Earthquest

By D.A. Madigan

When Webster Madison, Hired Gun is dumped at the other end of the galaxy from Earth by treacherous aliens, he must fight his way back home across the hostile stars. Hijacking a ship full of slaves, he successfully leads the human cargo in rebellion against the crew and embarks on a career as an interstellar buccaneer and liberator of the oppressed.

Meanwhile, back on Earth, Sam Curtis is using his newly found superpowers to reshape the world in his own twisted image. Should Webster somehow manage to set foot once more on his native planet, he will find himself walking into a deadly trap elaborately planned and set by his deadliest foe...

• Language: English
• Publisher: D.A. Madigan
• Release date: Feb 18, 2012
• ISBN: 9781466007505

Book preview

EARTHQUEST

D.A. Madigan

Copyright D.A. Madigan 2012

Published at Smashwords

PART I - SOMEONE ELSE IN DEEP SHIT A LONG LONG WAY AWAY

Chapter 1. The Word For World Is 'Mudhole'

K'Thallians are one of the most widespread of the Galactic Human sub-races. Found on most worlds accessible by starship, the K'Thallians originated on a roughly Earthlike world with more than double Earth's gravity and atmospheric pressure. Adaptable, durable, enormously strong, and as a general rule, not hugely intelligent, the K'Thallians have been exported as contract labor (and, in the sector's more lawless and therefore semantically honest regions, slaves) throughout the outward spiral arm of the Milky Way on more than 1200 of the well exploited 7000 World Lines. K'Thallian metabolisms require two to three times as much fuel as the Galactic Human baseline, making them easily exploitable, but also making them extremely short tempered when they've missed a few meals.

-- Touring The Milky Way For Fun And Profit, Webster Madison

I stood up, flexed my fingers to make sure my gloves were on fully, pushed my hat down more firmly, rocked slightly in my cowboy boots. Okay, I said, finally. Lights. Camera! -

The room I'd been in blinked and was replaced, immediately, by a narrow, filthy street between high, ancient looking, very shabby buildings that were unsettlingly alien in their overall shape, angles, and proportions. The street was full of ugly people and uglier non-people. No one seemed to be paying any attention to my sudden appearance, which was just as well.

Everything smelled bad.

Action, I whispered to myself, looking around warily.

Up in the greyish green sky, I could see what looked like a city of slender, silvery, impossibly fragile looking towers, apparently built on a shimmering bank of bluish clouds. Even as I focused on it, I could see a saucer like craft of indistinct size sliding down out of the upper reaches of the atmosphere and disappearing somewhere within those suspended towers. A few seconds later, a long, bright red needle rumbled upward from the same place the saucer seemed to have landed and streaked away, leaving behind a white vapor trail.

Okay. Spaceport up there. Me down here. Doubtless, there was a way to solve this apparent problem...

Which was right about when the K'Thallian scavenger gang jumped me, give or take five minutes...

They came at me from five directions when I was near the middle of a six way intersection. I'd had no chance to get off the street, even though I'd spotted them trailing me nearly a block back... the buildings lining the narrow, crowded thoroughfare were tall, ancient, stone monoliths of vaguely (to Earth perceptions) disquieting proportions, with sealed and guarded second floor entrances at the top of steep metal ladderlike stairways. The cracks between their foundations were far too narrow to qualify as alleys.

K'Thallians average around five and half feet tall, nearly that broad, and seem to be built out of rock and rubber. Two of the five closing on me from behind had lengths of flanged metal in their hands that looked as if they'd been stolen from a construction site somewhere (the jagged ends looked as if they'd been chewed down to size); the other three were bare fisted. Since their bare fists were the size of Daisy hams and would most likely hit like bowling balls, this wasn't much comfort.

What they wanted me to do was pick a street and head up it, away from the obvious attack. If I hadn't already spotted the other gang members waiting more or less patiently several meters along each of the other streets, I might well have done that. As I'd seen them, however, instead I fell backwards, rolled on my shoulders between two of them as they charged, and came to my feet as they went surging past me.

