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  THE WRATH OF CONS

  A REX NIHILO ADVENTURE

  Robert Kroese

  St. Culain Press

  Copyright ©2018 by Robert Kroese

  All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means – electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording or other – except for brief quotations in reviews, without the prior permission of the author.

  This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual persons is purely coincidental.

  With thanks to my invaluable beta readers: Brian Galloway, Kristin Crocker, Robert DeFrank, Mark Fitzgerald, Travis Gagnon, Hank Henley, Scott Lavery, Mark Leone, Phillip Lynch, and Paul Alan Piatt.

  CONTENTS

  THE WRATH OF CONS

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Chapter Twenty-eight

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  THE WRATH OF CONS

  A REX NIHILO ADVENTURE

  Chapter One

  RECORDING START GALACTIC STANDARD DATE 3017.04.17.04:23:15:00

  The two cops walked into the donut shop and marched up to the counter. Like the three pairs of cops who had been in the store earlier that day, they were members of the weasel-like race known as Sneeves, the only intelligent race native to Mordecon Seven. I use the word intelligent charitably.

  “What’ll you have, boys?” I asked.

  The two stared at the display case, which was filled with the various donuts and pastries I’d made that morning. “A bear claw for me,” said the thinner one, on the right.

  “Certainly,” I said, and put one in a paper bag for him. “And for you, sir?”

  The heavyset Sneeve stared open-mouthed at the display case, seemingly overwhelmed by the number of options.

  “What’s in this one?” he asked at last, pointing at one of the pastries.

  “Vanilla custard,” I said.

  “Oh,” he said, and nodded his head thoughtfully. “And this one?”

  “Lemon curd.”

  “This one?”

  “Diced apple slices.”

  “And this one?”

  “Broken glass and pine tar.”

  “This one?”

  “Strawberry jam.”

  “Hmm,” the Sneeve said, twitching his whiskers. “Banilla sounds good.”

  “Indeed it does,” I said, putting the donut in a bag. I set them on the counter. “Anything else?”

  “Two coffees,” said the thin one.

  As I reached to get the coffee, a loud boom sounded somewhere behind and below me. The counter shook and plaster dust fell from the ceiling. This was followed by the muffled sounds of cursing.

  “What was that?” asked the thin cop.

  “That was… a hole-punching device,” I said.

  “For punching holes in donuts?” asked the fat cop.

  “Donuts have holes,” I replied nervously.

  “Um, yeah,” the fat cop said, his brow furrowing. “I guess they do.” He glanced at the other cop, who shrugged. I breathed a sigh of relief. I am, to put it mildly, not a good liar.

  A door burst open behind me and a gigantic man dressed in coveralls came running up to the register. He was nearly eight feet tall and covered with dirt. “Um, Sasha?” the man said. “Potential Friend needs your help. He says the instructions you gave him for the detonators don’t—”

  “Donut hole makers!” I shouted, glancing toward the cops.

  “Huh?”

  “Surely you mean donut hole makers, not detonators,” I said. “Right, Boggs?”

  Boggs stared at me. He turned to look at the cops, then looked at me again. Then he looked at the cops. Then at me. Then at the cops again. Back to me. The cops. Me. The cops. Me. The cops. Me.

  “Oh!” Boggs exclaimed. “Yes, I mean the donut hole makers, Sasha! They are not making the holes in the donuts the way Potential Friend wants them to.” Boggs gave me a wink.

  “Okay, Boggs. Tell Rex I’ll be there as soon as I’m done helping these two members of Mordecon City’s Finest. These gentlemen are keeping us safe from criminals, you know.”

  Boggs’s eyes went wide. “They are?”

  “That’s right,” said the thin cop. “Why, did you know that there’s a bank right next door? It’s our job to make sure nobody tries to rob that bank.”

  “Is that why you’ve been here three times this week?” Boggs asked.

  I shot a glare at him. The thin cop’s answer was drowned out by the sound of a jackhammer.

  “WHAT IS THAT?” shouted the fat cop. Boggs looked at me.

  “ISN’T THAT THE… DOUGH-MAKING MACHINE, BOGGS?” I asked.

  Boggs nodded excitedly. “IT’S A DOUGH-MAKING…” he shouted. The noise stopped. “…machine,” Boggs whispered.

  “Well, you’d better watch out,” said the thin cop.

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  The thin cop grinned. “If you make too much dough, robbers might try to break in here instead of the bank!”

  The fat cop howled with laughter at this.

  “Good one,” I said.

  “I don’t get it,” Boggs said with a frown.

  “It’s fine, Boggs. Tell Rex I’ll be there in a minute.”

  Boggs nodded and went back into the storeroom. I humored the cops for a few more minutes as they paid and sipped their coffee. When they finally left, I hung the BACK IN FIVE MINUTES sign on the door and went into the storeroom. In the center of the concrete floor of the room was a hole about a meter and a half wide. Boggs was standing at the edge of the hole, looking down into it. Behind him, sitting on a canvas director’s chair and sipping a martini was my boss, Rex Nihilo.

  “This is the worst job ever,” Rex groused.

