Dark Side

by Jonathan Green

  During this brief hiatus in the otherwise unending rounds of combats, some of those in attendance were making a dash for the public conveniences or taking the opportunity to get something to eat from one of the eateries positioned just outside of the main arena.

  The Automaton Arena was not on any of the officially-sanctioned tours but it was one of the most popular and well-attended event locations within the whole of the teeming future metropolis of Luna Prime.

  Ulysses went from scouring the crowds for any sign of Selene to checking his fob-watch, to see how many minutes had passed since they had last spoken.

  “Any sign of her, sir?”

  “No, not yet. But then she’s still got another few minutes to go before the next bout by the look of things. You need to be keeping an eye out for a slight girl with long, platinum blonde hair and skin the colour of milk.”

  “Very good, sir.”

  The two of them returned to scouring the crowd, trying to catch sight of Selene as she made her entrance.

  “Look,” Ulysses said after only another sixty seconds or so, “and I don’t know about you, but I’m feeling a little peckish. In fact, I can’t remember when I last ate. Run and get me some popcorn or something in a bun would you, before the show starts? There’s a good chap.”

  A FEW MOMENTS later, Veronica Verse and Lars Chapter joined the steady stream of people entering the robot arena.

  “Which way did they go?” Lars asked, adjusting the position of the loaded pack on his back, as Veronica tossed a ticket booth attendant a handful of coins.

  “They’re inside.”

  “What? In the audience?”

  “Yes,” Verse replied as she bustled her way past the food stands and past the entrance to the main arena, making her way towards a gaggle of people surrounding a cage in which two robot avians were clawing and pecking the clockwork innards from each other.

  “Then why aren’t we following them?” Chapter said, hurrying to keep up with the trotting footsteps of his companion.

  “Because it’s too public, you silly pudding. We need to be more subtle than that if we’re to keep our cover. You’ve still got another of those remotes in your bag, haven’t you?”

  “Oh, I see,” the hitman said, as they ducked past the robo-cock fight, those eagerly absorbed in the match ignoring them completely. “You mean like the number we did back at the Ros –”

  “Shhh!” she hushed him, grabbing him and pulling him into the shadows behind an iron pillar. “Not here!”

  They waited as a burly engineer emerged from behind the curtain that led backstage, carrying a heavy spanner over one shoulder, whistling tunelessly through his teeth.

  “But yes,” she admitted once the engineer was out of earshot. “Like that. And you’ve still got that portable Babbage engine?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good. Then follow me, sugar cakes. We’re going to sabotage ourselves a robot.”

  “LADIES AND GENTLEMEN,” the voice boomed from speakers suspended from the spider’s web of walkways above the fight floor.

  All eyes turned to the balcony. Standing there in a motley top hat, floor length multicoloured coat and matching waistcoat, stood the Master of the Games himself.

  He was flanked by a pair of youthful lovelies – young enough to be his granddaughters – and twins by the look of things as well, and dressed even more outrageously than the Master of Ceremonies. They wore black tutus that might as well have not been there at all, considering how well they showed off their legs, their torn fishnet stockings and their thigh-length leather boots. Their blouses were open provocatively low at the front and the pair’s ensemble was finished with brass-rimmed goggles and a shock of short-cropped, peroxide blonde hair.

  The Games Master was tall – six feet at least – and thin. He could have been in either his fifties or his sixties but, even from his seat in the crowd, Ulysses could still discern the mischievous, youthful twinkle in his eye. His shoulder length hair and showman’s goatee beard had both been dyed a variety of colours to compliment the rest of his look, and in one fingerless-gloved hand he was holding onto the flared end of a speaking tube.

  His rich baritone swept through the arena and over the heads of the eager spectators. “It’s past the witching hour which means it’s time for... Midnight Murder Machines!”

  The roar of the crowd became a fever-pitched scream.

  This was the main event.

