The Fluger

by Doris Piserchia

Genres: Science Fiction; Sci-fi Action & Adventure; Space Opera

Synopsis

The Fluger was five meters long, had four thick legs, a body of impenetrable molecular density and numerous teeth capable of chewing diamonds into powder. It was four hundred massive kilos of violence, savagery and hatred. When the Fluger arrived as unlisted cargo in the enclosed city of Olympus, it launched itself on a murderous rampage which couldn't be halted. It presented that terrified utopian community with the problem of how to stop an irresistible force. The only answer seemed to be a hired alien assassin - an outer-space humanoid about whom the citizens of Olympus knew next to nothing except that he was a professional killer who would not quit until his job was done. But when the irresistible force met the immovable object they turned that fragile city in the sky into a raging battlefield, and their 'savior' looked to become as much of a menace as his monster counterpart.

Release date: June 24, 2013

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 200

Sample

The shadow in the archway behind Addard shifted and the alien came in escorted by number four adviser. Addard was enraged. No tentacles, thank heaven, not that he had expected the assassin to have any, nor did Kam Shar own bug eyes, warty skin or anything like them, and this was why Addard was angry, or at least he supposed this was the cause of his emotion.

His outstretched hand was damp in the palm so it was just as well that the Eldoron didn’t accept it but merely stood unmoving and impassive. Allergic to human sweat? Contemptuous, sneering, disgusted, afraid? The man (thing) might have been any of those, though he didn’t appear to be other than patient, observant, intelligent and alert. Funny how those calm gray eyes seemed to pierce one’s skull. No, the Eldoron wasn’t telepathic, or so Addard had been told. Again he felt outraged and now he knew why. He worked with a bunch of fools.

Kam Shar looked exactly like a human except for his eyes, which were too intensely gray and sparkling. Then perhaps his nose was a pinch too long and thin, while his lips were too well modeled, too pink. Were the teeth sharp, blunt, broad, tiny? The man from Eldoron stood more than two meters in height, weighed about ninety kilos; a large man (creature), really, and in fact he seemed to dwarf the business office which was a part of Addard’s apartment. Addard seethed, not because he was jealous or afraid but because of the fools.

“You’ll report to me regularly,” he said. The questions in his mind stumbled over one another. What did aliens think of people? Did they think of them as humans? As Earthlings? What did they call Earth’s dominant life form? “What am I to you?” he blurted, dismayed at himself. The fools whose task it was to advise him must be spreading their infection.

Kam Shar’s voice was soft and low. His diction was perfect, his choice of words accurate. “Everyone calls his homeworld Earth or the equivalent of the word. On my planet we give either numbers or letters to the worlds with which we have contact. Yours is the equivalent of Kappa.”

“Which makes me a Kappan?”

“I can call you an Earthling if you prefer.”

“Or anything else you take a notion to,” Addard said, immediately regretting his words and their accompanying bitterness. “No, it doesn’t matter. Please think of me as a Kappan. Hopefully your business here will soon be discharged.”

“Yes.”

“We haven’t informed our citizens of your presence. It isn’t something we want to do.”

Kam Shar smiled. His teeth were simply teeth, like any man’s. But then he wasn’t a man. “I will be discreet and remain as unobserved as possible.”

“You’ll catch the Fluger?”

“And kill him.”

“How long will it take?”

“Not long,” said Kam Shar. “I’ll report to you at regular intervals.” He turned and walked out.

Number four adviser, who had been sitting on a lounge, got up, crossed to the archway and looked after him.

“Who showed him how things operate?” asked Addard. “Where’s he going?”

The adviser came back. “I don’t know. He seems to work very independently. Since he’s a galactic detective—I suppose he’s actually a hit man—maybe there are no more surprises for him. How many ways are there to build cities and how many different modes of transportation and sources of information are there? I imagine he’s seen them all.”

“How does he strike you?”

“Impenetrable. I couldn’t begin to guess what goes on in his mind.”

“Alien?”

“Not especially.”

He didn’t like her for that, wanted her to declare the Eldoron ridiculous, intolerable and nerve-racking as he seemed to Addard.

She went away and he went back to his film viewer. Before Kam Shar’s appearance he had been monitoring the condition of the city budget. At a touch of his finger on the machine’s control knob, page after page of facts, figures, cautions and predictions passed before his eyes. Something would have to be done about transportation. More cabs had to be requisitioned, but first the money must come from somewhere. That had been a big chunk of glitter the vice-mayor chopped off the cube for Mr. Alien from Eldoron. A very sizeable chunk.

After he gave the intercom Randecker’s name and address, it showed him in a blurry haze until the other man accepted the hail, after which the scene on the screen showed Randecker in bed.