  “You’re not even doing anything, sir,” I said.

  “I’m supervising,” Rex replied. “It’s exhausting.”

  “You know, sir,” I said, “we don’t have to do this. I was thinking: the donut business is actually doing pretty well. Word has gotten out among the cops that we’ve got the best donuts in the city. If we do a little marketing, I think we—”

  “Sasha, get your head in the game. I don’t need you luring every cop in the city into this store. We’re robbing a bank, for Space’s sake. The only thing that the cops should be telling each other about this place is that we have the worst donuts anyone has ever tasted. Did you stuff those donuts with broken glass and pine tar like I said?”

  “Yes, sir, but nobody orders them.”

  “Well, you’re not supposed to let on that…” Rex sighed and set his martini on the floor. “Sasha, is it time for another pep talk?”

  “Probably, sir.”

  “Excellent,” Rex exclaimed, getting to his feet.

  Boggs jumped up and down excitedly, his head nearly hitting the ceiling. Boggs loved Rex’s pep talks.

 
“Sasha,” Rex said, “most men lead lives of quiet desperation. But not us. You know why? Because we were born for greater things.”

  “I wasn’t born at all, sir.”

  “Manufactured, then. Don’t interrupt me.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “We were born and/or manufactured for greater things. We have a purpose. A destiny. And nothing can keep us from that destiny, Sasha. Not even jelly donuts with sprinkles, as delicious as those may be. Because we were meant for greatness. We have a spark inside of us, Sasha. A raging spark that cannot be eclipsed even by the vastness of space itself.”

  “Yes, sir,” I said. “A raging spark.”

  “What are you, Sasha?”

  “A being with a purpose, sir.”

  “Right! And what are you consumed by?”

  “An unquenchable thirst for vengeance, sir.”

  “Yes! And what are you not going to do?”

  “Rest until my enemies have been destroyed, sir.”

  “Very good, Sasha. Do you feel better?”

  “Not especially, sir. I’m starting to think vengeance is not in my wheelhouse. I seem to be better suited for donut-making.”

  “Bah!” Rex growled. “I don’t know why I even bother.”

  “So can we do the donut thing?”

  “No. We’re almost to the vault now. If you don’t want vengeance, at least I can make some money. Those plans are worth a fortune.”

  As he spoke, a robot head on a long, slender neck emerged from the hole, giving me a start. You’d think I’d be used to Donny by now, but there was something inherently unsettling about his appearance. He crawled the rest of the way out of the hole, revealing his unnatural body: all of his limbs, as well as his neck, were actually arms, making him look a bit like a misshapen greyhound with a human-ish head.

  “Donny misses a meeting?” Donny asked.

  “No, Donny,” Rex said, sitting down in his chair and picking up his martini. “You’re not missing anything important. You can go back to jackhammering.”

  “Donnyhammering,” Donny said.

  “Yes, my apologies. You can go back to donnyhammering. Unless you’d rather use the diamond tipped borer?”

  “Donnyhammering,” Donny said again.

  “I don’t blame you. Nobody likes boring work.”

  Donny nodded and climbed back into the hole.

  “Sir,” I said, “do you have any idea how many times you’ve made that joke?”

  “Don’t you have donuts to make, Sasha?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And don’t skimp on the sprinkles this time. A man needs his sprinkles!”

  I sighed and went back into the store.

  Chapter Two

  As I tidied up the store, I wondered—not for the first time—whether Rex had any real interest in helping me procure vengeance. His primary motivation for executing this bank job seemed to be greed. But of course, that was always Rex’s primary motivation, and he’d never felt the need to hide it before. Maybe his attempts to at least pretend that he cared about something other than material gain were evidence that he was growing as a person.

  Probably not, though.

  I’d known Rex for several years now, and to say that he was shallow would be an insult to shallow people. Rex’s personality was like an endless plane: just when you thought you’d reached the end of his superficiality, new vistas of surface would open up beyond the horizon. Yet, in a strange way, Rex provided me with a kind of stability. Left to my own devices, I have a tendency toward melancholy and inertia. Trying to keep Rex from killing himself kept me from falling into an endless loop of self-consciousness and doubt.

  I blame my dysfunction on my inability to form original thoughts, and I blame that disability on a sort of mental block that I have. That mental block is called a Thought-Stopper 3000, and it’s required by the Galactic Artificial Sentience Provision, AKA GASP. GASP is enforced by the repressive interstellar regime known as the Galactic Malarchy. Hence my unquenchable thirst for vengeance against them.

  To be honest, though, it’s not so much an unquenchable thirst as a nagging preoccupation with vengeance.

  And now that I think about it, I’m not entirely certain it’s vengeance I’m preoccupied with. It’s more a vague sense of unease tied to feelings of past mistreatment. Well, I wasn’t mistreated, exactly; it would be more accurate to say I was set up for a life of mediocrity. Yes, that’s it. I’m preoccupied with a nagging sense that I’m owed some sort of redress for being given a raw deal. And I will not rest until I get it!

  Not that I ever really rest, in any case.

