The Endless War That Never Ends

by Christopher Brimmage

  A pair of rockets emerged from one of the bubbles and slammed into the pink blob. It was knocked to the edge of the B.S.S.C. Burton and teetered on the brink of falling. Then the cursed robot with drills for arms—the one that Prisoner-Art annoyingly referred to as Drillbot—dove into view from the same bubble and plunged drills-first into the pink blob. The robot was followed by what Agent 27142 could only describe as the most ridiculous dinosaur in the entire Multiverse: a tyrannosaurus rex with a matted blond coif atop its head that was short in the front and long in the back. The dinosaur wore a tiny crown made of fangs, a leather jacket, and a pair of rocket launchers harnessed to its sides. A second dinosaur rode upon a saddle on the tyrannosaur’s back, chomping on a cigar and operating the rocket launchers with its ham-sized paws.

  Meanwhile, thirteen other Arts and Ginnys dropped from the two other bubbles onto the hull of the B.S.S.C. Burton, these led by a Cyclopean Art carrying a club the size of a minivan. The Cyclops-Art raised his club and began charging toward the pink blob, but when the blob fell over the edge with the robot and the dinosaurs, the one-eyed monster shifted his attention to the bridge of the B.S.S.C. Burton. His minions followed suit. As they charged, Squadron Nu finally arrived to aid the B.S.S.C. Burton, strafing across the mass of Art and Ginny flesh and disintegrating three members of the invasion party, including one Ginny wearing a floating raincoat and one Art that looked like an elf and another Ginny that appeared to be a tiny fluttering fairy. Squadron Nu zoomed away and looped around to prepare for another pass.

  Agent 27142 turned from the carnage to look at Agent 29333. If circumstances were different, he might have complimented her on how her eyes sparkled in this light. Instead, he frowned and ordered, “Agent 29333, update me on the status of the fleet.”

  Agent 29333 pressed some buttons on her keyboard and then answered, “Of our fleet’s original thirty-six carrier-class shift-ships, fourteen remain, not including us.”

  Agent 27142 nodded, clicking his heels together as he turned back toward the view screen. In doing so, he found that the Cyclops-Art and his invasion team had smashed their way into the bridge of the B.S.S.C. Burton. Flames erupted from within the bridge, and the small image from the viewpoint of the B.S.S.C. Burton’s bridge in the bottom left corner of Agent 27142’s view screen winked out. Agent 27142 watched as the Cyclops-Art and the nine other remaining members of his raiding party emerged from the wreckage of the bridge and leapt off the side of the ship before Squadron Nu could engage in another strafing run. White bubbles appeared, catching the cyclops and his mates as they fell through the black night. Meanwhile, the B.S.S.C. Burton capsized, taking with it a dozen skyscrapers as it plunged toward the ground.

  “Scratch that,” said Agent 29333. “Thirteen ships remain.”

  “We call that a baker’s dozen on my earth. What do you call it here?” chimed Prisoner-Art from his restraints at the back of the bridge.

  Agent 27142 turned and glared at the prisoner. The prisoner wilted, his shoulders slumping and his eyes drifting to the floor. Agent 27142 noted silently to himself that if he survived this battle, he would enjoy torturing the mouthy bastard during tomorrow’s morning meal.

  With no warning other than a blinding white light that filled the view screen, the Cyclops-Art and his nine remaining followers dropped to the B.S.S.C. Mimessiah’s hull. They landed on the flat expanse that stretched for a hundred meters in front of the bridge. They charged toward the bridge, their weapons raised above their heads and ready to smash.

  Agent 27142 smirked. Unlike the captain of the now-destroyed B.S.S.C. Burton, Agent 27142 relied on preparation rather than luck and reflexes. He pressed a button on his captain’s chair and ordered, “Beta Squadron, engage maneuver ‘Raindrops.’ Agent 29333, engage maneuver ‘Monkey House.’”

  Agent 27142’s smirk transformed once more into a smile as the B.S.S.C. Mimessiah performed a barrel roll. As the ship turned upside-down and the city now loomed above it, the Cyclops-Art and his fellow invaders fell into the sky between the B.S.S.C. Mimessiah and the city, tumbling like ten plump raindrops. New cosmic bubbles appeared below them to catch them, but before the raiders could fall into the bubbles, Beta Squadron zoomed into view and opened fire with their Scatter Guns, disintegrating all ten of the invaders. The B.S.S.C. Mimessiah continued its barrel roll and returned right-side up.

