"He is here," said Barth Vapour.
"Obeah Bum K'nobby?" said Great Muff Tarragon. "Surely he must be dead by now?"
"What makes you say that?" said Vapour. "He is only ten years older than me. That is not all that old!"
"No," said Tarragon. "But there has been no sign of him for twenty years. I always assumed that he had been caught by one of the cleansing teams and..."
"No," said Vapour. "He is here. Now. I can sense his presence."
"Do you think this will affect our plan?" asked Tarragon. "Okay, your plan."
"Do not concern yourself with him," said Vapour. "I shall deal with him myself. I must confront him." The Stiff Lord stalked out of the conference room.
Obeah Bum K'nobby, known to Lurk Splitwhisker as old Bent K'nobby, was lost. He wandered aimlessly through the bewildering maze of seemingly identical corridors which seemed to be the primary architectural feature of the Devastator Station. He thought he had done a pretty good job of memorising the route to the nearest Attractor Reactor, but he had obviously taken a wrong turn somewhere.
"I'm sure it was Left, Left, Right, Left, Second Right, Right, Left," he muttered. "It should be right over there."
He heard footsteps approaching, and ducked back into what little shadows there were in the corridor. As a Trooper rounded the far corner, Bent made a small, familiar gesture with his fingers. His mind reached out and he made contact with the Source, manipulating the contents of the Trooper's mind. The Trooper marched straight past him without reacting, as though he didn't even see him, and disappeared around the curvature of the corridor.
"Now then," mused Bent, "if I were an Attractor Reactor, where would I be hiding?"
Bent closed his eyes. Slowly he raised his arms, as though feeling the energy from the reactors. He reached out again for the intangible whisper of the Source; this time, rather than attempting to guide anything, he simply looked, felt his way around, trying to build a bigger picture. The actual structure of the station was hazy and indistinct; much of the image he built up actually came from the minds of the Imperials who walked its halls on a daily basis. Sooner or later, he would find one who... There. A technician who had performed routine maintenance on a couple of the reactors recently. He saw now where they were, and where he had gone wrong.
"Left, Right, Left, Left, Second Right, Right, Left," he said. "Silly me!"
He fixed the location of the nearest reactor into his mind, then slowly opened his eyes. Standing directly in front of him was an armoured Shock Trooper. He turned his head slightly and counted five more, all with their weapons drawn and pointed at him.
"Oh crap," he said. "I don't have time for this."
Barth Vapour, Hard Lord of the Stiff, returned to his spacious but spartan quarters.
Although it would not do to show uncertainty in front of the Great Muff, Vapour was more than a little nervous about his pending confrontation with his old Jubbly Master. Although he was confident in his abilities, in his mastery of the Hard Side of the Source, his last meeting with K'nobby had not gone well; Vapour had barely survived, and had come out of their battle horribly scarred and disfigured. He had spent the many years since then hidden away behind the forbidding mask and the black rubber stillsuit.
His fearsome visage had made it extremely difficult to pick up chicks!
Of course, his Stiff Master, the Imperator, had soon taught him that only in solitude could one's Stiff powers grow to their full potential; in that, the Stiff and the Jubbly were remarkably similar. It had been Vapour's forbidden love for his secret wife that had subverted his Jubbly training and driven him down the path to the Hard Side in the first place, and sometimes he still felt regrets for what could have been. Had he handled himself differently, perhaps he would not have become Stiff at all.
Vapour sighed, the sound lost beneath the clicking and hissing of his mask's respirator. His thoughts were unfocussed. In this state he would be no match for his former master. He needed to spend some time refocussing his emotions, preparing himself for what was to come. He needed the purity of his rage and the clarity of his ambition, untempered by such weaknesses as pity or regret.
He strode into his dark meditation chamber.
Bent K'nobby returned the silver handle of his light rapier to his belt as armoured body parts rained and clattered to the deck around him. The pungent aroma of scorched flesh filled the air. He shook his head sadly. Such a waste of human life, he thought. Don't they teach these guys to stand further back? It was a lesson these six Troopers would not forget in a hurry. Of course, being dead, they would be unable to pass it on.
Bent stepped gingerly over the carnage and headed back the way he had come. He had a reactor to disable. He retraced his steps to the intersection where he had taken the wrong turn, and continued on down the correct route. Before long the decor changed; the polished walls and glowing white lights were traded for a subtly more functional look. This was obviously an engineering section of the Station.
