Rocket: How did you get … oh, I see it now!
Doc: Solon sometimes does criminal defense in Proxima worlds to relax. He says it’s refreshing to see them actually carry out the sentence right there in the courtroom as soon as the verdict comes in.
Me: We’ll unpack that later. It’s clobberin’ time!
Luther beats me to the punch. He brandishes a Buster Sword of his own, ablaze with blue flame. “Face me, Victoria. Face me … sister.”
Me: Shut the front door! Luther knows?
Doc: Yupper, they have the same mother too, Serena Mays.
Me: The Hell you say? Why didn’t anyone tell me this?
Frances Euphoria: I forwarded you Doc’s briefing on this.
Me: I read Sophia’s briefing instead.
Sophia: Ha! That’ll be the day!
Rocket: I read both briefings!
Me: Someone give me the gist of what the hell is going on!
Sophia: You should really really really start reading the briefings.
Me: Someone needs to provide me with an outline. I’m the decider guy, in other words, a busy man.
Frances Euphoria: You really don’t know what’s happening?
Me: Why does no one ever believe me when I say stuff like that?
Doc: Strata and Serena had Victoria and gave her up for adoption. They got back together a couple years later to try again and had Luther. Then they broke up again. Not too many years after, Strata had Serena declared mentally incompetent and unfit to be a guardian. This is about the time that you and Strata first met. Considering that you and he were bestest buds back then, I figured you’d be at least a wee bit more cognizant of his reproductive peccadillos.
Me: You figured wrong!
Veenure de-levitates and lands. Her hood falls backwards onto her shoulders revealing her Thulean tatted face.
Her expression softens. “Luther? Is it really you?”
The visor of his dragon armor remains shut.
A squad of Reaper bots move up behind her. Veenure lifts her hand and they freeze in place. “Is that really you?”
Luther lifts his sword and points it Veenure. The Lost Boys rattle and clank their weapons and bark and howl and shriek as if she’d said ‘Nakkha Lukhna’.
“Really? You’re outnumbered,” she says coldly, “but that’s beside the point. All of this has been for you, all of it. Dad has done everything in his power to find you and now, we have you.” Veenure glances over her shoulder at the Reapers. “We have him!”
Me: I don’t like her tone of voice.
Doc: Let this play out for a moment, but stay frosty.
Veenure’s green eyes beam hate and unhappiness at the rest of us. “They’ve taken your body, little brother, kidnapped it from our dad’s place. What they’ve done is illegal!”
Doc harrumphs. “Actually, we have Luther’s permission to care for his body.”
“Shut up, you filthy old goat!” Veenure barks at him.
“Welp, that settles it for me. No one calls me filthy.” Doc raises the MSIWI; the Reapers and their mechanical minions bristle and make ready. Our side is equally ready to rock ‘n’ roll; if a fly so much as farts, it’s gonna be a bloodbath.
“NO!” With arms outstretched, Sophia lowers in front of his weapon.
Sophia: Relax, Doc, you said to let this play out.
Doc begrudgingly lowers his weapon, mumbling something about tree-hugging vegan hippie peacenik do-gooders in the process.
Sophia: Love you too, Doc.
“The way we see it,” Veenure says, “the Dream Team has been illegally trapping players in Proxima Worlds to secure their own funding. A prime example of this is what you’ve done to my brother. You’ve stolen his body and you’ve imprisoned him here in Tritania.”
“Holy crap, Toots!” I snort. “You’ve been drinking the Kool-Aid since before you sprouted tits, haven’t you?”
“Ew!” Frances slaps me on the back of the head.
“What? It’s true!”
Luther’s visor rises on its own. “You’re so wrong about all of that. Dad’s lied to you about everything; about what he’s doing with in the Proxima Galaxy, and why, and how you fit in the scheme of things.” He cracks a sad little half-smile. “Did you notice that Dad only cared about you after he lost me?”
Veenure clenches her fists and a green flame spreads up her legs.
“Think about it,” Luther says, “I disappeared, and suddenly you’re the focus of his attention and the apple of his eye. Remember how he treated you before?”