From there I could have done many things -- jumped on the two who were armed and banged their heads together, Three Stooges style, then turned to deal with the remaining three in the best Bruce Lee tradition. Pull Lady Logan and shoot them all in the back with vapor charges. Had I really wanted to show off, I could have drawn a dozen throwing stars and mowed them all down with my incredible deadly ninja skills.

Or, my favorite tactic when vastly outnumbered by an enemy of unknown fighting prowess... having tricked them into a position of momentary strategic disadvantage, I could run the fuck away.

Which I did, after first pulling some flash powder bombs from the limbo in my magic Gloves of Holding and scattering them in their direction. The ffsssts!, WHOOF!s, flares of actinic light, and bright white, acrid billows of smoke did a wonderful job of not only making the K'Thallians lose sight of me for a crucial few seconds, but of riveting the attention of every human and nonhuman being on that section of street while I bent nearly double and scuttled crablike (or eeled, if you prefer) back into the stinking, reeking, motley Galactic mob.

By the time I let myself mostly straighten up again, my interdimensionally trademarked Hired Gun outfit of careworn denim jacket, blue jeans, and cowboy boots had morphed into a robe pretty much identical to the one worn by Alec Guiness in STAR WARS. My magical belt that doubled my already impressive strength was wrapped around my bare waist under the robe, my cowboy hat had gone back to limbo, and my yellow leather gloves were tucked into either sleeve. With hood up, I won't say I looked just like anyone else in the crowd, but I certainly looked a whole lot less like the only Earth human on the planet... and hopefully, a great deal less like a target for wandering alien thugs.

Oh, I'm sorry. You wanted a big fight scene with flying kicks and savage punches and maybe a couple of explosions? Wait for the movie to come out. While there is no bigger Jet Li fan than your humble correspondent, I'm here to tell you that in real life, those spiffy looking high kicks will get your leg ripped off at the hip (especially when you are attempting to use them against half a dozen natives of a high gravity planet). Furthermore, violence is not fun, reality is not a Mortal Kombat game, and anyone with any brains knows that the best way to defeat an opponent is to outlive them, and the best way to outlive them is to avoid being dead for longer than they manage that particular feat.

Basic wisdom, but entirely inconsistent with getting into an actual fist fight with five -- or twenty -- extremely strong and tough opponents when you can just leave the scene instead.

Drifting onward:

I'd already noticed that there was a lovely looking city of gleaming silvery towers hanging in the sky over the... er... less lovely looking... groundside slum (I assumed) I happened to be walking through... and, more importantly, that spacecraft appeared to land at and take off regularly from that city in the sky, as well. Therefore, I had to get up there.

I was wondering whether it would be easier to build a hot air balloon or hijack something when I realized I was being trailed by the K'Thallians, and, well, I dealt with that, and now, a few blocks further on, I was back to my initial train of speculation.

I didn't need to worry about food; I had magical steam trays stowed in my gloves from my very first interdimensional adventure for the Tarlians. A safe place to sleep, however, was an entirely different matter... but not one I needed to worry about in the immediate future, anyway, since I can stay up without sleep for around 120 hours if I really need to. (I don't like it, and you don't want to say anything mean about Grace Kelly's performance in REAR WINDOW or old SPEED RACER cartoons in my earshot from about the 100th hour onward, but still, I can do it.)

Which brought us right back to the problem of needing to be Up There, when I was Down Here.

Keeping a careful eye on the sky city as I shuffled along with the apparently constant and perpetual crowds through the eternally narrow, smelly, squalid, teeming streets, I noted (with my three times best possible Earth human vision) several small black dots rising up from below and dropping back down from above... so, apparently, there was traffic between here and there. I just needed to figure out where 'here' was, and then hitch a ride.

Of course, brain surgery is easy, too: you just get something sharp, and someone who will hold still long enough...

