by Lee Bond
Agnethea huffed and puffed angrily every time the Enforcer proved agile enough to counter her attacks, finally growing so upset that she shouted in exasperation.
"Listen here, you armor wearing buffoon, I have got considerably more important things to do, don't I just, and dancing here with you is doing my humor no good at all. Desist henceforth and I shall consider you well acquitted for your efforts. Persist, and I do promise that I shall crack your suit of armor wide open and pull you out by your ears for a good measure of attitudinal correction, see if I don't."
"Lady," Shuman replied, flicking quickly through the options available to him and ultimately settling on his visor laser, "I don't understand half the fucking words coming out of your mouth, so why don't you shut the hell up and die. My comrades could use the help dealing with your buddies."
Agnethea, who'd started circling to get a better measure of her opponent, was so taken aback by the words coming out of the man's helmet that she nearly stumbled on some uneven ferrocrete blocks. Recapturing her stability easily enough, the Pirate Queen shouted, "Think you those fools coming in from the other sides of this Stack my friends? Well, mayhap one may indeed be a comrade of sorts, but that which we seek can have but a single master, and to that end, none here, none here including yourself are to be considered anything save obstacles which much be surmounted."
Shuman, desperately irritated by the mangled words coming from Agnethea, decided to shoot her right in the face.
***
Spluttering at the red hot fury slamming into her face and her delicate eyes, Agnethea did the only thing she could think of under such rude circumstances; she screamed defiance once the assault was finished, then reached out with both hands, grabbed hold of the unconscionably poor-mannered buccaneer on either side of the suit's understated gorget and promptly deprived the man of footing.
Suitably airborn, Agnethea then proceeded to slam the fiend against the nearest ferrocrete wall, eliciting a series of timed gasps and incoherent shouts.
"And this," wham, "is what we get," wham wham, "when we shoot people in the face," wham wham wham, "and fail to maintain propriety, you rotten buccaneer."
Agnethea let the Enforcer drop to the ground then booted him firmly in the backside. She clapped her hands daintily, then nodded with pleasure at her handiwork, especially when the much-abused wall collapsed in on itself, burying the Enforcer beneath several tons of ferrocrete and other materials.
Dry washing her hands as clear of dirt as she could under the circumstances, Agnethea set foot towards where Jarvis languished, adding flippantly over one shoulder as she walked off, "I know that you are not done for 'neath all that stony brickwork, Enforcer, but I do caution you 'gainst laying hands … or shooting me in the face … any further. Up until now I have kept my humor and good graces. Any further disreputable behavior on your part will result in extreme comeuppance."
Then she was off, faint sounds of battle thusly joined elsewhere in Stack 17.
***
"Are you all right?"
Shuman ignored Clint's concerned tones in favor of mentally working on his resume. Destroyer of worlds, crusher of civil wars, eradicator of … things Trinity didn't like. The list of his personal accomplishments was quite long and amply suited for employment -in theory- anywhere inside Trinityspace.
Except for the fact that -at one point or another- he and every other Enforcer deployed by the machine mind had caused damn near everyone in the position to give him a job extreme and -in some cases- severely intense warnings. Oftentimes resulting in loss of property, life, limb, planets … really, there was no limit to Trinity's heavy-handedness.
"And that's the thing." Shuman muttered to himself. "These assholes don't get that this is just a fucking job."
"Oh. So you aren't dead." Clint stated with brutal sarcasm. "Just pissing and moaning about your job. And by the way, it isn't just a job. It's a …"
"Lifestyle, yeah, yeah, I get it." Suit announced it was poised to deal with the debris keeping him pinned. "Doesn't make this assignment any less … hey, what do you mean, 'aren't dead'?"
""Mm." Clint hemmed and hawed. "The other three aren't doing so well either. There's something off about these Arcadians. None of your guys' Suits function properly around them."
"Gee." Shuman drawled sarcastically as he shook debris loose from his Suit's joints as best he could; the energy Suit intended on using to blast away as much of the Arcadian-made landslide as possible was going to come from the emitter panels built into the softer spots of the armor and debris in the joints would make the op slower. "You think?"
Clint's possibly sarcastic and certainly rhetorical comment was lost amidst the furious sounds of Suit doing it's work. Bit by bit, the extremely resilient -and heat resistant- ferrocrete began dissipating, though not before warming up the exterior layers of Suit enough to have Shuman sweating nervously.
When both Suit and his own eyes decreed that his freedom was as unencumbered as it was ever going to get, Shuman hopped quickly to his feet, already engaged in a perimeter sweep for Agnethea. As always, predictive algorithms had the woman intent on returning to -or somewhere near- where the wreckage of her stolen car had plummeted to the ground.
That certainly made things a lot easier. Shuman made to call Clint up to inform him of what was going on when five impossibly loud retorts split the relative quiet of beleaguered Stack 17. It didn't take Suit -who popped up with information notwithstanding- to recognize the sounds of high-velocity rounds being fired through BishopCo's very own Excelsior-class Portable Railgun.
Suddenly, Shuman didn't feel so bad about battling Agnethea deRois. At least she was polite enough not to bring gear. She probably didn't need it, but Enforcer Shuman just wasn't up to handling a frontal assault of that kind.