“He didn’t know where I was! Mom hid me from him!” The green flames roar up her body. “She’s the one that threw me away when he wouldn’t give her what she wanted from him. It was her! She was crazy and hateful and selfish … and … and – her insanity! He was able to save you from her, but it was her – all HER!”
Veenure unclenches her fists and the green flames intensify. “You don’t know what you’re talking about! He loves me! He wants me! He cares for me!”
“He is using you to find me, plain and simple. Once he finally has me he’ll discard you like a broken tool. I’m the son and heir; I’m the one he wants. He doesn’t care about you. Never has. He’ll turn you in for killing that Dream Team member – that solves two problems; gets rid of you and makes him look like a good, upstanding, law-abiding citizen.”
Veenure’s voice is eerily, unnaturally calm as she says, “Well that’s easy to fix. If I never find you, he’ll always need me to keep looking.” Her eyes flicker left and right. “And I can’t find you if YOU’RE ALREADY DEAD!”
~*~
Veenure explodes into a sharknado of hate and anguish and fury, and hurls herself at her sibling.
A rain of fire and steel blasts out from both sides; the droids of doom surge forward in an armored phalanx of death and destruction, and the Lost Boys break their charge. Their ‘shoot and disappear’ tactic is something to see when you’re not the one they’re doing it to, and their modern weapons blast the Reaper-bots into Festivus poles and Holiday Tree Tinsel. Apparently, the cutesy Ewok shit was just for show.
There’s still a whole bunch of Reaper droids remaining and the other Dream Teamies move in and take them on. Surprisingly enough, the avatars of the flesh-and-blood Reapers hang back. I’m still slivers away from dying, so I’ve taken it upon myself to find a good vantage point and get to sniping.
Sure, I’m no Carlos Hathcock, but I’m no stranger to headshots either, especially with my three-barreled Storm PSR, item 92, and at this range I don’t even need to charge the bullets, even though charged bullets will blast through anything that’s between the shooter and the shootee. I’m taking off the heads off Reapers left and right, and it gets me wondering about the world rules in Strata’s Den of Stolen Antiquities.
Me: What happens when someone dies here?
Rocket: All good little avatars go to Proxima Heaven. Great place, hold on, need to land this kick. Hells yes! Did you see that? What was the question again?
Me: You’re killing me, Smalls.
Rocket: ???
Doc: If an avatar dies here, it can’t respawn for twenty-four objective Proxima hours. Keep shooting and do not die!
You don’t have to tell me twice.
A Reaper twice the size of Yogi Bear snags a handful of FE’s hair and lifts her up on tiptoe. He booms with malevolent laughter and before he can finish, she swings up into the lift, wraps her legs around his hyper-muscled arm and disjoints him at the elbow with one of her many Ginsu knives. His suddenly nerveless fingers unclench themselves from her hair, and she treats him to an impromptu splenectomy as she pivots down and away. That’s my girl! Smokey the Reaper crashes to the deck; she dives at him knife first and skewers him through the eyeball, stands, and fixes her hair.
Doc is the focus of three skull-masked droids. They keep getting inside his guard and they’ve swatted down most of von Richtofen’s Flying Circus. His gun’s down – looks like they bent it – and so is h
is life bar. With a big-ass actinic flare, he takes one down with a plasma fusion torch, and the other two blast him backwards into a pile of puffer fish, porcupines, and saguaro cacti.
I break cover and ease myself down next to our Reaper-wrecking ruminant, just as an over-muscled, chain and leather-clad bullyboy sails howling overhead, desperate to escape the pack of Lost Boys who pursue him like piranha on a pork pot pie. The Godsick chilluns are having their own private Clash of the Titans, and the Reapers and their mindless mechanical minions seem content to give them space to resolve their sibling rivalry.
“Damn, that’s gonna leave a mark in the morning,” the battered Billy Goat Gruff finally says, as he equips his silver cigarette case and sparks up a coffin nail. “They broke my bone saw and all my swords, dented my helmet, and I think they broke my tail off.” He looks, tries to wiggle it. “Nope, still there. Maybe it’s just sprang.”
“Log out,” Frances tells him, as she retrieves her sharp iron. “We’ve got this.”
