#perishablehomosexual

Gigan shook his head. “But as I’m standing in a freshly-leveled village on this planet that shoulda been my job, watching these jerks who undercut me walk strut around and trying to decide the best angle to attack them from, one of them bends over and licks up this smear made out of one of the locals. The other two screw up their faces in disgust, the one that licked it is scraping his tongue off on a rock, the middle one’s biting his horn in revenge—and then the head on the other side takes a taste too, and they do it all over again.” He threw back his head, squawking in laughter. The bartender rattled a couple of tentacles in amusement. The robot just shook its head.

“Anyway,” Gigan went on, “I figured then either they were too damn stupid to realize they’d stolen someone’s job—heck, maybe they were just wild animals that had been dropped off to make a mess—or, they were the most fun guys I’d ever seen. So I let ‘em live.”

“Did you talk to them?” the robot asked. It wasn’t looking at Gigan anymore; its optic was off. A dozen different open tabs in glowing squares and rectangles floated in front of the bot, projected from the computer plugged into its wrist. The robot groped around blindly for the battery and took another hit; the floating screens sizzled and wavered.

Gigan waited for the static to die down before he replied. “Nah, not then. Had no idea what language to start with. I figured if they really were mercs and not someone’s pet planet squashers, I’d eventually run into them again somewhere like this.”

“This” being the bar around them: an illicit pop-up stop clinging precariously to the surface of an asteroid under a makeshift canopy tent, with a smattering of round tables and stools screwed directly into the asteroid’s surface and a bar made out of a row of coolers. Places like this were a dime a dozen in this arm of the galaxy, appearing in a matter of hours and disappearing just as fast, lasting anywhere from a week to five years. All you needed to make one was a force field to keep out nearby asteroids and to keep in enough air to prevent customers’ heads from popping—but providing gravity and breathable air was the customers’ responsibility. The bartender wore goggles and an air filter that snaked around her head to an air tank strapped between three larger tentacles; Gigan had enough internal air storage and a good enough filter in his throat that he’d be fine for hours as long as he didn’t get in a fight. He kept his tail and one leg curled beneath his seat to keep himself from floating off it.

Bars like this were the best place to find odd jobs and the odd guys to do them: hired killers, hackers, thugs, dealers in contraband of all kind. Gigan couldn’t count how many bars like this he and the triple threat had hung out in—either because they’d run into each other there between jobs, or because they’d come together.

“We crossed paths a lotta times over the next, uh…” he waved a scythe vaguely, “dunno. Few centuries, I guess? It’s hard to keep track of standard galactic time when you spend all your time bouncing between different planets with different year lengths. Sometimes we got hired by two different employers to hit the same world—I usually, y'know, got hired as muscle to extort a ransom, but the only jobs they ever did were full mass extinctions. I got to see them in action—wow. They’re a moving force of nature. On the right planets—wet ones, mainly—they create storms hundreds of miles across just by flying.” To the bartender, he said, “You’re from an aquatic world, right? You look like it.”

Rapping on the makeshift bar top with the tips of half a dozen tentacles, the bartender said, “My ancestral world? Mostly aquatic. About four fifths of the planet, I’m told.”

“Yeah, they’d tear your planet to shreds.“  He didn’t have enough appendages to speak the bartender’s percussive language properly—like the robot, he was speaking it by synthesizing the right raps and taps through his speaker—but he added a scrape with one scythe on the bar top to underscore the sentiment.

She shrugged.

"Fought them a few times, too,” Gigan said. “They’re vicious in close combat. It's kill or be killed, no in between. I’d usually have to cut and run, heh, just take the financial hit, cuz there’s no beating them without getting damaged so bad the victory isn’t worth it. They’re probably the best warriors I’ve ever met, but the worst mercenaries to share a market with.”

He thought his tone was admiring, but the robot said, “I thought you got along with each other?”

“We did,” Gigan insisted, and immediately corrected himself, “We do. It just took a while to get properly introduced to each other, you know? Every time I met them, they were in the middle of a job—and they had that whole... intense, mysterious, aloof loner schtick going on. For the longest time, I didn’t even know whether they could talk.” He hooked one of his wrist spurs through the handle of his drink, took a sip through the straw—hated straws, but a lid with a straw was the cheapest way to keep a drink from floating out of a mug and bars like this were nothing if not cheap—and grimaced. Either his drink had gone off in the past five minutes or that battery was messing with his taste buds. Probably the latter. "When we finally met each other properly, it was in—you know that cruddy little strip of solar systems that ended up under no one’s jurisdiction after the 'Rog turf war? Buncha little lawless hellholes?“

The bartender said, "My ancestral home world was in that strip.”