  “This is what you’ve all been waiting for. The fight of the night! Pure mechanoid mayhem! No quarter asked and none given. Kill or be killed. A battle to the death between our champion and a new challenger!”

  The crowd went wild.

  “Sorry,” came a feminine French voice from besides Ulysses, making him start. “It took longer to get away than I thought it would.”

  “Never mind,” said Ulysses, his racing pulse slowing again. “You’re here now; that’s all that matters.”

  The girl looked much as she had when Ulysses had last seen her in her boudoir, only she was wearing a travelling cloak over her clothes now.

  “Ladies and gentlemen! Fight fans! Please put your hands together for five times champion, undefeated in this ring to date – the Slayminator!”

  The crowd cheered as a brassy fanfare trumpeted from the speakers over their ringside seats.

  “So, what did you want to tell me that you didn’t want to risk telling tell me back at the Moulin Rouge?” he asked, having to raise his voice to be heard over the noise of the crowd.

  She leaned in closer. “I know who Barty was working for.”

  “And now,” the Games Master’s voice bellowed from the public address system, “give a big Automaton Arena welcome to the carborundum-bladed menace, the mech of misery, the robot revolutionary – Lockjaw!”

  This time the ever-growing audience responded with as many boos as huzzahs.

  “He was working for someone?”

  “Yes.”

  “What do you mean? I can’t imagine Barty ever having anything like a conventional job.”

  “I mean I know what he had got himself mixed up in. I knew it was dangerous. I told him he was playing with fire. But the way he spoke about it... I don’t think he really had a choice.”

  “What was he mixed up in, Selene?”

  She opened her mouth to speak again.

  “Gladiators!” The roar rang from the steel walls of the gladiator pit. “Prepare for battle!”

  Horns blared and klaxons sounded. Having loosed the chains securing the droids’ weapons, the hulking, battle-upgraded automatons’ attendants hurried to safety, retreating beneath the great spiked portcullis gate which lowered behind them with a reverberating clang.

  “Let the mechanoid mayhem begin!”

  A strident horn blast sounded and battle was joined.

  The furnace roar of steam engines, the grinding of chain weapons, and the pumping of pistoning pile-driver fists – along with the crash of iron on steel as the robots charged each other – even this white noise of battle was almost drowned out by the hysterical screams of the hyped-up crowd.

  “Say that again?” Ulysses bellowed over the clamour.

  “Your government. The British Government!” Selene repeated, her voice suddenly sounding louder than even the clash of steel booming from the arena below.

  Ulysses turned away, his brow crumpled in consternation, his attention falling on the spectacle unfolding beneath them.

  The Slayminator was like an industrialised suit of armour built for an ogre, its head a grilled knight’s helm, one arm a whirling flail, the other a whirring chain-blade. Lockjaw was shorter, squatter and more compact, with tracked caterpillar treads rather than pistoning legs, its head little more than an endlessly snapping gin-trap maw lined with diamond-hard carborundum teeth, both its telescoping brass arms ending in snapping pincers. The two robots powered towards each other, trailing steam and sooty smoke, their mechanised actions generating their own monstrous bestial battle-cries.
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  Surely if Barty had been employed by Department Q, the same agency he worked for, he would have been informed. Surely Barty would have told him. But then perhaps he was working for another faction within the government, one with its own shadowy puppet-masters with their own agenda – one at odds with the powers that be. Or whoever had got their claws into Barty had lied. Perhaps they had merely been masquerading as a government agency. Or perhaps Barty had lied to his new girlfriend to make himself appear to be something other than he truly was.

  A scream of metal sparks flew from the carapace of the beleaguered Lockjaw as the favourite, Slayminator, buried its whirling chain-blade in the robot gladiator’s treads. Another cheer went up from the crowd. The underdog spun on the spot, its motive systems crippled. The hulking, adapted Goliath-droid pulled its blade free, bringing the Morningstar mace-heads of its flail crashing across the crown of its rival’s head.

