Cyber Circus

by Kim Lakin-Smith

  The monk belonged to a silent order and wouldn’t answer of course. But it didn’t stop D’Angelus wondering if the monk knew something he didn’t about the integrity of the rock surrounding them? The superstitions of the miners certainly suggested as much, which was why a Zen monk always accompanied blast parties to the rock face. But the bore tunnels were well established; any unstable rock had long been mechanically sheared off, or netted and bolted to a seam above.

  D’Angelus let back his head and howled. Seeing the monk flinch instinctually, D’Angelus strained against his harness, laughing from the pit of him.

  “Forgive me, Father. Don’t think me without faith. But these black pits, well, they give me the willies. Gotta have a sense of humour.”

  “Oh yessy,” Das mumbled from the driver’s bucket seat up front. The navigator fixated on the windshield as the burrower’s headlamps glanced off tessellated rock. “Gotta have a joke if you wanna survive the mines. Dust handlers got filthy mouths on them.”

  D’Angelus grunted. “Don’t I know it! Come pay day, the fuckers end up in my joint. Wanna trade a dollar for snatch. Not that it’s in my interests to complain. A dollar’s a dollar, hey, Father?” He gave the monk’s arm another knock and showed his ghoul teeth.

  But just thinking about the Elegance Saloon brought to mind the rich blaze of chandeliers, his stable of warm, languid girls jacked up on Dazzle Dust, the scold of Jackogin, and his smile drained. He didn’t like it below ground. Didn’t like it one bit.

  Seated alongside D’Angelus, Jaxx seemed to sense his boss’s apprehension. “Not long until we surface now. That right, Das?”

  “Yep’um. Just entering the old farm tunnels.”

  Jaxx glanced across. His eyes were slits of jet. “It’ll be dawn once we surface. Nowhere to hide in that dust bowl. For Cyber Circus or us.”

  * * *

  The farmhouse had long since run to ruin. A windmill that once pumped water for livestock stood motionless. The porch was crumpled in. The roof had sloughed most of its tiles; those that remained were the colour of rust.

  Across the yard were a water tower and tumbledown barn. The water tower reservoir advertised ‘Soul Food’ in faded red lettering. The door to the barn stood ajar. Inside were a great many hessian sacks stored for the transport of the plant feed, now buried under dust.

  The farm appeared hastily abandoned, with many remnants left in place to rot. Delivery trucks were still parked out back of the barn, tyres fallen in, the sun and wheat sheaf logo bleached across their bonnets. Out in the nearest field of dust, the traction reaper had seized mid-furrow, jaw craned wide, its scythe-like teeth blooded with rust. Chaff plates ran the length of the reaper’s spine. Two squat chimneys sprouted up back like testes. Other machines were scattered as far as the horizon: corrugated burrowers, steel Jack O’Lanterns with their eyes gone out, a stack of reserve trespass mines from the end of the farm’s operational life when it became necessary to guard against the protestors and those whose land had been destroyed.

  Dawn brought with it a new intruder – a large dirigible drifting overhead. The unusual craft boasted a brightly striped hide, open skirts that frilled and ebbed like living fungus, and strings of coloured lights streaming from its twin masts. Smoke spilt off the backend, leaving a grey snail’s trail across the sky. As the sun rose over Soul Food Farm, the dirigible advanced with bursts of steamy engine sound and soft putt-putts of expelled air.

  In the barren field below, dust started to bounce a centimetre above the ground. Moments later, the surface broke with an audible crack that echoed off the quiet landscape. A metal corkscrew wormed up, expelling dry dirt like sputum. It grew in circumference, revealing a huge titanium crest, faces behind glass and a scaled abdomen that tapered to a steam-sealed trapdoor.

  Sledging up and out of its hole, the burrower propelled itself through the dust, belly flicking side-to-side to drive momentum.

  * * *

  “You can’t be serious about putting down.” Hellequin stared at the ringmaster.

  “Someone explain why we’ve gotta land,” Herb threw out as he strode between the pitch crew, busy oiling the fleshy rigging either side of the gangplank.

  “Need to refuel,” answered Asenath, the Jeridian with a penchant for severed heads and who now headed up the pitch crew.