“Sucks,” Gigan said. “Hope it wasn’t one of the ones the 'Rogs asked me to clear out. Anyway, I crossed paths with them in one of the space port cities near the edge of the contested territory. They’d gotten in a bar fight. And lost.”

They’d been thrown across the bar onto their back, legs kicking uselessly in the air, hissing and spitting in the worst Suneri that Gigan had ever heard. Someone had been mad at them because they’d finished the job they’d been hired for even after they'd been told the world had paid the ransom their employer had demanded; they were mad that they’d been ordered to stop when they’d said from the start that wasn’t how they worked. They were twice the height of anyone else in the bar besides Gigan; but they were fighting completely naked—weaponless and defenseless—and consequently got their tails handed to them.

He’d learned a little bit more about them by then. Over past few centuries, he’d asked around about a three-headed, golden, scaled, winged warrior that spat lightning. He'd eventually stumbled on some sparse info about the prize weapons of a conquering empire in some far-flung corner of the galaxy, a race rather like the local Garogas. Their three-headed warriors were some sort of genetically engineered killing machines.

So was Gigan.

The warriors he’d seen were very, very far from their home.

So was Gigan.

Over time, he'd found enough info on the empire to download its dominant species’ language, so when he’d crossed paths with the warriors again and confirmed that they could, in fact, speak—

“I offered to buy them drinks.” In their home world’s language. “And they kicked me in the chest.” He laughed.

It was his fault. He should’ve known that anyone who’d flown that far to get away from their masters wouldn’t wanna hear a stranger speaking their masters’ language. Would Gigan have?

“And this is when you started making friends?” the bartender asked dubiously.

“Sure! It was the first time they didn’t try to kill me,” Gigan said. “And they did let me buy them that drink. They were flat broke. Get this—this is why I kept running into them everywhere—they were snapping up half the jobs on the market because they were doing them for free.”

The robot made a painful-sounding buzz low in its abdomen that Gigan took for a laugh.

“Yeah! Yeah. Remember what I said about that edgy loner schtick of theirs?” He drummed emphatically on the bar top. “They just wanted to watch worlds burn. No money. No rewards. They didn’t turn down anyone stupid enough to hire them, but they don’t take any orders, either. Get what you pay for, huh?”

“What is their name?” the robot asked.

Gigan’s good cheer immediately disappeared. “They don’t have one,” he said sharply.

“Of course they do.”

“No, they said they don’t. They weren’t given one. They wanna be nameless, I’ll respect that.”

“I am in the Xiliens’ military personnel database.”

Gigan leaned over, trying to see the screens from the robot’s angle. “Yeah? You’ve got a connection to their empire from here?”

“A really slow one,” the robot shot back, “patched into the network via a Xilien spy two star systems away who is connected to the home world with the worst ansible I have ever had the displeasure of interfacing with, so I would like to spend as little time doing unnecessary searches as possible. It looks like they have got hundreds of files on three-headed monsters like your buddies. Once I have cracked the security encryption on them, I do not want to open them one by one.”

For a moment, Gigan was silent. Then he said, “They said their home world didn’t name them—it numbered them.”

“Sympathies,” the robot said. “I have still got a bar code on my ass with my factory serial number. Do you know theirs?”

“He said they’re Zero.” He felt like a traitor. They'd only trusted him with that information because they'd believed him when he swore that he'd never call them by their homeworld's label—and certainly that he'd never tell anyone else.

The robot froze momentarily, processing that. “Easy to remember.” One of the screens changed as the robot started searching.

“Just one 'he’ now?” the bartender asked. “You were talking about all three together earlier.”

“Yeah, uh, he as in—as in the one on the left,” Gigan said. He didn't think of the information as coming from them, but from him—the one who'd persuaded the other two to share it, the one who'd leaned in to whisper it to him in the dark while the other two watched for eavesdroppers. “You’ve got lefty, righty, and front-and-center. Totally different people. Lefty’s… probably my favorite. I like them all about the same, but he—makes himself easiest to like, you know? Great sense of humor—the murderous kind—the kind of guy that can find anything entertaining. From explosions to head wounds. That’s rare.”

