“It sure felt like it,” she says, raising her snout in the air.
“Yeah, I’m going with Steampunk,” Doc says, ashing his cigarette.
“No smoking on the steamboat,” Ray tells him.
“That’s why I’m finishing my post-victory cigarette now.”
We hear the screech of the griffins on the horizon. It is harder to see them approach on account of their bodies not being covered in mirrored scales, but they get closer eventually, and they’re big – ugly too.
“Griffins?” Mirror’s eyes flare at me. “And where’s Chrono? He’d better be coming if I have to coordinate with griffins.”
“Rocket?”
“He should be here any moment now…”
Pixie dust and whatnot swirls in the air as Chrono the blacksmith, aka some kid from Brazil who has somehow made his way into our narrative, materializes into digital dreamworld existence. He’s got his shirt off, an ax thrown over his shoulder, and I swear to Jeebus he’s oiled his pecs up.
I turn to Rocket and give him the fuzzy eye.
“What?” he whispers. “I thought Mirror liked him.”
“She does,” I say under my breath, “but that doesn’t mean you had to butter him up.”
“I figured she could use some encouragement,” he says under his breath. “Besides, Chrono was down for it.”
“Hello, Chrono,” Mirror purrs. She moves towards him in a sultry way, making sure to keep her rump high in the air behind her.
Doc flicks his cigarette to the ground. “Let's get this freak show on the road.”
After a little more banter, it's up and away we go.
Frances is snuggled in next to me, or at least, that's how I imagine her being, and Chrono is to my right, his oiled body reflected off Mirror’s scales; Ray Steampunk and the War Faun are tooting along behind us in a flying steamboat; Rocket and Aiden are on griffins racing each other; and Sophia has decided to use her own flying prowess, impressing us with her aerial moves, twists, and her loserific magical abilities.
Someone mentions our drop off point being somewhere on the westernmost end of Hyperborea, and that someone definitely ain’t me. Even with Frances this close to me, and the great view of Tritania below us, I’m already in fight mode, itching for a brawl, cruisin’ to give a bruisin’.
One track mind.
Doing what Mrs. Hughes’ favorite only child does best.
~*~
A variant of the Flight of the Bumblebee plays out in my head.
Bomb bomb bomb BOMB BOMB, bomb bomb bomb BOMB BOMB, bomb bomb bomb BOMB BOMB, bomb bomb bomb BOMB!
And that's exactly what we get to doing as soon as we see the Reaper forces: bombing the living hell out of them, blowing them back to the Middle Ages, which kind of makes no sense considering we’re in a fantasy world that’s technically mirrored upon the Middle Ages.
But regardless – explosions!
“Time for some kablooey!” I shout, on the verge of equipping my white rhinestone cowboy hat, item 34, and my lasso, or should I say Wonder Woman's Lasso of Truth, item 379.
“Don't you even think about wearing that hat, Quantum!” Mirror roars.
Frances laughs, and slugs me in the arm.
“Hey!” I say, as we continue over the foothills of the Klin Mountain Range. We're about to be in Reaper territory, and I haven't decided how I'd like to go about delivering a fiery death from the sky.
If I had my choice, I would just parachute down there using my Amelia Earhart parachute, item 511, and open up a good ol’ fashioned can of whoop ass, but Doc has said to make it an aerial assault, and I’m not trying to buck the system, especially with whatever tech the skull boy crew may have.
I’ve got a couple of options for an opening statement: my Bomberman bomb, item 385, or my GBU-43 MOAB, item 358, which seems more appropriate. Better get approval if I’m going to drop the Mother of All Bombs.
Me: Doc, I got a MOAB, am I good to go with that?
Doc: Let’s hold off on that. What else do you have? You don’t have the FOAB, do you?
Me: I only buy American, you know that. How about my GBU-57A/B? Massive Ordnance Penetrator could do nicely, and I have its controls hooked up to a PS4 remote. You in?
Doc: MOP it is!
“We're going for a little kaboomski, Frances, so hold on to your ass.”
Frances rolls her eyes.