  “Precisely.” Herb stopped walking and rested his elbows on the brass safety rail. He peered down into the air-filled hull. “My girl here is running on dregs. She needs to suck on a water pipe.” He gave the rail an affectionate if begrudging pat.

  Hellequin dragged a hand through his hair. “The pimp’s gonna have acquired a new chain gang of heavies.”

  “It’ll take D’Angelus two days to navigate the dust trail to Haven Springs. Plenty of time to get a bellyful of water.” Herb kept his gaze on the grey landscape below. “Plenty of time to set up pitch and relieve the marks of their dollars too.”

  “You want to put on a performance at Haven Springs?” The soldier’s steel eye tucked back into its socket, revolted at the fact.

  Herb tutted. “Hellequin. I’ve been straight with you all the way since you and I first bumped gums. You need a way of life that’ll distract from the madness you know is coming. I need acts. Simple as. So when I tell ya Nim’s a nice girl, but in my eyes, just another asset, I’m guessing you gotta believe me. You keep guard outside your girlfriend’s dressing room if you want. But for the rest of us carnies, the show must go on!”

  The ringmaster walked away, patting his belly and nodding knowledgeably as he inspected the handiwork of each crew member he passed.

  Hellequin leant forward and draped his long arms over the railing, aware of the warmth of the metal through the sleeves of his frockcoat. Below, the open hull gave out onto the dust plains – or as he remembered them, fertile prairie until Soul Food sucked the life from it. He caught sight of something then, a silver dash in the desert. The HawkEye implant telescoped in, its twin rings performing alternating revolutions. He saw the tip of a vast metal nose cone, the splatter of dust mid-motion...

  “And what if the pimp’s caught up with us already,” he called out.

  * * *

  Rubberised silk blasted up into the sky, propelled from spinnerets to the rear of the burrower, Wanda-Sue. Most fell short of Cyber Circus. Two threads struck home, one attaching to the stump end of a brass vein, the other to a kite line. Each gob of silk burst apart into hundreds of micro-fine threads that wound round and round their anchor points, securing purchase. The noise of the ship deepened as it buckled against the restraints. Far below, the burrower wormed its backend into the dust.

  “They’re bedding down. Everyone grab a hold!” cried Asenath, abandoning her maintenance task to grip the rail alongside Herb and Hellequin.

  “What in the name of the Saints does that mean?” Herb’s eyes widened with the sort of surprise that didn’t strike the ringmaster often.

  “Means D’Angelus has got himself an ex-military burrower. Machine fitted with cannons capable of shooting rubber silk at the enemy.”

  The Jeridian was right, Hellequin realised. Focusing on the feed jet at the base of one spinneret, he saw the flight of the silk bundles in fractured snapshots. He switched his attention to Asenath, steel eye retracting and refocusing.

  “Who’d you serve with?”

  The Jeridian batted a hand off her brow. “Ninth platoon. Home of buffoons, loons and idiots.”

  “Ninth platoon?” Hellequin took in the ladder piercing at the woman’s throat, the rock ammo scars at her high forehead and a shoulder, the scar of a stab wound running from an inner elbow around to her collarbone, a dark blue symbol at one ear lobe. Tattoo of a sickle blade. Sign of one of Zan City’s gangs.

  Hellequin kept the knowledge to himself. The woman was well versed in military technology, and, just then, that was all that mattered. She was also Cyber Circus’s newly appointed chief pitchman and all about giving orders.

  “Herb. You’ll take the br
idge, ya? Be ready to drive your lady hard once we’ve broken free of the tethers.”

  “Hold it there.” Herb jiggled his generous belly with his hands, freshly agitated. “This is my ship and I don’t take kindly to being ordered about by a Jerdian bitch who’s newly elevated but who can just as speedily be removed from the post.”

  “Yes, this is your ship. You speak to its heart and lungs. You’ve known this vessel the longest and have the most experience as its sailing master.”

  There was a sudden jolt. Asenath’s dark green eyes acquired the same intensity as Hellequin’s metalmorphised gaze.

  “They’re reeling us in. I am asking you to take the wheel for this hour only. After that, you can don your hat and order us around again.” A flash of silver and Asenath’s scimitar arrived just short of Herb’s throat. She grinned. “I’ll even let you keep your head.”