He turned the final corner and entered a large open space. A bridge spanned the cavernous drop, and half way across, the reactor stood on a platform off the edge of the bridge. It hummed quietly.
Bent approached the reactor, studying it carefully. He had to disable it in a subtle manner, so that it would not be immediately obvious where the problem lay—or even that there was a problem—while at the same time not making it easy to reactivate.
He began to move around the reactor on the narrow access walkway. On the far side from the bridge, he found a switch which looked promising. Beneath the switch was a small maintenance panel, held in place by four screws.
Bent lifted the light rapier from his belt. Turning it around, he gripped the handle tightly and gave the end a twist. A small utility tool popped out. Bent quickly turned it, looking for the blade he needed. Knife, fork; in true Jubbly tradition, there was no spoon. Saw, corkscrew, magnifying glass. Here we go! He unfolded the small screwdriver and went to work on opening the panel.
There were no mirrors in the meditation chamber, no reflective surfaces of any kind, but still Barth Vapour hesitated before removing his helmet. He could not bear the sight of his own ruined face, its hideous scarring a grim reminder of the lowest point in his life. Finally, though, he released the clasps that locked the helmet onto the suit, and lifted it from his head. He blinked his eyes in the dim light; he was not used to using them without first passing the light through the filters built in to the lenses of his helmet. He rarely removed the helmet at all, these days.
Now that he had, though, the cool air in the meditation chamber felt good on his face. He breathed it in, rejoicing in the chance to fill his lungs—what remained of them—with air that did not taste of rubber and his own sweat.
He closed his eyes, and his lips moved as he mumbled a chant to focus his thoughts.
He let his awareness expand, seeking out that particular ripple in the Source which signified the presence of Obeah Bum K'nobby. In order to beat K'nobby, Vapour must first defeat his fear of him. To do that he must revisit the memory of their last fateful encounter—and in a delicious irony, he intended to recruit K'nobby himself to help walk him through it. The old fool would do it, too; he had always been too sentimental for his own good, and the thought that he might be able to redeem his former student would be irresistible.
Where are you, old man? he wondered.
He moved his mind out wider, his thoughts scuttling like a thousand spiders through the tangled web that was the Source.
He was dimly aware of fully half of the massive station—Shock Troopers patrolling, THIGH Pilots eating and singing and sleeping, Officers officering, and one particular Trooper engaged in a routine prisoner transfer who seemed to have a stronger than usual presence in the Source—before he felt that old familiar ripple. He drew his thoughts back to himself, refocussed them solely on making contact with the old man.
Bent removed the fourth screw and carefully lifted the panel out. Beneath it were a number of electrical connections; it could have been a confusing mess of wires if somebody hadn't thoughtfully included a neatly labelled schematic on the inside of the panel. He studied it.
Suddenly he heard something. He glanced up. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that he had heard nothing. He felt a chill finger tap his spine. Although nobody was near, he knew that he was no longer alone. He reached out for the Source, and felt a malevolent entity lurking there, curled up like a spider in its web.
"Hello, Obeah Bum. What are you up to, old man?"
"Hello, Mannequin, old friend," said Bent.
"Mannequin Splitwhisker is long dead", hissed Vapour's voice in his head. "You killed him, remember?"
Bent smiled. "That is not quite how I remember it. Barth Vapour, then. Long time no see. We must get together some time."
"Oh, we will, old man. And soon. We have unfinished business, you and I."
"I look forward to it," said Bent cheerfully.
"Do you remember how we first met?" asked Vapour.
"Of course," said Bent.
"I met a man, crazy for me."
"I met a boy, as cute as can be."
"I helped you out with my pod-racing skills."
"I trained you up with my Jubbly drills."
"Summer days," said Vapour. "Fading away into Summer nights."
"Well it was Ratatouille," said Bent. "It is always summer there. Where are you going with this?"
"Ratatouille?" mused Vapour quietly. "Do you know I had forgotten that planet? That explains why I disliked it so much..."
"You've been there recently?" asked Bent. "Small galaxy!"
"Do you remember our last encounter?" asked Vapour, changing the subject. "Do you remember what you took from me? And how you left me for dead?"
"Left you for..." Bent shook his head. "I remember what it was that finally drove you over the edge and severed your last tenuous link with sanity and reality, if that is what you mean. And I remember feeling partially responsible."
"Only partially, old man?" Vapour snarled. "You tried to steal my wife away from me..."
"You drove her away yourself, with your greed and ambition," countered Bent.
