“Why, for God’s sake?” Veronica Verse shrieked, her face contorted into a demonic manifestation of rage.
“Because anything with a longer effective range wouldn’t fit in a backpack!”
“Then get after them!”
“But someone might see us,” Chapter protested, still trying to direct the killer robot at the same time as holding up his end of the argument.
“What would you rather risk? Someone seeing us, or our bloody reputation? Answer me that!”
NIMROD AND ULYSSES ran on – with Selene still in tow – and out of the confines of the Automaton Arena.
Even though it was close to one A.M., Venusville’s Petit Paris was still bustling with tourists, gamblers, gentlemen in search of companionship for what remained of the night, and young ladies of questionable virtue looking to give those very gentlemen the benefit of their company for significantly less time, and considerably more money, than the gentlemen would really have wished.
But it was clear to even the most casual of onlookers by now that something was wrong. Underscoring the melange of card-programmed steam organs, the cheery tunes rising from the many vaudevillian establishments that lined the street and the cries of bunko booth artistes, were the cries of the crowd now pouring through the arena gates, heedless of their own safety in the face of the chugging hansoms, omnibuses and steam-velocipedes already struggling to navigate the packed central thoroughfare of Petit Paris.
Ulysses skidded to a halt as a hansom cab hurtled past, missing him and his two companions by only a matter of a few inches, horn blaring angrily.
The dandy quickly scanned the street in front of him. He was met by lurid neon-lit signs, crowded omnibuses and the scattering survivors of the arena massacre.
Behind him he could hear more screams accompanied by the screech of rending metal and the furious roar of the Slayminator’s weapons.
And then, to Ulysses, it seemed as if a curious hush fell over the scene.
He turned, his right hand still tightly gripping the girl’s, his knuckles white, not daring to let go. And then Nimrod was gone, swallowed up by the escaping masses.
Ulysses looked back at the advancing automaton. Eight-feet tall, and almost as broad across its shoulders, it was covered in armoured plate three inches thick, intended to protect it against the worst the robo-arena could throw at it. Each piston-driven leg could deliver several tons of pulverising pressure while its whirling flail and chain-blade attachments were designed to remove the head or limbs from a fully-armoured counterpart – as it had proved to such great effect against the unfortunate Lockjaw. Flesh and bone would be as rotten fruit and cardboard against their crushing metal might.
Ulysses was reminded of his various run-ins with the Limehouse Golem in the rotting docklands of the East End of London. Nothing less than an explosive charge had been required to take that down in the end – and, even then, the technologically-adept vigilante Spring-Heeled Jack had been able to reconstruct it and bring it back from the dead.
The Slayminator’s scratched and dented carapace glistened with an unearthly iridescent green and purple sheen in the sinful lights of Petit Paris’ seedy illuminations.
With less than ten yards between them, the automaton tore down the circus-tent drapes of the arena entrance, stepped through onto the street and came to a grinding halt.
“WHAT’S HE DOING?” Lars Chapter’s tone was one of utter disbelief, as Veronica Verse dragged him into cover behind an overturned food stall in the entrance lobby.
“What is it? What’s the matter?”
“He’s just standing there, looking at us...”
“Looking at us?”
“The robot. I mean the robot.”
“Then take him down!”
Chapter hesitated, his hand hovering over the joystick control. “Perhaps he knows something we don’t. What trick’s he got up his sleeve?”
“None that he’s going to have time to use if you take him down now!” Verse hissed, daring to poke her head above the rim of the toppled cart. “I can see him. Him and the girl. Take them out. Both of them. Now!”
Lars Chapter took hold of the control lever. “Very well. If you’re sure.”
WITH A HISS of steam and a grinding of gears, chain-blade revving, the Slayminator resumed its advance.
“Monsieur?” Selene said weakly, giving Ulysses’ hand a squeeze. “If I might make a suggestion, I think now might be a good time to run, non?”