  Herb considered his new chief pitchman with an appraising eye. “Uh huh.” The trace of a smile at his lips suggested the ringmaster was secretly pleased to be tasked with saving his ship. He strutted off in the direction of the bridge, knocking into the rail either side now and again as the circus struggled against its tethers.

  Returning the scimitar to a black leather scabbard at her back, the Jeridian clapped her hands briskly. The pitchmen responded, apparently having already fallen in with her abrupt style of leadership.

  “We need volunteers to climb out on top of the tent, locate the parasite ropes and cut us free. The devils have landed three shots last count,” she told them.

  “You want some sucker to climb out on the rigging while Cyber Circus is in flight?” spat one pitchman, chowing down on a smoke stick as if it was his last taste of life and he intended to drain every bit of flavour. “We ain’t got a hope. The Saints alone know where the gobs landed,” said a second, and a third, “We ain’t paid enough for that kind of shit!”

  “D’Angelus will set snipers on anyone who goes up top and tries to free the craft,” said Hellequin. He pursed his lips. They hadn’t much of an alternative. The closer they got to the ground, the greater the likelihood that D’Angelus’s men could pin down the ship.

  “You need an athlete to navigate the exterior while avoiding sniper fire.” Hellequin stepped inside of himself a moment, to the night he had been tasked with removing the civilian contingent from the goods’ store at the township of Graymo. Tucked in behind a shot-out truck tyre, he’d sketched out his manoeuvres in the dust. He would send in men from the rooftop. He would cover them – that was the purpose of the HawkEye soldier. To see what was coming before others did. To be one step ahead. To volunteer the lives of those more disposable than his own.

  His mind snapped back to the present. “Lulu should do it.”

  The surprise on the faces of the pitch crew gave way to a dawning inevitability and murmurs of “The ladyboy should do it,” “Only one with the skills,” and “Whaddaya say, Jeridian?”

  “My name is Asenath,” the woman emphasised coldly. She scrutinised Hellequin with her dark green eyes. “And how do we persuade Lulu to do it?”

  “Let me handle Lulu,” said Hellequin.

  * * *

  “Drag them in! Drag them in!” hollered D’Angelus.

  Jaxx drove the giant winch by its handle, stretching onto tiptoe each time the wheel moved around to its highest axis. The sleeves of his kurta shirt strained across his tensed muscles. The brimless white kufi hat he wore grew dark with sweat.

  Das was at his elbow. Crossing his wiry brown arms, the navigator squinted up and gave a low whistle. “Now that is one strange critter you’ve harpooned there, Jaxx. Oh, yessy yes. Oh, yessy yes,” he repeated softly.

  All around the burrower, D’Angelus’s men were drinking in the fresh air after the hours in the hold, stretching their legs, sharing jokes and occasionally shadowing their eyes with the flat of a hand and staring up at their catch.

  You think it’s all over, thought Jaxx of each, including the saloon owner. His Spirit belief system led him to consider another path though. One that allowed for a small seed-like shape flickflacking down the side of Cyber Circus’s tarpaulin.

  * * *

  Lulu took to his ass and slid down one panel of the tent’s roof at speed. The bowed fabric at the bottom formed a makeshift trampoline. The instant his feet made contact with it, Lulu softened his knees, absorbed the tremor, and kicked off. He knew all about tumbling through space inside the tent, where the spotlights burnt down from above like balled fire. But this was a different degree of vastness. Arms pinioned to his sides, feet pointed out of habit, he imagined himself catapulted up to the heights of the tent’s twin peaks. Except, there was an endless stretch of blue sky above him this time. Nothing to cling onto. No net below.

  He tucked his fear beneath his breastbone. He was Lulu – tantalising, mesmerising, the marchioness of flight! There was nothing new about this performance. It was simply an alternative venue. And a tougher crowd, he realised as a couple of rock ammo shots fell short of him.

  The attack brought his latent testosterone to the fore. Soaring over the first peak of the tent, propulsion hollowing his cheeks, he found a new motivation to succeed. Yes, he’d extracted a promise from the HawkEye in exchange for his help, but it was reward enough to spit in the eye of the bad men below. Men who’d take a prize like Nim and scratch their initials into her. Men who’d abuse gentler souls and leave them fit only for the circus, he reminded himself, pushing darker memories of his own misuse aside.

