by Lee Bond
“Oh, come now, this is hardly sporting.” Eyes on the remaining flock of deadly birds, Agnethea felt enormous weight tug on her heart as they redirected themselves with fiendishly quick haste. “I do disagree with all of this.”
Tucking and rolling as she’d been taught to do when flying through the air after being treated roughly by one of the Big Kings, the freed Golem drastically changed her direction and elevation, though not quite quick enough; a smattering of the small things –which were even now revealed to her as nowt more than slender metal tubes held aloft by fire- flew right by her face, leaving trails of scorching heat that did positively nothing good to her dress.
Then, because the only mistresses she knew were harsh ones, Gravity reared her ugly head and called Agnethea back down to the ground. She collided fiercely with the side of a building that’d seen better days, then, before those damned things which she supposed were similar to an old, ancient King’s missiles, were back up on dainty feet and off on the hoof again in proper fashion.
“I see you now, up there.” Agnethea fixed the Enforcer’s location in her mind’s eye and a bright red smudge of light appeared on the inside of her, competing for attention with the other flares of illumination that were her fellow fallen Arcadians and poor old Jarvis, who, bereft of contact, was surely panicking. “I see you and I will thrash you most severely.”
Kingslaying was difficult business. You got good at it fairly quickly on, no matter the amount or purity of ‘sblood you could lay your hands on. It didn’t do you any good to be lazy. Well, perhaps, in the last hundred years or so of Kingkilling, with the positive glut of Elixir made available to gearheads and wardogs everywhere, laziness had been permitted to fester and rot, but not for someone as old as Agnethea.
“Oh no, you filthy buccaneer, not someone as me, hey?” Agnethea’s lips curled into a wicked smile as sensitive skin felt the missiles redirect for yet another approach. “I reckon you hain’t seen summat like me in your entire life.”
Pirate Queen Agnethea deRois was done. She had the measure of them swift metal birds that were the equal of a lumbering King’s old-time missiles, so she knew just what to do.
She spun in place, measured of distance between herself and the exploding birds, plotted their directions –reminding herself all the while that they could turn quicker than a greyskin's temper - and ran right at them.
***
Shuman blinked. “What? I don’t even …”
“What?” This, from Slizzer, who even though she pretended wasn’t interested or concerned clearly was because they were all concerned; they might be playing fast and loose with this deployment and none of them were willing to talk about the giant white space elephant in the room, but they were all clearly on edge about what a single piece of Arcadia-tech had done to the entire goddamn Stack.
There really wasn’t a single life sign on the entire level. All of it, gone. Snatched up and eaten. They couldn't even find a single atom that might've belonged to a man, or a woman, or a fucking plant! Christ, most of the inorganic matter had either been eaten outright or was so elementally broken down it was surprising they weren’t wading around, neck deep, in dust.
“This bitch … she dodged my minimissiles. And now … what the hell?”
This time, the feed had everyone involved, including Clint, watching down from on high. His voice came over comms, and he didn’t sound too pleased at what he was seeing from watchdog point.
“Okay, people, the woman in question, positively identified as the woman calling herself Agnethea deRois, dodged some missiles, ran back into them, grabbed a few and chucked them at our friend Shuman. She’s … yes … she’s now running through downtown whatever-the-fuck this place is called with the rest of those missiles hot on her case and Shuman is gracefully digging himself out from under a pile of rubble.”
“So be on our guard?” Terrex demanded nervously.
“Unless you’d like to have your ass handed to you by a skinny little white woman or the male equivalent, yes. This ‘Agnethea’ looks nothing like a wardog. Looks like she’d be more comfortable having tea and biscuits but she took those missiles and kept on … yikes.”
Terrex, Slizzer and Abercoign signalled they were looking for more updates, but just then, their own individual slices of Arcadian Hell came home to roost…
***
Still intent on getting to poor old Jarvis, stuck no doubt somewhere ‘neath some dirt or something equally disreputable –you needed to worry about your help, even if they were terrified of you, yes you did indeed- Agnethea intended on making a quick circuit of the city block she were on only to learn that outside the Dome, people really and truly did make themselves t’home. With the missiles chasing her, that route were a bit … perambulatory and stuffed with a wee bit more gymnastics than she were accustomed to, but alas, when in the company of enemies, do as the enemy insisted.