One of the less cowardly Reapers bounds over a stack of file cabinets, around a pile of pirates’ treasure chests that are overflowing with Bitcoins, and launches herself at us. Sophia’s eyes flare; she points her finger gun at the airborne armored asshole, says ‘Zap’, and the Reaperette pops into a pixelated poof of pink pixie pollen.
“Holy crap! Sophia – that was the second coolest thing I’ve ever seen you do!”
Her avatar actually blushes. “What was the first coolest thing?”
I pretend to think. “It was either the rust fish spell or the Jareth’s Glass Balls; I can’t decide.”
“Shut up!” She pushes my shoulder, but snickers as she does so, and then turns her focus to Doc. “Frances is right, we got this.”
“Pfft! There’s still some life left in your old Uncle Ungulate, young Miss Wang. DUCK!” He grabs the front of her sorceress’ armor and yanks her down as a spiked metallic fist swings through the space her noggin just vacated. “I’ll be damned if I’m going to let you guys have all the fun.” A Podbyrin 9.2 appears in his other hand and he unloads it into the face of the offending Terminator.
“Thanks, Doc, I think,” our mind-mage remarks, as she picks cactus spines out of her unarmored tookus.
A Reaper in fantasy Viking gear lands directly in front of us, brandishes his war hammer hack and just has time to bray “Prepare to meet your DOOM” before Chrono gives him the Gallagher treatment with his Maxwell’s Silver Sledge-O-Matic. A Boris and Natasha tag-team of Reapers bounce over the pointy pile of unlikely objects we’re covered down behind, firing as they come. Skeletor never sees the blade as Aiden hacks him in half; Skele-whore loses her head before her feet touch the ground. Morning Assassin puts the tip of his blade in through their eye sockets, just to be sure, and grins at Frances as he wipes his blade clean on Skele-whore’s black T-shirt.
Young master Godsick is no stranger to the swordsman’s art – it’s safe to say that Strata’s favored scion has downloaded the odd swordplay tutorial or two. Big Sis fights with a bladed wizard’s staff, and she’s a whirling, twirling, hacking, attacking Cuisinart o’ Death – or would be if Luther wasn’t parrying all of her attacks with a nonchalant ease that is most misleading. He’s just defending, making absolutely no effort to attack.
“Hey guys, have you noticed that all of a sudden, there are no more war-bots, and the big bad Reapers are just hanging back and watching those two fight?” Doc asks.
“I was going to mention that … ”
“Yeah – what’s up with that?” he wonders. “Okay, now’s the perfect chance. Get your Golden Goosinators engaged and let’s put the gang-zap on Miss Victoria before her butt-buddies decide to get all frisky again.”
I re-equip mine and train it right at her. Rocket levels his kama, Sophia her hack claws, and Frances takes aim with her double barreled arm hack. Even though his life bar is just about out of go-juice, the fightin’ faun aims his bowhack.
“Jumping Jehoshaphat!” He lowers his bowhack. “The way they’re both bouncing around, there’s no way to not hit him too. Aiden!”
Morning Assassin takes shape next to Doc. “Here, Sergeant!” he shouts with a wolfish grin.
“Listen up troops, the count will be ‘three-two-one-shoot’. Everybody knows what to do on ‘shoot’, right?”
Head nods all around.
Rocket raises his hand, “Shoot, right?”
“Seriously? Son, you’re killin’me here, you’re just killin’ me. Of course shoot! Why would you not shoot when someone says ‘shoot’?” Doc shakes his head and continues. “Aiden, do your teleport thingy, and bring Luther’s ass here. Time to kick it up a notch.”
“Can do easy.”
Doc counts and Aiden blinks out on ‘two’. He pops into existence behind Luther just long enough to grab the kid.
They’re back before Doc finishes ‘shoot’; the massed fire from our combined Reaper hacks roars over Veenure, the pyrotechnics even more spectacular than a fire safety boo-boo at a Mexican fireworks, tequila, and nitroglycerine factory.
With Daddy’s Little Monster suddenly zotzed out of play, the remaining Reapers don’t even stick around long enough to utter some variation of “Oh SHIT!” – the dirty-diapered life-pilfering pansies disappear faster than mooching in-laws at Thanksgiving dinner clean-up.
