by Will Madden
“Mori, come in.”
A transparent image of the skiapod butler appeared on his helmet visor. Totally not in a dangerous way.
Caught mid-butle, Mori straightened and turned toward him. “Yes, Master Victor,” he said solemnly.
“Pestilence neutralized. ETA three minutes. Prepare my car. I’m headed to the Spyhole.”
The comm dropped as Victor upshifted for more VROOOOM.
On the final approach, an earth bridge carried the bike high above a magma runoff from the central vein below Mt. Myrtle. The heat was brutal: engines could give out quickly here. Human bodies too.
The chopper squeezed through a fissure in the rock wall. Blasts of icy air dimpled his riding leathers as he passed into the Storm Lair. The aggressive cooling system served as life support for the three-story corridor of surveillance equipment, satellite downlinks, matrix analysis cubes, and data platter arrays.
Mounted high on the ceiling and pulsing with a vascular lavender light was String-o, the digital heart of the Violet Storm operation. This was the Boswell Institute’s breakthrough computational lattice-mesh, a semi-conscious engineering miracle that housed a duoverse processing core with twin onboard hexeracts to implement nine-dimensional quantum sorcery. Times two.
The chopper whispered to a halt on the receiving platform across from the machinist bay. The platform rotated for some reason.
Mori awaited him, bobbing slightly at the knee. Although this was resting state for a skiapod, the motion lent his appearance an overeager air.
Victor tossed Mori the key to the bike. From a proffered tray, he snatched the keys to the Duesey parked outside Davy Castle, ready to take him to the Spyhole building in center city. He strutted on to his wardrobe to pick out a change of clothes.
Mori bounded after him. “You’ve defeated them all, sir?” Undoubtedly tracking Victor’s activity, he must have known the answer.
“No,” Victor replied dryly. “I had to leave the wimpy one behind to chase down the ringleader.”
He caught Mori glancing askew at the key in his hand. Constructing the Storm Cycle to Victor’s fussy design specifications had made it somewhat impractical for a one-legged skiapod to valet.
“I wouldn’t leave any loose ends, sir,” Mori said politely. “The Pestilence’s remaining members will be advancing now on the mission’s primary target.”
Victor stopped. “The primary target?”
Mori looked embarrassed. “Or. One should be sure, in any case, sir.”
Victor snagged a computer console and scanned the emergency dispatches around Dodoville. The sites of the Pestilence’s offensives appeared on a city map, marked with miniature explosions. Blue red and yellow arrows also indicated movement of police, fire, and medical. It looked like a Jackson Pollock.
“A mad dash crisscrossing the city,” he muttered. “Emergency personnel deployed everywhere. Creating disruptions.”
“Yes, crisscrossing.”
Victor stared at him mutely.
“Casting a wide net.” The butler offered an encouraging smile. Victor wanted to slap it off.
“Remember, sir,” Mori said patiently, “everywhere they went, the knights gave only haphazard attention to the police. Clearly, you were the one they wanted to engage.”
“Of course. Cumin Media’s intelligence network is larger and more sophisticated than the cops’.”
Mori shook his head. “The CKE doesn’t know you are Victor Cumin, sir. They only know you as the Violet Storm.” Subtle emphasis on violet.
“Who can defeat any one of them in single combat.”
“Perhaps, sir. But remember, the Church of the Knight Errant has thousands of members, many of which train secretly in equestrian arts. Today they sent only four.”
Three of whom he had given a sound public beating. The work now was to ensure his people at Spyhole’s presented the story correctly. He hacked into von Chesterdrawer’s computer to see how the bald old fart was mangling this one.
“Four is a biblical number,” he snarled, finally hearing Mori’s comment.
The skiapod shrugged. “So is forty.”
He was right. The four was important. But not for symbolic reasons.
“Logistics,” Victor mumbled.
Mori giggled, bobbing more vigorously now.
Victor sighed. “They didn’t send more marauders because they don’t have enough equestrian armor. They need more spider-silk.”
The console screen summoned an image of what looked like a mothballed factory in a wooded clearing. The computer-animated neon purple webbing across it.