Although sometimes Gigan had gotten the impression that, on some level, lefty was forcing himself to feel entertained. The more Gigan got to know him, to see under the aloof façade they all put on, the more he got the sense that lefty had this... desperate fragility about him, like he was crumbling apart and looking for something to latch onto—a weird taste or a unique view or a good fight—something to hold him together.

All three of them gave off that impression, truth be told, just in different ways. Righty looked for stability in his other two heads, ever turned inward, to the point he was all but oblivious to life outside of them. Front-and-center held himself together through sheer force of will, and held back anything from getting close enough to touch him and break him apart.

They were all three so very brittle. They had fissures deep in their body and minds, fissures traced along the paths of the invisible scars where they’d been stitched together into a three-headed monster. And whenever Gigan glimpsed that brittleness—whenever they withdrew into themselves at a question about their past, whenever they tried to pretend they weren’t nervous around employers who paraded about mind-controlled thralls, whenever they hesitated in front of a door that said “No Pets” like they didn’t think they qualified as people instead of animals—he felt the fissures between his flesh and his metal, too.

He didn’t like to talk about his fissures. But they liked to talk about theirs even less, so it all worked out neatly—except that, sometimes, he wished he could talk to them about how he kept his from cracking open, in hopes that it could help them too. He hated their brittleness. He hated how it hurt them.

“But they’re all fun,” he said. “Fighting them especially, once you get them to a place where they’re trying to beat you instead of kill you. They don’t mind losing a few body parts, even—they just regrow them. I even saw them regrow front-and-center’s whole head, once. I didn’t take him off, just saw it happen. Fighting alongside them, though—sometimes we'd get hired for jobs together—watching the way they can work a hurricane, wow…” To think that they didn’t think they were people. Had they never heard themselves sing before? Had they never seen the way they danced through clouds and lightning? Had they never noticed how they effortlessly conducted both rain and minds alike like they were symphonies? Didn’t they know that they were maestros in the sky? Their sheer visionary genius, their unsurpassed grace, the beauty of golden scales gyrating through the cloudless eye of a storm…

“Hit me again,” he asked the robot, and he wasn’t sure whether it was in hopes of pushing the images out of his RAM or in hopes of summoning up another hallucinatory vision of them. The robot flicked on its optic long enough to pick up the battery and lean over.

When Gigan came back down, the robot said, “I am not finding any monsters named Zero. Have you got another name?”

“No—what do you mean 'named’? They don’t have names besides numbers, do they?”

“They do. The Xiliens gave them all code names. They are things like 'Death’ and 'Hyper’ and 'Kaiser.’”

Gigan shouldn’t have been surprised that they’d lied about their name, after everything else. But he was. And it hurt. “Well—keep looking. You’ve got the picture I sent you, right?”

“I will have to look through every file individually to find a visual match.”

“I’m paying you for your time, aren’t I? Come on.”

The robot made an irritated buzzing noise, but snapped, “Fine.”

“Why do you have to track them down anyway?” the bartender asked. “If you’re so close.”

Gigan shrugged. “They went and disappeared on me ages ago. I’m just trying to figure out where they went. I figured their home world might be looking for their lost planet-flatteners, so…” Although they’d never said so, he’d always got the sense that they were terrified of their home world—and terrified that they were being followed. Not the vague paranoia that any escaped weapon felt, but like they knew.

“So why’d they take off? You have a fight?”

“No. We didn’t. In fact, the last time we spoke was—was the opposite of a fight.”

The last time they spoke, Gigan had asked them to come with him. For good. He thought they should market themselves as a package apocalyptic deal, let Gigan handle finessing the employers and victims while the triple threat handled the razing. Give the three of them the opportunity to experience the cushy things you can only get when you’re getting paid for your jobs—fine dining, luxury hotels, resort planets—because they deserved those things all the time, not just when they happened to cross paths with Gigan between jobs. Take them to symphonies and operas—he heard them singing, constantly, any time things were still and they thought no one was listening, in languages he’d never learned. Travel the galaxy together. Get as far away from their pasts as they could.

They said they’d think about it.

He’d never seen them again.

He snatched up his drink and irritably stirred the straw, trying to suck up the last drops floating around inside. He slammed the mug back down. "Just trying to see if they tripped and fell in a black hole or something,“ he muttered. "Get me another. Less blood this time, it tastes funky.” The bartender took back the empty mug and opened one of the coolers.

The robot turned on its optic. “I think we have a match,” it said. Gigan immediately leaned over, squinting at the screens. Something in him sparked and simmered when he saw the photo. That was them—far younger, with a near-feral bloodthirst in their eyes that he’d only ever seen when they were fighting for their lives.

