by Marc Horne
Chapter 13
Xolo’s ship dove from the sky of Earth (which sounds a bit funny if you don’t come to Earth much. Sort of oxymoronic.)
The biggest sphinx was his target. And he almost skimmed across its back before kicking in maximum thrust and blowing its back and belly into a powder, collapsing it into two kicking pairs of legs and a futile head.
Xolo pulled back on his stick, avoiding the planet as best he could. The gold ship shuddered. It hated gravity and atmosphere and there was a chance it would crack and when one of these bad boys cracked that was pretty much the end of the story.
But it held together and traced a big brittle ‘O’ in the air, illuminated by the ion flames on the back of the ship.
In the cockpit, Xolo spat out blood, which hurtled sideways to decorate a wall as he barrel rolled around for his second attack. Was the blood he spat due to the Gs he was cranking or from his increasingly noticeable brain buzz?
Outside the zombie sphinxes’ howls filled the night. The noises reached the king and his men and they stopped dead. Something the fuck was going on, but what the fuck was TBD.
Xolo turned his ship round once more. This trick was not going to work four more times. But maybe once more would be worth trying. He locked on the one that had already stopped baying at him and was also trying to lock plasma grenades on Xolo’s ship right now.
Xolo jinked left and right, up and down, but he had to stay in a certain tunnel or he was going to miss the bugger. He wove around his tunnel, responding to signals from his radar and from his eyes. The sphinx chased him around with a little lock on cursor, but its multitask mind was also able to jump and spring around. Two mad things of flesh and steel locking and hopping and rolling.
Sphinx grenades launched. One clipped Xolo’s wing, three went off to unknown adventures. The grenade blew. Xolo reacted. Took his ship down low, through the legs of the sphinx. Then thrusted, went up and spat fire along his belly, catching some key engine and atomizing this sphinx definitively.
Xolo’s engine stalled. Fast and high, looking down at the black mountain. There would be no walking away from a landing like this.
What to do, what to do?
Run a quick diagnostic check. Any chance of getting those engines back on? No, not in time. No ejector. Too small. Might as well take one of them with him. He could steer enough to do that. He locked his eyes onto the fattest sphinx, the one that actually looked more like an octopus.
Not the death he had envisioned.
Closer and closer, but the octopus sphinx was fast and had a long reach. Tentacles locked onto him, trying to deflect his path. Xolo had already allowed for that, stupid sphinx. The golden ship hit it right in its fat fleshy mantle, blowing human shaped chunks hundreds of meters into the air.
The pile of bodies and junk burned. The other sphinxes got the picture that the ambush was well and truly disrupted so they galloped round the mountain to see if they could scoop up the king that way.
The golden ship burned inside all the bodies and wires and engines at the foot of the black mountain.
Xolo’s head was killing him.
He climbed out of the wreckage basically intact. Tentacles and then a huge pile of flesh had brought the crash to a point where the airbags had been able to do their job well. The ship was a goner, but Xolo was not. However, soon he probably would be. Three sphinxes was right at the limit of what the Conscience Bomb could turn a blind eye to. Although Gukkool had not sent those sphinxes it was clear to anyone with half a brain that Xolo was bending the rules. The Conscience Bomb teetered on the edge of taking Xolo’s head smooth off, as it was born to do. His cybernetic DNA screamed for the moment of ecstasy. But his life experience in this fascinating mind held him back. Xolo’s head screamed with agony as the decision played out in a molecular computer smeared in his grey matter.
Xolo’s head was killing him.
He staggered around the black mountain. Hatred of one man was unbecoming of a geological structure. But the mountain did seem to look at him with particular hatred as he shambled after the Sphinxes.
Why didn’t Xolo walk away? Why didn’t he sit down and think bad thoughts about the king?
On the whole he was still dealing with a busy couple of days. Then there was the part of him that said, “Go take a couple of potshots at the King and see what happens.”
He walked long. The battle raged without Xolo for a while. It was bloody and it was furious. Men and women lived and died. Zombies were raised, chunked, spliced, mixed, bred, burned, buried, shredded, feared, hated, grappled, kicked, victorious, defeated, slowly slowly beaten,
Rail rifles ripped apart the two remaining sphinxes. Five soldiers were killed by their own guns going off. Victory, death and pyre all in one fluid motion.
No one we are focusing on though. Statistical people.
The battle was done by the time Xolo turned up, face bright red, temples bulging. The remaining zombies were being put through wood chippers. Their faces chomped like an old man putting his dentures in as you loaded them in the machine. Or like lobsters going in a pot. Or like maggots. Or like a flag flapping in the wind. Or like a flashing light. Or like nothing.
Gomez galloped over to Xolo and then dismounted in a flashy way and ran to embrace him.
“Godlike, man. Absolutely godlike! They’ll sing this song as long as the kingdom endures. It’ll go like…
“Xolo?”
Xolo’s face was full of muscles full of blood and his skin was doing basically nothing to hide the fact, His eyes looked dry as wasabi peas.
“Egads! What did they do to you? You’re not turning zombie, are ye? No…it doesn’t go like this. What is it? What is it?”
Xolo couldn’t really speak. He was using all of his mental faculties to contain the intruder. It was a hostage negotiation in his brain.
But there were two words he wanted to get out. He looked out for a second when the Conscience Bomb was distracted. Then he got them out.
“Slap. Me.”
Gomez was not the type to bluster, “W-w-what?”: he just plain slapped Xolo.
Then he didn’t wait to be invited to do it again. He slapped and slapped and slapped.
A tide of survival instincts kicked in. The Conscience Bomb was flooded with confusion.
Xolo took a deep breath and deep in his brain he tore at the edge of his identity. He pulled and pulled and pulled. Threads unraveled.
The Conscience Bomb looked around, panicked. His universe was unthreading and he went with it. He saw Xolo disintegrate and he couldn’t even get it up enough to self-destruct. Betrayed and disappointed, the bomb died as Xolo disappeared, flushed out of every brain cell in less time than it takes to tell it.
Xolo was gone.
…
The sun rose. The camp rebuilt, but lightly like they did when they suspected a new day might bring a new attack. It was likely that the killing fields of Berlusconia were depleted, but they couldn’t relax.
Xolo received special care. Xolo’s body. His brain was not operational. It showed activity but formless activity, like an unstructured sea just before the dawn of life. All the structures for making structures were there, but the mysterious chain reaction, the catalyst of life, had not yet stumbled onto the scene. Possibly it never would. The brain is a small ocean, compared to a planet; a tiny canvas.
The King stopped by to pay his silent respects. Sunny held Xolo’s hand for a long time, but her face was impassive. So either the face or the hand was putting on a show.
It was the face.
…
As Xolo breathed pointlessly on Earth, a space fleet was massing on the edges of Gukkool space. It massed recklessly, confident in the security of its sector to protect it about any spies who might report to the other potentates what they were doing. One hundred armed ships breathed fire in the vacuum of the edge of the AA1. Admiral Woo was ready to take the dive with his men, just waiting for the final word from Counselor Magrega, whose holo-puppet
sat tapping her foot on the bridge of his ship, the Magnificent Dragon Katana.
On the yacht, a coconut was cracked open.
The holo-puppet stepped to her feet, suddenly loaded with thoughts from a faraway planet.
“Prepare for the invasion of Earth and the capture of the Bolivar of Space, the Hated Count Boa Morte!” she screeched.
Woo gave the order. Beautiful and ugly star dragons plunged into a black hole, full of people ready for a blood letting since the day they were born.
