripcords on Pain, then Punishment, and, shotgun-chainsaws blazing, vaulted up onto the stage and sprinted behind the curtain.

Brüt crashed through an overturned dressing table, pieces of shattered mirror crunching beneath his boots. The Mantis had crossed to the far corner of the room, his exit blocked by a heavy steel portcullis, a security measure no doubt meant to keep criminals out rather than trap them in. He still held Daisy in his suffocating grip. The dancer's face was turning ashy, her pleading cries reduced to a thin whimper.

Brüt ID'd three other lifeforms in the room apart from Daisy, the Mantis, and himself. An arachnoid dancer crouched in the far upper righthand corner of the room on a web with strands of spidersilk as thick as a baby's cock, a human woman huddled underneath a dressing table that looked like it had suffered an explosion of lace g-strings and garter belts, and the catgirl from earlier -- Pussy something-or-other, Brüt wanted to say.

The arachnoid remained perfectly still, staring at the Mantis, greed and hunger evident in her black, soulless eyes. She wore nothing on top to cover her humanoid breasts, but a short, gauzy skirt and six matching garters decorated her spindly legs and humongous abdomen.

The human woman did nothing but repeat 'Lord Jesus' over and over again, peppering in the occasional, 'It's gonna eat me.' Brüt didn't have the heart to tell her that she was more likely to be eaten by her web-dwelling colleague than the Mantis. He'd already chosen his mate, and it wasn't her.

The catgirl, however, was a different story. The look in her golden eyes wasn't so different from her arachnoid sister except there was anger and purpose behind the catgirl's intense, unblinking stare. Gradually, with lithe movements so silky smooth they became undetectable to the human eye -- unless that human eye happened to belong to Brüt Stallyn -- the catgirl inched toward the Mantis. He could see the tightness of her shoulders and thighs, the tense twitch of her tail, the slight backward angle of her ears. She was preparing to pounce. The stupid thing was going to throw herself at a maniacal killing machine and get her head sliced the fuck off with a single swipe of the bug's scythe-like forearm.

"Get down!" Brüt shouted, aiming both his chainsaw shotguns squarely at the Mantis's bug-eyed face.

The catgirl jerked her head toward him, fangs showing, white hot fury burning behind her golden-yellow eyes. The Mantis lashed out and caught the feline dancer in the gut, sending her flying back into a clothing rack that technically held more hangers than fabric. She twisted midair, landed on her feet, and crouched, ready to spring. Cold steel glinted in both her front paws. Where she'd drawn the blades from, Brüt had no inkling, nor did he particularly care to find out. She hissed...

...and at that exact moment, the lights went out.

Brüt pulled the triggers of both shotguns. The air sizzled with the heat of buckshot and burning ozone. The muzzle flash lit the room for a fraction of a second. The Mantis took a full load of lead to the face and screamed, a terrible, high-pitched, banshee scream. One of his eyes turned a milky, off-white color and his antennae twitched frantically, his head jerking about as he attempted to find his bearings. Brüt fired again, aiming a little higher for fear of hitting Daisy. The flash revealed the catgirl, now behind the Mantis, blades in hand, fiery eyes glinting in the near-dark. The human woman began to sob. Mantis shrieked. There was a terrible crash and a crunch and Brüt envisioned the catgirl's body falling to the floor, cut clean in twain by the Mantis's powerful forearms. Another crash, this time rocking the whole room, and a third. A porthole opened in the ceiling and sunlight spilled in, muted and red. The Mantis tore the hole wider and pulled himself up and through.

Daisy lay limp and prone at the feet of the catgirl who started to climb up after the bug, then looked back at the unconscious cowgirl. She dropped to the floor, landing gracefully on all fours, and checked Daisy for a pulse.

Brüt didn't wait to hear the prognosis. He kicked his heels to engage his antigrav boots and launched himself out through the improvised skylight.

The bug landed in the street and Brüt shouted after it as he dropped down from the roof onto the front porch of Olympus Mounds. "Not another step or I'll blow your goddamn head off."