In the past... whatever... I'm going to say 'month'... since wrapping up the Death Football... adventure, caper, I don't know what to call it, although 'primal adulthood trauma' probably comes closest... I'd spent most of my time haggling over various points in my contract with the Tarlians (such as making sure my ex-wife didn't get put into my new, ongoing adventure series as a co-star, among other things). Other points, however, were making sure that when they kicked off their new, certain to be a hit, interdimensional adventure serial EARTHQUEST: THE JOURNEY HOME (A Webster Madison, Hired Gun Adventure), I was placed not only within my own native timeline/dimension, but somewhere within, oh, say, a few hundred light years of Earth.

I got no say, of course, over specifically where they dropped me off, but I did manage to insist it be a planet with a spaceport (they wouldn't have dumped me on a backwater anyway; they wanted an interstellar romp, not gritty survival in some jungle or desert) and I also narrowed it down to a specific section of the outer spiral arm of the Milky Way where Earth's system is. Then, in what spare time I had, I studied everything they had on file about the places, and more specifically, the peoples, who lived in that galactic sector.

Since the Tarlians, like their competitors for psychic energy, the Verrane, regard every sentient creature in the universe as being at the very least a potential customer, their databases are extensive. Over the course of several weeks, I memorized vast reams of stuff on hundreds of Galactic Human sub races and dozens of sentient nonhuman races, the cultural traditions and taboos of hundreds of worlds and unEarthly societies, the varying tech levels to be found spread through that particular area, and the different political and governance systems I'd have to be wary of, as I tried to beg, borrow or steal a ride or rides home.

The recorded data the Tarlians let me study is full sensory; not only did I know what all these races looked and sounded like, I also knew what they smelled like, felt like (mostly when you punched them, which is what I was primarily concerned with) and in some cases, tasted like. Three times greater than best possible human (Earth human) in all normal human talents and capacities allows me to study fast, learn quickly, and remember everything

Lost in thought, I'd been paying little conscious attention to my surroundings as I jostled, bumped, thumped, and squirmed my way along those nasty little avenues. Still, apparently my subconscious had been soaking up the ambience. It wasn't until a small, green tinted moon appeared in the narrow slice of sky I could see at any given time from the bottom of the deep canyon created by the monoliths on either side of every street, though, that enough clicked together in my mind for me to realize where I was.

The planet’s official designation was Betel VI, but it was known as a variety of things to its various populaces depending on their language, most of which translate roughly as Mudhole. (Some of them are much more profane, and the Lydians, for reasons known only to them... and perhaps not even to them... call it Ph'neezz-kchow, which certainly deserves a 'god bless you' from any Earth human who hears it, but which actually translates fairly exactly into English as Full Spectrum of Rationality. Which would tell me immediately, even if I hadn't already learned it from study, that the Lydians ingest a lot of hallucinogens.)

Mudhole rejoices in a roughly two tiered society... the upper caste, natives and tourists, who live in the pretty floating cities and the lower caste, natives and... well... more newly arrived natives (many of whom are former tourists) who live in the groundside slums beneath each floating sky city. The residents of the floating cities are basically like Sheryl Crow -- all they wanna do is have some fun. The groundsiders do all the work, pretty much as slaves of the corporation that runs the entire tourist trap planet.

Nominally a province of the Argle-Bargle Imperium (it's not really called the Argle-Bargle Imperium, the actual name of the political entity that Mudhole is a more or less apathetic member of is a series of whistles and klicks that don't translate well, as they signify some ancient potentate's proper name, and a word that more or less means 'region where that person is boss'), Mudhole is in reality pretty much run as an exclusive resort and residence for the upper executive class of the Interstellar Sales Corporation. (Again, that's a translation, but it's a pretty accurate one. ISC makes pretty much nothing and sells damned near everything and is probably the largest, most influential, and wealthiest commercial entity in our entire section of the Milky Way Galaxy... but they measure wealth in material terms... minerals, chemicals, heat exchange based and electromagnetic energy interactions... and as such, are of no real interest to either the Tarlians or the Verrane, who deal exclusively in psychic energy.)