“I meant that literally,” I tell her as I start scrolling through my list. I'm tucked up under one of Mirror’s scales, trying my best to get comfortable, but you try riding a dragon for an hour and come away without some chafing or a few cramps.
Doctor ‘I don't want anyone else to have fun’ Wang is up ahead of us, and if she keeps up her pace, she's going to be in the range of my MOP when I drop it.
I give her a gesture to get behind us, and she actually sees it, because she's flying backwards so she can look at us.
She sees my gesture, rolls her eyes, and with her arms crossed over her chest, she lets Mirror get ahead of her.
Mirror isn't having any of the sass, and she’s sure to pop off a little cloud of sparkling smoke in Sofia's direction just as we pass.
“Thatta girl, Mirror!”
“Take that cowboy hat off!”
“I’m going for something here, trust me!”
To my right, I catch Morning Assassin riding a griffin. Damn, he looks swell; I hate to turn up the heat on our bromance, but seeing a guy dressed as a ninja riding a big-ass griffin with a twelve-foot wingspan, a gnarly lion face, and talons the size of my Bowie knife is the epitome of badass.
Aiden gives me the one-finger salute, and I start to laugh, the wind whipping all around me as Mirror increases her speed. You try killing a guy for two subjective years and not find it funny when he flips you the bird. Hell, there are at least two of those killings in which I cut off his middle fingers, strung them up on a necklace, and wore them around for the whole day.
They didn't like that look at Barfly's, and I barely got in, even after bribing Croc.
But hey, what the hell else was I supposed to wear to a Mardi Gras party?
With the griffins behind us now, Ray and Doc in the flying steamboat, and Sophia's grumpy ass long gone, I shout for Mirror to kick it into high gear.
“Okay, here's how it's gonna go down: we're going to get up there, and as soon as we see the center of their camp, I'm going to equip something that you can't carry. You ever seen Dr. Strangelove?” I call out to Mirror.
“Dragons don’t watch movies!” she shouts.
“What?” Chrono shouts over to me.
I fire off a message to everyone, to make this easy.
Me: I'm going to equip my jetpack and fly ahead. I need everyone to stay back for this, because the kaboomski ain’t going to be pretty, especially if you live in your mom’s basement and parade around in Proxima worlds wearing a skull mask.
Doc: Sit back and enjoy the death, kiddos.
Me: That’s the spirit, Doc!
Rather than wait for Sophia to respond, I jump off Mirror’s back, just as item 567, my steam-powered jetpack, appears on my back. I blaze forward, also equipping my Reaper skull, item 551, to utilize all the data made available to me through the skull. Just when I'm over the center of the Reaper camp, I equip my MOP, the PS4 remote appears in one hand and I ride it down.
Boy howdy is it a good time! I get to a point about eight hundred feet up, and I blast off the giant bomb, my movements sped up by my AA bar, my hands on the controller as I button mash, triggering the explosion.
The explosion throws me up even further, and sure, my life bar takes a bit of a whupping, but I'm still good to go.
I glanced down and see the blowback, the smoke, the fire, Reapers running towards weapons, Reapers logging out, lots of panic, and my crew on the verge of attack.
After a little spiral just to look cool, it’s back to the ground I go, my jetpack spewing steam behind me.
I land, and start blasting at the skull babie
s with my BFG 9000, item 100.
Doc: Goat incoming!
Doc touches down to my right, blasting way at skull babies with two sleek Uzis. Chrono superhero-lands on the other side of him, turning up the death with his silver hammers, his body shiny as a newborn straight out of the womb.
A Reaper with a mutant hack machine gun starts street-sweeping, killing anything and everything his weapon can hit, including his own people. He's a buffed-out bozo, a jacked-up Mickey Mouse in Día de los Muertos regalia, a target for my wrath.
I’m made in the shade as I hit the AA brakes and sidestep his beefy slugs, watching them pass before my face as I figure out the best way to get him before he gets us.
Hackie, item 554, forms in my hands as I dive and roll.
He screams feed me! inside my skull as he handshakes with my Reaper skull, and bada boom bada bing, I flick the switch to ‘freeze’ and turn the jabroni into a Reapercicle.