A shrill steam-whistle blew behind them. Ulysses shot a glance over his shoulder, some unknowable instinct inside him meaning that he was already moving out of the path of the accelerating vehicle before his conscious mind had registered what was going on.
As the robot powered towards them, trailing clouds of smoke and steam after it, the omnibus hurtled across their path, and slammed into the automaton.
An empty omnibus ploughed on up over the edge of the pavement – the automaton’s heels kicking up sparks from the mooncrete as it was pushed ahead of the speeding vehicle – and into the side of the arena palisade before coming to an abrupt halt, its windscreen fracturing under the force of the impact.
For a moment the crowd was silenced. Then the hubbub began to rise in volume again as the scattered onlookers began to jostle around, morbid fascination dragging their steps back across the street, wanting to see for themselves precisely what fate had befallen the gladiator droid.
A tangle of piston-limbs and twisted weapon attachments protruded from the buckled bonnet of the omnibus.
The driver’s door creaked open, making those leading the line of the curious start, and a dazed Nimrod half-fell out of the cab onto the street.
Slipping free of Selene’s hand, Ulysses was the first to reach his reeling manservant.
“Nimrod, are you all right, old boy?” he said, putting a steadying hand around his companion’s shoulders.
Nimrod looked at him sheepishly and nodded.
“That was a damn stupid thing to do, you old fool!” Ulysses clapped a hand on his back. “That’s just the sort of foolhardy thing I would’ve done. Well done!”
“I learnt from the best, sir,” Nimrod said, the rumour of a smile creasing his lips momentarily.
“Come on,” Ulysses said as Selene joined them, one shock after another compounding the look of utter bewilderment on the girl’s face. “Let’s get you a stiff drink. Or do you think you need to see a doctor?”
“No, sir, I’ll be fine. I’ll be right as rain in a minute. If I could just sit down for a moment...”
“Of course,” Ulysses said, “and we’d better make that drink a double. And one for you too, old boy,” he quipped.
The murmurs of the gathering crowd were suddenly drowned out by the tortured groan of twisting steel coming from behind them. The crowd gasped.
“Now that doesn’t sound good.” Ulysses surveyed the spot where the omnibus had ploughed into the exterior wall of the arena.
It shifted on its wheels and then bumped backwards on its tyres. With a scream like an over-revving engine the Slayminator’s chain-blade started up again.
Rusty water sprayed from the ruptured boiler of the cab in a geyser of super-heated steam as the robot cut itself free.
The gestalt entity that was the crowd was backing away now, parts of it at a stumbling run, knowing what the killer-bot was capable of, other parts screaming as hysterical panic seized hold of them.
Ulysses and Selene began to do the same, half-carrying the woozy Nimrod between them. Ulysses wondered if he was concussed after the crash.
As he watched the Slayminator extricate itself from the wreckage of the omnibus, he really didn’t know what they were going to do.
The droid stumbled free, almost losing its balance straight away. Ulysses could see that its right foot had been almost sheared clean off by the collision, crushed as it had been between the cab of the omnibus and the steel wall of the arena, which now bore a massive indentation in the shape of its hulking mechano
id form.
The robot’s head rotated left and right as its optical sensors struggled to locate and lock on to its original target.
The head abruptly ground to a halt mid-rotation, the angry red glow pulsing from behind its visor fixed on Ulysses’ face.
The droid limped towards the dandy’s party, still managing to cover several yards with every stride. Its flail twitched ineffectually on the end of its right arm but – as had already been proven by the Slayminator’s escape from the wreckage of the omnibus – its devastating chain-blade was still in lethal working order.
Ulysses was quietly confident that he could move faster than the robot, now that it had been crippled, but Nimrod was in no condition to run anywhere, and the dandy wasn’t about to leave him to the mercies of this killing machine. He was pretty sure the girl wouldn’t get far without him either. He couldn’t risk leaving either of them. He still wasn’t entirely sure which of them – him or the girl – was the actual intended target. There was always the possibility that it was both of them.