  His toes made contact with the far side of the tent. He somersaulted sideways and down, nimbly avoiding the snipers’ pot shots. Beneath him, the tent billowed and sighed with each wound.

  A clot of the parasitic silk clung to the brass rod that ran around the edge of the tent roof. Lulu tucked his feet under the warm metal and leant back against the canvas to make himself invisible to the snipers. Reaching over a shoulder, he extended a corrugated hose from the small fuel case strapped to his back, aimed it between his feet and squeezed the trigger. Flames splurged from the mouth. The knot of silk melted back in layers, but still the fibres tried to re-knit. Lulu kept up the outpour of flames, narrowly avoiding scorching the more delicate tarpaulin as he fell sideways suddenly when that particular grip on the ship released. He let go of the trigger. The fire rescinded instantly.

  “Oh, my sweet heart!” He patted the spot above one set of ribs.

  * * *

  The craft lurched, the bridge tipping skyward. Just as suddenly it rocked back. The ship was being towed towards the ground again.

  “What the devil is Lulu doing up there?” Herb wrestled the ship’s wheel at full lock, his squat hands moulding with its frills. Cyber Circus bucked, objecting to her restraints. The ringmaster was momentarily thrown against the chart coil to the left of the wheel, a navigation system worked via a foot pump and which drew a calico cartography strip through twin brass winders. He steadied himself, stepped up onto a foothold in the stalk of the wheel and tried to manipulate the pulley system overhead.

  “Got to get us some leverage here.”

  Nestled in the viewing pit, Nim pressed her face to the grimy window. The bridge was a pustule of ribs and glass, located at the front of the ship and accessed via a gangplank above the head crest of the calliope. To the rear of the room was the ship’s wheel and associated apparatus. To the fore, a cushioned viewing pit.

  Nim peered up and saw a fresh glob of silk arrive alongside the shredded remains of the first.

  “They’ve got a replacement gripline attached,” she called back.

  “Shit me backwards. That nimby, Lulu, better hurry his ass up and cut us loose already,” spat Herb, voice strained with the effort to keep the wheel from spinning.

  “We need someone else up there.”

  Hellequin stood at the entrance to the bridge, holding back the muscle sheet of a curtain. The whir of his internal clockwork made him just another part of the craft.

  “Go!” Herb cried enthusiastically. “Any
of you, go!”

  Nim pressed her hands to the glass and stared down. She saw D’Angelus, the motherfucker, in his signature trekker’s hat. His men swarmed below. Like fire ants, they deserved to have boiling water poured over them.

  She turned around sharply. “I’ll do it.”

  Hellequin parted his lips to speak. The red hot magma of her eyes was enough to torch his objections.

  * * *

  D’Angelus tucked behind one of the burrower’s giant spinnerets; sooner or later the circus crew would get in range to start using their rock rifles. He squinted up to see a second figure emerge at one of the peaks of the circus tent. While the first had proven a slippery little sucker, flickflacking to avoid his snipers’ best shots, the newcomer had a fluid elegance.

  “Like a dancer,” murmured the salon owner. He nipped at his smoke stick and savoured its aroma. “You!” He addressed the nearest of his dust handler grunts. “Give me your binoculars.”

  The man removed a pair of field binoculars from around his neck and handed them over. D’Angelus shook back the strap and brought the device to his eyes. One lens was pitted, the result of exposure to Humock’s torrential dust storms, no doubt.

  “How’d you see through these damn things,” he muttered, adjusting the zoom to admire his prey in detail as she opened her black umbrella, brought it under her and leapt inside. Nim set the umbrella spinning in her descent. The snipers were forced to weave their barrels every which way in an effort to sight her.

  “Fighting back, Nim? Well, I never.” He flicked up the rim of his trekker’s hat to get a better view.

  * * *

  Nim slid down to the fat brass vein running around the circumference of the roof. She stepped out of the moving umbrella and twirled it up over one shoulder.

  “Lulu!”

  “Miss Nim?” called the ladyboy from below. He appeared over the edge, face blackened by the backdraft off the flame hose. “The devils sent you out here to do a pitchman’s job? The yellow-bellied stink swines!” Lulu pulled his lace handkerchief from the cup of his bustier, went to dab his temples then remembered his manners and offered it to Nim first.