by Andy Remic
Pippa stood, panting for a few moments, then dragged out her yukana and leapt down from the machine. She ran over to her clone, who was lying on her back with a hole through her body the size of Pippa's head. At first glance Pippa thought her clone was dead: she was soaked with blood, and the wound was ragged and torn, edged with strips of flesh and bone. Pippa reached forward, fingers nearly touching the wound but reluctant... what could she do?
Nothing, she realised.
Pippa's clone opened her eyes, and smiled through a sheen of blood speckles. "I... tried to help," she said.
"You did good," said Pippa.
"I was sent to... kill you. But you know something? In... in the end, I liked you too... much."
Pippa saw her clone's finger stretching out, flexing almost spasmodically, and she took the clone's hand and thought about all the bad things this creature had done, all the savage killings, the murders, the murders in her fucking name... and that was if she'd lied, because maybe she was the clone and the dying woman in front of her was Pippa. The real Pippa. The original. The template.
Pippa barked a laugh, but tears were rolling down her cheeks.
She was confused.
It was just too fucked up. Too mashed up.
And Pippa realised that here and now, before her on the ground, dying, dribbling blood like a baby dribbles spit, coughing up chunks of her own smashed lungs, a quarter of her body flushed out like bad piss... well, here and now, this wasn't an evil creature, wasn't a ganger, wasn't an enemy, wasn't somebody to be hated. At the end of the day, it was just a woman lying on the floor, dying.
Pippa squeezed her fingers.
"Thank you," she said. "For your help."
"What I said... said before... I..." she spasmed, and her eyes glazed over. Then she relaxed, and her tongue licked her lips. "It's a trap," she said. "All... a trap."
Then she died on the factory floor.
Pippa held her hand for a while, slack fingers in hers, and when she opened her eyes she thought her dead clone was crying. Until she realised it was her own tears, dripping from weeping eyes, flowing from her face to its mirror image. Pippa looked at herself in death, and shuddered. Is this how I'll appear? Is this what it'll taste like? And she had the unique experience of watching herself die.
She did not like it one bit.
Pippa stood, and rummaged through her clone's clothing for extra MPK mags. Then she took the second yukana sword and sheathed both weapons on her back, beneath her pack.
She looked up. Around. There had to be cameras. Had to be. She grabbed one of the spikes through her arm, readying herself for the agony, and yanked it out with a spurt of blood.
"Right, fuckers!" she screamed. "I'm coming for you!"
Pippa's MPK blossomed, yammering, hot fire ejecting from the glowing barrel. A line of squib soldiers went down in a fast line from left to right, punched from their feet, splattering blood up a wall of sand crates. Crouching, she paused as the smoke swirled and parted, her body tense, eyes narrowed. She stood slowly and stepped forward, searching. Another squib charged at her, screaming, and a single bullet between the eyes slapped him back, ending his fury with a nasty crack.
"Any more?" she said, voice calm.
Apparently, there were not, and she touched her arm delicately where she'd patched her flesh together with skinglue after removing the Thumper's nails. She took a deep breath, levelling the pain in her mind. Control it, she snarled at herself.
Pippa stepped gingerly between the corpses and stepped through the door into another narrow corridor. These were the worst - in the confines it was easy to get shot, easy to die - but Pippa's fury was carrying her on, pushing her on, and when it came down to it, when the shit hit the fan, she no longer cared, no longer worried about consequence, no longer gave a fuck about the 3Core and Quad-Gal and the invading junk army. That was just a backdrop, a distant play acted out for the benefit of the decadent and mocking gods. Pippa had nothing left to fight for, and even worse, nothing left to live for. Everything she had loved was gone, and that shrivelled her heart to a small black place and locked the gate.
You must be close. To the 3Core. They're throwing everything they have at you...
And she didn't care. Her whole life she had been a victim, and despite her hatred and violence and her ability to kill, she knew now - she had been the victim. A victim of bullies and an abusive father. A victim of hate. A victim of anger. A victim of pride. A victim of fury. And she was tired, so tired, and wanted to let it all go...
But could not.
