Free The Sheriff of Yrnameer by Michael Rubens

extra two days to cross the plains. Along the way they’d lost another member of their party.
    He’d been particularly enthusiastic about kicking the dead Taknean, and that enthusiasm had cost him: he had directed his final and hardest kick toward one of the spikier patches on the Taknean’s torso, and one of those spikes had penetrated his thick boot and jabbed him in the toe.
    He was feverish and complaining within a few hours. By the next morning they’d all grown so tired of him that they abandoned him near a wash with a thin trickle of water flowing through it, leaving him with some food, a weapon, and a promise to pick him up on the way back.
    Even if they had intended to keep their word, it wouldn’t have mattered. Upon their return they would have discovered his gleaming skeleton, the bones picked clean. It wasn’t the fever that had killed him. It was the thousands of tiny beetlelike creatures that had swarmed over him at night.
    So now there were eight of them, pitching camp as the light faded. One of them had managed to shoot a fat, furry animal that they’d come across, rooting in the dry dirt for tubers. It stood on itshind legs and stared at them stupidly, not used to predators, until it was struck by a bullet many times too powerful for the job at hand.
    They gathered up the pieces they could find and tried unsuccessfully to start a fire. One finally grabbed the Krager stove and sat apart from the others, grumbling and swearing as he repeatedly pumped the plunger and twisted the two knobs and slid the slider thing.
    There was a dull, concussive thud, and a small mushroom cloud rose from the spot where he had been sitting. And then there were seven Bad Men.
    “Hey!
Hey
!” Cole pounded on the cockpit door with his fist, knowing they’d never hear him. The Payper swirled about him, still babbling instructions: “Before continuing to page thirteen, please make sure you’ve read and understood …” “… two copies must be made of this sheet, and submitted with …” “… this sheet has been left blank intentionally. This sheet has been left blank intentionally. …”
    Cole spotted Teg’s helmet, propelled himself to it, pushed off the ceiling, reached the door again. He pounded on it with the helmet. “Hey! Open up!!”
    “Thank you for your cooperation.” It was the patbot. It was about to disconnect the skirt that sealed the robot to the window, and when it did Cole would be sucked out of the hole into space, or the cockpit would implode, or both.
    He brought both legs up to the cockpit door and sprang across the cockpit, the Payper dancing in his wake. He hit the viewing window, grabbing onto the edge of the hole to keep himself from bouncing back from his own momentum. The patbot was disconnecting just as Cole moved his hand out of the way and shoved the top side of Teg’s helmet into the aperture.
    The vacuum on the other side of the glass yanked the helmet into place like a ten-ton drain plug. But the seal was imperfect—the helmet was designed to fit human heads, not plug precisely circular holes. There was a screeching, hissing
whoosh
as air jetted violently out into the nothingness through the skinny, half-moon crevices along the sides of the helmet, and then the
whoosh
was cut off by near-simultaneous
fwoomps
as the gaps were plugged by sheets of Payper.
    But the vacuum was pulling inexorably at the clog, and suddenly,
whoosh
, the wad on one side gave out and
fwoomp
was immediately replaced by more Payper, and then the same happened on the other side,
whoosh fwoomp!
initiating an uneven rhythm of
whoosh fwoomp! whoosh fwoomp fwoomp!
as physics began winning its battle of attrition with bureaucracy.
    Cole pushed off the window and flew back to the cockpit door. Behind him he could hear the
whoosh fwoomp
and the suddenly muffled voices of sheets of Payper sucked away in midsentence: “If you have questions regarding the
mphmmm mmm mmmm …
” He could also hear a creaking,