“It does seem to me,” Agnethea spoke to herself as often now as she had before, all in an attempt to aid her ancient Golem mind in staying rooted in the present, “that this here block does go on forever! How can that be? Why … I do know from poor Ickford that had I not been in the midst of growing my fair city ‘ere it got knocked flat by that cranky bastard, my people would’ve been living cheek to jowl.”
The Pirate Queen lashed out with an indestructible, lightning fast hand and closed it around a missile as it sought to lurch past her to come back at her from the front. The wee bastard thing tried pulling loose from her grasp, but –so far- there were nowt on the planet as could stand against her will, should she so choose it; the force of the thing were full enough to threaten to drag her off her feet, which is a thing any Queen should choose to avoid wherever possible, so smoothly now, as if ‘twere a motion she’d done all her life, Agnethea pivoted gracefully, allowing the rocket engine to assist.
When she were spun around enough, a ballerina on the stage of war, she released the small, vicious explosive bird back towards it’s lord and master, the metallic-clad arsehole hovering just beyond her reach.
Nowt came to mind but an improper gesture. Agnethea looked around, merely for propriety’s sake. As there were no one about, she followed through with her impetuous desire to deliver unto the Enforcer a message which he or she should surely understand well enough, but alas, her would-be tormentor was currently skating away through the air in a bid for an explosive-free future.
The last of the missiles, fuel cells depleted, erupted just shy of the Enforcer’s armor-clad withers, sending the fiend crashing to the ground in a clatter of limbs.
“Haha! Damnable sky knight,” A mirthful grin creased Agnethea’s soiled face, “it seems as though e’en your own missiles do not like you.”
Agnethea tipped her head pleasantly to the temporarily discommoded Enforcer, then angled herself towards one of the many downed buildings through which there just had to be a path leading to Jarvis and his ill-chosen point of repose.
“Ordinarily I would stay,” Whilst she worked her way inside, Agnethea admitted over her shoulder to the Enforcer, “and pull your head clean from your shoulders as is the only acceptable method of dealing with your enemies, but I have twice the duties as I should. I hasten to Jarvis, then on to Book.”
An explosion loud enough to shift dust and blow buildings down roared through the vast level known as Stack 17.
“I believe,” Agnethea huffed as she was forced to pull a slab of ferrocrete twice her height and King knew how many times her weight loose, “that our friend Chevril Pointillier is knocking on the door e’en as we speak. Such good times, hey?”
***
Shuman just … lay there. For the first time in a terribly long time, he wasn’t exactly sure of himself. Oh, they’d heard about the goings on out there in Jade Whisper, they’d all seen the reports beamed directly from the man’s Suit to EnforcerNet and –strictly against orders- they’d all partaken of the actual combat footage.
How could they not? The death of an Enforcer was
a big fucking deal, and with their numbers dwindling on what appeared to be a regular basis, only fools and madmen left their trust in the hands of a machine mind that seemed to be more disconnected than ever from It’s Domain.
This wasn’t like that. Not at all.
Then, Tiv Solom had gone up against not just Specters, not just Specters who’d spent a considerable amount of time with The Man They Were All Supposed to Just Completely Ignore –which was still a huge irritation to all of them- but Specters wielding some of the most bullshit powers any of them had ever seen. Flying rockmen. Burly guys generating invisible force fields. Tall, angular EuroJaps with black swords that could cut through anything. Teeny tiny little guys doing … well, nothing of importance, not really. Fairly sexy blonde women doing weird stuff with the electronics.
Visible, tangible, measurable bullshit powers that while bullshit were also easily seen, understandable and more importantly, stuff you could deal with.