“Once they acquire enough” Victor said, “they’ll be unstoppable.”
The skiapod clapped, his hands fluttering like little bird wings. “That does seem a concern, sir.”
Victor scowled at the display of excitement.
“String-o!” he shouted.
The computer’s translucent wiring flushed purple to indicate attention.
“Full CCTV sweep of Dodoville. Show me: Sir Bubo Skymole, Club Towers, and Ariadne’s Arachnophilia Euphorium.”
A jumbo holograph map of the city appeared on a table in front of him. The tower dominated the downtown in red. The 3D model was so detailed you could see a little Abhoc in handcuffs, still telling stories to bystanders while he waited for the police to load him into the van.
Deep in the forest, the spider den loomed in black. Bubo appeared on the edge of the wood in yellow. His vector graphic showed he was not moving.
“String-o, what is Sir Bubo doing?”
A live camera feed of the knight switched on. He was inside a mountain supply store, packing a body-length shoulder bag.
“Acquiring additional weaponry, a sewing kit, and salty snacks.”
String-o’s voice was unimaginably horrible, as if the words were spoken by a dying lamb, both forward and backward at once, also diagonally, inside out, underwater, and with a stutter, all rolled up in a ball and mixed with ground teeth and peanut butter.
It made Victor want to vomit out his eyeballs. Even Mori frowned a little.
“Can we do anything about that?”
“The voice?”
“No, the other soul-shredding sound horror!”
Mori shrugged. “I don’t believe so, sir. That’s the noise String-o projects from the six pocket dimensions posited by superstring theory.”
“Why not put a filter on it?”
“Along which pocket dimension do you wish to install it?” Mori asked reasonably.
“Then how ‘bout we just posit a different theory?”
Mori looked nervous. “That governs all time and space throughout the multiverse, you mean, sir?”
“Yeah.”
He scratched his jaw thoughtfully. “Hum. I’ll see what I come up with tonight,” he said.
“String-o, if you have anything else to add, say it through interpretative dance.”
The computer’s mass of wiring shifted into some rather rude-looking emoji.
“Thanks, girl,” Victor said, blowing it a kiss.
“Sir, I should warn you: the trade-off for making String-o’s circuitry invulnerable to flooding, magma, and ESD is that it has almost no tolerance for being patronized.”
“Mori, phone von Chesterdrawer.” Victor snatched up his onion mask from where it hung on the monitor. “Tell him to not to wait for me to put the paper to bed tonight. Say I have to bully/blackmail some investors again.”
“Very good, sir.”
He turned, whispering. “Also, you know my unbreakable quarterstaff? Brum broke it. Can you fabricate me something else?”
“Not without notice, sir,” the butler replied cheerily.
“Mori—”
“Which is why I began this morning!” The way his face beamed struck Victor as mildly psychotic.
“Perfect. You got about ten minutes. That’s about how long it’ll take me to figure out how to take a leak in this getup.”
“Oh peaches, sir! Of cours
e, I thought of that. All you have to do is . . .”
“Ten minutes, Mori! Don’t you ever take a breather?”
“Honestly, sir, I wouldn’t know what to do if—”
“Finish my damn weapons! I probably have like fifty dudes to fight!”
The bathroom door slammed shut.
The skiapod hopped to work. But only barely enthusiastically.
In the distance, the dark shape of the Euphorium lay like a half-buried stone in an overgrown field.
Victor hid the Storm Cycle in the brush and made the final approach on foot, treading silently down an old cart path that cut through the tall grass. About him, the air teemed with tiny white puffs floating across his field of vision. Dandelion umbrellas. As the moon poked through the cloud cover, they exploded into pinpricks of white fire. How magical!