"And then you destroyed my body and soul, and my life."
Bent shook his head again. "Your hatred has warped your memory, my friend. It was not like that."
"Perhaps guilt and age have dulled yours," said Vapour.
"Why don't you tell me how you remember it?" said Bent.
"Very well..."
The planet MustardFart was far from the core of the galaxy, and Barth Vapour had come here to finally end the war which had been tearing the galaxy apart for the last ten years. It was a violent lava planet, a mass of constantly erupting volcanoes. The industrial complex here was heavily shielded, and the constant blue flaring as the shields did their job was an indicator of just how inhospitable this planet really was.
Barth Vapour had been sent here under orders of the Imperator himself to, uh, conduct negotiations with the leaders of the opposing forces who had fled to this distant planet for reasons best known to themselves. He had just concluded the negotiations—bringing peace to the galaxy where the Jubblies, for all their pious posturing, had failed—and was returning his light rapier to its holster on his belt when a flashing warning on a console caught his eye.
A ship, coming in.
Vapour recognised it as his wife's personal flyer. What was she doing here?
He ran out to meet her as the glistening silver ship settled down on the landing pad beside his own battered fighter.
I've heard terrible things about you, she cried. Are they true?
Everything I do, he replied, I do it for you.
You're going down a road I cannot follow, she sobbed.
I love you, he said. Together we can rule the galaxy.
You're breaking my heart, she wailed.
And then Obeah Bum K'nobby was there, standing at the top of the ramp into her ship.
You're with him, shouted Vapour. Both of you have betrayed me.
No, she said. No.
If you're not with me, he roared, you are against me!
Only the Stiff think in absolutes, accused K'nobby.
And then Vapour's wife was—asleep, or something—and the two men were duelling back and forth across the platform. Light rapiers flashed and skittered off each other, and sparks flew from the walls as the fight took them inside the processing station and through the control room.
In the heat of the battle, one of the rapier blades slashed through a computer console. The shields which protected the station from the ferocious heat of molten rock flickered briefly, and then collapsed.
Vapour pursued K'nobby out onto an enormous collection vane. As they battled, the vane itself buckled in the heat and eventually toppled down into the river of magma which ran below the station, where it began to float away downstream. Clinging desperately to the doomed structure, the two men still swung and slashed at each other. They made their way ever higher as the enormous vane slowly melted and sank. Finally K'nobby swung across to a small hovering raft with its own shield generator, and Vapour leaped onto the back of a similarly shielded collector 'bot.
In the intense heat, the two men yelled abuse at each other across the gap between their respective transports.
K'nobby's raft drifted close to one scorched but bearable bank, and the Jubbly Master leaped to safety. Vapour followed him, guiding his 'bot with the power of the Source. Scared for his life, K'nobby begged the Stiff Lord not to follow him any further, to leave him alone; unswayed, Vapour leaped high into the air.
And K'nobby—cheated, or something—and the next thing Vapour knew, he was sliding back down the slope towards the intense heat of the lava, his legs sliced off by the evil Jubbly. K'nobby had even stolen his light rapier before turning and leaving the helpless Stiff as his clothes burst into flames...
Bent K'nobby's jaw was hanging open. He never would have imagined the Hard Lord to be this delusional.
"Well?"
"That's quite an imagination you've got there, Barth," he said at last.
"Are you saying that is not how it happened?"
"I'm saying they must have given you some pretty powerful hallucinogenics after your accident. Or maybe they simply brainwashed you," said Bent. "There are tiny fragments of the truth in there, but they're completely distorted from the reality I remember."
"So how do you remember our last meeting, old man?"
"Well, let's see..." mused Bent.
The planet Coruscate Primus, capital of the known galaxy and home for a thousand years to the council chambers of the Galactic Senate, was considered by some to be the bright jewel at the centre of the galaxy; however, it still had its seamy side. There were back alleys where just about anything could be bought or sold.
It was to one of these more disreputable parts of the planet-wide city that K'nobby finally tracked young Mannequin Splitwhisker.
Three days ago, Mannequin's wife had come to see Obeah Bum K'nobby. In tears, she had told the Jubbly Master of their secret wedding; she had told him, too, of how Mannequin had become increasingly remote as his lust for money and power grew out of control; finally she had told him how, in a random fit of rage, Mannequin had hit her. And now she was leaving him.
