The angry light emitting diode flashed ominously on the dash console for three hundred arcseconds straight. Sweating internally with dread, the humble space cop pushed the TALK button and coolly answered, “Yes?”
“ABOUT TIME YOU SACK OF STICKY CHIPS.” It was the commissioner, using full administrative privileges to turn up the volume for maximum spitfire. “SERGEANT STYLE—OR SHOULD I SAY—OFFICER STYLE, BECAUSE YOU’RE DEMOTED AS OF NOW—YOUR TRANSFER TO THE EQUILATERAL GALAXY IS EFFECTIVE IMMEDIATELY. ALL ONGOING CONFLICTS MUST BE RESOLVED WITHIN EIGHTY-SIX THOUSAND AND FOUR HUNDRED ARCSECONDS OR YOUR SORRY FAUX MEAT ASS WILL BE DISASSEMBLED. TRANSMISSION COMPLETE.”
Style’s compound eyes spasmed as the glowing chevrons on his mechsuit rotated and formed a star. Following the ship’s spontaneous teleportation to the assigned destination, he blacked out.
He woke up to his neurons being stirred into a frenzy by a forcefully introduced energy tank.
Antennules fluttering with distress, he outstretched his sturdiest pereiopod—a humanoid one—and utilized its extremities to back slash command retrieve a log of recent disturbances. There was only one. He exhaled calmly and expanded the report for details which read:
LUXURY CRUISE LINER HIJACKED BY PIRATES FROM THE PLANET WEDGE. OBJECTIVE, INITIATE PEACEFUL COMPROMISE FOR THE SAFE RELEASE OF PASSENGERS AND CREW FROM THEIR CAPTORS. RECOVER STOLEN PROPERTY.
But when Style carefully read it aloud using his manual brain to decipher the dot matrices, it came out like: “Res-cue… help-less… meat bags and… ut-ter-ly… des-troy all… hos-tile… cri-mi-nal… scum… who try to ob-struct… the long, raptorial appendage of justice.”
He downloaded the last ping coordinates of all the passengers from their ticker-wristlets. “SYSTEM—who do I have for back up?”
“NO ONE, OFFICER STYLE.” The disembodied ship computer replied. “ARE YOU SATISFIED WITH MY ANSWER OR DO YOU HAVE OTHER INQUIRIES?”
“…Isn’t android labor actually just slave labor?”
The ship computer bean playing the Intergalactic Peace Anthem and a prerecorded mantra, “IT’S NOT UNETHICAL IF IT’S EFFICIENT.”
“…Thanks a lot for reaffirming my unshakable beliefs.”
Style ignored an incoming broadcast light in favor of gazing at the radar—which showed an 8-bit monolith closing in on his tiny, green pixel. Instead of replying, he broadcasted his own message: “Hello this is Officer Style. Please disclose the object name of the unidentifiable mass behind your ship.”
The pirate captain and his main crew huddled into the screen’s active recording area. They were shiny and gnarled like something Style expected to find in a spaceship’s front grill after flying full speed through an asteroid belt.
“WE MEET AGAIN, SERGEANT STYLE! I’VE WAITED SEVEN REVOLUTIONS AROUND THIS SUN TO CROSS PATHS WITH YOU AGAIN. YOU WILL NOT ESCAPE ME THIS TIME! I—”
“Divulge the information I requested or I will arrest you for obstruction to justice. What’s that behind you? Is it a secret weapon?”
“YOU AROUSE MY SUSPICION. MY SENSORS INDICATE THAT NOTHING IS THERE UNLESS YOU MEAN THE PLANET ITSELF. IT’S IMPOSSIBLE FOR YOU NOT TO REMEMBER—”
“I just don’t have any of your files on record.” Style’s maxillipeds drummed his carapace chest plate. He leaned back and pretended to run his hands through his tangled antennules as all of his mechanical pereiopods mobilized underneath the console, flipping a myriad of switches in a specific sequence required to activate the ship’s last resort weapon. One by one, he shut down numerous applications and rerouted all of the ship’s resources to the SOLAR CANNON. “I’m only here to investigate that which is behind you.”
