Slide On The Run

by Mick Farren

  Without removing herself from the chilly but intimate contact, the Queen raised a transparent arm and gestured to the handmaiden in the shadows. The Martian moved quickly to beside Slide, and placed the bottle to his lips. The delivery method was hardly ideal, but it would have to do. Slide again felt Mina's frigid breath as she asked him. "You also want the pipe?

  "No. I don't feel any need to dwell in the dream canyons just now."

  "Your body would like it."

  "But the rest of me wouldn't."

  "Why do you resist me?"

  "Because you say you need me, but you don't tell me for what. Like I said, alcohol and caution."

  Mina was now writhing against Slide, and his body was responding eagerly, straining against the bonds with breath coming in short, sharp, anguished gasps and heart racing. Now Slide knew for sure she was trying to unbalance him. "I need you. Isn't that enough?"

  Fortunately Slide the Idimmu was infinitely schizophrenic, and could detach completely from the body, and its simplistic human lust. "All you have to do, your Majesty, is to explain."

  The Queen's frozen breathing was also quickening. "I need your demon power."

  "You'll have to be a little more precise."

  "I need your demon power to change all this."

  Slide's bound and heaving body, and the translucent form of the so sensually-busy Queen Mina were starting to merge at a number of points on their extremities. Where the foreplay had been distracting, this new intensity of melding was threatened to engulf the totality that was Slide, despite all his attempts at Idimmu detachment. He could have all too easily toggled down his logic and awareness, and wallowed along with the body-that-had-once-been-Yuma all those millions of years in the future, but Slide knew that to do that would be a serious error. He made an even greater effort to fully divorce himself the tactile storm and rise, discorporate, to a point in the middle of the air close to where SD21 had been flashing. He immediately found himself facing the equally disembodied essence of the Queen, ready for the move and positioned to head him off.

  "Your core-being is immune to my wiles?"

  "My body is having a wonderful time. It doesn't need me."

  Slide tried to peer past her to see if any other beings might be nearby in this private discorporation, but she deftly blocked him. "If you're looking for the Count, he's a long way from here."

  "But you don't want me to see for myself."

  "I am quite alone."

  "I only have your word on that."

  The Queen was icy in either condition. "I am supposed to rule here. I have to maintain some authority."

  "But you claim to need me."

  The two metaphysically copulating bodies were now completely merged, losing their physical integrity in a firework display of tantric energy, while the core-beings faced each other coolly. "You think it's easy for me to admit I need anything?"

  Slide moved to the heart of the matter. "But you say you want to change all this?"

  The Mina entity sighed. "I have come to the reluctant, but all too obvious conclusion, that coming to Mars was a good idea at the time, but, in the long run, a very bad mistake."

  "For a replicated slice of the British Empire on Ancient Mars, it seems pretty damned coherent."

  The Queen took on a negative and depressed coloration. "This place is nothing but a fragment of fantasy, and the people here are just a pack dentists seeking to make an extraction."

  "Are you sure that's not just the tetradetoxin talking?"

  "What do you know about tetradetoxin?"

  "Plenty. In fact, a fuck of a lot. We Idimmu pretty much live on tetradetoxin."

  "Then that's something we have in common."

  Slide's body was moaning loudly while that of the Queen's was emitting prolonged cat howls. On the swan-bed the long, silky-white fur of the apt-pelt was standing on end as though reanimated by the so-total coupling. Slide made a discorporate gesture towards the torridly writhing energy mass. "Will I have a body left when we all that unnatural passion has run it's course?"

  "You like that one so much?"

  "No."

  "So take another. I know you can."

  Slide was sly and teasingly sideways. "I might take yours."

  The Queen briefly sparkled with laughter. "It would seem that you already have."

  "I'm serious. This is neither the time nor place to be breaking in a new one."

  "Don't worry, we have drug that will restore us to whatever levels of normality we enjoyed previously."

  Slide's interest was instantly piqued. "A drug?"

  "It called fluxamelotide, and…"

  "Fluxamelotide?".