ISC, like most mercantile entities doing business in the Argle-Bargle Imperium, operates under an Imperial license, the terms of which are pretty much, you pay your taxes, we leave you the fuck alone. So it is that while Mudhole has an actual Imperial governor, (sskaa-Lrrn Bnnfagle, a fairly young Ichthalian currently between gender choices) Its Honorableness has little to do as long as ISC ponies up the quarterly valuta. The Imperium's local force of Imperial Killers (hey, that's how it translates) is mostly decorative, and what law exists is pretty much in the form of ISC regulations, and enforced by ISC Conservation Troopers (whom are considerably more efficient and dangerous than even non-decorative Imperial Killers).

All this I'd learned from the Tarlian databanks. They had a great deal of material on ISC, mostly because, in another hundred thousand years or so, when the sentient life in this timeline/quadrant of the Milky Way Galaxy has evolved enough psychic capacity to be able to pick up telepathic projections, the Tarlians (or the Verrane, or somebody new) will most likely end up dealing with them... or someone like them... as middlemen.

Going over all this data in my head, I realized that getting up to the spaceports in the sky, and thus, off this lousy rock, was going to be a little tricky. The economy on the surface of Mudhole is a slave economy, with no real cash or anything else of worth changing hands, ever. The downsiders work in various factories (the huge, disquieting monoliths) in exchange for food and shelter... if they're lucky. The constant Brownian movement on the streets is largely the result of shift changes, staggered to take advantage of every minute of every day and every night, because the sleep cubicles are also assigned by the shift, with every work day starting with one slave-worker being shaken awake roughly by another one who wants to get into his cubbie.

Not everyone is employed; there are always misfits, incorrigibles, and other losers who wind up on the streets, can't get or hold a factory position (or don‘t want one) and generally avoid starving to death only because they get dragged down and eaten first... or manage to join a gang that keeps itself fed by doing the dragging down and eating. Unlike other slum cultures, there is no criminal subclass because the only laws are there to protect the upsiders, who can't be reached, much less hurt. There are no pawnshops, no jewelry stores, no banks, no liquor stores, no drug dealers... nothing worth stealing at all, because the only things of worth on the surface are food and shelter and labor, and all of those things are commodities controlled by ISC.

I was finding this all very depressing.

A circular shadow twenty yards across passed over me and then skimmed on down the street. Looking up, I could see a saucer shaped craft moving at little more than a brisk walk thirty feet or so above my head. Most of its bottom was an oval mirror. I was fairly certain that from the other side, that mirror was transparent, and probably crowded with upper tier tourists, come to gawk at the lowlife down below.

Thirty feet away. Ten lousy yards. Moving at a relative snail's pace... but it might as well be light years, for all the good it could do me...

Wait. TWENTY feet, from the top of one of those narrow metal staircases leading up to a monolith's entrance... seventeen feet, from the railing around the platform at the top of those ladders. And the best jumper in the world can leap seven or eight feet up... which meant I could jump at least twenty, twenty five... even without factoring in my strength belt.

I bolted. A motley variety of Galactic Human subraces and a few sentient aliens got thrown every which way as I shot down the street, knocking anyone who got in my way head over whatever as I hauled ass, trying to not only catch up with the slumming saucer, but get a good ten or twenty yards ahead of it. My shapeless robe morphed into bike pants and a tee, my cowboy boots turning into spike soled athletic shoes, my feet slamming the muddy cobblestones of that nasty street with a sound like machine gun fire as I ran. From above it must have looked like Bugs Bunny tunneling under Elmer Fudd's lawn, except the clods of dirt getting thrown to either side were protesting factory drones.

I passed into the saucer's shadow and just as quickly back out of it. I was moving against the crowd, which was good, because by now a good two or three seconds had passed and people were actually shoving to get out of my projected path. As the now yammering and gesticulating crowd opened up ahead of me, I picked up more speed, and drew a bead on the narrow metal ladder-stairs I meant to vault to the top of and bounce off to reach the saucer.

Once I reached the saucer, I could only hope there was something to hang onto... or, if I were really lucky, some easily accessible way to get inside. Still, I was willing to bet that if some insane downsider actually jumped on top of an upsider vessel, the pilot's first panicked instinct would be to head back upstairs... and I was sure that if I could hang on at all, I could hang on long enough to pull out Vastator and cut my way inside.