And sure, I'd love to give him the ice pick treatment as a follow-up, but there are plenty more skull boys and gals to take out, so I let Hackie do what he does best – fry his ass.
“Argh!” Chrono comes in swinging, his hammers of misfortune rearranging limbs and spines as he cuts through a cluster of Strata’s henchmen. Sophia is above him, her eyes white as she blasts waves of magicky goodness at Reapers on steamcycles.
The Big FE makes her landing and she’s also gone for her tried and true mutant hack, cutting through Reapers left and right, focused fury in her movements.
Talk about pumping the gas. Frances is juiced up on the AA moving around like Speedy Gonzales’ faster sister. The woman who rescued me from the Loop, who nursed me back to health, and who I later betrayed – damn me – is back to her old self.
So I join her, punching, shooting, stabbing when I get the chance, and stomping in skull masks. And just when I’m getting into my rhythm, a group of bleachies appear on our left, trying to flank us.
“Don’t kill them,” Frances reminds me, and rather than argue with her, or take a pot shot just for shiggles, I skip out of the way and whistle for Aiden.
Morning Assassin sees me and before I can gesture for him to join me, he flashbangs out of existence and is instantly by my side.
“I can’t kill them, but you can,” I remind him as I hand him item 300, my suicide bomber jacket.
“Doing your dirty work, huh?”
“I owe you one.”
“You owe me more than one,” he says. One wolfish grin later and he’s gone.
“We got bigger problems!” Doc lobs a grenade, and a couple of Reapers who are riding glammed up steam choppers with enough neon to reopen Studio 54 and still have some left for the DeadMau5 holoconcert are caught in the explosion, bike parts and fanboy limbs hurtling through the air.
A group joining from the northeast rev their engines, and rather than equip item 205, my red Akira bike, I go with my SPAS-12 shotgun, item 189, figuring a little clickety-boom is in order.
“We got you, Quantum!” Rocket zips by on his griffin, firing arrows that create spheres of lightning upon impact.
“I didn’t need you to get me!” I call up to him as a female Reaper approaches me on my left and learns the very definition of ‘one shot, one kill.’
Clickety-boom!
I put her down, and turn to her compadre, who is just about to log out when I squeeze the trigger and log him out Loop-style.
Sophia joins Rocket, and in the time it takes an FDA Monitor to contact someone after an early morning trip to the local diner, the least favorite member of the Dream Team has all the Reapers twitching and thinking their skin is melting.
Gruesome.
The ground shakes and I see, much to my horror, that the things I thought looked like oddly shaped hills earlier are actually Reaper mechs.
Easily the size of four-story buildings, the big bastards get to their feet and start unloading heavy artillery at the dreamiest team this side of the Knights of Non Compos Mentis.
“How are they doing that?” I ask after I’ve AAed out of the way. “Anyone have the steamsuits in their list?”
Sophia lands next to me. “It’s ingenious!”
“Stop admiring the enemy and tell me how we’re going to take them down.” I’ve already got my hand behind my back, scrolling to item 459, my Reason Railgun, when I see Ray Steampunk’s floating steamboat overhead.
Cue the Transformer sound.
The stern wheel shifts down as Steampunk’s vessel starts to turn vertical. The stacks press out and swivel so they are facing forward, and the bow folds back, revealing a golden face with glowing, coal-fired eyes.
“That’s what I’m talking about!”
The bottom of the hull opens up, revealing six-gun turrets. And as they whir and focus on the approaching Reaper mechs, the stacks fire off tactical ballistic missiles, each tipped with a golden dome, and each delivering a payload that makes me want to equip item 268, my EOD 9 Bomb Tech Suit, just in case .
But I’ve got more important things to do, like sweep up what’s left of Strata Godsick’s failed siege of Aramis. There can’t be more than twenty or thirty Reapers still brave enough to take us on. Or should I say, stupid enough to take us on.
Rocket and Doc are now on the same griffin, Doc firing an unidentifiable video game laser gun much to the griffin’s dismay, Rocket still going for concussive shock arrows.