Now, on the other hand, all he had was some frothy bim who’d crashed some wealthy socialite’s Sweet Sixteen party by accident. And she wasn’t yet dead. Suit was practically going mental over trying to figure out just what in the hell was going on with Agnethea’s inexplicable ability to even momentarily deal with attacks from an Enforcer and, if things weren’t put on the backburner soon enough, would almost definitely assign all available resources to that resolution.
As it was, the ceaselessly repeating loop of that first admittedly awesome dodge was about to drive one Enforcer Shuman completely up the goddamn wall.
“The fuck is wrong with you?” Shuman pounded the side of his helmet with a gauntleted fist. “This is stupid.”
Suit said nothing, which, for Shuman, wasn’t off-script; the Enforcer knew other Suits were practically constant companions, which he found frankly on the odd side, but the one time he could use some words of encouragement or explanation, he got what he always got.
An empty helmet.
A huge explosion ripped and tore it’s way through cavernous 17, knocking down some of the few remaining towers and kicking up a considerable amount of debris.
“Fuck my life. That’s all I fucking need. Visual filters.” Shuman tabbed in to the commlines, only to hear a boatload of cursing and frenzied shouting and general demands to Clint for air support and proper Intelligence.
Shuman picked himself up off the ground, feeling rebelliously smug. “Least I’m not the only one having awful fucking luck.”
The Enforcer looked around. The whole world was coated in a thin, smoggy haze of dust now. He shook his head in disgust, flipped through a handful of filters until he found one that had the least annoying color scheme to it, then hurried on after his bitch, disgusted at himself for failing to’ve already killed his Arcadian and even more disappointed that he was going to have do it on foot.
This was all wrong. None of them should be in Stack 17. The Book thing in the center of the Stack, glowing a blue so bright the center was a pristine, eye-aching, mind-numbing white … it should’ve been destroyed the moment it’d been discovered by the original teams assaying freshly uncovered Arcadia.
Shuman was by no means an ideologist. He understood with perfect clarity precisely what his job was. Every Enforcer did. Some –like Clint- had pointed things to say on much of Trinity’s actions and behaviors of late, which was fine and dandy because the machine mind encouraged free thinking and permitted vocalization of doubts, but at the end of the day, every Enforcer had to be on board with what was being demanded of them.
Destroy a population getting uppity? Check. The Universe was too full of idiots anyways.
Parboil a secret asteroid installation working on uncovering a viable method of nanotechnology? Check and check again, with added ‘BAM action for good measure.
Wrap an unruly Offworld species inside one of the many and varied methods of preventing anybody from leaving the relatively small confines of their own solar system? Hell yes, Offworlders were getting just as uppity as some Human-variants. This close to a Dark Age, the last thing you wanted were species with Age-resistant tech roaming around the fucking Universe. Singularity String ahoy!
Visit rack and ruin on It’s enemies, using a dizzying array of outlawed and illegal tech, and for no other reason than you could, or it was a slow day, or you were coming up on your weekend? Cry havoc and let loose the dogs of war, then warm up some leftovers on the smoldering ashes that’d once been the Great and Plentiful Assemblage of Couter-Alazy.
Because fuck those guys.
But this … this was all wrong. No one, not even Trinity, really knew what’d gone on underneath that weird goddamn Dome, so allowing unrestricted, unregulated tech that’d shredded an entire Stack … was a mistake. A correctable one, because really, the only ‘irreplaceable’ thing lost thus far was a few hundred thousand lives. Everything else could be rebuilt, and besides which, people had amazingly plastic minds. Ten years, maybe fifteen, and Stack 17’s disaster would be a footnote, relayed as a cautionary tale to children and idiots everywhere
Worse than that, though, were these motherfucking Arcadians.
Shuman didn’t know how the others were faring with their target, but if they were anything like his, his comrades in Suits weren’t doing so well.
“I swear.” Shuman growled to himself, and to Suit, who was probably listening. “If this bitch gets the drop on me again I am going to fucking nuke this whole area. No. You know what? I am going to ‘BAM this fucking place.”
Reaching for the semi-BAM contained in it’s little storage pouch at his waist, Shuman’s hand closed around the infinitely deadly sphere just as something crashed very resoundingly into his helmeted skull.