“AS I SAID, MY SENSORS INDICATE THAT—”
“You’re saying that your back room, black market jerry-rigged sensors are better than my official top-notch, state-of-the-art officially issued Intergalactic Law Enforcement equipment?” A policeman’s patrol ship was a junker, but he said the word ‘official’ twice hoping each time it made things sound better than they were. 
“—NOTHING IS BEHIND ME. NOW, SURRENDER OR DIE—”
“Prove it! I dare you to shoot it. I’m sending you the coordinates. As you can see, it is between Wedge and your ship. I’m preparing to surrender now.” Style turned on the atmospheric stabilizer in his stomatopod mechsuit.
“VERY WELL, AND TO AMUSE MYSELF I WILL HUMOR YOUR AMOEBA-SIZED BRAIN.”
The SOLAR CANNON was fully charged and locked on target when the enemy ship’s guns reversed direction. Style pulled the final lever.
KA-CHOOOOOM!
The blast enveloped the enemy ship, and with its shield and anti-radiation casing obliterated it spiraled out of orbit.
It was pitch black for thirty arcseconds in Style’s patrolship before the back up generator hummed online. The lights were dim but the stealth shields were fully operational. Until eighty-six thousand and four hundred arcseconds of solar absorption, the ship’s traveling capabilities were disabled.

After entering ejecting from the patrolship, he entered Wedge’s upper atmosphere and began to skim the skies. Chunks of the cruise liner floated like ugly kites as bandits picked them apart for scrap.
Tracker indicated there were two passengers left stranded in the remnants of a subdivided compartment—a supply closet eight thousand meters away and still moving.
Style throttled towards their location, and not even a hundred meters into the course, pinball-checked a dozen different bandits—all engineers armed to the mandible with hot welding torches and laser cutters. He dodged one drive by after another. As soon as the distance tightened, two to three suits at a time were firing at him, blowing past, and then circling back around for another pass of laser barrages.
“LOG. High-key ammunition conservation. Low-key I have sixteen different photoreceptor pigments per row of ommatidia and I can’t tell the difference between cloud formation and sentient aggregates.” One eye stalk curved over his shoulder while the other zoomed in ahead. Either they were flying at him or he was flying at them. “UPDATE. Preparing  to engage all exosphere-dwelling hoodlums within range of the ASS-SPREADER.”
‘ASS-SPREADER’ was the name of Style’s generic assault buster. It was non-automatic and its capabilities we limited to one shot at a time as quickly as he could trigger them.
Accelerating, decelerating, juking left, and juking right—Style wove in and out of eclectic shoals of engineering squids and fired exclusively at tailgates and crotch metal.
One beam up the ass wasn’t enough to decommission all the suits. Slow-moving, heavy-armored squids were whirring all up in his face. He fired up to five shots per, but as soon as one dropped another two filed in for the attack. The delay between trigger-pull, shot, and the time it took for hits to land caught up to him. Style could smell suit carapace heating up and it smelled like burning rainbows.
“LOG! These chop shop delinquents desperately dislike the law. To earn their respect I must adopt their thief-life ingenuity.” Style swooped into newly dispersed wreckages and looted weapon components.
His maxillipeds and pereiopods passed components back and forth at blinding speed until he had a rudimentary, fully functional homing laser assembled in his hands.
“I call this ‘MONEY-SHOT’.”
Style held down the button and the weapon’s prism lens directed a solid energy beam into the nearest bandit squid, whose armor and jet packs gradually melted off. As the opposing suit’s pilot ejected, the beam ricocheted from the explosion and into the adjacent squid. 
VRR-RR-RR-RR-BOOM! VRR-RR-RR-RR-BOOM!
Like popping rubber globules with a magnifier.
Suddenly, the shoal of squid thinned and withdrew their attacks. The object of his mission was two thousand meters away when something hacked his suit’s communications and force-accepted an incoming broadcast queue.
A garbled, badly translator voice pieced together this: “HOW DARE YOU SERGEANT STYLE. MEET AGAIN WE. DESTROYED PIRATE KING SHIP YOU DID. UNINVITED TO MY DOMAIN YOU ARE AND TO USE EXCESSIVE FORCE. FROM BRUTE TACTICS PROHIBITED FROM USING ARE YOU NOT?”