I veered towards the stairway, ready to jump, grab, whirl around, jump, and grab again...

...and caught, from the corner of my eye, someone at the top of a metal staircase to my left as I was bulleting by, pointing a long black stick with a slender metal needle sticking out of the end of it at me...

There was a blinding flash of bluish white light, and something hit me like a wall of fire, and I distinctly remember being hurled up into the air, tumbling head over heels, limp as a spilled bag of laundry, and seeing the metal ladder I'd been running towards looming up in front of me fast...

I'll bet it hurt like hell when I smashed into it.

Chapter 2. Commodities Trading

The Interstellar Sales Corporation, or ISC as it is normally called, is well known to have the company motto Own nothing, sell everything. They prefer labor contracts to outright slavery, leases to deeds, verbal agreements to written (when they can find someone gullible enough), and virtual wealth to cold, hard radioactives in claw. They are living... if a corporation can be said to live... proof that ownership does not always mean control. Where they operate in lawful environments the laws always favor them, in regions without law, their Conservation Troops protect their interests with a zealous efficiency. They are far more a government to their employees than any planetary, stellar, or interstellar authority structure could hope to be to its subjects, and their uppermost hierarchy firmly believes they will prove more durable than any such ever could. They avoid violent confrontations wherever such would be unprofitable... but they are no longer young. And as an old and powerful social entity, like all old and powerful social entities, they are become arrogant, and smug, and intolerant. As such, they react badly to things they do not understand...

-- Guidebook For Interstellar Travelers, Resig twa'Kwallor & Co.

The enigma hung, naked, bruised, burned, and in some places, slowly bleeding, from heavy metal restraining devices nearly any human of any Galactic culture would have recognized as chains, in the Branch Manager's office.

The Branch Manager could just as easily have used antigrav and electrocuffs, but there was no atmosphere in that. Chains... heavy dark cold metal link chains, with big thick heavy cuffs at the end... they brought a certain visceral style and charm to the whole imprisonment/torture process.

Plus, they were considerably more painful than antigrav would be. Heh. Little bonus, there.

I really wish, the Branch Manager said, walking around the enigma slowly, vibrating painrod in his slender, faintly blue shaded hand, you would answer my questions.

The enigma only groaned, and opened his puffed, bruised eyelids to slits.

What a look, the Branch Manager murmured. Having seen the recordings, I realized you were quite strong, but... hmmmm... perhaps I simply need to get a new painrod. He chuckled, and trailed the empty fingers of his other hand along the swollen, blackened burn running down the enigma's side. Or perhaps the initial shock of the bolt-blast has numbed your perceptions, somewhat?

He let his hand slide down to toy with the enigma's genitalia for a moment. Or, perhaps you're so primitive you would respond better to a different sort of stimulus... hmmmm... The Branch Manager sighed. A pity you're so blocky and thick and... pale. He shuddered. Really rather nasty looking. Not my type at all. He walked around behind the enigma and ran his fingers over its buttocks. Still, I'll bet down in my factories there's someone who wouldn't be so fussy as me. Hmmmm... probably several someones.

The enigma groaned and writhed in his chains at that. Ahhhh, the Branch Manager said. I see. You ARE primitive... one of those who equates penetration with submission, perhaps? Hmmmm... He wandered over to a hover-counter, put down the painrod, and rummaged around a bit in the tools there. Hmmmm. Well, we'd want you to be able to fully appreciate your very first experience with satisfying a large group... yes... not be distracted by other sensations...

The Branch Manager walked back over to the enigma and began spraying his skin with something that felt cold at first, then cool and pleasant. As he passed the sprayer down the enigma's legs and then moved around to his back, the trauma already sprayed could be seen to be visibly healing... welts smoothing out, burned tissue lapsing from angry red puckers back into smooth pink flesh, bruises fading.

The enigma's dark brown eyes opened fully and focused, for the first time since he had first awakened here in a sea of agony... jolting, intense pain that came at random, irregular intervals, accompanied by incomprehensible questions, keeping him from focusing or concentrating.