No, he thought, this had to finish and it had to finish now. The only question was what suitable weapon was there available to him that could stop the Slayminator when it had managed to walk away from a high-speed collision with a six-ton omnibus?
Ulysses steadied himself as a series of tremors passed through the mooncrete-surface of the road. A second later he could hear the crash of pounding footfalls as well as feel them through the trembling ground.
“What now?” Ulysses exclaimed, snapping his head in the direction of the new wave of screaming emanating from the other end of the street. Had another droid been sent after them?
A shadow passed over them as the Juggernaut stepped between them and the goliath-class automaton.
The Slayminator had been an intimidating presence, a good two feet taller than Ulysses and many, many times heavier. But even this champion of the Automaton Arena was dwarfed by the statuesque Juggernaut, looking like some primitive idol come to life in response to the prayers and entreaties of its cowed followers.
The rust-red monster clomped towards the gleaming but battered Slayminator, fists the size of forty-four gallon oil drums pulled back, piston-muscles ready to pound the battle-bot into the ground.
With a furnace roar of fury, the kill-droid engaged the Juggernaut, chain-blade raised.
Ulysses and Selene continued to back away, making for the other side of the street, taking Nimrod with them.
The Juggernaut had its back to them but even in the strange, pooling neon light of the whorehouses and casinos, Ulysses could still make out the tattered remnants of playhouse bills and advertisements for the oxygen mills plastered to its hull. With the colossal droid standing between them and the berserk killing machine, Ulysses could see little of the fight that ensued but of a couple of points he was certain. It was brief and it was brutal.
He heard the scream of the chain-blade. He heard the crunch of a fist – designed for pulverising moon rock repeatedly for days on end – connect with armour-plating three inches thick.
The scream of the blade became a screeching – like the cry of a wounded animal – and then died altogether. There was the crump of a boiler imploding and the fingernails-on-a-blackboard sound of separating metal vertebrae, before a nerve-shredding unnatural silence descended over the street.
The rust-red hulk in front of them rotated about its waist-bearing and Ulysses found himself presented with the head of the Slayminator, held in the shovel fingers of the victor, spools of copper wire and leaking hydraulic pipes trailing from the dead robot’s severed neck. As he watched, the furious red light behind its visor grille faded and died.
Ulysses looked from the disarticulated head up, past the juggernaut’s colossal chest-plate, to the driver’s cab atop its shoulders and the grinning face of the girl.
Blue eyes and a shining smile beamed down at him from beneath a shock of bleach blonde hair, a pair of grease-smeared goggles pushed up on the young mechanic’s panda-eyed face. Ulysses smiled back at the girl and her droid.
“All right, gents?” Billie said. “Looked like you could do with a hand, didn’t they Rusty?”
The rumble of a steam engine rose from inside the boiler-chest of the juggernaut, and in that moment Ulysses could have believed that the robot was chuckling to itself.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Pretty Woman
T MINUS 1 DAY, 8 HOURS, 8 MINUTES, 51 SECONDS
“WELL, I DON’T know about you lot,” Ulysses said as he helped ease Nimrod onto one of the cream-upholstered sofas back in the suite they shared at the five-star Nebuchadnezzar, “but I could do with a drink.”
“Here, let me,” the French girl said, bustling into the apartment and making her way over to the room’s drinks cabinet with unerring accuracy.
“Cognac please. Two.” Ulysses looked at the still woozy Nimrod with genuine concern in his eyes. “And you’d better make them doubles.”
“D’accord.” With that Selene set about pouring the drinks from a crystal decanter from a silver tray on top of the cabinet.
“Come in, Billie,” Ulysses said, addressing the open door of the hotel suite. “Come in. You’ve earned your right to be here just as much as anyone else. If it wasn’t for you we probably wouldn’t be here at all!”
The smudged face of the youthful cab driver appeared from around the edge of the door.
“Blimey O’Riley!” she gasped, her eyes wide with shock. “I ain’t never been in a place like this!”