“I worked late last night.”

“Run a check on Eldoron for me,” said Addard.

“What is it?”

“A planet in the Cyclone Cluster. Fourth system from the sun, third in.”

“What else do you know about it?”

Addard didn’t know anything else about Kam Shar’s world and said so. The admission angered him. When Varone was alive he had habitually made private deals and then passed the buck on to Addard. This buck was turning up blanker than any of the others. Now Varone was dead of a heart attack and the city played host to his purchase.

The Fluger hated the city and the noise, which meant he relished what he was doing; hatred was his inspiration and his motive for living. Buried in his brain was a pebble-sized gland that released vitriol into his bloodstream as regularly as his belly demanded sustenance, a condition or a happenstance that came about when his species was developing on the home-world. Hateful place, Fluga. Hateful people. The Fluger loved it. In order to survive, he and his kind needed to be competitive, untrusting and untrustworthy.

Corradado was big—four hundred kilos, five meters long, four thick legs, lithe yellow body, blunt head, numerous teeth, eyes tawny and full of guile. He was adventuresome and curious and had stowed away on a drone, one of the mechanically driven ships that visited his world to delve for ore and precious stones. It had brought him to this place, which was inhabited by unintelligent life forms that shrieked and tried to run away from him. With zest he had been showing them what his species was like. The primary nature of his id was to seek out and challenge with all the cunning and fury of which he was capable. He was omnivorous.

Now he prowled in a cab tunnel and snarled at the lights, the glittering tile, the shiny tracks, the distant sounds and the recollection of scurrying life forms. The latter were objects of which he approved, particularly when they gave little bellows of terror before using their puny legs to try to escape from him.

Whistles in the distance made him growl low in his massive throat, made him feel inclined to ascend a tiled wall and creep along the ceiling. He found that creeping was boring since there was nothing to the activity besides crossing one clean tile brick after another. Flexing his claws and then retracting them so that all his suckers were distended, he began racing upside down along the ceiling of the tunnel at top speed in a straight line toward a little machine that tooted and zipped along unconcerned. It carried a passenger.

The front of the cab was transparent, so the man had a clear view of the tunnel ahead. At first it appeared to him that a section of the ceiling had broken and was hanging down, and he grabbed a communicator from the wall and yelled something into it. Then he grasped the brake cord and yanked hard. It wouldn’t have mattered if the cab had smashed full force into Corradado, who was built like a tank and didn’t know what caution was. He would simply have plowed through the front pane and ripped the passenger to pieces, which is what he did no sooner than the machine had skidded to a halt. After he finished mauling the corpse he demolished the vehicle, the tracks beneath it and a section of the side wall. Then he loped away to find a place where he could enjoy a moment or two of solitude.

On his journey he met with an obstacle, a wall and a sealed archway, which he splintered. The farther he went in that direction the more walls and closed archways he encountered. Ruining them all, angered because he was naturally antagonistic at all times, he approached a last and final partition more powerfully constructed than the rest, thick and resistant, tough where there was no obvious reason for it, stubborn and unyielding enough to further enrage him. He used his best series of claw swipes and head butts to ram his way through.

It was his turn to shriek as he crashed out of the north side of the city into empty air. Bellowing with rage, he contorted his body and made wild grappling motions with his legs. His flailing left rear appendage touched something, and with lightning speed he dug in with a single claw of his foot. The nail was yanked to its entire length but it held, so that his long body stopped plummeting and began swinging back and forth. His foot was paining him so he stilled himself, made his body dangle inertly while at the same time he assessed the situation. It seemed he was clinging to a flagpole. Luckily for him it was unreasonably thick with a diameter of at least two meters and it jutted way out from the building, if that was what the structure could be called.

The Fluger would never admit that he was capable of flawed logic or idiocy, hence he stopped thinking about the fact that he had known the shape of the city, had been aware that somewhere in the cab tunnel he was bound to run into an exterior partition. Olympus was built a kilometer high in some places. From a distance it looked like a series of 0’s stuck up in the sky upon two pillars, somewhat like a surrealistic rainbow. There were ten 0’s in all, well-balanced with modern and clean apartments within their walls, besides all the other things of which a city normally boasted, even speedy transportation at all times for the squealing little inhabitants. Aside from his other criticisms of the place, Corradado thought the same color of pale green everywhere had been an uninspired choice on someone’s part. He preferred deep, rich colors such as purple, vermilion and black.

Dangling, thinking rapidly, he easily raised up to grasp the pole with both paws. After working his way to the apartment veranda, he kicked the pole into the clouds below. His gorge rose as vertigo overcame him. For a few minutes he staggered about the veranda as he sought to wipe his mind clean of thoughts of great height, falling, smashing against hard ground. He didn’t know whether or not the fall would kill him, but it was another side of Olympus and its people that he hated. They weren’t afraid of high places.

