by Lee Bond
Trapping Chad Sikkmund in a gigantic glass bottle –for that is what it surely was- and stitching him up with a thousand thousand wires, pipes and tubes served no other purpose than cruelty, held no other reason for being that way save meanness; for after all, was Chad Sikkmund not the First Brigadier and First Son? If there was any man beneath the vast Dome that should be given the best of all treatments, considerations above all others, it’d be Chad.
Garth rapped the thick glass with a gauntleted rap-rap-rap. Hollow echoes reached his ears, but Chad himself didn’t stir. “I honestly don’t think I like you very much, Chad, given our history together, but this trap you’re in is completely bogus.”
The Engineer followed the profusion of tubes and everything else leeching something from the imprisoned Arcadian to their individual spots on the exterior of the man sized glass bottle; pipes and conduits starting off no larger around than a pinky finger grew thicker and thicker until they met the distortive edge of the glass, whereupon –once they somehow passed through - they doubled, becoming leviathan-sized before curling away and up and around the entirety of the single-chambered Armory. Each outlet spiraled and spiraled around the room three or four times each –it grew difficult to tell how many times- before finally reach the roof of the enclosure. One massive pipe big enough pass for Jormungandar’s little brother disappeared through a cavernous opening set into the very center of the room.
“What in the fuck goes on here?” Garth demanded irately, desperately sickened by the obscene science.
He knew what it all looked like, but it was a goddamn repugnant idea to even formulate, let alone execute. It was so clearly an extractor of some kind that the Engineer in him was already working on uncovering what was –or had been, for the entire room was utterly, utterly quiet save for the gentle tick-tick-ticking the various machines waiting for something to do- being … obtained … from Chad.
Given what everything he knew about Arcade City, what he’d learned about how it worked and how the King Himself did business and Chad’s nature, the odds were pretty good that the vile and unnecessarily cruel device sucked the very essence of a man loose, and that was perhaps the worst crime in the Universe, as far as one man intent on giving everyone a second chance was concerned.
Garth held up a hand. The hexagonal-shaped scales forming the gauntlet clicked and clacked away into nothingness, allowing him to press a bare hand against the thick glass. Nothing. Either the glass was too thick or the nanotech particulate going into it’s formation had been layered to prevent anything from passing through. There was no heat, no cold, not even the faintest of tremors.
Re-armoring his hand, then cupping both against the bottle to form binoculars, Garth then pressed his face against the glass and stared at Chad, waited for some sign the man was still alive; if he wasn’t, if the King’s vindictive ministrations had proven too cruel and unkind for the resilient cybernetic assassin, well, not to put too fine a point on it, but that’d mean the whole mission was completely fucked beyond repair.
Without the ‘easy’ solution on how best to kill Barnie, the impending confrontation would devolve into two nanotech-powered titans who hated each other whanging away with everything they could imagine.
Though the outside was protected by the thus far indestructible Dome, Garth reckoned two petty Gods trying to bash one another’s brains in with nanotech would push that hardiness to the limit. A war using ultimate tech wasn’t something he wanted to be with a part of, least of all because there was no telling if the hivemind intellect housed inside the Platinum King truly was gone; if it wasn’t, if there was still some sentience somewhere within the Cloud hungering for freedom once more, using particulate was a surefire way to wind up a puppet like Barnabas.
Garth pressed his forehead against the thick, almost crystalline glass harder, willing Chad to show some sign of life.
“Ahhh, there we go. Not dead yet.” Garth smiled despite the dark thought rising in him. Sure Chad moved his head a bit, causing the Medusa-esque explosion of tubes running out of his skull to rustle restlessly, but … that didn’t mean a goddamn thing. “Now, just don’t be brain dead, mmkay?”
Since there were no readings coming from the glass or Chad himself, there was only one thing left to do.
He pulled back a hand and closed it into a fist. Thick, glass-punishing spikes grew from the knuckles, clinking into place with the sound of falling dominos. Then he picked a favorite spot on the thick glass surface and hauled off to clobber the thing, hollering, “Hulk Smash!”