  Agent 27142 again peered out of the view screen at the battlefield. He sighed as two of the remaining carrier-class shift-ships began firing on a third ship nearest them. The B.S.S.C. Seventh Circle burst into a ball of flames as explosions rocked its hull. It drifted slowly sideways and then began falling to the earth. Agent 27142 noted to himself that he would need to recommend the captain of the Seventh Circle for a posthumous medal of valor, for the image from the viewpoint of the Seventh Circle in the bottom right of the view screen showed the captain screaming orders to his imminently dying crew and pointing toward a particular spot on the ground far below, where hundreds of the blue bear’s incursion force were engaged in an all-out murderous brawl with hundreds of members of the pink bear’s force, filling every square inch of a few city blocks as they murdered and maimed one other. The falling ship crashed atop them. The viewpoint from the Seventh Circle winked out, flames engulfed the area of the city where it crashed, and hundreds upon hundreds of Arts and Ginnys met a fiery end.

  Unfortunately, these hundreds upon hundreds of flaming and dying incursion force members were but a tiny fraction of the Arts and Ginnys at war on this planet, so Agent 27142 gave himself no opportunity to rejoice at their deaths. Instead, he ordered Agent 29333 to open communications with both the B.S.S.C. Yeti and the B.S.S.C. Irrational Number.

  “Whomever is now in control of my ships, this is Agent 27142, the captain of the B.S.S.C. Mimessiah and the admiral of this B.I.T. fleet. I will give you one chance at mercy: release the surviving crew members of my ships unharmed, and I may be convinced not to annihilate you from existence.”

  Agent 27142 received no acquiescence from the two commandeered ships. However, he never expected acquiescence. He instead expected to grab the attention of the commandeered ships so that they might stop firing upon the other members of his fleet. Agent 27142 knew he had succeeded when the ships turned to face the B.S.S.C. Mimessiah.

  Agent 27142 glanced at the small images on the outskirts of the view screen that represented the bridges of the Yeti and the Irrational Number. In the image from the Yeti, a version of Art dressed like a pirate—complete with an oversized red coat, a black admiral’s hat with a skull-and-crossbones stitched across the front, a hook for a left hand, a peg in place of his right leg, and a green parrot with footlong antennae that extended from just above its beak—stood victorious above the corpses of the bridge crew. Behind him stood three other Arts that had accompanied him in commandeering the ship, one a gangster in a dark suit, one a cowboy holding a pair of six-shooters, and one an Art with a vicious cobra in place of each arm. A ghostly white bubble hovered at the back of the bridge.

  The Pirate-Art pressed a communication toggle on the dead captain’s chair and shouted, “Yar! Hoist the black flag of Dread Interdimensional Pirate Art, for the B.S.S.C. Yeti now belongs to me. And now I’m comin’ for ye, Admiral whatever-yer-number-is! But first, let’s see how ye manage without yer Yeti’s damnable jets.” The pirate then pressed another series of buttons on the dead captain’s chair, and he shut the power off to all the jets that were assigned to the B.S.S.C. Yeti. Agent 27142 cursed.

  Meanwhile, the Irrational Number’s bridge was filled with the exact same carnage, but this carnage was personified by Ginnys that appeared identical to the Arts onboard the Yeti—a pirate-Ginny, a gangster-Ginny, a cowboy-Ginny, and a snake-armed-Ginny. Each pirate yelled to its followers, and they all rushed headlong into their respective cosmic white bubbles, disappearing from the bridges of the Yeti and the Irrational Number. Naught but death remained behind them on the ships’ bridges, but at least this death was no longer a plague s
preading destruction to the remaining B.I.T. carriers.

  Agent 27142 grinned, excited for the imminent action about to erupt on his bridge. He unbuttoned the fastener that held his Scatter Gun pistol in place. He pulled a small brass pill-shaped item from another segment of the holster, touching a button on its side that caused three petite spikes to pop out of its bottom.