The Mantis had its back to him. Truth was, it was far enough away that even if Brüt let loose with both barrels of both guns, they wouldn't likely fell the beast. That exoskeleton was tough and thick. But even as he considered what measures he might take if the bug called his bluff, he noticed the gathering pool of whitish-green ichor puddling at the Mantis's feet. The green bastard was injured. Maybe more than just his eye. And maybe, just maybe, it was hurt enough to slow it down, to give Brüt an opening to bring Slut-Shamer into the fight.

And just as he thought that might be the case, the Mantis whipped around, drew all four of its revolvers, and unleashed a hailstorm of screaming-hot lead. One of the support posts for the porch disintegrated into toothpicks and the awning overhead yawned in warning before it came crashing down on Brüt's head. As he fought his way free of the debris, carving a path for himself with his whirring chainsaw bayonets, the Mantis leapt vertically nearly thirty feet to land on the roof of the nearby General Store. His middle legs reloaded his revolvers with practiced efficiency and by the time Brüt had cut himself free, he was once again looking down the deep-bore barrel of the Preying Mantis's magnetitech revolvers.

Brüt activated his antigrav combat boots and kicked a sputtering neon beer sign out of his way. He raised Pain and Punishment and twisted his perfect teeth in a perfect sneer. "Time to bring the pain," he growled.

But before he could bring any pain at all, that stupid pussycat dropped into the street between him and his target. She crouched there in the dusty road, ears straight back, hackles up, tail puffed out, fangs bared. "Get out of my way," she hissed at Brüt, "this one's mine."

"The hell he is," Brüt growled, "that bug'll rip you limb-from-limb, kitten. Stay out of my way and let a man handle this."

Ultra-caliber, high-velocity bullets ripped through the air as the Mantis emptied its revolvers, turned, and dropped over the side of the General Store building.

"You bloody bastard!" the catgirl hissed. "He's getting away!" She sprinted forward, up the side of the General like it wasn't even there. She leapt gracefully from one building to the next, heading southeast. Brüt took one step to follow, then thought better of it. He didn't need to chase down the bug, he needed to head it off. And thanks to that dumbfuck pussycat he knew exactly where it was headed. He jumped on Bitchkicker, cut the tie rope with Pain's chainsaw bayonet, and spurred his mount between the General and the Burlington Menswear Outlet. They took a left, then another left, raced through the narrow gap between two ramshackle shanties, and came out a hop skip and a jump away from the entrance gate to Dust's tired old spaceport. As if on cue, the Mantis burst into the street, still looking over his shoulder as he careened straight at Brüt.

Like a flash of lightning, the catgirl appeared behind the fleeing Mantis. Dressed in a form-fitted bodysuit and little else, she nonetheless produced a pair of wicked-looking double-bladed glaives that she twirled hypnotically before setting herself to pounce.

Brüt jumped off Bitchkicker, cocked his chainsaw shotguns, and pointed them straight at the bug's big, stupid face. The Mantis heard the snicker-snack of the shells loading into the chambers and snapped its head around. Its guns were in its scythelike hands, its gigantic compound eyes reflected Brüt's utter badassness like a dark mirror. He saw fear in those eyes. Saw death. He had the bastard dead to rights.

The clocktower chimed high noon. The sun burned overhead, hot and red and foreboding. The Mantis twitched its head back and forth. If a bug could sweat, that bastard surely would be. It had all four guns drawn, two trained on Brüt, the other two on Pussy. It chittered wildly. Brüt neither understood nor cared. He'd saved the girl and now he'd kill the monster. It was what he did, after all.

The catgirl said in a loud, clear voice, "You're coming with me, Cannibal Bill. Lay down your weapons and come quietly."

The Mantis chittered back at her, its clawlike fingers tightening on the triggers.

The catgirl snickered. "Better alive than dead."

The bug seemed to disagree, chittering harshly and jabbing his gun in the catgirl's direction.

"What the hell is going on here?" Brüt demanded, taking a purposeful step forward.