  "Flux for short."

  "What does it do?"

  "Among other uses, it's the prefect normality reconditioner."

  "What's it made from?"

  "You might not want to know."

  "Believe me, girl. I have ingested some pretty out-there intoxicants in my time."

  Queen Mina's entity took on a devilish hue. "Fluxamelotide is a distillation of the slime of the Slimy Things."

  "Shit."

  "Shocked?"

  Slide metaphorically shook his head. "No, but you have to admit it's kind of extreme."

  The Queen's color suddenly became business-like. "So are you going to help me?"

  "You seriously want me to make this place like it never existed?"

  The merged and flaming bodies had moved to the bed. Now it was Queen's turn to coquettishly reference their shuddering multiple orgasms. "It's surely the least you could do after the good time I've been showing your human receptacle."

  "It may not be as easy as you think."

  "But you'll try? Tell me you'll try."

  Slide could see that the Queen was close to pleading. She wanted an answer, and he suspected that it would not go well for him it he didn't give her the one she hoped to hear. He went for one final delay. "Why go to all the trouble? This place can't last. Sooner or later it'll fall, either to the Martians or the Slimy Things."

  "I don't want to wait that long."

  "It might not take that long. Look how fast the American Empire fell apart on most C21 timelines."

  A purple impatience suffused the Queen. "Even if it happened tomorrow, I am in no condition right now to deal with the crippling sense of defeat that would naturally follow."

  Slide knew he had no choice but to go along with Queen. He would agree to what she wanted, and continue to play out the game one moment at a time. "I'll do what you want. You have my word."

  The Queen flared happily. It was the first time that Slide had seen her so positive and satisfied. "Be assured, Yancey Slide, you will not find me ungrateful."

  Then, at that very moment, the entire discorporation fell apart.

  As far as Slide could tell, the forcible transition that suddenly engulfed them had nothing to do with the Queen's gratitude, but was the product of a wholly external intervention. After a nanosecond of infinite falling, he and Queen Mina were rudely dumped down in the physical, and, as if that wasn't enough, they discovered that Lupo, with a frightened handmaiden behind him, was standing beside the swan-bed watching them, as they untangled from each other's intertwined limbs, and torsos slick with shared fluids. As soon as he was able The Queen sat bolt upright, nude and furious.

  "WHO FLUXED US UP?"

  Lupo, the Renaissance vampire bowed gravely. "It was me, your Majesty. I had to do it."

  "You?"

  Lupo's face was like a carved Michelangelo. He was plainly well versed in the unpredictability of royals. "Me, ma'am."

  "You're nothing but a visiting vampire."

  "That's why the task fell to me. The others were scared of what you might do to them."

  "They were right."

  "Sir Richard suggested I should bring you the bad news, ma'am."

  "And you weren't scared?"

  "I am nosferatu. What could you do to me? I don't even fear the sun on this planet."

  "And
what news could have been so horribly important to warrant this intrusion?"

  "Your city would seem to be in clear, present, and highly immediate danger."

  "Danger? The city is always in danger according to Barton."

  "An uprising has broken out among the Martian workers at Morlock's foundry."

  The Queen's anger mounted. "A STRIKE? You interrupted me for a bloody INDUSTRIAL ACTION?"

  "It's more than a strike, your Majesty. It is an armed insurrection. The Red Martian workers are well organized, and marching down the railway that connects the foundry and the city."

  "I'll hang Bolivar Morlock. This is all his fault."

  But Lupo hadn't finished. "Meanwhile…"

  "There's a meanwhile?"

  "There's a meanwhile, your Majesty. The Slimy Things seem to have taken the uprising as some kind of signal, or at least an opportunity. Their fighting machines are advancing rapidly on the Grand Canal with what would seem to be hostile and aggressive intent."

  The Queen turned to Slide. "Now do you see why I want you to do what I want you to do?" Before he could respond, she was snarling at the handmaiden. "Don't just stand there you wretched girl. Hurry, damn it. Summon the rest. I have to dress. I have to select a uniform. Didn't you hear the vampire? The city is under attack."