K'nobby had agreed to talk to Mannequin. However, the young Jubbly had vanished. K'nobby had finally traced him to this grungy section of the city, where he had gone to ground in a Curry Bar which went by the name of Lava World.
K'nobby pushed aside the bead curtain which covered the doorway, and slipped into the dingy room beyond. The air was rank with the aromas one usually associated with curries, and the eating thereof, with perhaps a hint of stale beer thrown into the redolent mix for good measure.
Mannequin was in a corner booth. Several empty glasses littered the small table, along with a couple of empty bowls.
K'nobby lowered himself into the rickety chair across the table from his troubled student.
"Go'way, leamee 'lone," slurred Mannequin.
K'nobby tried several times to elicit something more from the drunken youth, but Mannequin wanted nothing more than to sulk in his self pity. He was recalcitrant and untalkative.
A server 'bot trundled over to the table, bearing a piping hot bowl of curry. It was the house speciality, Mustavva Curry—"as hot as lava or your money back"—and it positively reeked of red hot chilli peppers. The 'bot cleared up the scattered bowls and glasses from the table and placed the bowl in front of the youth. It rolled away and returned a moment later with a full glass of beer, which it placed beside the bowl.
Mannequin belched deeply. Ignoring K'nobby, he stuck his grimy spoon into the bowl and lifted some to his mouth. He shovelled it in, and sweat instantly beaded on his forehead.
"Look, my friend, please come with me..." began K'nobby.
"You just don't get it, do you?" screamed Mannequin suddenly. "Just fuck off and leave me alone."
K'nobby sighed. Slowly he wiped the spray of curry from his face. Then, sadly, he did just that: he fucked off and left him alone. As he stood to leave, he nudged something with his foot. It was Mannequin's light rapier, lying on the floor where it had been kicked and forgotten. Carefully he stooped to retrieve it, intending to return it to his young friend when he had calmed down a bit.
"So yes," concluded Bent, "when I left you there, you were indeed 'legless', to use the vernacular. Perhaps I should have dragged you out of there by force, and I now regret that I did not do so. It was only the next day that I heard of how you had passed out face-first in that bowl of Mustavva Curry, sustaining several burns to your face, and nearly drowning before they fished you out. But who knew that a few scars on your face were enough to push you over the edge? You always were a pretty boy, but none of us ever realised quite how strong your vanity had grown."
There was a long silence.
"And then there was the accident with the ambulance on the way to the medical ward—although there is evidence that it was engineered by Palpator himself, taking advantage of your vulnerability to turn you to the Hard Side. Either way, your legs were crushed when it flipped, and you were trapped there for several hours. We know that the Imperator's people found you before we did, and for a long time we thought you were dead." Bent sighed. "And then the purge began, and it was too late to do anything for you. For anyone."
"You expect me to believe this rubbish?" asked Vapour angrily.
"After all this time? No. I expect you to ignore it as the ramblings of a senile old man." Bent sighed again. "Before you dismiss it completely, though, why not do a search for the planet—what was it? MustardFart? I am almost certain it does not exist."
Bent waited a while longer, but the feeling of being watched had slipped away. He was alone again.
He wondered if he had managed to reach what little remained of his friend inside the mind of Barth Vapour. He wondered if his friend still existed at all.
He turned his attention back to the schematic.
"I met a boy, as cute as can be," he whispered sadly...
"I met a man, crazy for me," whispered Barth Vapour in the dim coolness of his meditation chamber. He blinked as he emerged from his trance-like state.
"But now he is just a crazy old fool," he said aloud to the empty room. "Crazy. Expecting me to believe a story like that."
At least his meditation had achieved his goal: his anger was now finely focussed, and he no longer feared the coming confrontation with his former master.
However, he decided to change into a clean stillsuit anyway, just for that extra boost of confidence.
Although scarred, and with diminished capacity in his lungs, Vapour did not need the stillsuit or the helmet in order to survive. They did, however, make life more comfortable—and, as a convenient side effect, added greatly to his aura of mystique, and inspired terror amongst the masses.
Collecting his helmet, Vapour strode from the meditation chamber and down the hallway into his bedroom.
His bed had been neatly made up in his absence. The black silk sheets were folded down precisely. Nestled into the gap between the two black silk-covered pillows sat the one piece of colour in the otherwise dark and forbidding room.
Barth Vapour's plush teddewok was hot pink; her fur was soft to the touch, her nose a lump of black velvet. She stared at him across the black expanse of the bed with her two beady black button eyes. Before he had cut it off, the label protruding from her back had borne the legend "My Name is LI'L HONEY"; Vapour had rechristened her Boadicea, without being entirely sure where he had heard the name.