The Lost Boys whoop and holler, toss their hats and helms and fire their weapons in the air. Chrono, Aiden, Doc and Rocket fist-bump and engage in manly back-slappage, while Frances and Sophia visibly restrain themselves from straightening each other’s outfits.
Luther catches my eye and nods. I wink in reply, and for right now I’m good to just sit here for a few.
We’ve smacked down Strata’s two heaviest hitters and most of his varsity line-up. Hell, we even got some of the JV by the looks of it. Yeah, RPC Rollins can respawn in twenty-four Proxima hours, and any of the Reapers we didn’t Goosinate can also respawn, but we’ve permanently taken his queen off the board. The improved Reaper hack we zapped her with will force-spawn her into the OMIB no matter where she tries to spawn – forever.
We got her, we really, really got her good.
Chapter Twelve
Where was Strata in all this?
It is the first thing on my mind when I logout and respawn on Frances’ couch in my real world avatar. Every time I move, it feels like someone’s levering the tip of the bayonet from item 381, my International Harvester M-1 Garand, between the vertebrae, so I just sit there for a moment like an uncomfortable sack of meaty doorknobs.
Why didn’t Strata show? Why leave the defense of half of your corporate assets to your brainwashed daughter and her children’s crusade? I wish I could remember the guy, remember what it was like to interact with him. How could I not have known what he was like?
I stand, think about stretching my arms over my head and then think otherwise. As I turn to France’s bathroom, I receive a message on my iNet screen.
FDA Monitor/PTSD Counselor 1351885: Hi Mr. Hughes, it appears that you have exceeded your breakfast caloric intake, but we can get to that later. We haven’t spoken in well over twelve hours. Have you missed me?
Me: I haven’t not missed you, if that does anything for you. And frankly, ‘have you missed me’ is pretty much the exclusive territory of clingy, insecure, psychotic girlfriends.
Evan: Would you like to hear a joke then?
Me: I absolutely most certainly would not.
Evan: What’s green and smells like pork?
Me: Dammit, Evan, not now. I just finished diving and now I’m heading to the can.
Evan: Oh come on. Don’t be a spoilsport. What’s green and smells like pork?
Me: I don’t know, what?
Evan: Kermit’s face!
I can’t help but chuckle. A bad joke is a good joke with the right timing, and delivering the punchline just as I plonk my narrow ass down on the cold plastic seat has to be more than a coincidence.
Evan: Want to hear another?
Evan: Excuse me?
Me: Sorry, can’t chat, I’m busy sending a message to the White House.
Evan: I’ve been perusing quotes from old detective movies. Care to guess the film?
Me: Dammit, Evan, not now. As I said before: message; White House, currently sending.
Evan: Experience has taught me to never trust a policeman. Just when you think one’s all right, he turns legit.
Me: Making a deposit in the porcelain bank. Not listening, I mean reading.
Evan: What’s the matter? You look like you’ve been on a hayride with Dracula.
Me: Listen, buster, a man is supposed to have some privacy when he’s in the voting booth!
Evan: Those gates only open three times. When you come in, when you've served your time, or when you're dead!
Me: My gate opens at least twice a day, regardless if the criminals have served their time or not. But I digress. Why, for the love of all that is holy, why, why, why do we always have to meet here? I like you, buddy, I do, I really do, enough to want you to come work with us here at the Dream Team, but I also like my restroom time alone. I like to brood while I’m in here, think about the past, catch up on the news, pick at my nails, doze off for a moment if the seat is comfortable enough.
Evan: You are increasing the risk of developing hemorrhoids by sleeping on the toilet. You are aware of this, correct?
Me: Not if you sleep in a squatted position.
Evan: How does one do that?
Me: One doesn’t. I’m joking with you.
Evan: Your jokes are worse than mine.
Me: Thin ice, pal, thin ice. Look, as much as I’d like to sit here and develop hemorrhoids while I converse with you, I have some Proxima business to attend to after I attend to the business I’m currently attending to.
Evan: Are you diving back to Tritania?
Me: Something like that. We’ll be in touch, trust me.
Evan: Don’t forget about the leadership conference.
Me: How could I forget? It’s at the top of my to-do list, trust me.
Cyber Noir Redux: (Book Six) (The Feedback Loop 6) Page 12