She kicked open the door and bullets whined at her, slapping the wall beside her head, tiny splinters of hot steel stinging her skin. She unleashed metal fury, stepping, leaping, into a roll and coming up fast, eyes narrowed, lips pursed, MPK slamming in an arc that ended with a final crack as she took out the last enemy squib on the high bridge above her. He staggered, hit the rail, flipped over, and landed with a dull thud in front of her, unmoving.
Pippa stared through the gloom. There was, at the centre of the chamber, what could only be described as a huge pod.
Can it really be that simple? A Pod Vault? A fucking pod in the middle of a room? But then, she'd killed, what? Sixty? Seventy angry little gangers in the process? Did that make it an easy infiltration, or was she just jaded beyond belief after decades of slaughter? But it was all for the greater good, right? All for the bigger fucking picture.
I'm tired of death, she realised. I'm tired of the kill. Maybe Keenan did the right thing after all. Maybe I should go back to VOLOS, the core of Sick World, the twisted, warped, corrupted Machine God... Maybe I should join Keenan? It has to be better than this.
Pippa moved forward, wary, MPK sweeping her surroundings. The Pod Vault was barely what Pippa would describe as a museum; it was a room, an armoured room designed to protect an item, a series of items, something precious. She stepped through the arched portal of the black pod and into the dark, oil-smelling interior. It occurred to her that it might be a trap; that the whole thing might just crush her, or swamp her in poisonous gas, or inject her with a thousand spikes. She no longer cared. Pippa had moved beyond thoughts of death. She was sick of the gangers, sick of the clones, she just wanted out of there - one way or another.
It was cool inside the Pod Vault. A single room with a gentle, glowing light. There were diamond shelves with various items ranging across their sparkling expanse. Pippa scanned the shelves, squinting a little, holding her breath. They'd travelled long and hard and fast trying to find an answer to the junks; could she really be this close to discovering the one thing which could save the Quad-Gal from their infectious invasion?
She murmured a tiny laugh.
Her eyes alighted on a small grey disc. Around the edge, in tiny, alien script were letters, or numbers - some form of identification. This had to be it. The 3Core. The junk's computer chip, once used to run their global mainframe, and which coordinated their civilisation and their battles and their society. The heart, mind and soul of their civilisation. The Junkala Soul. Quad-Gal Military could reprogram it, re-infect the spreading junks with a digital retrovirus. Turn them from warmongering creatures of accelerating destruction into... something not quite so corrupt.
Pippa reached out.
Her fingers closed slowly around the disc, and she lifted it to her face, and she felt the power emanating from the tiny object: something so small, so delicate, so fragile, and yet with the potential to do so much good. It had been hidden here, hoarded here, and Pippa was damn sure the gangers had no real idea of what it was, of what it could potentially achieve. They'd have taken over the Quad-Gal by now if they had any inkling of its power.
"Beautiful, is it not?" said the soft, slow voice.
Pippa whirled, crouching, yukana out and quivering, the shring hanging in the air.
At the entrance stood a small man, a hunchback, one shoulder lower than the other. His face was oval, his hair a straggled mess, his mouth upturned at one corner, his eyes mi
smatched in colour - one green, one yellow, a curiously mesmerising stare.
Pippa looked for weapons, but the hunchback was unarmed.
Pippa relaxed a little. His soldiers would be outside, of course. Waiting for her to step out. Ambush!
Hell.
"Do you know what it is?"
"I know it belonged to the junks. That is all. We have tried to decode it, but do not have the technology. Quad-Gal Military saw to that with their... sanctions." He almost spat the last word, but then smiled lop-sidedly.
"Hmm," said Pippa, eyes searching for a way out. She did not consider the hunchback a threat. He was little more than a distraction before the real violence began. How many soldiers? How many guns? Shit, she was trapped like a bear in a cage. Well, she'd fucking dance all right. She'd dance and maim and kill until she could kill no more.
"How did you convince your clone to help you? We were amazed by that turn of events. She was genetically programmed to hate you, to bring you in, to kill you as a last resort."
Pippa gave a small shrug. "I did nothing."
"You changed her."
"I could not change her. She was me."
"She was a copy of you," said Ziggurat. "She was your clone. With a few... modifications."