  The clacking gin-trap jaws snapped shut on a steel ball. The crowd started to boo. The Slayminator, finding itself trapped, raised its screaming chain-blade again. The champion’s supporters cheered and waved banners.

  Ulysses was only half aware of what was taking place in the fighting pit below. He barely even noticed when a smear of oil burst into purple-orange flame, ignited by a stray spark.

  During the course of the last forty-eight hours his world had been turned upside down. His brother was dead, so were the three industrialists he appeared to have some (as yet unexplained) interest in, and now Barty’s girlfriend had just told him that his brother had been working for the British Government. If that was truly the case, was that the trouble that had driven Barty into hiding on the Moon, the problem that he had claimed even Ulysses, with all his contacts, couldn’t help him with?

  “Hmm?” Ulysses asked, aware that Selene was speaking to him again. Nimrod sat on the other side of him, gazing with disinterest at the gladiatorial combat.

  Selene looked at him, sorrow etched deep on her young face. “I said what do we do now?”

  “Now? We find my brother’s killer, that’s what.”

  “But we already know who...” She broke off as the tears came again.

  “I don’t believe it,” Ulysses said, his tone one of insistent denial.

  “Who else is there? Who else would have done such a thing?”

  “It has to have something to do with the three industrialists.”

  The scream of metal on metal rang from the fighting pit as the Slayminator’s chain-blade grated across the carborundum teeth of its challenger.

  “Did you know about them as well?” continued Ulysses.

  “Barty did say something. You know who these men are?”

  “Were. But yes, I do.”

  “Were?”

  “They’re dead as well, now. All within the last twelve hours.”

  Selene stared at him, utterly bewildered. “They were murdered too?”

  “It rather looks that way.”

  “Then how can they be behind...” She couldn’t bring herself to finish the sentence.

  “They’ve still got something to do with it, I’m sure of it. Just because they’re dead doesn’t mean one of them didn’t see Barty bumped off before someone got to him in return.”

  She fixed him with an accusing stare. “And that wasn’t you?”

  The crowd shared a sharp intake of breath as the Slayminator wrenched its rival’s head from its armoured body.

  “What? You think I killed them?”

  “Well, did you?” Selene asked.

  “No, I did not! Well, one of them, but that was an accident. I wasn’t the one who let a rogue droid loose in his robot factory!”

  “What?”

  “It’s a long story.” Selene’s accusing stare didn’t waver. “And it would take too long to go over again now. Just believe me when I tell you that I didn’t set out to do away with any of them. I only wanted to get to the bottom of who it was that had Barty killed!”

  Registering the horrified look in the girl’s eyes Ulysses turned away, as he concentrated on bringing his temper back under control. He hadn’t meant to fly off the handle at her like that, but then grief affected people in different ways.

  He looked up sharply. Something was wrong. It took him a moment to realise what it was.

  It was the voice of the crowd. He could hear screams as well as shouts rising from the throng of spectators – and not screams of excitement either. They were screams of fear and the primal screams of mass hysteria as panic began to spread its insidious tentacles throughout the audience.

  Ulysses stood up.

  “What is it, sir?” Nimrod asked, rising from the bench.

  “Something’s wrong.”

  The crowds of people were parting like the Red Sea before Moses’ staff as a tidal wave of terror surged ahead of them.

  Ulysses stood on tiptoe, craning his head to see what lay to the rear of the panicking throng.

  The first object his eyes alighted on was the smoking wreckage of the machine known as Lockjaw, now missing its head and one pincer limb, the ruined robot’s torso still whirling like a dervish about its central gimbal.

  It took him a moment to find its conqueror, the Slayminator. The gladiator-automaton was up to its chain-blade and flail in bodies, arterial blood spraying across its armour-plating, a furious red glow behind its eye-visor. People were gutted, bludgeoned and crushed beneath its relentless advance as the robot waded into the defenceless crowd.

  Beyond the barricade of the portcullis – which, Ulysses noticed, remained down and locked in place, no doubt – technicians were desperately punching at remote controls, shouting at each other in desperation as their efforts to shut down the Slayminator from afar failed spectacularly.