The catgirl hissed at him, "Back off, bub. Nobody poaches my bounty."

The clocktower chimed for the twelfth and final time. As the sound of the ringing brass bell reverberated through the backwater Martian town, Cannibal Bill opened fire.

On instinct, Brüt dove to the left. A series of searing slugs sizzled straight past his right ear. An inch to the left and he would have been sucking dust while his brainmatter liquefied and ran out his nostrils and the gaping hole in the right side of his skull.

He twisted, aiming from the hip, and unloaded on the killer Mantis.

The catgirl darted to one side, revolver rounds slugging harmlessly into the road, kicking up rust-colored dust. She performed an impossibly acrobatic backflip with a half-twist sommersault, another four rounds tracing her progress, striking behind and beneath her, but some of Brüt's stray buckshot caught her in the thigh and she fumbled the landing, dropping to one knee, clutching at her wounded thigh. Cannibal Bill twisted, his buggy eyes bugging, and jammed all four of his custom.44 Magnum magnet-powered railgun revolvers right in the stupid, arrogant pussy's face.

Brüt wanted to play the hero, rescue the damsel, get the glory and the gold and the satisfaction of a goretastic kill, but the Mantis's exoskeleton was thick and his guns shot rounds at near the speed of light. The stupid bitch had gone and gotten herself killed. Brüt had warned her, too. Preying Mantises don't make good pets for sweet little sex kittens.

Dumber still, she wasn't even looking at the towering insectoid with four über-powered guns pointed at her cutesy face. She was glaring past him at Brüt, an expression of feral fury wrinkling her pink nose and baring her yellow fangs.

Brüt had to do something. He threw his shotguns aside and tore Slut-Shamer from Bitchkicker's saddle ties. He swung the massive six-barreled, hadron collider-powered autocannon around and screamed over the cacophonous sound of the über-gun's power cylinder roaring to life. "Duck and cover, motherfucker!"

The catgirl's eyes widened in horror as Brüt leveled his autocannon at the Cannibal Bill's exposed back and pulled the hyper-sensitive, bio-lock trigger.

She moved like a flash of lightning, her furry body a blur, her glaives twin flashes of sunlight. She dove into a forward roll that culminated in a vertical leap directly beneath the towering Mantis. She springboarded off the bug's chitinous chest and into a triple axle spin-flip. She nailed the landing a good four feet to the left of the bug's position a mere fraction of a fraction of a second before Slut-Shamer's power core reached critical mass and eviscerated the Mantis formerly known as Cannibal Bill. The buildings that stood in the line of fire were torn to shreds by somewhere between five and eight quadrillion uranium-core rounds. Every building in his line of fire evaporated into smoking ruins. In the far distance, on the horizon of the bleak Martian landscape, a small mountain range collapsed into a heap of dust and rubble.

There was nothing left of the Mantis except a single back foot, twitching and wriggling in the dust. So thorough was the obliteration, the über-awesome and totally bitchin overkill, that not even a blood smear remained.

The catgirl stood about ten yards away, glaring ferociously at him with her slitted yellow eyes. In one hand, she held both of her glaives, edges darkened by the greenish-white slime that passed for blood in insectoids. In the other, she held Cannibal Bill's cleanly severed head by its antennae. The great, bulbous eyes rolled wildly and the mandibles twitched erratically.

"What the bloody hell?" she shouted. "You could have killed me!"

Brüt clenched his jaw and growled back, "Killed you? I saved your furry ass!"

"Saved me?" She laughed, it had the element of a purr to it. "I saved myself, asshole. You only got in the way!"

"Little kitty, you were going to get yourself shot. To death."

She shook with rage. "I had everything under control until YOU interfered. Do you have any idea how long I've been tracking this bug-eyed bastard?" She held the severed head up to make sure he knew who she meant.

"He was gonna shoot you. What about that don't you get? Had you dead to rights."

She rolled her eyes. "Whatever." With a flourish, her twin electroglaives disappeared behind her back. She wasn't wearing much more than a tight bodysuit. No belt, no scabbards, not even a fanny pack.