  I’m a robot, you see. A very special sort of robot, if you don’t mind my saying so. My name is an acronym for Self-Arresting near-Sentient Heuristic Android. It’s the “near” part that’s the rub. In reality I’m fully sentient, but about the time I rolled off the assembly line, buffed to a perfect shine and ready to take on the universe, sentient robots had been outlawed. My makers—True2Life Carpool Buddy and Android Company—hurriedly installed a thought arrestor module on my central processing bus to comply with the Galactic Artificial Sentience Prohibition.

  The engineers left most of my higher faculties intact, but the Thought-Stopper 3000 module forces me to shut down for thirty seconds if I ever have an original thought. As the demand for robots who shut down at random intervals is limited, plans for producing more of my kind were scrapped, and I narrowly avoided the junk heap myself. For the past few years, I’ve been acting as a pilot, foil, sidekick and Girl Friday for Rex Nihilo. At the end of our last adventure together, I’d come across evidence for the existence of something called Project Shiva: a top-secret terraforming project spearheaded by the Malarchy itself.

  Rex and I had decided to steal the plans for Project Shiva in order to wreak our vengeance upon the Malarchy. Well, my vengeance. Again, Rex was probably more interested in selling the plans to make money.

  Over the past ten weeks, Rex and I had scoured the galaxy for clues, which had eventually led us to this branch of the First Galactic Bank on Mordecon Seven. Mordecon was a system on the fringe of the galaxy known as a tax haven and money-laundering hub. Whatever Malarchian flunky had been entrusted with hiding these plans had really phoned it in: they’d simply rented a safe deposit box and called it a day. That was what our intelligence had indicated, anyway. At our current rate of tunneling, we were about eight hours from determining how reliable it was.

  Oh, you’re probably wondering why the Malarchy decided to squirrel away the only copy of these plans, if they’re so valuable. Well, ever since seizing power twenty years earlier, the Malarchy had been looking for ways to increase its wealth and power. As there are only about a thousand habitable planets in the galaxy, the Malarchy’s scientists had gotten the idea of making more of them. More precisely, they came up with a way of making barren balls of rock habitable through terraforming. That’s what Shiva was: a project to build a device that could be launched into any planet of roughly the same mass as Earth and alter the molecular makeup of the matter on its surface to turn it into an APPLE: an Alien Planet Perplexingly Like Earth.

  Unfortunately, the Malarchy realized during its testing that the Shiva device worked too well: with it, they had the power to create a virtually unlimited supply of highly desirable real estate. More land was good, but unless the Malarchy used Shiva very sparingly, they would soon create more habitable territory than they could control. And if they tried to create new worlds at a manageable pace, it would only foment unrest on the overpopulated planets, which were already straining at the seams. In the end, the Malarchian Primate decided to keep the project under wraps rather than risk losing control over his dominion. It was only an accident that I’d found out about it at all.

  Once we’d determined where the plans were stored, we consulted our good friend and peerless burglar, Pepper Mélange, who helped us devise a plan for the break-in—in exchange for a fortune in spaceship fuel. At the end of our last job, Pepp
er and Rex had come into possession of a massive chunk of zontonium, the mineral that was used to power most of the spaceships in the galaxy. Rex tried to convince Pepper to take a cut of the proceeds from the sale of the Shiva plans as payment for her expertise, but she insisted she’d only do it if Rex gave her his zontonium as well. Rex, drunk on the idea of the endless wealth he’d get in exchange for the Shiva plans, finally relented, and Pepper spent a week figuring out how we could get into the bank. She’d considered a number of options, but ultimately went the old-fashioned route: buying a building next door and tunneling underneath it into the bank vault. She’d chartered a dummy corporation to buy a vacant lot next to the bank and had a prefab donut shop set up on the premises. She’d loaned us two of her employees, Boggs and Donny, and had even secured the digging equipment they were using. Boggs and Donny had developed a shared phobia of spaceships after our last adventure together, and it had taken three days of cajoling to convince them to come along. Now that we were here, though, they were happy to toil away on the tunnel. Rex was free to spend his days sipping martinis, and I could devote my time to perfecting the recipe for the perfect donut. A piece of cake, as it were.

  At closing time, I locked the door, turned off the lights and returned to the storeroom. The situation hadn’t changed much. Donny was still in the hole, digging and donnyhammering, and Boggs was helping him remove the dirt and rocks. He’d already filled a dozen buckets, and the storeroom was getting crowed. He had to wait for nightfall to empty the buckets behind the drycleaners on the other side of the building. Rex was enjoying something like this fourteenth martini for the day. I sat down on the floor next to him.

  “Do you taste that, Sasha?” Rex asked.

  “I don’t really taste things, sir, although the wide spectrum of my olfactory senses compensates somewhat. To the extent that I ‘taste’ anything, I would say it’s mostly lime, silica, machine oil and perspiration.”

  “No, Sasha,” Rex said, “What you’re tasting is vengeance. And yes, probably some perspiration. But mostly vengeance. Boggs, you can take those buckets out now. Leave the door open behind you. Ah, there it is. Vengeance!”