Warty Hugeman and The Fecund Clown of Rome

Warty Hugeman crouched against the fetid wall of the Roman catacombs, resting a moment to let the lactic acid scavengers in his blood do their work. He could hear the assassin breathing as the splashes of its footsteps died down. Some quirk in assassin clown ethics made it stop chasing him when he stopped running. Warty knew he could sleep for days and the clown would hold to the temporary truce, but the second he moved it would be after him. It was all in the email, a slickly-designed e-brochure for the clown’s services in an obscure language. “The Fecund Clown” was the best the timesuit could manage for what it was. It certainly looked like a clown, if monstrously fat and sporting half-meter fangs. The text went on for pages; phrases like “statistically successful induction of atavistic fear response” and “durable construction based on endergonic protein reinforcement” flitted by. tl;dr. He was dragging it to the recycle bin when the clown attacked.

Warty checked his weapons. The graviton laser was down to 10 percent. It had taken most of the charge to collapse the entrance of the catacombs behind him, but it had bought him a precious hour in order to retreat into the tunnels and initiate the repair systems to the timesuit. Two magazines of .45 ACP +P left. It seemed to do the most damage to the clown, but any chunks he blew away the clown just ate and they seemed to grow back. The rounds killed the scrabblers out-right, but there seemed to be an endless supply of them. The SmartCape was still online, even with half of it chewed, burnt, or abraded away. It wouldn’t offer too much more protection, but its weapon systems were functional, if almost depleted.

Warty listened to the clown breathe and he tried to slow his own. He wasn’t finding any weapons or ammunition as he ran, which meant either something was creating enough time interference to keep him from returning at a later date to plant them or The Fecund Clown will have killed him before he could return. The convulsing nature of meddled time meant that all the future Warties he’d met meant nothing about the likelihood of his survival on this night, in this time. He had dreamed of ending his life on his own terms, diving a starship into the heart of an exploding sun or lethal overgasm in the pleasure pits orbiting the burnt out husk of Mars. Anything but this.

His wristcom beeped. Repair to the timesuit was 70 percent complete. The main circuits had been fused at the muon-level by the clown’s first attack and the emergency timejump armband that would fling him one week in the past had foamed and fizzled, flowing to the ground and finally evaporating. Warty couldn’t conceive of a technology that could do that. The picobots in the suit were constructing a new time core by cannibalizing the old one. He had set them to leave the survival features and weapons of the suit untouched. They could eat the rest of the damn thing if that’s what it took to get out of this, he reasoned.

Warty looked in the direction of The Fecund Clown and flipped through the available image filters in his visual implants. The clown burned white in infrared, like staring into a coke furnace. The scrabblers around it were outlined in black, barely warmer than the ambient temperature. In ultraviolet, he saw the clown produce another from its body, a soft plop into the shallow liquid filth in the catacomb. In infrared, the tiny creature cooled quickly--a perfect replica of the clown in miniature--they would fight for their mother mass viciously, to be eaten and reabsorbed when they were killed. Warty had obliterated hundreds in the last few days, but the bulk of the clown seemed unchanged.

Warty dialed the graviton laser output so it would drain the battery in a single burst. He could discard the gun after that and the onboard anti-paradox generators would shiver it to dust. He checked and rechecked his remaining weapons. There was no sense in waiting any longer. Warty slaved the laser to his retinal implants and crosshairs were imposed over the infrared image of the clown. He aimed for the hottest part of the clown. It might be a reactor driving the insane thing, he thought.

Warty fired the laser, dropped it and launched himself into a run in one smooth movement. He could hear the howl of pain and anger coming from the clown as the stream of high-gravity photons slammed through its torso.

The SmartCape shed nanomines like vicious pollen as he ran. They were programmed to loiter and embed in organic tissue when they were picked up. He was listening for them to begin exploding when his wristcom beeped. He slapped it and it began to scroll text across the map of the catacombs projected by the visual implants. The picobots had salvaged what they could from the fused timecore. It was ready to be ejected. Warty smiled and deactivated the anti-paradox generators in the core.

Warty Hugeman stopped, turned and seeded the floor of the catacomb in front of him with the last pack of proximity grenades, keyed to the mass of the clown and fused for a mixture of thermal charges and diatomic acid delivery. Warty flooded the tunnel with light. He could see the clown coming toward him, sometimes running, sometimes undulating like a diseased snake.

The scrabblers were out front and went up first, blasted to a fine mist by the billions of nanomines that had saturated their pallid flesh. The clown faltered a bit, slowing as it realized all the pieces of itself it was using as scout were now a red, sparkling fog. Warty put an entire magazine from the .45 into the clown, hoping to distract it or enrage it to attack. It roared some alien gibberish and started toward Warty. The nanomines in its own skin didn't do very much damage, but millions of millimeter-wide smoking wounds made chewed meat and violet pus spray in every direction.

"Come on, you fucking cunt! I'm right here!" Warty yelled. The clown lurched a few meters closer. The grenades went off all at once, dousing the clown in acid and fire from a dozen directions. It howled again, charred and liquefied chucks of it raining down on the floor.

Warty stepped close enough to the suppurating, blistered mass and ejected the damaged timecore directly into the hole the graviton laser had carved out. The timebubble expanded around the entire clown and all movement inside it froze.

A fast sweep with nanometer radar confirmed no movement in the vicinity. Warty let himself collapse to the floor. The new core was 82% complete. Still enough time to take care of the clown. He communicated with the old core with a tightly focused beam of hyper-rotating neutrinos.

Time began to move inside the bubble. A second for a second, a minute for a second, a day for a second. The clown healed itself and then began beating on the walls of the timebubble, but it was sped up like bumbling cops in a silent movie. A month for a second of Warty's time, then a year a second. The clown stopped trashing and stood completely rigid, staring at Warty for objective decades, then centuries, then millennia. Eons passed within the bubble. The clown finally raised a fist and slammed it down on the wall of the bubble at normal speed to Warty's perception. It must have taken it billions of years of the tiniest movements to make that happen.

Warty looked at his wristcom, rivulets of sweat running down his face. The old timecore had maybe nine seconds left. The timebubble would vanish when it finally died, releasing the clown. Trillions of years flashed by within the bubble. Warty was down to a single grenade and a magazine of .45. He held them at the ready as the wristcom screeched an alarm as the timebubble evaporated. He waited for the clown to move. It looked the same-- leering, idiot grin with a nightmare of teeth, ragged motley.

It didn't move. Even its horrible breathing had stopped. Finally Warty edged forward and prodded it on its out-stretched fist with the barrel of the .45.

The Fecund Clown collapsed to dust. The hunt for whoever sent it began.

THE END