"Much as I'd like to stand here chatting," snapped Pippa, stepping forward, yukana lowering to the hunchback's throat, "I need you to step out of the way. In one piece is fine, but if you like, you can do it in several slabs."
"Tut tut," said Ziggurat, smiling gently. "You people do so underestimate me. But you only do it once."
Pippa hesitated. But she was deadly tired, emotionally distraught, mentally drained, psychologically bruised and just damn sick of the whole fucking ball game.
"I warned you," she said, and launched herself at the hunchback, yukana slamming down in a killing stroke - only Ziggurat wasn't there; he'd side-stepped neatly, right hand darting out, the palm of his hand slapping Pippa's chest over her heart and accelerating her backwards with such force she could not breathe. She sped across the Pod Vault's interior, hit the wall and fell to the ground. She rolled to her feet, hissing. Ziggurat traded his air of nonchalance for an expression of loathing. This was fine. Pippa was used to people trying to kill her. It was when they were nice she started to worry...
"A nice trick. What is it? A pulse accelerator under your palm?"
Ziggurat shrugged, discarding his robe with the same motion. Pippa blinked. He was now naked, his body twisted and scarred - heavily scarred - from either acts of torture, or a hundred battles with a blade. His small, shrivelled penis swung between his legs as he took a weird kind of wrestling stance, one shoulder low and stooped, the other pushed back by his spinal deformity.
"You going to kill me, or fuck me?" snarled Pippa.
Ziggurat smiled. "Show me what you can do."
"Come on, it's one thing trying to kill you, but I shouldn't have to look at your tiny dick at the same time. That's an unfair advantage," but even as she spat the insult she was leaping, sword whistling in five beautiful, precise strokes. Ziggurat, despite his deformity, moved with practised speed and an agility that stunned Pippa. He swayed, shifted, danced, and avoided each and every swing without seeming to make any effort. He was a dancer, he was a ghost. He was untouchable.
Pippa took a step back. A light sheen of sweat grazed her brow and upper lip.
"Shit," she said.
"Submit. We do not want to kill you. We want to question you. About the Junkala Soul. About how we can access its data. You can help us. We know all about you, Pippa. We know your Combat K history. We know you have the skills to decode this alien trinket."
"Fuck this." Pippa grabbed her MPK, rounded the weapon on Ziggurat and pulled the trigger hard. Bullets screamed, Ziggurat shifted posture and... Pippa blinked, then howled as the weapon was torn from her grasp, removing a layer of skin, and slammed across the Pod Vault's interior. The MPK hit the wall so hard it broke into three pieces, which skittered across the ground, shedding bullets from the blasted magazine.
Pippa charged, yukana whistling for Ziggurat's head. He brought both hands together with a clap like thunder, and Pippa smelled ozone, everything seemed to go red and black, and she was picked up and her yukana sword bent and distorted into a twisted ball, and that was impossible, fucking impossible, and the pain exploded through her, and she was burning with hot hellfire as she was lifted, floated, accelerated, and she burned, and burned, and burned without flames, and tears ran down her scorched cheeks and she got one final glimpse, of Ziggurat, naked and grotesque, his green eye and yellow eye watching her, unblinking, uncaring before the pain became too much and she fell down an infinite well of darkness and welcomed the bottom of the pit; welcomed oblivion.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
AN ORGY OF ORGS
"What we gonna do, what we gonna do, squawk buster? I didn't shack up with you guys to die a pointless death on a pointless bloody ocean, I thought you had a better plan than this, I thought you knew what you were bloody doing squawk and here I'll be all lost and alone and lost at sea, and I'll burn me bleedin' motors out tryin' to fly all the way to dry land 'cos we're in the middle of bleedin' nowhere, so we are! What we gonna do? What we gonna squawk do, I ask yer?"
"Shut up," said Franco. "You ain't helping the damn situation."
Tarly was pale. They were in the shit, and here, and now, there was no magical Quad-Gal Military to bail her out. No expensive computer like Alice ready to calculate a solution to the problem in the blink of an eye. Tarly Winters might be one of the richest women in the whole of QGM, she might command more respect and power than Franco could ever dream about in a trillion years, she might be at the very top of the ziggurat - but here, she was just as helpless as the next woman being dragged into a four-klick wide whirlpool.