  The Games Master and his girls were staring in horror at the massacre being committed in the arena below, their shock-white faces pressed up against the reinforced glass of their booth.

  “It’s gone haywire, sir!” Nimrod exclaimed with a burst of uncharacteristic emotion that surprised Ulysses almost as much as the murderous actions of the droid.

  “I wouldn’t say that exactly,” Ulysses muttered, his eyes following the Slayminator’s homicidal advance. “I think if you look again, you’ll see that it’s heading straight for us.”

  Selene gave a heartfelt cry of, “Merde!” and was on her feet in an instant.

  “That’s a very succinct way of summing up our situation,” Ulysses said. “Now if I might make a suggestion? Run!”

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Robots

  T MINUS 1 DAY, 9 HOURS, 29 MINUTES, 18 SECONDS

  “WHAT’S GOING ON?” Selene shrieked as Ulysses pulled her after him through the panicking crowds.

  “I know,” Ulysses managed between breaths, “you’re wondering why we’re running when we should be standing up to that thing and taking it down.”

  “No, that’s not what I was thinking, actually!”

  “The situation is that that thing’s targeting us,” Ulysses explained as he and his manservant forced a way through the throng.

  “What?”

  “Well, one of us. You or me.”

  Selene looked even more confused and uncertain than before Ulysses’ revelation. “How can you be sure?”

  With a rending crash of steel, the Slayminator burst from the arena between them, tearing down a sheet metal wall with one swipe of its whirling chain-blade, its attack bolstered with the additional momentum of the weight of its massive body. Selene screamed.

  “Is that enough evidence for you?”

  People scattered behind them, but still the huge gladiatorial robot thundered after them, flail whirling, chain-blade shrieking.

  The air around them was redolent with the smells of engine oil, hot metal, burning coal and fear.

  “And if that isn’t enough evidence for you, put it this way.” Ulysses dodged past an abandoned food stall, dragging Selene after him, as Nimrod brought up the rear. “First the three men that my brother h
as files on in his apartment are killed within the space of a day. Then I follow up the only other lead Barty left me and find you. We then meet to talk and it just so happens that that’s when an eight-foot tall kill-bot decides to go haywire and lays into the crowd, whilst heading in our direction. Coincidence? I think not.”

  The main entrance to the arena was in sight now. Behind them the Slayminator swept a hot dog stand out of the way with a swipe of a massive arm, crushing the wretch who had been manning it under a heavy steel hoof.

  The two sentry droids came to life, rotating about their wheel bases and, moving as one, converged on the escaping gladiator-droid.

  The battle between the three automatons, such as it was, was brief and yet would have been the stuff of mechanoid-mangling legend, had it taken place within the ring. But in the time it took Ulysses, Nimrod and Selene to cross the holding bay the conflict was over, the gladiator emerging with its armour scarred and dented, but unbowed. What was left of the sentry-droids, however, would have to be collected in barrows and wheeled to the nearest scrap heap.

  “We get clear, we draw it away from other innocent bystanders and we limit the loss of life,” Ulysses explained. “Then, when we’ve got it out in the open, we take it down.”

  “And how do you plan on doing that?” Selene pressed, still in a state of shock.

  Ulysses turned and flashed her a manic, devilish grin. “Don’t worry, I’ll think of something. I usually do.”

  “THEY’RE LEAVING THE arena!” Lars Chapter exclaimed as he kept a hand on the joystick of the remote control.

  Crouched behind an upturned droid, lying over an inspection pit in the repair shop backstage at the Clash of Steel, Chapter and Verse followed the droid’s progress via a grainy image on the tiny screen in front of them, piggy-backing on the signal transmitted by the automaton’s own optical relays.

  “Is the ’bot still in range?” Verse demanded.

  “At the moment, but it won’t be for long. This kit’s only got a short range transmitter.”