The collision was immense, powerful enough to cause the carbon-fiber scales from fist to elbow to warp momentarily out of shape. Several bits flaked off, drifting to the ground like so much black snow. Garth stared at the denatured nanotech particulate for a second before coming to grips with the fact that he’d be lucky if another nanotech-fueled megapunch knocked a quarter-sized chunk of the resilient glass prison loose.
“Hm.”
Garth stepped away from Chad’s prison, rolling his shoulders and limbering up with some jumping jacks and a quick round of shadow-boxing. As he did so, he drew on more Cloud resources, doing his best to carefully monitor the interaction between particulate and his focus; even though he truly had come to grips with the darker side of his soul, he was by no means going to simply assume that everything was hunky-dory in Brainsville.
”And if there’s one thing I’ve learned from movies and television,” Garth said this to Chad, “is that bad guys ain’t dead until they’re all the way dead. I am not keen on scraping the bottom of the metaphorical barrel of The Cloud only to have that fucking hivemind pop up, talking about ‘all your brain are belong to us.”
The air thickened with a black swarm of particulate, reminiscent of flies or mosquitos.
Garth shifted his stance, looked through the black swarm to stare fussily at Chad in his prison. Now that his stupid brain had brought up the topic of nanotech possession, the goddamn thing wouldn’t let go and was conjuring up all kinds of fucked up scenarios.
“You better have some fucking answers, dude, or I’m gonna be super pissed.” Garth clapped his hands together, rubbed them furiously for a few seconds before allowing the teeming Cloud particulate to swarm him.
Where before King’s Will had balked at any truly Outside-world augments, the Armory held no such restrictions; after doing an initial assessment of the specs, Will took Garth’s carefully crafted demands and just ran with it. The hexagonal plates on his arms and legs grew to twice the size, losing the quick, panther-like properties of stealth armor that Specters like him preferred in favor of bulky, piston-driven augments that the more … confrontational … Specters preferred.
Garth snorted as a giant section of machine-powered engines assembled themselves on his shoulders. “Ain’t no one more confrontational than me.”
Torsion dampeners and kinetic blowback inhibitors knitted into existence across his chest, down his torso, and finally, all the way down his legs. The collection of suit augmentations the Cloud was throwing at his armor was, in a word, dismaying: clearly Chad’s thick crystal prison was more of a challenge than it appeared.
Not only was Cloud pulling out all the stops to bring his strength back up to full ex-dee Kin’kithal levels, it was devoting an equal –if not greater- amount of resources into keeping him upright and whole for the duration of the op.
Obviously, then, Chad’s prison wasn’t made out of glass. Not even Barnabas was stupid enough to house the world’s second most dangerous being behind glass. But if wasn’t any of the things you’d normally expect someone like Chad to be locked behind, what in the fuck was it made from
“Well,” Garth sniped sulkily as Cloud finished it’s ministrations, “if I could get some kind of fucking HUD like I used to be able to, I could get some kind of reading off this fucking prison and go at it like a goddamn champ. Since I can’t … I’m talking to the Cloud. Get your head in the game, Nickels. Last thing you want is for Cloud to talk back. Bec
ause how awful would that be?”
Images of him talking to a semi-sentient Cloud particulate like it was HAL and he was Dave played through the vast and oftentimes ridiculous movie screen in the back of his mind. Garth watched for a few seconds more before deciding that he was his own worst enemy.
Brandishing freshly refurbished super-commando mega-powered cyborg arms, Garth went to town on the crystalline prison, just like in Street Fighter, when for no real reason, you spend a good three minutes beating the absolute fuck out of a random car. Each punch carried with it enough force to shatter stone into dust, yet it took forever for fine cracks to begin spiderwebbing across the skin of Chad’s prison.
As the not-glass soaked up tremendous amounts of punishment, pistons set into his armored feet suddenly fired, literally pinning him to the ground with cracks loud as rockets launching. Suddenly wondering what was so different about right then than a few seconds ago, Garth went to raise an eyebrow to augment that curiosity when a giant fucking chunk of glassy crustal popped loose.
At roughly the speed of a cranked-up locomotive.
Right into his chest.
