BRAIN WRECKS:

A Sample

From the story Troupe, a space operetta.

GOING ABOARD

Gordon Axelrod thundered through Phaze Station’s maze of boarding-area corridors clutching the metal egg in his big fist. His breath came hard, and sweat stained his waiter’s uniform. The operation’s cover was blown. The pursuing Tyrakians would just love to put him in an orbit all his own, without a suit, around the dead planet that Phaze Station called home.

A waiter’s role: what a stupid idea -- in fact, one of Grisham’s, damn him -- and a stupid idea whose time should never have come. The Tyrakians had spotted him as soon as he’d spilled soup on their chief of operational intelligence. Gordon was not good with trays of food. Weapons, yes; vichysoisse, no.

He dodged into a side passage, then another. Voices rose ahead of him. He turned once more, and ran headlong into a motley turmoil of men, women, and aliens of several builds and genders trundling long racks of clothes aboard a ship docked to the station.

“Excuse me?”  An enormous woman stuffed in a furry gray leotard grabbed Gordon’s collar. “Why weren’t you on board four hours ago?”  Her trumpet soprano rang his eardrums.

“I’ve got to – ”  Gordon stared wildly back over his shoulder. The unmistakable sounds of Tyrakian clawed feet, with their little toe bells, grew louder. He swallowed, looked at the big woman, and muttered, “Very sorry, I was drinking.”  He twisted free, diving past two racks of clothes to elbow a tall lumpy man aside and board whatever ship this was.

“Ha!  I knew it!”  Her words blared after him as he burrowed through another clothes rack -- this one full of dressy-looking red uniforms rank with sweat stains -- to emerge between two small bald men in the ship’s docking corridor. Gordon dived past the men and rolled aside into a tiny closet of a room, just in time to hear the sound of a hard lemon being loudly grated. A Tyraki voice.