The smell of barbacued meat barely penetrated the thick stench of recycled station air as I pushed aside the hanging cloth that separated the restaurant from the teeming masses of space trash outside. The patrons weren't much better: armed and underfed, the ones who bothered to look up from their food glared at me as I stepped past them.
I took a stool at the bar and ordered the "special plate." I figured the "special" meant "rat", but when you've been eating reconstituted gruel for two weeks even that sounds good. I dug into the plate and tried to tune out the drumming of the station's gravity engines and the rhymthic thudding of boots on the metal floor.
Then a shadow fell over me and a mountain of a man engulfed the stool to my left. I glanced up at him and froze. This mountain was wearing the horns and draped fur of the Catoplebas headdress! One of those treacherous, murderous, bastards, right here on this station, sitting right next to me.
I was lucky he was distracted by the menu as I stared, then snapped my eyes away. What seemed like an eternity passed as I looked down at my empty plate. Then I looked back up at him,
"Hey, do I know you?" I said, trying to keep the fear out of my voice. He looked down at me, with no change in expression.
"Don' think so," he rumbled, like a volcano preparing to erupt.
"Uhhh, didn't we do a job together on Torrid II?" I said, my mind racing. I didn't know what I was trying to get him to say, or admit to.
"Never been to Torrid." A lie, and an obvious one -- everyone knew the Catoplebas met on Torrid every year.
"Okay. I guess not." I paid and stood up, my heartbeat thrumming in my ears as I crossed the tiled floor. It was multicolored and patterned like it was from some old vidreel, but the plastic was cheap and years of rough spacer shoes left it scratched and dull. As I reached out for the cloth door the scrape of a stool over the tile penetrated the background drone of the station and I spun to see the Catoplebas mountain leap off his chair towards me and pull a hammer from his back, inhumanly fast.
Screams from the other patrons barely registered; the only sound I heard was the thumping of his feet against the ground as he charged towards me, and the whirring and crackling of his charged hammer. I pulled my laser pistol from its holster and fired a shot into his side. He jerked back but didn't stop charging.
I rolled to the side as he swung his hammer towards my head and felt a brush of electricity down my back from the near miss. I got up on one knee, braced my elbow on my thigh against the recoil, and fired three quick shots. One missed, one hit his shoulder, and one buried itself in the fake fur of the headdress. I was sure that would slow him down, but he barely registered the hits and swung the hammer out towards me.
I tried to fall backwards out of the way, but a blinding flash of pain told me I failed as the end of the hammer cracked into my ribs. Electricity arced through my body and I felt myself flung backwards into a table. My vision was fading to black, I could smell scorched flesh, and I could barely feel the pistol in my hand, but I could still hear the thump, thump of his footsteps. I willed myself to stay conscious, clenched my hand against the pistol's grip, and blindly fired one, two, three, four shots, until I heard the dull "click" of an empty battery. What felt like an eternity of silence passed, then a loud thud of the mountain's body hitting the floor.