The man inside the apartment was fast on his feet, courageous and not given to standing about pondering imminent disaster. When the big Fluger poked its head into his business office he turned and ran through the nearest archway, not to the cab depot below his bedroom but straight into the next apartment. At that, he wasn’t so courageous, having momentarily diverted the predator by presenting another prey in the form of an astonished woman in the act of bathing, but perhaps he suffered from mind stall and didn’t know what he was doing.

He ought to have tried the cab depot and the lower tunnels, which were filled with cubbyholes, maintenance rooms and dark shafts. Both he and the wet woman broke the same glass pane as they flew through it, propelled by the same rapier-like claw attached to Corradado and, since Olympus was so modem that nearly everything in the city was soundproof, their cries went unheard as they pitched headlong and due south for approximately one kilometer.

A slum boy named Hulian roasted a ten-kilo rat over hot coals and contemplated the fortune which was bound to come to him sometime in the near future. His ship would come in, the pot at the end of the rainbow would be his, the sunken treasure would float ashore at his feet. Why was he so optimistic? Because he was thirteen and in good health due to the fat rats, fruit and vegetables which were his daily fare.

Hulian was black but that wasn’t why he was poor. Addard was also black, as were many citizens of Olympus; their citizenship was the reason why they were well-to-do if not downright wealthy. One day Hulian would receive his right to live in the sky-metropolis. He would move into one of the luxurious apartments, find work suitable to his varied talents and then there would be no more rats, no more filth or filthy companions, no street language and dreariness.

Now he cooked his dinner beside one of the pillars holding up the city and minded his own business. Half a kilometer to his right was an entrance into Olympus, a small complex staffed by employees who dealt with slum visitors during daylight hours, gave them briefings on the procedures for citizenship application, dispensed brochures that depicted life in the big town. Most visitors were only interested in how soon they could be admitted into one of the high 0’s, having already read dozens of brochures and viewed hundreds of photographs of the parks, apartments, utility complexes, industrial units, bureaucratic blocks, cathedrals, synagogues, temples, schools, etc. Most had come from other cities, or rather their slums. When one wasn’t born into civilization it was a long and tedious process to get there by annexation. Life in a city greatly depended upon checks and balances, which meant that a thousand extra bodies could conceivably throw the status quo out of kilter, not to mention the fact that bureaucrats were afflicted with leaden feet.

Hulian was willing to go by the book as long as he believed such a course would prove beneficial to him, but when he decided otherwise he would do something else. Olympus was his city because he had been born in her shadow. He didn’t want to live in any other, though he had traveled across country and seen Superior, Yosemite, Carlsbad, even Everglade way down in the swamp. After he became an Olympian he could ride in speedy underground cabs and visit Troy, Rome, Saxony and Orio. It was incredible to think that a trip abroad in one of those special cabs required no more than twenty or twenty-five minutes.

He cooked his dinner, dreamed of future glory and was unaware of the havoc being played inside the entry complex to the city he loved. Knowing nothing of Flugers, Eldorons or interstellar travel, he nodded and dreamed, allowed his head to lean against the beloved steel so close to him and for a little while he slept. As he did so the Fluger pierced the visitor’s complex, dispensed with the personnel, burst into the open and raced straight toward him.

He was scarcely awake when the big alien passed him, would never know why the swipe of the claw only took out his left eye as he turned to see what raced across the dusty ground with such speed. It could have been his head that rolled in the dirt, or Corradado might have come to a full stop and gutted him like a deer vanquished by a wolf. Probably the Fluger was sated with flesh and blood, or likely he was tired of being cooped up and wanted to taste some open country. The Earth boy wasn’t significant but of course no aborigine could go untouched by the great Corradado, and so the Fluger relieved Hulian of one little eye and continued racing across the ground of what had once been called the United States, state of New York, city of Manhattan.

Using the sleeve of his shirt for a bandage around his head, Hulian staggered home to get help. When he arrived there he found the place a shambles and guessed that whatever the thing was that had wounded him had also done this. The old man who had shared his shack was dead, ripped from chin to groin and tossed through the tin ceiling like fodder. Everyone in the shantytown was dead. Corradado had missed no one, had left not a single abode standing. In the time it had taken Hulian to stumble there from the stoop of Olympus the big creature made a graveyard of his home.

All night he lay beside the old man’s stiffening corpse and sopped his leaking eye socket. His only fear was that he would bleed to death or perish from infection. One thing he had to accomplish before going down into the final hole was to slit the throat of the monster that had hurt him and killed the only p. . .