Only after a moment did he notice the puffs were not the right shape. They were animal, not vegetable. Activating the magnifying scope on his digital eyepiece, he saw the legs held together in a tight bouquet, the fibrous hairs and the haunting arrays of eyes, and—was he imagining it?—the tiny glint of fangs. A flight of spider hatchlings was flurrying around him, ballooned on gossamer parachutes into the surrounding woods. Such a wealth of crafty hunters spawned here that most of their offspring had to trust themselves to the turbulent mountain winds for a chance at survival. They were carried across punishing Kolkhek heights or down into the river valley on the capricious furnace blasts of the volcano. Sometimes they even caught an updraft into the jet stream and ventured the wide world over.
Victor flung his arms open and let them scurry over him: the white and brown ones, black and speckled ones, meaty and leggy ones, deflecting off his body like driven snow.
The shriek a man makes at the sight of a spider is unlike the one he makes at his own reflection. For this terror is not of what is but what he has failed to become, what God in her wisdom or cruelty has declined to make him.
His late mother’s voice echoed in his ears. Twenty years after Rochelle Cumin’s death, Dodoville still remained under her influence. The Spyhole still bore her masthead, and even the Violet Storm, Victor suspected, somehow served as her agent. It was true that as one of her last acts, Rochelle had helped install the Consortium, the gangland regime Victor now used all his skill and knowledge to undermine—but hadn’t it always been her way: cast a web and later abandon it, use the strength she garnered from her successes to lay a bigger trap for more powerful prey?
Beyond the clearing, Victor’s eyepiece detected something moving through the undergrowth: agile as it was enormous, featherlight so the leaves hardly rustled in its wake.
He pressed on.
Ariadne’s Arachnid Euphorium was a refurbished textile factory, one that had produced “medieval” Dodovillean tapestries in the late 1990s. After a mudslide buried much of it, a new main entrance had been punched into the upper story. Beside the door, a whimsical neon sign flashed “FLIES WELCOME.” Below that, in hand-painted letters: “Business Hours 9am - 3pm.”
No one had been euphoric enough to post the name of the enterprise anywhere.
Bubo’s mare stood hitched to a post out front, grazing contently. Victor remembered from his surveillance report that her master had given her an off-putting name: Toad.
He examined the front door. Open. No sign of forced entry. He stepped inside.
In the dark, he found a gift shop. Adorable plush spiders. Decorative cobwebs. Postcards, silly string, bouncy rubber balls, T-shirts with four extra arms. A small library of coffee table books. A cellophane tube full of plastic bugs and worms. It all felt rather twee, even illuminated in the creepy neon of the window sign. Yoo-fucking-phoria.
Victor strode behind the counter and passed through the employees’ entrance to the back rooms.
An aseptic fluorescent-lit hallway terminated in a steel door. Key card lock, biometric scanner, and some kind of elaborate puzzler. Weaver Hall, the sign offered. DANGEROUS: KEEP OUT. This warning appeared on overlapping stickers that covered the metal portal from floor to lintel. It was propped open with a piece of wood.
Slipping inside, he emerged on a catwalk suspended above the loomworks. Below, the room teemed with tens of thousands of tiny bodies darting around pinwheel warps in reducing concentric paths. A deft apparatus, called the nelly, picked up webs, untangled the fibers, and spooled them away. Another machine twisted strands together to make thicker and stronger strands. On the level below, a battery of machines dyed the silk and wove it into bolts, which were stacked on palettes in the corner.
Square miles of material. Nobody supervising the work. The process seemed fully automated.
Victor had underestimated the scale of this operation. And its significance.
For two decades now, nearly every financial asset coming in and out of Dodoville had to pass through the hands of the Consortium. For that reason, no rival gang had managed to scrounge up significant opposition. But the production of a lightweight ballistics-resistant material could bring in an independent stream of funds from governments and private citizens across the globe. Any gang that controlled this factory would be able to offer the Consortium the first real challenge to its authority in a generation.
But should it fall into the hands of the CKE, Dodoville’s future was lost. At least the Consortium wanted something to hold tyranny over! The Pestilence would pillage the city and raze its buildings to the ground. How many silk-armored horses would they need? With no more than four, they had overrun the police, then terrorized the shopping district, the suburbs, and the night entertainment center. With a hundred riders, not even an army could stop them.