“Nice try but all planets in the Isosceles-45 system including Wedge are outside Intergalactic Peace jurisdiction. I don’t have to follow any laws—therefore I am the law.”
“TO PLAN YOU ENTER TO EXTRADITE MY WORKFORCE HOW DARE?”
“Wha-at? No-o, no. I’m here to eradicate anything in my reticle. By the way—just who am I talking—” The user interface finished re-coding and updated its drivers—answering the question before he finished asking it. In the same relative vicinity of the saved coordinates, loomed an enormous cybernetic supermass surrounded by a field of aerial mines. “—to-oh—I don’t remember at all.”
“I AM LEVIATHAN! BEFORE ME SERGEANT STYLE WILL BE MADE TO COWER FINALLY!”
The tracker blipped excitedly. It confirmed that the two passengers were presently lodged somewhere in the organic jelly rolls of this mountainous, shaking mass of tentacles.
LEVIATHAN regurgitated a school of drones.
“NE-VER ES-CAPE SER-GEANT STY-LE! NE-VER!”
Though they were built crudely from refurbished scrap, the drones propelled their way towards Style at thirty knots.
Style dipped into the minefield with the drones hot on his telson. A few of the drones pursuing him exploded. LEVIATHAN apparently wasn’t devoting that much CPU power into operating the drones. Seizing an opportunity, Style dragged the drones and the mines they magnetically attracted around and around LEVIATHAN in circles while he searched for the supply closet. He found it—and during each pass he barrel rolled underneath and chipped at the biological substance coating its sides. Scaly matter flaked off the sawtoothed dactyls of his raptorial appendages as he flew off. His two stomachs gurgled with disgust. “Ugh!”
The supply closet began to slide out of the supermass’s crusted crevice.
Style pulled way then did a loop-de-loop straight into LEVIATHAN’s core and at the last second, with hundreds of drones and aerial mines in tow, dove so fast that on radar it looked like a ninety-degree angle turn.
Maxillipeds scraped the outside of the supply closet, pereiopods hooked into the divots, and Style dragged it off with him.
The school drilled LEVIATHAN point blank, flooding its cybernetic jelly with hot bullets, and the mines fast collided into them from behind. Flames and explosions rocked LEVIATHAN tumbling into the thermosphere. There it began to crumble like a giant cake of slimy ground meat and steel ball bearings.
“UP-ON YOU… A CURSE… STY-LE…” Static.
His notifications cleared.

Checking up on the health and physical condition of the two passengers was impossible but the pings meant they were alive, that they had suited up following procedures when the emergency arose,because the ticker-wristlets ran on energy from the suits’ battery packs. Style had to land somewhere. Descending was slow and excruciatingly boring, but he couldn’t send them to his patrolship until the engines had absorbed enough sunlight and the environmental thermo-regulator could run. It was currently freezing in there. Now if he peeled off the door too soon, he risked exposing the poor, helpless space civilians to heat. They would vaporize. That he wouldn’t do, but he thought about it as a way of passing the time. Open it. Zap! I open it. Then, zap!
Later, after three thousand arcseconds of gliding over the ocean, he managed a smooth landing on a factory manufactured bridge, one of many that connected a group of nearby islands together. The area was ripe with mishandled satellite equipment, broken mechsuits, and abandoned seafaring ships that had been gathered there by the current and trapped by the network of bridges.
Style promptly pried the supply closet open and peeled the door clean off with the seal attached. As easily as he would mercury, his raptorial appendages balled up the scrap and chucked it overhead. Freed at last, the two female pheromone producing organisms climbed out of their chunky prison. One was slender as a whip and the other was a rough globule of globules.
The dank odors of water vegetables and marine life propagating flooded their vents, including Style’s, when their suit computers suddenly deemed the atmosphere livable and switched to outer circulation to conserve power. Everyone gagged.
The whip wheezed,“Th—this planet stinks terribly!”
The globe heaved, “Disgusting! It’s disgusting! Where are we?”
“I don’t think it’s the planet,” Style coughed. “I was breathing fine until you two emerged. I’ve deduced that the smell is coming from the inside of a suit—one of yours—uurrgh—and I’m going to avoid you both instead of finding out whose bowels are completely evacuated.”
