Chapter 3: Trash Collector

Alarms blared right on top of each other. If I knew what the hell they were saying, I’d probably be pissed at the overlap. As it stood, I was already pissed because that’s what one does when they are floating away from a spaceship in a broken suit. The culprit for all my current problems had just jettisoned themselves and everything that wasn’t tied down out the airlock door. It was the same airlock door where I had just been standing.

Bradley was already clear of the debris field and was making his way back towards his ship, dragging the four argon fuel tanks behind him on a long chain. He didn’t see me flailing end over end, away from him and towards the empty nothingness. Better yet, I couldn’t call for help over the radio because the damn zombies broke it before I got my perky butt ejected.

A lamp flitted past my head, and I swung my staff at it. It collided in a silent crash that split the bulb and shade into a thousand tiny fragments, but it did what I wanted. The main idea behind traveling through an empty nothingness is the only way to move forward is to push something else back. I think some really thousand year old dead guy came up with the concept, but it worked. The shards of the fragile lamp went backwards, and I got the tiniest bit of forward momentum.

It carried me forward, toward the main drifting cloud of debris. It was a mass of half broken tools, clothes, moldy food, and boxes of supplies, along with over thirty floating zombies.

Thirty zombies meant a lot more rooms I could have gone through for treasure.

Why the hell am I thinking about money right now? Nothing is worth flipping end-over-end in the void in a smelly alien spacesuit.

On that cheery thought, I made it to what looked to be a shelving bracket. Its metal glinted off the ship’s lights, and I took a swing at it with my staff. Most necromancers used wood staves. They said it helps to channel their interior powers more efficiently or some such tripe. I don’t know about my counterparts, but wood is expensive. Plus, you could only brain dead things over the head so many times before it broke and you have to make or buy a new one. That made it even more expensive.

I’ll stick with my titanium staff, thank you very much.

Off in the distance, I saw Bradley punching in the access code to his ship’s airlock, the fuel tanks bobbing weightlessly behind him on the long chain. It must be nice to have a working space suit. I say that because I was really tiring of Bradley’s one time use cheap-o space suits. Sure, if you go into an alien ship you’ll never know what kind of gross semi-sentient slime you’ll run into, and taking it back with you would be a pain. Sure, I’d hate to throw an expensive suit in the incinerator after a bad mission, but you know what? I’d at least have a suit that fit and didn’t smell like dead lizard people!

I made it into the densest part of the debris field, half-frozen bits of Revaulo zombies floating around me. A lot of necromancers used their staves as sacred implements in their rituals. Screw all that static. Necromancy could be delicate, sure. That was especially true if you were trying to bring someone back from the dead with all their faculties intact. But necromancy could also be a blunt instrument, and all I needed out of my staff was a focus for my power. When stuff got crazy or distracting, out comes the staff. If I had time to poke around in someone’s brain at my leisure, then who cared if I had a stick or not? In this case, I absolutely needed because I just didn’t have the reach to whack some of these stupid bits of spacecraft to get me moving in the right direction.

Just as I started to get the hang of it, I noticed something really unfortunate. The zombies, covered in ice crystals from the jettisoned humidity inside their ship, began to twitch. I didn’t know what it was about Revaulo physiology, but these suckers were damn near unstoppable when they went into full zombie-mode. Three more swings and I was about seventy-five percent through the debris field, but the twitching accelerated. I guessed some of the bits I was shooting off into the void were bouncing around on a few zombie heads on its way out of town. That hive intellect was kicking in again, and one was alerting the horde.

Bradley had finished loading the tanks into the airlock and finally noticed me out in the middle of the center of the debris, struggling. He unhooked the chain from the tanks and kicked his maneuver unit into full-blast heading my way. The old scavenger didn’t see the zombies moving. He was too far away, and I couldn’t warn him with my broken radio.

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I felt something grip my ankle and looked down to see the prehensile tail of the same stupid Revaulo that had broken my spacesuit in the first place. I poked my staff into the thing’s face in an attempt to convince it to let go, but it didn’t do a thing. Next I rapped the metal rod onto its tail, where it gripped my leg. It loosened. It was only a little, but it was enough. I kicked off as hard as I could and it launched me toward Bradley. I looked back at him to see he was fighting off two zombies who had jumped him and were trying to pierce his suit to get at all the juicy bits inside.

The light on my staff was red, so I pushed my will into the implement until the light went green again. It was ready just as I collided with the two Revaulos attacking Bradley. I expended the full charge on a necromantic disruption field, a little trick I learned on Belios V. Most necromancy was tied to a single target. The magic wasn’t really meant to scale up. It was an intimate power that put me in complete control. When I pushed it out into an aura, the effect wouldn’t last long, but it stopped the zombies dead in their tracks.

I hate puns.

Two seconds is all I had before they reanimated and chased after us, but Bradley was able to kick them loose. I grabbed the end of the chain with my free hand and shouted, “GO!” through my helmet. He couldn’t hear me, but it didn’t take a genius to figure out what I mean. He gunned the maneuver jets, and we flew back through the nothingness to crash into the airlock door. We both scrambled inside, hit the pressurize button, and then collapsed on the floor of Bradley’s ship.

I took my helmet off after the pressure came up and turned to face him. “You’re welcome,” I said.

“I’m welcome? You’re welcome. You’d still be stuck out there if it wasn’t for me.”

“We’d both still be stuck out there if I hadn’t killed off those zombies attacking you.”

“Killed is a bit of a strong word, stunned more like,” he retorted, but he was smiling all the same. The old bastard liked the danger.

I was smiling too, right up until I looked out the airlock window and saw a floating mass of alien zombies moving across the debris field and latching onto the outside of our hull.

“We got a problem, trash man. We aren’t out of this yet.”

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