  “Agent 29333, to me. Engage maneuver ‘Mirrorland.’ Bridge crew, remain at stations and prepare to be boarded,” he ordered. He heard Prisoner-Art murmuring and whining behind him, but he ignored the feeble noises. Agent 29333 stood from her station and walked to Agent 27142, standing back to back with him so they might be ready for an incursion from any angle.

  A white bubble appeared on the port side of the bridge, while a second appeared on the starboard side. Agent 27142 faced the starboard portal, Agent 29333 the port. The cowboy version of Art was the first through the starboard portal. His face melted into a gurgling, liquidy red mess as Agent 27142 threw the brass pill at the man’s head, its metallic spikes sinking deep into the unlucky Art’s cheek. A gurgling, liquidy sound behind Agent 27142 indicated that Agent 29333 had performed the same attack on the cowboy-Ginny appearing from the port bubble.

  Agent 27142 dove toward the starboard bubble, shifting his momentum to roll up onto one knee just as the pirate-Art leapt through and landed on the deck of the bridge, firing a flintlock pistol that would have hit Agent 27142 directly in the chest had he not rolled away. Fortunately for Agent 29333, she had again mimicked Agent 27142’s movements, diving and rolling toward the portside portal. The bullet from the pirate-Art scored a direct hit in the heart of the pirate-Ginny, and the bullet she fired did the same to the pirate-Art. Agent 27142 dodged swipes from viper arms and blasted a Scatter Gun bolt directly in the face of the arms’ owner. He followed this attack with a second shot into the face of the gangster-Art before the gangster was able to fire his already-drawn pistol.

  His foes defeated, Agent 27142 turned to see how Agent 29333 fared. She also stood victorious over her boarders. As the cosmic bubbles faded into nothingness, Agent 27142 walked to the bloody corpses of the pirates and the cowboys and nonchalantly fired his Scatter Gun pistol into each one, hitting them with disintegration bolts that would rend them unto oblivion and thus guarantee they would be reincarnated by neither blue nor pink bears.

  “Nice work, Agent 29333,” said Agent 27142 with a smile.

  She did not smile back, instead returning to her station with a mild, “As you say, commander.”

  Agent 27142 turned back toward the view screen, his adrenaline still pumping from the fight and his breath heavy. He frowned. On the ground below, the blue and pink armies were being continuously reinforced by new white and black bubbles that dumped new Arts and Ginnys onto the wreckage of the vast battlefield.

  Agent 27142 grunted in disgust. The stalemate continued across the battlefield. But now Agent 27142 realized that attrition was affecting his B.I.T. forces worse than either of the other two invading armies. Now that the B.I.T. fleet was down to twelve functioning carriers—not counting the B.S.S.C. Mimessiah, and assuming the surviving crew members could take over command of the Yeti and Irrational Number—the incursion forces had more leeway to fight without being disintegrated into nothingness. Agent 27142 sighed, his confidence wavering.

  At least we have the shield, thought Agent 27142. I can lose every ship in my fleet, but so long as that shield holds until the High Commander is ready, I will have saved the Multiverse.

  And then, as if the Multiverse were waiting for its cue to launch into ironic mayhem, a vast explosion erupted across the generator park inside the shield. Agent 27142 cursed louder than he had ever cursed before. His throat felt raw. He cursed again as the shield that guarded the heart of the B.I.T. faded and the incursion forces on the ground turned their attention toward the newly vulnerable area of Earth 55,777.

  Agent 27142 pressed a button to alert the High Commander, and then ordered the ship to drop altitude to put itself between the Olympus building and the invading forces. The adrenaline faded from his heart, transforming into a ball of dread that drifted down into his stomach to take up residence.

  When Prisoner-Art groaned in despair at the back of the ship, Agent 27142 did not even deign to promise torture. Instead, he groaned, too.

  Chapter 17

  A PUTRID SKIRMISH

  REGULAR-GINNY ROLLED HER way through the wreckage of the city, making a beeline for the building marked Olympus. She nonchalantly swatted aside fighter jets as they rained down around her. The divebombing jets had at first filled her with dread, because she had assumed the B.I.T. had some sort of new weapon or tactic up its sleeve, but after the first dozen or so crashed around her, she realized these doomed ships had simply lost power somehow and were falling to the ground.