Though it was a front he posed to prevent victims from clinging, part of his fake deduction was correct and stunned both ladies into silence.
Style surveyed the area. “LOG. The planet’s natural magnetism tampers with my tracking device. Pings have become intermittent. Readings implicate one of the passengers is circling my location at a high spee—”
Metal alloy plates in the bridge path quaked screechily. They braced themselves as the bridge drifted over the water and then down the cascade. Sheets of water swished around their lower extremities.
“RESTART LOG. I’ve identified an unknown species of slug lurking beneath. Classification—large—very large—and shiny. SUBCLASS ‘BIG NASTY’. It’s probably an invasive species of slug. Maybe it’s benign.”
The water boiled. An undulant, liquidy voice surfaced from the frothing sea. “SS-SSERGEANT… SS-SSTYLE… I SS-SSEE YOOUU…!”
“—UPDATE. It has identified me somehow with its hundreds upon hundreds of little eyes and it’s not benign—it hates me.” His visual screen UI finished re-coding, allowing him to zoom in. Closer inspection of a snapshot revealed eyes nestled in every spiraling cluster of glittering scales.
Another foul-smelling wave crashed into the bridge. The ocean slurped the overflowing runoff.
BIG NASTY brought its flippers down like rotary blade, slicing and dicing the bridge into pieces. The divided bridge slid apart. The floating partition they were on spun around and away.
Trembling and weeping, the ladies hugged each other. The glob screamed, “We’re going to be murdered!”
“Mollify your mammaries,  madam. Officer Style is here to protect and serve.” Angling his shot, Style fired MONEY-SHOT for the last time and emptied the barrel on the nearest shipwreck. The honing laser, stronger than he supposed, punctured multiple wreckages floating in the water. Resultant heat glazed the surface of the sea with lattices of cooling metal. “Time to move.”
“Are you insane?” The shrill whip cried. “Can’t you fly us out of here?”
“Supposing I do and BIG NASTY hops out of the water and eats us in midair?”
CRRASSH! SPLASH! They hightailed it across to the nearest shipwreck as BIG NASTY galumphed through the bridge pieces. The whip and the glob held onto a bent periscope for dear life. The wreckage sank faster with the three’s added weight.
Style discarded the empty gun over his chunky, segmented shoulder. He shooed the fretting quadripeds. “Go, go! I’ll be right behind you!”
“Without a gun, officer?!”
“Don’t move! He’s trying to trick us or something! He’ll feed us to it if we’re not careful!”
Style planted his pleopods behind a gun turret on what was left of the ship’s deck. Biramous antenna felt the gun carpus for a port. “The wreckage is taking on a lot of water. We don’t have much time which is why you should abandon it now.”
Pop! The second antenna found a port and activated manual operation of the gun. The cylinders started steaming and burning off the condensation.
BIG NASTY erupted over the bow with its mouth-hole frothing with sea-filth, endless rows of razors descending towards the inside of its throat as far as Style could see, and lunged roaring.
“VENGENCCCE!”
Screaming, the whip and glob ran to the next sinking wreckage.
Bright, explosive shells riddled the BIG NASTY’s faceless head-zone. Style’s three pairs of arms vice-clenched the spade grips and kept firing blindly until the snarling, drooling slug fell backwards into the sea still raging.
Style was swimmeret-deep in water. He grabbed the periscope, scuttled up the conning tower, and leapt across. He landed by the shivering quadripeds.
“Why are you two still here?!”
“Please don’t yell at us! We’re scared.” Their eyes were gushing hysterical tears.
Groaning, the humble space cop ran a diagnostic of his patrolship. It had absorbed enough energy by now to sustain life comfortably.
“Don’t touch anything in my ship, alright?” The rostral plate and carapace of his stomatopod suit swung open and he climbed out of the exoskeleton one leg at time. The helm, parts of the cephalothorax, and the raptorial appendages separated with him. “You’ll both fit just not comfortably.”
The glob gasped with deep disgust, “You’re a biped.”
His mandibular palps clapped slowly. The whip was silent.
The two rescue victims climbed into his suit with room in the thoracic cavity to spare when their limbs folded.
“I’m a non-ped,” he argued briefly as the thoracic segments closed. “Good-bye.”