But now... calm, and comfort, and concomitant clarity, were flowing through him.

He felt weak... dangerously weak... muscles strained, fatigue toxins saturating his bloodstream, tense and stressed... but he could focus again. He could concentrate...

On the hovering bench top, across the room... the outfit he'd been wearing when he'd made that abortive run for the saucer. His gloves stacked on top, still intact... thank God. If he lost them... if this piece of shit had had them cut apart... well. Things would have become much more difficult.

As it was, though...

The soothing spray had spread down his back and legs now. Blissful... he almost felt like he could sleep, even hanging from chains with his feet off the floor... No.

How long would he be able to focus for? He had no idea. No time to waste, then.

On the benchtop next to his clothes were spread various instruments... some he didn't recognize, others of which were obvious in their purpose.

Many of which were very sharp.

The Branch Manager walked back around and looked up at him brightly, eyes sparkling in a pale, faintly blue face under a thatch of fine golden fur. That's much better, he cooed. Back with us now, are you, dear? Good. Now I'm going to pop down to the factory floor for a bit and find you some lovely new frien -

He stopped talking then... gave a horrible, choking rattle deep in his throat... raised his hands to claw frantically at his neck... and then collapsed to the ground.

Behind him, the sharp knife that the bruised man in chains had been weakly trying to levitate with his relatively minor telekinetic gifts subsided to the hover-table again with a metallic clatter. The chained man stared down at the feebly writhing body on the floor in bafflement. As he watched, a last series of tremors and shudders went through the blue skinned fellow... and then he was still.

Well. THAT was nice... but what the hell...?

Hey, big fella, a high, shrill voice piped from near his left ear. Over here.

His arms were pulled up alongside his head, making it very difficult for him to see anything in his peripheral vision. Stifling a groan as he used stiff and tormented muscles, he turned his head incrementally.

A four inch high female human was hovering in the air on fluttering butterfly wings, a foot or so away from him.

Webster's eyes widened. Fuck, he croaked. Pixie, what the hell are you doing here?

The tiny little insect girl from Earth's wide smile widened further. Webster Madison, you say the sweetest things, she warbled. I'm going to hold you to that once I get you loose and let you rest a little.

* * * * * * * * * *

Slutty flirting aside, I had to get Webster loose ASAP. I'd blipped quick through the whole complex and there were Conservation goons all over the place. Mr. Blue Boss had apparently left strict Do Not Disturb directions behind when he'd gone into his private office to play with his new toy, but if he let the work on his desk pile up someone was gonna come knocking.

I've seen Webster in action and I'd stack him up against nearly anyone if he was loose and thinking clearly, even with maybe one hand tied behind him. But right now he was a mess, and if two or three of those cyborg Troopers came through the door, I wasn't gonna be able to just blip into their throats with a big metal scraper the way I had with Mr. Boss (and oh did HE have some nasty breath). Or actually I could, but I'd expect them to just crush me with their larynxes or something.

The Tarlians hadn't sent me along until after Webster had been chained up so I didn't know if there were keys or not, or where they'd be. And I don't know anything about picking locks. So I actually wasn't sure what to do next. But leave it to Webster, he only goggled at me suddenly coming back from presumed death for a second. Then he said Go get me my gloves. You're going to have to put them on my hands.

So I did that and if you think those four words cover up a very complicated process what with grabbing them and flying back over and tugging them down over Webster's fingers with him doing his best to hold them straight out so I could, you're right. But a couple of minutes later he had them on. Then he did something and some kind of tube like for airplane glue appeared in his one hand and he said Spread some of this on each of the cuffs and for God's sake don't get it on you, it's an acid paste. So I took it very gingerly and managed to spread a lot of it around on each metal cuff without getting it on myself or Webster, and the cuffs started to fume and smoke almost immediately, and a minute or so later, Webster yanked really hard downward with his arms and the metal came apart in a shower of black flakes and he fell down onto the floor.