Slowly the girl entered the room, struggling to take in the sheer opulence– from the crystal chandelier, the polar bear skin rug on the floor, to the lead crystal glasses of the drinks cabinet and the home kinema screen on the far side of the living room.
“Bloody Nora!” she exclaimed, her voice barely more than a whisper. “My five brothers and I grew up in a place less than half the size of this one room!”
She looked as if she was about to take a step over the threshold into the suite when she hesitated again.
“Are you sure they’ll be all right with me leaving Rusty downstairs in the car park?”
“They should be. After all, I tipped them handsomely enough,” Ulysses said. “Which brings us rather neatly to the question of your fee. Come on in and we can discuss how much over the odds I’m going to end up paying you. Give me a hard time, mind. I’m not a pushover you know.”
Cautiously the young cabbie-cum-mechanic took half a dozen wary steps into the hotel room. She suddenly stopped and looked down at her feet.
“Oh Lordy,” she said, as she saw the dirty black footprints the soles of her boots had left on the pristine, ice white carpet.
“Don’t worry,” Ulysses laughed. “Come on in. Have a seat. Take the weight off. You’ll have a drink with us, of course, won’t you?”
“I can’t,” the girl said, suddenly coming across as mousey and nervous, the bravura she had demonstrated back in Venusville having evaporated.
“Oh, I see, I’m sorry,” Ulysses backtracked. “Of course, how foolish of me.” Billie looked crestfallen. “You’re quite right; you shouldn’t drink and drive.”
“What?” A snort of laughter erupted from the cabbie. “Many’s the time I’ve taken Rusty out after a skin-full the night before when I’ve probably still been drunk as a skunk. No, I’ll drink your health, sir. I was just worried about the furniture. I can’t sit on that.” She pointed at the cream covering of the sofa.
“Oh, I see.”
“Quite right too, Miss Wilhelmina,” Nimrod said, making all sorts of strange faces as he struggled to bring his eyes into focus.
“Here, I don’t suppose I could ask a cheeky favour, could I?”
Ulysses smiled at the young woman. “I have a feeling you’re going to ask me anyway.”
“Would you mind if I stepped into your bathroom to freshen up, only I don’t often get to take a shower under anything other than the leaky gutter out the back of the garage Rusty and I call home. On
ly, seeing as how we stepped in at the last minute and saved you–”
“It’s all right, go ahead,” Ulysses said. “You don’t need to justify yourself to me. You deserve it. Run yourself a bath if you fancy it. It’s that way.”
“Thank you kindly,” Billie said, kicking off her boots and scampering across the vast suite, already starting to strip out of her greasy overalls as she did so.
Selene gave her a severe look as she passed her, two half-full glasses of brandy in her hands, as much as to say, “Don’t start treading on my toes; flirting is my stock in trade.”
Ulysses found himself unable to wipe the satisfied smile off his face as his eyes followed the young woman’s skipping steps to the bathroom, the oily overalls already pulled down as far as her hips.
She ducked through the door to the bathroom – leaving greasy finger marks on the gleaming brass handle – and closed it quickly behind her.
Ulysses, his pulse racing, realised he had been holding his breath and now let it out in a breathy whistle.
Handing the dandy and his butler their drinks, the courtesan sat down beside Ulysses on the sofa, folding her legs under her, the sliced fabric of her dress separating to expose the milk-white flesh of her thighs.
Now that she was so close to him, Ulysses inhaled, catching the lavender and lilac scent of her perfume, and his felt his pulse quicken for the second time in as many minutes.
He caught himself at that point. This was his brother’s grieving girlfriend – his late brother’s girlfriend – and a harlot at that. Not that that bothered Ulysses. He had enjoyed the company of the ladies at the Queen of Hearts’ Temple of Venus in Belgravia on plenty of occasions, but he wondered if it had bothered Barty, knowing that she was going with numerous different men on a daily basis, between their own stolen moments. The evidence provided by the Moulin Rouge flyer suggested that Barty had probably met Selene the same way most men had.
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