At the far end of the catwalk, the knight known as Bubo Skymole stepped out of the shadows. He had a drumstick in his hand and was eating messily.
“I’d hoped to give you the slip, Onion,” he said, wiping the animal grease from his chin. “Or should I say . . . the dip?”
“That doesn’t make any sense,” said the computerized voice through Victor’s mask.
“Twook-ker-dem-jeet!” Bubo growled. “I don’t give a fuck.”
Something about the Pestilence’s quartermaster had changed. He still moved with that afternoon’s awkwardness, but his bearing had soured, and he seemed disinclined to grant deference to anybody. Victor suspected he was about to confront the technician’s true form.
“Didn’t you like my party?” he said, his voice petulant. “I did so much planning to make you go home content. The finest knights of the realm delivered into your hands! The most conspicuous battle sites so you’d gorge yourself on the media coverage you crave. And to top it off: I laid down a really bitchin’ soundtrack for you to fight to, from a stereo system mounted on my horse! What more do ya want?”
Well, it’d definitely been a unique day, Victor thought. Engaging in deathly combat while a crowd swayed and sang “The Chain” had been the most surreal moment of his life. And he fought criminals in a onesie and slippers.
“I am the servant of Dodoville,” the Violet Storm pronounced, “not publicity. And I shall not rest until you and your kind are driven from the city. Forever this time.”
Bubo threw the half-eaten bone over the rail and watched it catch in the webs being woven by gorgeous orb spinners.
He shrugged.“That’s a good line. But if I had you balled up and sobbing right now, what would you confess to? Just wanting to help people? I dunno, maybe. Maybe not!”
Something about the threatening note in Bubo’s voice made Victor’s endocrine system clear his thoughts and soothe his nerves. The tingle of tranquility spread like meltwater to his extremities.
“You’ll have to defeat me to find out,” he said serenely.
“Just a minute.” He licked the grease from his fingers. “Before we get to the threat-making portion of the evening, I just want to thank you for making the resurgence of the Horselords possible. We simply did not have the technology to accomplish it. Sure, we had jet engines and awesome weaponry. Our combat sk
ills were whetted to a fine edge. But you just couldn’t win our kind of war anymore. Once upon a time, they had to build walls to keep us out. Now walls were no longer necessary. We were forced to live among our enemies and work beside them. To our disgrace we sent our children to school with their children. All hope seemed lost. But then you.”
Bubo clasped his palms together in a gesture of gratitude and admiration.
“The unstoppable fighting force who cheated bullets and the blades of knives. Live electricity danced in his hands but did him no harm. But how? Must be the purple suit. Not just any purple, but the same color as the ash of Yterpokhok—the sacred mountain heathens call Myrtle. Somehow the volcano itself infused the fabric with its power.”
The knight leaned nonchalantly on the railing, an oily satisfaction on his face.
“First we assumed some sort of plant fiber, a secret left over from the reign of Big Botany. Nope. Next—oh you’ll get a laugh out of this—we thought it was wool. For months we believed someone was herding super sheep up on a mountain crag. Funny, right? Laugh. I have to. Then one day. I was watching that Superman movie where they hold up a ton weight with one of his hairs. I know it doesn’t make any sense, but the moment I saw that, I knew the answer. Spiders! Steel-strength strands, just like the Man of Steel. After that, it was just a trip to the library. The lilaportia, the tiniest of the earth’s web spinners, who lay their eggs exclusively in the hot ash of our sacred mountain. The problem is, even harvesting thousands of these little fuckers, we couldn’t make more than a square centimeter a day. We were about to give up.”
Bubo smiled. “Then we found out about this place. We were, how do you say? Euphoric.”
“A pity you came so far for nothing,” said Victor, his voice eerily calm. “You are no match in combat for me, Sir Skymole. And you are all alone!”
“Am I?” Bubo pulled a gladius from his belt. Sized for the small knight, the sword looked no bigger than a toy, and he made a show of pretending he didn’t know which way was up. It slipped from his hands and fell from the catwalk, clattering loudly on the floor below.
“Aw, shucks. Now I’m defenseless.” He giggled.