Frances is still hacking away at what’s left of a few Reapers who got too close to one bad mama, Chrono is cracking skulls figuratively and literally, and Sophia is doing all sorts of wowsie-wow David Copperfield-esque magic tricks.
Me? I’m smoking my Cuban cigar by this point, item 30, hand-rolled on a virgin’s thigh. Morning Assassin lands next to me and places a hand on my shoulder. “You going to join them?” he asks.
“Nah, they got it under control.”
“You got another cigar?”
“I have one made of bubblegum, item 137.”
“That’ll do.” I equip the pink cigar and hand it to Aiden, who pulls down his face mask and jams it between his lips. “Not bad,” he says as he starts chewing one of the ends.
Chapter Six
“We got the rest of the day off or what?” I ask as Sophia lands next to me. Yep, someone’s gotta rib her, and that someone has got to be me.
“Are you saying that you didn’t look at today's itinerary?” she asks, disgust spreading across her face.
“There's an itinerary for today?”
I shrug and step over to a Reaper that is still breathing, the one that has stupidly failed to log out. I take my cigar out of my mouth too, lift up his skull mask, and press the sizzling end of my cigar into his forehead while he screams.
“The Dream Team doesn't torture people,” Frances reminds me. “How many times do I have to tell you that? Didn’t we just go over this yesterday?”
“That was then, this is now,” I say as I stuff the cigar back in my mouth.
“We're not torturing.” Doc caps a Reaper trying to crawl away and log out. “We’re interrogating. You three, four if you include Rocket, are too young to know about some of the enhanced interrogation techniques of the early twenty-first century. I'm not here to tell you about them. And I'm not here to debate the fact that they don't really get the results; all I'm saying is we're not torturing, just fishing for information.”
Sophia starts to roll her eyes, and I swear it takes her a good thirty to get her eyes to the other side. Normally, I'd be twitching after seeing this, but with age and time has come a good and balanced Quantum Hughes, a fair man, nay, a man of the people, who can put up with people that he hates, a loveable misfit with a grudge he’s able to bury.
Besides, maybe I don't hate Sophia that much.
“To answer your question, we have a meeting with Thulean royalty.”
“Ah, I scratched that part out of my itinerary.”
“So you got one?” she asks, narrowing her eyes at me.
“Yeah, I told you I did.”
“Sophia…” Doc starts to say. “As much as it pains me to say this sometimes, Quantum is our fearless leader. He kind of has to come.”
Aiden appears behind me and surprises me. “I thought I was the fearless leader around here.”
“If I had wanted you dead, I would have killed you already.”
Frances laughs. Rocket pulls back on his bow and looses three arrows into a Reaper who's trying to get to his feet. I don’t know why the Skeletor didn’t log out with the others, but he does now, three arrows jutting out of his back.
“We’re meeting Thulean royalty today?” asks Chrono, as he wipes blood off his brow. “Not bad.”
“That’s right, big guy. And don't worry about me, everybody. I'll keep my mouth shut, and let the Thulean queen, or whoever the hell is in charge up there, put their foot on my head, or their ghost limbs, or whatever. You know what I mean.”
Sophia shakes her head. “FYI: You will possibly come into contact with Princess Renata, whom you beat at the giant tournament in Waringtla. Just so you know.”
I kick another Reaper skull mask away, unequip my own mask and toss it over my shoulder, where it goes straight back to my invo-list. “Like I said, Dr. Wang, bygones be bygones. I did say that aloud, right?”
I looked at Frances and she shrugs. “No idea.”
“Well, I meant to anyway.”
“And the Thuleans have an emperor, not a queen, another FYI.” Sophia floats back into the air to her favorite passive-aggressive position.
“Say, speaking of emperors, how come we always have to deal with Empress Thun? I recall someone saying there’s a guy around.”
“He’s busy.”
“Too busy to take care of his own fiefdom?”
Sophia looks down at me. “He likes to hunt, and he spends most of his time hunting in remote parts of Polynya. I wouldn’t count on him being involved or around.”
Apotheosis Boom (The Feedback Loop Book 8) Page 6