The thick, resilient chest plates took the brunt of the blast and dampeners and stabilizers kept him from being slammed against the back wall a la rag doll in a physics test and then…
Well, then shit got serious.
“Because of course he’s under…” One of those baseballs took him right in the forehead, not so much knocking him unconscious but hammering unconsciousness into him with a vengeance.
***
“This cannot be good for me.” Garth groaned miserably.
Even encased in the most unbreakable armor his brain could work up, even protected by the impressive array of gadgets designed specifically to withstand an onslaught of depressurization, every inch of his body ached like the dickens. For the first time in about a billion years, his internal organs were about the only thing currently not complaining, and Garth really suspected the lack of emails and texts from those various and important body parts had more to do with the fact that he’d been beaned right in the forehead with a fist-sized chunk of glass than anything else; there was a fiery knot of pain smack dab front and center making his eyes water every time he shifted his noggin left or right.
He groaned and hawked up a bit of bloody-tasting spit. “I think I read somewhere that being hammered unconscious so often is pretty bad for memory and recollection, only I been knocked out so often since I came here I can’t remember if I actually read that or not.”
Making matters worse, he was still clamped to the floor. Garth Nickels shook his head. “Because of course. Time to … huh.”
Now that he’d assessed his own miserable situation and was about to begin the process of un-creating all the extraneous armaments designed solely for breaking a possible lunatic out of prison, Garth had in fact spared precisely one second to that prison, expecting to see Chadsik al-Taryin still chambered there, a living Chia pet with tubes and wires instead of hilarious grass seeds.
What he saw, in fact, was an empty chamber filled to the brim with an awful lot of ripped and torn tubes.
“Ahhhh, fuck my life.” Garth wiggled a bit then started hammering at his legs; the powerful piston-driven spikes had him nailed right where he was and thus far, precisely zero mental commands were working. “Shitshitshitshit.”
“Wot seems to be the problem, mate?” Chad Sikkmund, aka Chadsik al-Taryin, he who was first born Platinum Brigadier and First King’s Son –not to mention Universal-class super assassin- and bona fide lunatic, strolled onto the scene, sipping delicately from a fine, thin as paper tea cup. “Gor blimey, I do love me tea. The trick, right, mate, is not only the tea you is usin’, yeah, but the cup, right? Well, also the temperature o’ the water, and about fifty billion uvver fings, but loads of people forget the cup. Well important.”
Intent on not being outcooled by a naked assassin sipping tea, Garth sort of … leaned back … in his armor and put his arms behind his head, like he was, you know, watching television on the couch or something. “Actually, I did know that. One of my buddies is full blown EuroJapanese. Taught me the tea ceremonies and everything. ‘course, that ceremony was a few hundred years old when your guys decided they loved them so tea and started, you know, that whole mess.”
Chad inhaled the aroma wafting from the thin cup. “I do really hate the fact that in all the Universe, right here under this Dome is the only place to have a truly proper cuppa. A lot. All the tea everywhere, even the crap stuff they is growin’ on actual ‘Tea Planets’ run by idiotic FrancoBrit morons and the … mishmash that them bloody EuroJapanese insist is the real deal … it ain’t. Absolute dogshite, it is. All of it. Right down to the last bloody teabag.”
“Did you know,” Garth asked, bringing up one of his own personal favorite diatribes –watching Chad drink tea was very nearly pornographic and the situation was in no way made less so because the man was balls-ass naked- “that there’s still potatoes here? Like, the actual fucking tuber and not some kind of bullshit half-assed Trinity-approved space-tuber like the tate? I had potatoes. I ate so many of them that I looked like an asshole and I gave myself a pretty serious stomach ache I couldn’t bitch about because the people I was traveling with would’ve just made fun of me the whole time.”
Chad drained his cup of the very last of the dregs and flicked the delicate thing into nothingness. Then he looked Garth Nickels right in the eye. “You is a fuckin’ moron, yeah? Like, if I was spendin’ a considerable amount o’ time huntin’ down all the proper morons in the entire Universe and linin’ them up before you, they would all totally bow down and like, proclaim you to be the greatest of them all. You would be King Moron of Moronspace, champion of fools and idiots everywhere. I literally cannot explain how stupid you is.”