Well, actually, he landed pretty good, not falling all over or anything. Then he picked up the burned and shredded up cloth that was lying off to the side and held it in his hands a second. It sort of shimmered and seemed to flow over him in kind of a grey shiny morph effect from the movies and then he was back in his denim jacket and blue jeans and cowboy boots.

Aw, I said, fluttering around his head. "You looked awful cute au natural, Webster."

He looked at me and gave an exasperated sigh. Someday, he said, when I'm not in deep shit, and after you explain how it is you're not dead, you and I have to have a discussion on exactly what, assuming we were both so inclined, you think a 5'11 inch male could do in bed with a four inch female who has butterfly wings.

I landed on his shoulder, rested my head on his earlobe, and whispered Does the phrase full body massage mean anything to you in that particular context, big fella? Then I giggled and took off again.

I heard him mutter behind me, Okay, now I'm going to have THAT image in my head for the next week...

We got down to business then. He asked me what I knew about the building he was in and I told him... the upper levels were full of what I guessed were clerical staff and executives, the lower levels were given over to factories that made things I didn't understand. I told him about the Conservation Troopers I'd seen and gave him a rough count on numbers. Meanwhile, he was examining the table that all those nasty instruments of torture had been laid out on.

It was like one of those tables from STAR WARS that just hovers in the air without anything holding it up. While we were talking, a little square panel at the bottom of one wall opened and a cute little shiny metal sphere the size of a volleyball floated in and started moving around the outer perimeter of the room. I could see that all around it a little dust storm seemed to be raging and realized it was doing something to suck particles of dirt out of the wall and the floor. Webster looked up from the hover-table at the cleaning 'bot and I could quite clearly see a little change come over his facial features like he'd just thought of something important.

His giant Western looking six gun (I don't know anything about guns, Webster's looks a lot like the one Liberty Valance was always trying to shoot Jimmy Stewart with) appeared in his hand in that magic way it has and Webster fired a big glob of green streamers at the floating bot which wrapped around it. It kind of squawked and hovered there. Webster walked over to it and his gun disappeared again and something that looked like a mechanical pencil appeared in his hand. He touched it to the bot's surface and it fell to the office floor with a thump.

He didn't have to tell me to keep a look out and I was grateful he didn't. Webster never treats people like they're idiots. I honestly think he simply never assumes people are stupid; they have to prove it to him. Over and over, sometimes, from what I remembered of his dealings with Sam and Amy Curtis. So while he was doing all this I was fluttering around the office keeping generally alert. I kept glancing back over at him, though.

I don't understand anything he did. From somewhere he produced a lot of tools (well, I know from where, his gloves have access to some kind of pocket dimension and he keeps it full of useful things) and within twenty minutes or so he had the silvery bot apart and a hatch I hadn't even seen in the hover-table off and components from both scattered all over it. He tinkered around and moved stuff from one place to another and did a lot of other things I couldn't begin to explain or hardly describe.

At one point, though, he looked up at me and said Hey, come here a sec. He held out one hand with his finger out, like for a bird to perch on. So I blipped onto it. He lifted me up to his face and very softly kissed the top of my head. Thank you very much for saving me, Pixie, and I'm very glad to see you alive. Sorry I didn't say that before.

He looked very solemn, so I leaned forward and planted a big muah! on his lower lip which was unfortunately a tiny peck to him. You're welcome, I told him and he totally was.

He smiled at me. Full body massage, huh? You're a very bad little girl. He flicked his finger a little. Now get back to work. So I fluttered off into the air and went back to work keeping watch, feeling very warm inside because he was glad to see me, and thought I was a very bad little girl. Ha! Little did he know the full depths of my wicked nature. But if I had anything to say about it he was going to find out. I had always been a little pissed off that blond heartbreaker had grabbed Webster first. I have to admit, when I found out she was an enemy agent (and an ugly alien in real life, too) I wasn't all that upset. Although I'm sure Webster was, and I felt bad for him. And wanted to comfort him. (Evil cackle.)

I was just getting ready to say something about how we were probably pushing our time limit (I hated