"Where do you even keep those things?" Brüt asked.

Her golden eyes narrowed sharply. "None of your business."

"So, what, you've been tracking this guy? He owes you money or something? And then you're just going to let him shoot you in the face? Sounds like you had things real under control, sweetheart."

"No. I've trailed him through three different systems. I finally had him cornered and then you showed up and nearly blew the whole mission." She bared her fangs and added in a hiss, "Sweetheart."

Brüt's eyes narrowed. It almost sounded like the pussycat was making sense. But that didn't make any sense because she was just a chick. Some vapid, brainless, undersexed dame. He saved girls like her. Girls didn't save him. The well-tuned cogs in his brain whirred and churned, working overtime to puzzle this weird little kitty out. "Oh yeah? What's so important about this stupid bugface anyway?"

"To you?" she asked, scoffing. "Nothing. To me? About 30 million galactic credits."

That got his attention. Brüt figured thirty million credits would get the attention of just about anyone. "He owed you that much? You should be more careful who you loan money to, kitten."

"Ugh. Are you actually this stupid or do you just look it?"

Brüt's shoulders tensed. His hand tightened on Slut-Shamer's biolock trigger.

She arched her back, almost daring him to do it. "There's an Imperial bounty on this bastard's head for crimes in two different systems and more than seven different planets."

He grunted. "Thirty million seems like a lot for one guy."

"Yeah, well, when he's evaded the law for nearly 17 years, murdered dozens of people, broken out of a maximum security Imperial penitentiary, and ate the head of the archduke's grandson-in-law, the bonuses tend to pile up."

Brüt whistled. "That's a lot of scratch," he said. "What would a pretty little thing like you possibly do with so many credits?" He did genuinely wonder. A woman could only own so many pairs of shoes, after all, and it appeared this catgirl liked to go barefoot anyhow. And that much money could solve an awful lot of his problems. Thirty million of them, to be specific.

She stared at him for a moment, then turned and strutted luxuriously toward the spaceport entrance.

"Hey!" Brüt said, "I'm the one who killed him."

"No," she said, not even turning to look back at him, "you disintegrated him. I killed him and now I've got his head and I'm going to claim the bounty and if you're foolish enough to get in my way again, I'll take your head too."

Brüt laughed. It was a deep, rolling, belly laugh. The thought of that skinny little kitten overpowering someone as strong, as awesome, as manly, and as über-radical as Brüt Stallyn tickled his funny bone something awful. "I'd like to see you try, sweetheart."

Her knives were at his throat before the final word fell from his lips. He never even saw her move. She scissored her glaives at his throat, closing them slowly until they nicked the skin, drawing a bead of blood that turned into a trickle. Her twisted, furious, feline face glared at him from between the curved blades of her electroglaives.

Brüt chuckled, then reached up and casually pushed one of the blades out of the way. "You got promise, little kitty, but Brüt Stallyn works alone."

Her expression morphed from murderous indignation to bewilderment. "Are you daft?"

Brüt didn't know what that meant, but it sounded like a compliment. He grinned, his perfect teeth shining perfectly white. "You know it."

The catgirl cocked her head to one side and took a step back, lowering her glaives. Brüt continued to beam at her. "I take it back," she said, her glaives disappearing behind her back with a wicked flourish, "you're even dumber than you look."

Brüt snorted. "Flattery will get you nowhere. You're good, but I can't afford to take on a sidekick right now. Brüt Stallyn isn't the sort to be tied down." He struck a hypermasculine pose, flexing his biceps and his pecs. "I'm a dark, brooding, dangerous, mysterious loner. That's why I work better alone."

"Uh huh. See you around, broodmaster." The catgirl shrugged and turned, slipping gracefully forward, scooping up the Mantis's head, and strutting up to the spaceport gate where she pressed the com button.

"It's Brüt, not brood. Brüt Stallyn. I do like the Master bit, though. Master Brüt." He paused, musing, letting the words roll around on his palate. "Has a nice ring to it."