“Well let’s not beat around the bush or anything.” Finally. There. In the back of his mind, the connections linking him to Cloud were coming back online. Chad’s demeanor at the moment didn’t say ‘I is goin’ ter kill you and wear your face as a codpiece, mate’ but when you were dealing with someone like Chad, appearances were like Michael Bay scripts: utterly useless and prone to explosions. “Which part? Coming here? Dealing with your dad? Getting infected with Kingsblood? Trying to free you from a heavily pressurized chamber without first thinking things through? Hey, while you’re deciding which part of my catalogue of stupid moves to pick on first, how’s about you, you know, cover up?”
Chad looked down at himself and grinned like an idiot. “Right. Naked. Though,” Chad raised a finger, “I should like to point out that it is a terrible world when a fella can’t be comfortable in ‘is own skin in ‘is own ‘ome. Like, this is my pad, man. I should be allowed to bandy me twig and berries about all I want, yeah? Unless you is disgusted by the ‘uman body? Or is you likin’ wot you see?”
Garth sighed. “It has more to do with the fact that your dad is en route and he’s … not in the best of moods. I’ve fought naked before and it’s not a lot of fun.” Connectivity to the Cloud was restored. Garth commanded the nanotech particulate to unravel the heavy machinery securing him to the ground, noticing as he did so the quick smirk flashing across Chad’s austere face.
“Fine, right, wotever.” Chad allowed clothing to grow over his awesome body, replicating the last set of duds he’d ever really enjoyed; combat boots with many, many buckles, black fatigues with all sorts of pockets from which all manner of interesting things could be pulled when needed, a black shirt, and naturally, a long leather coat. As Nickels’ interesting armor was taking extra-long to undo what it’d done to save it’s stupid owner from being blown around the room, he pulled a cigarette from behind his ear and lit up.
“There.” Chad said, exhaling a delicious mouthful of smoke. “Crikey. First real smoke in ever. Brilliant. Now. Firstly, before I is tellin’ you in precisely which manner you is epically moronic, I is feelin’ it mighty important for you to know I is not going to kill you.”
&
nbsp; “We went through this once before.” Garth brandished Finger, Ex-Dee Weapon of Death, grinning like a goon when Chad looked … displeased.
Dribbling ash onto the floor, Chad clapped as sarcastically as he could. “Oooo, look at me, I is the Kin’ki-fucking-thal, I is a bloody superhero wiv all sorts of awesome majestic powers that quite frankly ‘ave turned me into a huge arsehole. That’s on the outside, though, sonny Jim. Out there, in the Unreality, you is kind of a big deal…” Chad trailed off meaningfully, wiggling his eyebrows insistently.
A cracking sound shattered the awkward silence. Left leg, free. Garth reflected sourly on Chad’s unfinished sentence. “Okay, fine. I get it. In here you’re the Big Kahuna and you’re not going to kill me, which, I guess, is kind of nice. This place …”
“Yep.” Chad nodded curtly. “Great big shit’ole. You is ‘avin’ a wicked case of Arcade City Blues, too, in’t ya. Been around, done some stuff, got into all sorts of trouble. While you was bein’ unconscious, I took a gander at the user logs. The old city ‘as seen some better times, hey?” Garth went to explain, but Chad waved him off. “Nah. Don’t bovver, mate. I is not really carin’ one way or the other about wot ‘appened to this place. It were a goddamn nightmare, one I is well glad to see is about done for, all right?”
Chad suddenly realized something important. “Oi! I guess … I guess you is understandin’ a lot more about me know, hey? Like, why I is the way I is and all that?”
Garth nodded, though inwardly he was stressed; the right leg was taking way too long to return to normal. Another sly grin from Chadsik al-Taryin suggested that the First Platinum Brigadier was the cause of the slow-moving nanotech erasure. Fuming but unable to do anything about it, Garth nodded again, saying, “Yeah. Yeah I suppose I do. Arcade City is about a million times worse than any wardog ever admitted to. I wish there’d been more info out there.”