  Slide and Lupo found themselves ignored by the irate flurry that was the Queen and her attendants, and Lupo spoke in a low voice. "If you find a way out of this place, I would considered it a favor if you took me with you. These humans are more insane than most."

  Slide grinned at the venerable Vampire. "What did you expect, pal? They're living on fucking Mars, aren't they?"

  Story so far: Yancey Slide, Idimmu Demon of the Tenth Continuum, running from a fragmenting backstory, finds himself in a Martian revolution. The workers are rising up angry against Queen Mina and the neo-Imperial Victorians who have established a faux-British Raj on the Red Planet.

  Episode Nine

  Workers Of Mars Unite!

  Across the span of the bridge, mob chaos confronted mounted geometry. As Slide watched from his vantage point on a high balcony of the Turquoise Tower, several thousand workers from the Morlock Foundry, a mixture of humans and red and green Martians, united and marching under black banners emblazoned with the emblem of a crudely stylized clenched fist, swarmed across the final bridge that led into the city of Extrosylvania. At the nearer end of the bridge, a double, line-abreast formation of Red Martian cavalry waited for them. The huge war-thoats

  snorted and pawed at the ground, but the plumed and turbaned riders seemed calm and impassive, as though they believed that the throng would, at the last moment, turn and retreat in the face of such an impressive show of force. This was the first time that Slide had seen Queen Mina's troops deployed for a confrontation. He had only previously observed them in ceremonial mode, parading for the colonial Victorians.

  The workers were clearly in the motivating grip of a powerful and long suppressed anger, but all combat logic dictated that the strikers from Bolivar Morlock's hellish steel and munitions mills - even though some carried wrenches and spanners as makeshift weapons - stood no chance of breaking through the armed lines and into the city. The show of force arrayed for their benefit was simply too overwhelming, and their only real options were to turn back or be cut down in their tracks. Behind the cavalry, a second formation of Martian civil police, in black and tan uniforms, stood with equal menace, some leaning on the leashes of snarling calots, the tusked and ten-legged Martian equivalent of attack dogs. Behind them a solid, defensive square of red-coated infantry, armed with repeating radium rifles, provided a final, and apparently unassailable bulwark against working class heroics.

  Slide knew, however, that uprisings didn't always play out the way they should on paper. He had seen the similar confrontations on the St. Petersburg timeline in 1917, and in New Damascus in 2209, when the Dionysian Bolsheviks had risen against the Tharg, and everyone knew the unexpected outcome in those conflicts.

  Lupo the Vampire, who stood beside Slide on the balcony, must have read his mind. "That's always the question, isn't it? Will they open fire on their own kind, or will they mutiny in the final moment of truth?".

  Slide didn't like his mind being read by a nosferatu just because the nosferatu could do it. He grunted with irritation. "The moment is pretty fucking close."

  "Who was it who said that war is a bayonet with a worker on each end?"

  "Damned if I remember, but you can be sure it wasn't one of them." He gestured to where Bolivar Morlock, Sir Richard Barton, Harriot Marwood, Prudence the Kitten, the elderly generals, plus a growing crowd of courtiers, both military and civilian, human and Martian, surrounded the Queen in this moment of emergency, babbling what could only be conflicting advice. Slide and Lupo had both decided that they wanted no part of this and stood off on their own.