“Call me bitch once more, you vile buccaneer, and I really will yank your bean right from the garden.” Agnethea shouted sweetly from her perch. “And for finishes, I’ll flay you with your own nerve endings.”
***
Agnethea pursed her lips. If this were what pirating was all about when you weren’t gadding about the Unreal Universe in a ship, then she weren’t entirely certain if the post of Pirate Queen was for her. Naturally, she planned on having a crew of likeminded persuasion alongside for some of the more interesting bits, but following her surprising resurrection into this new, resilient flesh, she’d more or less promised herself that getting dirty was a thing that would happen to other people.
“At the very least…” Agnethea chose another sizeable chunk of ferrocrete –her fingers, well familiar with the grit and feel of regular stone, informed her that this stuff was durable enough to stand for thousands of years, if only for a lack of explosions- from the pile of rubble close to hand and waited for her poor Enforcer to pick himself up again, moving her stony warhead this way and that, awaiting the best possible target. “I say, at the very least, I shall need to look into clothing as stays clean no matter what ill I involve myself in.”
Then she caught sight of dirt-stained fingers, and assumed the worst: that the rest of her was just as covered as dainty digits.
“And, of course, some form of cloth or wipe. For those moments when a woman needs to feel comfortable in her own skin.” Agnethea hefted the stone aloft for a moment, then slammed it downwards with all her considerable strength; the wobbly Enforcer, no doubt wondering just how often his or her bell could be rung in a single setting, was just that moment making headway in resuming an upright position. “I shall have at thee until I am done, Sky Knight. While I do have the patience to battle until the stars go to sleep, I am most pressed for time, so be a lamb and just die, if you please.”
The ferrocrete projectile collided with her Enforcer’s tin-wrapped melon and Agnethea swore as she jumped down to have a polite word she actually did hear a gentle gong. Landing gently amidst broken rock and temporarily discommoded servant of Trinity Itself, Agnethea did a quick check on her countrymen.
As she’d feared, the explosion at the far end of the level was the rather rude announcement of Chevril Pointillier’s arrival on
the scene, a somewhat surprising appearance, given the more-or-less retiring attitude of the Elder Gearmaster’s outlook on life. His marker in her mind was not moving terribly quickly, which meant that he, too, was engaged with an Enforcer.
The other two, Dom and Mirabelle, were also on the stage, also coupled with their armor-clad dancing partners.
If she could but end this quickly…
***
Shuman picked himself up off the ground, muzzily trying to figure out what was going on with his goddamn Suit; every time he got within range of Agnethea, it seemed like it's sensors went on the fritz and his response time was very definitely running at less than optimal speeds.
There was no way a random woman who admittedly possessed strength above the ordinary -Suit, coming late to the game, decreed that the chunk of ferrocrete she'd just bounced off his skull was in excess of three thousand pounds- should be able to do as she was doing without obvious signs of augmentation.
"Goddamn it, Suit. Get your fucking head in the game." Shuman clanged gauntleted fist into the side of his helmet again, this time around, significantly harder. "This is a … FUCKING CHRIST!"
Shuman danced out of the way as a tiny bony fist came arcing towards his armored chin, receiving for his efforts a dainty kick to the stomach. Error messages belched all over the virtual-scape deployed by Suit, somber red warnings that the woman's front kick had come perilously close to cracking open the plates there.
As it was, a handful of exo-environmental controls were now on the fritz. Not a big deal, not right then because Shuman wasn't about to flit off into space.
Not when a skinny little silver-haired bitch from Arcade City was trying to kick his ass six ways from Sunday. He wasn't going to go out like Tiv Solom. Not now, not ever.
Shuman blocked the next cluster of kicks and punches spinning his way as fast as he could muster, silently gauging the woman's efforts, manually entering them into a database with ease, thanks to the mental link between himself and Suit; it wasn't the first time he'd come across an enemy that defied description or prediction, but it sure as hell was the first time this side of The Cordon.