"Do something, Franco," she said, clutching his arm.
Franco grinned, and puffed out his chest. "Hey, they don't call me Franco 'Bodge Monkey' Haggis for nothing, sweetness. Leave this one to me!" He pointed at the parrot. "You! Parrot! Find me a screwdriver."
"A sonic one?"
"Eh?"
"A sonic screwdriver?"
"No, duckweed, a bloody Phillips one! And a hammer. Can't fix nothing without a hammer."
"What are you going to fix, Franco?" said Tarly, looking over her shoulder at the impending whirlpool - and their impending deaths - in a sweeping, crushing, watery grave.
"The Hyperdrive," said Franco, proudly, scratching his beard and puffing out his chest once more. "You just stay here watch that, love," he said, as the parrot dropped a screwdriver into Franco's fist. He waved the screwdriver around, and without any hint of irony whatsoever, said, "I'll be back."
He disappeared below deck.
The hyperdrive was whining and belching, the power nozzles set on full power. Plumes of black smoke were emerging from the port side of the galleon, and Tarly and the parrot looked at each other.
"Pretty Polly," said the parrot, weakly.
"Fat lot of good you are, AI. You couldn't think your way out of damn Connect Four game. When we get out of this shit, I'm going to drop you in the shit."
"Hey, this ain't my fault, buster!"
Below decks, Franco was staring at the hyperdrive, hands on hips, a big frown on his face. He heard somebody on the steps and turned, seeing Tarly descend to stand beside him. He brightened, visibly.
"Ah! The Heckler and Steinberg 52pnm co-rotational Hyperdrive!"
"You know it, then?" Tarly looked uncertain.
"Er. No. But I've read about it."
"What did you read about it?"
"I read, er, that it was... a... good... hyperdrive."
Franco started forward, and Tarly shivered. Here was the most dangerous thing known to woman - a man with a screwdriver. Franco crouched by a huge panel and undid the screws holding it on. He dropped one, which rolled away and was lost in the galleon's interior gloom. He grinned back at Tarly. "That always happens," he said.
"We're going to fucking die!" she screamed at him.
"Okay, okay, don't hassle a dude when he's on a gig, reet?"
He held up his hand, flat palm outwards.
"Back up. Back up."
Tarly, with great exaggeration, took several steps back.
"A dude needs room to breathe, yeah?"
"Just fix the fucking engine!"
"Okay, okay, don't hassle me."
Franco started to poke around inside the hyperdrive, which fizzed and popped. At one point, he was illuminated by bright white light. Then he tapped his teeth with the end of the screwdriver.
"Just as I thought."
"What did you think?"
"It's damn complex in there."
"Hmm. You don't know what the hell you're doing, do you?"
"Hey, just hang on there, trixie-knickers. Give me a few moments to codge... to codga... to think about it." He tapped his teeth again. "If I bypass the dytronium relays to the fusion hyperindex, then we should back a backpressure upsurge which negates the bipedal contrafugal..."
Tarly crouched in close beside him. "Do you feel that sideways pull?"
"Uh-huh." He nodded, meeting her gaze.
"That's us, spinning around the edge of the whirpool. You've got a minute, fucknugget, then we'll be revolving so fast we ain't getting out of this shit-heap alive. Ever."
"Don't pressure me, lass, don't pressure."
Franco reached into the hyperdrive and poked about with his screwdriver. There came an almighty scream, like worlds colliding, and the hyperdrive shut down. All lights flickered off.The engine was dead.
Franco grinned backed at Tarly. "Whoops," he said.
"You fucking, fucking, fucking idiotic, fucking, nim-witted dim-witted fucking stupid mind-frazzled drug-riddled numb-skulled brainless bowel-wrenching dog-fucking horse-fucking goat-fucking erection-obsessed fucking useless lump of fucking lard..."
As she'd been ranting, Franco reached into the hyperdrive once more. With a whine, the lights on the hyperdrive came back on. The galleon gave a jerk. The whole machine started to vibrate insanely.