Boadicea wore a black T-shirt over her pink fur. Inscribed across the shirt in small white stylised letters was the phrase 'STIFF HAPPENS'.
Around her neck was a pink choker, tied in a bow. At each end of the choker was a little velvet heart; the words 'Love' and 'Hug' were embroidered across the pink hearts in white.
The Imperator, Palpator, maintained a family for the sake of appearances. Most of the time he kept them distant, so as not to interfere with his more sinister role as Barth Sifyllous, Hard Lord of the Stiff, despotic overlord of the galaxy. During a rare visit, however, Palpator's three year old great granddaughter had presented Boadicea—LI'L HONEY—to the fearsome Barth Vapour with the expressed wish "that the poor sad man should cheer up."
For some reason, Vapour chose to keep the stuffed toy around. He suspected it was the T-shirt that sealed the deal.
Vapour placed his helmet on the end of his bed and reached around awkwardly to unzip his stillsuit. It was a bit of a struggle, but since he only changed suits occasionally he preferred to do it by himself. Once he got the zipper down he wriggled his way out of the top half of the stillsuit, then eased his way out of the lower half.
Vapour's skin was white and wrinkled and, in many places, scarred—where he still had skin. His legs, from mid-thigh down, and his right forearm had long ago been replaced with robotic prosthetics.
Carefully he hung the stillsuit on the back of the door—when he returned, it would have been taken away for cleaning and any necessary repairs or upgrades—and opened his wardrobe to reveal his replacement stillsuits.
He lifted one out and laid it across the bed. Even as he did so, he felt his anger rising. His Stiff stillsuit was still stiff! He had a still stiff Stiff stillsuit! He had been engaged in an ongoing battle with the laundry department for some time now; all he asked was that his stillsuit should be properly treated so as to be supple and limber, and instead they were coming back stiff and hard. As far as Vapour was concerned, he was Stiff and Hard enough without his suit being likewise.
It was about time there were a few more painful deaths in the laundry room.
For now, though, Vapour did not have the luxury of time to get the problem fixed. He rummaged in the drawer of his bedside table and produced a large jar of moisturising lubricant, which he began to smear across his skin. The biggest problem with a stiff stillsuit, apart from the discomfort, was actually getting into it.
After pushing down the switch on the reactor, causing its hum to fade into silence, Bent had rewired the connections behind the panel and had then spent five minutes scraping the schematic off of the inside of the panel. Then, for good measure, and to distract anybody who tried to fix it, he had jammed the blade of his light rapier into the centre of the wiring and twisted, thoroughly destroying whatever wiring might lie inside the casing of the reactor. It wasn't going to be working again any time soon.
Now he replaced the screws holding the panel in place. At a casual glance, the reactor seemed to be undamaged.
He edged cautiously back around the side of the reactor—and froze as he heard the electronically artificial voices of Shock Troopers. He peered around the edge. Two Troopers stood at the far end of the bridge.
"Have you seen those new Model 6004T Fighters?" said one.
"Yeah, they're pretty flashy," said the other. "But I've got a Pilot friend who hates them."
"A THIGH? Is it true what they say about them?"
"Sure it is. Uh, what do they say?"
Bent made a small gesture with his fingers.
"Well, they reckon that... Hey, what was that?" The first Trooper turned and looked around the far corner. As his colleague did likewise, Bent slipped away.
"Aw, it was nothing," said the second Trooper. "Just gas venting or something..."
Leaving the two chatty Troopers behind, Bent headed back for the Serendipity Sparrow. He suspected he would be having Stiff company there fairly soon.
Gasping for breath, Vapour was glad to finally lock the helmet back down onto the neck of the stillsuit and allow it to do his breathing for him.
He strode from his quarters. He had not gotten a clear location on Obeah Bum K'nobby, but even if he had, he doubted the old man would still be there. Whatever else he was up to, though, he would have to return to his ship eventually. Vapour keyed his comm. "Send three squads of Shock Troopers to meet me at the captured freighter," he said curtly. He cut off the officer on the other end in the middle of his obsequious acknowledgements. "Tell them to await my orders; they are to do nothing more than stand guard on the ship."
"Yes sir, at once sir."
"You won't escape me this time, Obeah Bum," he said aloud as he strode down the hallway for his meeting with destiny.