Fore!

“That’s right, just curl your fingers around it” Jay murmured “Use both hands”

“Like this?”

“Oh yeah, that’s great”

“Now what?”

“Crouch down a bit more and keep your head straight. You need a nice smooth stroke”

Cass scowled and wrinkled her nose “These balls are weird”

“Yeah, you need to pay attention to them”

“Go on,” Jade urged, from the sidelines “put your shoulders into it! You can do this!”

Cass turned and stuck her tongue out at her “Don’t put me off” she complained “This is harder than it looks”

“Yeah, right” Jamie scoffed “It doesn’t look that hard”

“Do you want to do this?”

“Nah, you’re okay”

“Get on with it!” Yakekeekekek bellowed furiously, spittle spraying from his flabby maw “Or so help me, I’ll ram those balls down your damn throat”

“Yeah, as I was saying” Jay said, pointedly “I want a nice smooth stroke”

“Okay, okay” Cass grumbled “I’m doing it”

Resuming her position, she tapped the Hyperclub on the floor to arm it and squinted down at the three balls, oscillating around each other on top of the tee. While she wasn’t entirely certain, she was pretty sure that old-fashioned golf balls didn’t involve quite as much micro-macro entanglement as these did.

Giving the club an experimental swing or two, Cass frowned and straightened once again “Are you sure we definitely playing through the middle of that battle?”

“It’s one of the hazards” XC-21, Yakekeekekek’s majordomo said, smoothly “Your golfing apparel should afford protection from the worst excesses of these primitive’s weapons”

Cass scowled at the sleek, spotlessly white droid. The bodysuits they’d been required to change into as they flew from the GELF asteroid to the one habitable word in this system, clung and rode up in all the wrong places. Worse, she was entirely unconvinced that they would offer any protection whatsoever from the swords and axes being swung by the aliens teeming in the valley below.

“Yeah, right” she muttered, squaring up to the tee and tapping the club on the ground once more.

“Don’t forget to follow through when you take the shot” Jay reminded her.

“In this suit?” Cass swung and smacked the balls with the club, sending them arcing high over the battle raging in the valley below, before they smacked down near the edge of the press and detonated. The explosion sent dirt, blood and alien body parts high into the air “What the fuck!?” she screeched, stumbling backwards in shock.

“Thirty six attributed kill points” XC-21 announced to a polite ripple of applause from Yakekeekekek’s party “Four thousand six hundred and twenty four metres to the hole”

The sound of panicked screams drifted up from the valley.

“I’m sure we can get a better body count than that” Yakekeekekek waddled forward towards the tee, repugnantly resplendent in his own clingy bodysuit.

“No way” Jade snapped “You can’t be serious – Nobody said anything about killing sentients!”

“Of course” Yakekeekekek sneered as he lumbered past her “The body count is just one of the ways we score this game”

The Dwarfers all looked away with an involuntary shudder as the bloated GELF bent over and placed his balls on the tee

“I reckon I should be able to kill a good hundred or more of the critters...”



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Yakekeekekek’s about to slaughter a whole load of innocent aliens in the name of golf – any objections?

Who’s playing the next shot?
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