“The Xiliens have a database of AWOL monsters where they document their efforts to track them down. It was a lot faster to go through than all the files,” the robot said. “You were right—they are numbered, and they were assigned zero. I believe your friends were the prototype for the others.” It pointed at small text at the top of their file, Monster #0, and then dragged its finger down to the far larger text underneath: KING. “That is their name.”

Gigan wondered why they would rather claim they’d been named “Zero” than “King.” They deserved to be called King. “Well? What’s it say? Do they know where they are?”

The robot pulled up a map of the galaxy. It showed a cone stretching away from their general neighborhood—like the maps that came from trying to predict the path of a hurricane crossing an ocean. It curved counterclockwise in an arc, a little more than half the galaxy’s radius out from the supermassive black hole. The path was thousands of lightyears long and, at its widest point, hundreds across.

“They found faint psychic traces of King’s interstellar path almost a hundred thousand years ago heading roughly along that arc, assuming they continued on the same trajectory,” the robot said. “But that is the most recent data the Xiliens have.”

“It’ll do,” Gigan said. At least it was a starting point. Even if they’d long moved on, Gigan might be able to pick up the trail again if he knew where they’d been. “What are these 'psychic traces’ the Xiliens are tracking? Any way I can track that too?”

“I can look it up, but it will cost you more.”

“Yeah yeah yeah. That’s fine.”

“Hold on,” the bartender said, setting down Gigan’s new drink. “A hundred thousand years ago? You’re looking for someone who disappeared a hundred thousand years ago?”

Gigan winced. “Technically, no. It was—longer than that, actually.”

“How long ago?”

Gigan opened his mouth. And stuck the straw in it so he wouldn’t have to answer.

The bartender tapped out disapproval on the bar top. “They could be anywhere in the galaxy by now.”

“Yeah, if they had any idea how to hitch rides,” Gigan said. “They fly everywhere. With their own wings. They spend long flights inside these things.” He stamped a hooked foot on the asteroid. “And I don’t mean a ship disguised to look like an asteroid, they travel in rocks!”

“This is gross,” the robot said. “Organic brains are gross. But here. I got the unique psychic frequency that the Xiliens are using to track King and blueprints to a machine to do it with. I do not know if they are good blueprints. I refuse to think about brains any more than that.”

“It’ll do. Beam it over.”

The robot mentally transferred over its exorbitant invoice. The instant Gigan transferred payment, it followed up with the files. “Pleasure,” it said, unplugging from its computer and beginning to pack up. It pointed at the battery. “Do you want more?”

“Keep the rest. Consider it a tip.”

“Nice.” It carefully wrapped the battery in a napkin and stowed it with the computer.

Gigan sucked down the rest of his drink, pulled some physical cash out of a compartment in his calf, and slapped it down on the bar.

The bartender put a tentacle over the money and carefully slid it to the edge of the bar so it wouldn't float away. Several taps dragging out into wry scrapes, she said, "Must be a more impressive lay than they look like.“

If Gigan hadn’t already finished his drink, he would have choked. "We never—! I mean—we're—colleagues. Colleague-friend-…mercenaries.” He shifted the leg he had anchored around the bar stool uncomfortably. “Does it... seem like something else?”

Several tentacles rippled in a shrug. “I don’t know anything about your species,” she said. “But in most, no one spends that kind of money, obsesses that amount of time, and crosses that amount of space unless it's for an offspring, a hive mind hub, a nearly-extinct food source, or a mate of some kind.”

Gigan turned that over. In his head, he called up the photo in the file that the robot had sent him. They were so young, so furious, so bestial—so much more broken than they had been even when Gigan knew them. It was a damn pity that the Xiliens kept visual instead of audial files. He wondered if they had sang back then, too.

“Honestly?” he said. “I don’t know much about my species, either.”

His flesh felt icy and his metal felt numb during the few seconds after exiting the bar’s force field as he crossed the asteroid to where he’d parked his junk heap of a ship. He was warm again by the time he’d powered it up and gotten off the rock. He turned toward the nearest proper spaceport that accommodated people of his size and profession. He had a very long search ahead of him, and he had no idea when he was next going to cross paths with a proper spacefaring planet. He had to stock up on supplies.

He needed to buy a ship that wasn’t falling apart, too. Something built for deep space exploration.

Careful not to cut it, he peeled the one picture he had of the triple threat off of his windshield and stowed it in his calf compartment, to transfer to his new ship later.

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