  Even the babbling ceased, though, as the distance separating the mob and the cavalry was progressively reduced until it was less than a hundred yards, and the mob showed no signs of turning back. A hundred yards became eighty yards, then eighty became sixty. A thoat reared, as though anticipating what was surely going to come, and a calot started barking hysterically and could not be quieted by its handler. The front ranks of the workers seemed to falter for a moment, but then they surged forward again, either having regained their courage, or simply pushed forward by those behind who weren't so precisely aware of the threat that faced them on the bridge. At the fifty yard mark, the cavalry drew their sabers and cruel curved blades flashed under the orange Martian sky. A roar went up from the mob and the leaders began to run forwards, as though impatient to meet either death or glory. An order was shouted, and the mounted troops also plunged ahead. The helmeted riders struck left and right with their swords, but did not achieve the instant rout that might have been expected. The strikers might have been sparsely armed, but, on the confining span of the bridge, their numbers were enough create a problem. Workers by the dozen reeled away with blood pouring from horrible wounds, and others were killed where they stood, but no matter how many times the sabers rose and fell, more pressed forward. Thoats were hemmed in by the press of the crowd, and hands reached for the riders, dragging them down in a mass of hobnail boots, iron tools, and pounding fists.

  Urgent whistles blew, and now the civil police moved into the fray. The calots furiously attacked with bared fangs, and policemen with drawn sidearms opened fire. As the first reports of radium weapons were heard on the palace balcony, Lupo glanced at Slide. "Now the shooting starts."

  Slide nodded grimly. "It sure does."

  He wished he knew the name of the bridge. Whatever the outcome of the head-on confrontation, it would preserved in Extrosylvanian history for as long as Extrosylvania had a history. More workers were felled by the gunfire, but they were also arming themselves. Snarling calots were hacked to pieces. Policemen were effectively mobbed and their pistols taken from them. An eddy of mayhem could not be contained by the balustrade of the bridge. Steel and stone gave way, and two thoats and a dozen of more men and Martians plunged, arms and legs like windmills, to flagstones of the underpass roadway a hundred and some feet below.

  "This is getting messy."

  "Very messy."

  Slide could see the eventual outcome all too easily. The cavalry and the police had failed to put the workers to flight, and were, in fact, barely holding their own. It could only be a matter of moments before the infantry square was brought into play, and orders were given for the redcoats to clear the bridge with withering volleys. As Slide figured it, the only thing holding back such a slaughter was the indecision of the officers at the scene, and the many police and cavalry in the line of fire. He suspected, however, that a reluctance to butcher their own would not remain a delay or consideration for very long.

  Those on the bridge seemed to come to the same conclusion as Slide. In the center of the span, a lull had ensued in the hand to hand fighting. The pistols still barked, b
ut both sides were falling back, regrouping as best they could, and using whatever cover the dead and the debris afforded. Orders were being shouted and the infantry were assuming formal firing positions, but then the loud voice of a Martian woman cut through the general din.

  "Warriors of Mars! Warriors of Mars! Listen to me!

  The pistol shots dwindled and heads turned.

  "Warriors of Mars! Listen to me! When did you become the slayers of the defenseless?"

  Consternation broke out around the Queen. General Cairngorm was demanding to know why the infantry had not commenced firing, but, down on the bridge, an eerie silence had fallen.

  "Warriors of Mars! We are the workers! We are just like you. We labor in the foundries and the mills just as you serve in the ranks. Will you shoot us out of hand? Are we not tied by blood? The very blood that you are about to spill?"

  An injured and bleeding cavalryman got painfully to his feet, started limping back towards where the infantry stood ready. The woman's voice gained strength. "Warriors of Mars, when did you murder your own people at the command of humans? When did you slay your own for no good reason? Are you no better than the calot that kills at the word of its master? Have you forgotten that your ancestors and our ancestors were the Great Jeddaks?"

  An infantry sergeant-major attempted to drown out the woman by yelling at his troops in heavily accented Martian-English. Already the native redcoats were starting to look confused.

  "Kill the loudmouth bitch, lads! Kill them all!"

  No one fired. Lupo again glanced at Slide. "A moment of truth, I think?"

  "Any second now."

  But the infantry failed to open fire, and the woman made a final plea. "Warriors of Mars, don't do this thing!"

  As far as Slide could see from a distance, the sergeant major flew into a sudden rage. He turned and shot the woman. This was too much for three of his men in the front rank, who immediately aimed their radium rifles at him. Slide could only credit the sergeant major with having more courage than common sense. He rounded on the men and screamed at them. "You bastards all know the penalty for mutiny!"