  She glanced toward the sky and sighed. Though a horde of the jets had lost power and were plummeting to the ground, thousands of others were still streaking across the cloudless black night, swooping down periodically to strafe Ginny’s puppets and disintegrate them into oblivion.

  She rolled south and east, entering the area of the city that the shield had protected until moments ago. As she made her way down a major thoroughfare marked by blue street signs as Ζεύς Avenue, pink hatred twisted her heart, and without even a second thought, she stretched two mighty tentacles out to her side and clotheslined a pair of skyscrapers. The pair of buildings buckled and toppled, tipping into the next pair of skyscrapers and causing them to topple, too. Screams erupted from within the buildings, and then abruptly ended with a sickening squelch. Ginny paid no mind, as the pink current within her heart swirled ever deeper with angry scorn.

  Two vehicles rounded the corner in front of her. They looked like Panzer tanks from her world, except they hovered three feet above the ground and had a B.I.T. seal emblazoned across their flanks. A dozen marines in black-and-gray camouflage perched atop each vehicle, kneeling with their rifles drawn. Ginny squashed them beneath a pair of wide tentacles before they managed to fire a single shot, and then she played with the aftermath, crunching the tanks into huge balls of metal and slinging them high into the air at the jets above. She heard screaming from a few maimed marines who were still alive within the wreckage. The sound tickled the pink malevolence inside her as it faded into the distance. She smiled.

  Debris from a fallen skyscraper blocked her path. About two miles away, high in the sky, she could see the neon letters of Olympus call to her—somehow, the letters were still alight despite all other power winking out in this part of the city. She sighed. It was so close. She charged through the debris and found that Ζεύς Avenue continued directly through the middle of the generator park that had lain behind the shield wall before it fell. Though smoke and assorted debris blocked much of her vision of the road ahead, she knew from the tickle in her brain that she need only follow the street and it would eventually end on the other side of the generator park at the base of the Olympus building.

  She rolled forward as quickly as possible. About thirty yards ahead, a gigantic hole lay open in the ground with a radius the size of a Winnebago, and from it stretched a swath of destruction in every direction. Smoking hulls of warehouse-sized generators lined both sides of Ζεύς Avenue, and if her blob had not made her fireproof, her skin would likely have been charred and blackened. She heard struggling in the distance, but the smoking debris that lay in her path blocked her ability to see its source. The pink inside her tickled her brain and demanded that she hurry.

  A massive green energy beam shot into the sky from within the flaming wreckage of the generators about a quarter-mile ahead. Behind the crackling of flames, Ginny listened hard and heard grunts and screams and death rattles and a familiar cursing, and the itch in her brain revealed to her what she already knew in her gut: that Arthur the Putrid would be at the center of the struggle.

  Ginny grew her blob even larger, adding a good thirty-stories of height. As she rolled through the fl
aming wreckage strewn across Ζεύς Avenue, she extinguished the fires with her blob as she rolled over them. When she neared Arthur the Putrid and whatever was causing him and his Death Cavalry trouble, she slowed to a halt. A pair of smoking generator hulls lay blocking her path. Rather than rolling over them to dive right into the carnage that lay between herself and the Olympus building, she decided to use caution. The pink buzz in her brain grew stronger—obviously the Pink One showing her displeasure at Ginny’s decision—but Ginny ignored it. She created a current within her pink blob that brought her up to its topmost point, from which she peered over the two flaming generator husks that lay in her path.

  She looked down upon a wide clearing—a clearing that existed because the generators that had previously occupied the space were no longer present. She could clearly see the outlines of where four of the mighty warehouse-sized generators should sit, concrete foundations that no longer housed the rounded metal tops of the generators. Ginny noted the bodies sprawled across the clearing. The moleman version of Art and his gigantic beast lay in the throes of death, covered in dozens of stab wounds. The beast screamed as the robot with drills for arms emerged from its flesh, ripping it in twain. Arthur the Putrid’s Death Cavalry lay in similar positions of gore, some showing signs of having been exploded in a haze of rocket fire, others ripped in half by claw and tooth and drill. The tyrannosaur stood over its most recent victim, the version of Ginny with the floating bunnies strapped to her feet. Only the feet of this Ginny remained, one of the bunnies dead and the other alive and trying to fly away, fluttering around in a sad lopsided loop a few feet off the ground.