Tevun-Krus #99 - BDO

Any Other Tuesday - A Short Story by @RJGlynn

Any Other Tuesday
By RJGlynn

[This short story was written for round 3 of the Ultimate SciFi Smackdown 2021-2022. It follows on from the events of round 1 and 2 stories (The Saviour, Red Pill, and Beyond Liberty), and had to include a cat, a big dumb object (BDO), and a cooking recipe with ingredients and instructions. Reader advisory: Don't try the recipe at home; it and the story contain traces of horror. All rights are reserved by the author.]

Vibrating darkness. Bioluminescence, an otherworldly glow, revealing fungi-smothered ship bulkheads, spilled supplies, and at least thirty corpses suspended on hooks.

The SS Adiona's main cargo hold. The remains of her crew, eight weeks dead.

Janus cast a jaundiced eye over them from within his spacesuit's helmet, then turned to secure the electronic airlock hatch he'd just 'charmed' his way through, a.k.a. hacked.

Damaged, misappropriated ship. Rotting, mutilated bodies.

Just another Tuesday in the outerworlds.

The glowing, oozing fungi, however, was novel ... interesting.

"I know we came looking for corpses." A cool voice cruised over his helmet comm, strong enough to cut through rumbling engine noise, feminine enough to knot his gut. "But I didn't expect this."

Looking past his face shield's heads-up display, Janus eyed the woman watching his back. Encased in a black, armor-reinforced spacesuit, she merged with the gloom, but his HUD's infrared showed more.

A darkly shielded gaze aligned with a raised P50 plasma pistol.

Liberty McQueen. His current client—and current reason to drink bad whiskey. Ex-Agency. A government operative gone rogue. While her upper-class origins graced her with beauty and charm, any eyelash-batting smiles she aimed his way were as calculated as any sniper shot.

And even knowing that...

Janus acknowledged his heart's unsettled beat with amusement, then dismissed it. He was an outerworld mutt turned grey-market intel and service broker, an asset for the ex-spy to use. The only thing the woman cared about was keeping her brother, Kiran, out of her ex-employer's hands. The highly shady organization had a keen interest in the attack that'd killed the man's former crew—its unusual circumstances and consequences.

'Unusual,' as in there'd been contact with multiple extra-terrestrials in uncharted space.

'Consequences,' as in Kiran should've been dead, but had returned to known space alive—and able to read minds.

Shaking his head, Janus drew his pistol. Yeah, another Tuesday in the 'Outers.' Others might balk at the idea of someone getting killed by one alien species then resurrected and given psychic abilities by another, but he made his living in the universe's grey zones, going places others didn't, wouldn't, or shouldn't. He'd seen plenty of alien and weird; lived with it. His co-pilot, a lab-rescued chihuahua with a drool problem, had an IQ close to 200.

Lifting his weapon, he turned his attention to his latest 'odd job': a hold full of bodies, the oozing meal a bioluminescent fungus was slowly consuming.

With help.

The kind that involved a butcher's knife and a junkyard rat's constitution.

Beside him, Liberty moved forward, her grace turned up to lethal. "Do I even want to know where all the arms and legs have gone?"

"Darlin', you serve up a smorgasbord of protein on the edge of civilized space, you'll get Raveners coming to the table." Janus checked his HUD: No biohazard alerts. The recent knife damage was also reassuring. If the cannibalistic scavengers still utilized the dead, the fungal growth wasn't acutely toxic.