That being said, he unleashed three gridades and a scattering of sticky caltrops; the former launched high into the sky, took a round of geographical surveys, fed them into their programming and set about acquiring their relative positions within the boundaries while the latter rolled off in all directions, leaving in the dust odd little three-pointed footsteps.
"Because fuck this bitch and anyone else in the area." Shuman was done. If one or more of the invading Arcadians were deploying next-gen assault weaponry on another Enforcer, it was the duty of every other Enforcer in the area to drop what they were doing and give an assist.
Shuman set off on foot, Suit scanners trying to track Agnethea's scent. Of course -because everything seemed to be going wrong today- there was no appreciable scent worth tracking, but the damned Suit did seem able to follow the woman's dusty footprints.
"When we're done here, you are going in for repairs. I don't give any kinds of a fuck." Shuman picked up the pace, powerful robotic legs sending him whipping towards where he supposed Agnethea must be…
***
"Jarvis?" Agnethea nudged a few boulder-sized chunks of junk out of the way with the tips of her toes. It was well wicked to be as strong -if not stronger- than when she'd been on the Inside. It certainly made things easier, didn't it just? "I say, Jarvis, be a good fellow and give us a shout when we get close, hey?"
The Pirate Queen of Arcadia -and soon to be all of Trinityspace- started a bit at the vicious sounds of gunfire shredding the gentle silence of quietly dying Stack 17. She weren't much in the way of an expert on firearms, having come to them fairly late in the game as it were, but the sounds still echoing off the far walls did not bode well for whoever was being shot.
"Definitely not our lad Dominic." Agnethea flipped a chunk of metal out of her path. "Hain't the sort, and I well know Miss Mirabelle hain't the sort neither, so must be our man Gearmaster Chevril. Hrm."
That old man was too crafty by half and then again plus some more on the side. She’d always been well impressed by the geezer’s attitude and leanings towards the sophisticated side of things, especially his stance towards the end of his career on the Inside; as undocumented Gearmaster, Chevril Pointillier had
started taking the longer approach to his dealings with the weird and wonderful of Arcadia, oftentimes letting Elixir-tainted folks go with nowt but a warning.
What little she’d seen of his actions during the Siege of Ickford warmed her devilish old heart to the point where Agnethea felt summat human all over again as well; he, e’en more than N’Chalez himself, had done his best to save her people from the monstrous green beasts, standing side by side, fighting with old gray ones and their like.
Behavior like that bought a lot of cachet with a monarch, e’en one wi’out a land or a home or a people to call her own, but…
“I can honestly say,” Agnethea shifted what looked like the tail end of a vehicle –not hers, no, that were farther off still- out of her way and frowned when Jarvis didn’t rear his shiny bald sphere, “I do not want to move against the man. Both out of honor and respect for his time served in fair old Ickford, but mostly because I do feel it in my bones that he is the greatest threat out there. Five additional men with the kinds of long guns as to make these here Enforcers consider their words and occupations, hey?”
Chevril Pointillier, him with the silver hair and the garrulous tongue and the stories, why, he could snare damn near any lad or lass into his orbit, couldn’t he just? And if his escape from whichever … whichever Conglomerate had held him in their clutches and his resultant freedom were anything like her own? Well.
That sort of expedition in the Outside could have the man at the head of an army, couldn’t it just?
As she continued picking through the fragments and wreckage, Agnethea kept one ear peeled for more sounds of outright warfare, another ear peeled for sounds of an encroaching and impertinent buccaneer wearing a suit of armor and yet another ear primed and ready for faint sounds of Jarvis calling for help.
Agnethea stamped a foot prettily. “The problem with all of this,” she swept her gaze left, then right, then back to the patch of destroyed building she’d been eyeballing, “is that ‘tis very difficult indeed to keep aware of a tiny silver orb when your ride has turned into a molten fireball all about you, hey? The damnfool brain could’ve bounced off any of those high points above me, caught wind, and flown off for the far end of this level. For all I know, Jarvis has somehow returned to poor Constance and her o’erbearing mother at this point, wi’ all of ‘em sipping tea and chatting about my adventures as if they were words in a book. Damn and blast.”
The ear listening for battle sounds was well occupied. Though they were all miles and miles away from where she was stood, preoccupied in playing archaeologist, you’d be hard pressed to ignore such noises, especially when more than half the world they were currently in had been blown flat by Book’s awakening. The Pirate Queen was beginning to learn how to tell the difference between the quieter sides of warfare offered up by Arcadians and the brighter, more … energetic stylings of the Enforcers.
They all seemed to be faring relatively well.
“No more powerful retorts, though.” Agnethea murmured, sad that she were pleased by that turn of events. Bad enough she were going to be called upon to lay hands against Chevy. Doing so when he were wi’ people who’d done some sort of service or other to Trinity or who knew who? “Too many more dead bodies assigned to my name, and that’s … by the King’s Unruly Arsehole, what in the actual and utter blazing hell?”
A tiny little thing, no more than twice the size of the missiles as the Enforcer had tried to introduce her most intimately not so long ago, buzzed into view, forcing the Pirate Queen to pause most intently right where she were standing, with one hand raised in conversation, about to make a point wi’ herself, and t’other pointing right at the devilish device.
It twitched and spun, twitched and spun, but now it was out in the open, it made no move other than to rotate in midair, somehow managing to impart a certain level of ominous focus.
"This does not bode well, Agnethea thought to herself, spying the meaning behind the immobile and undoubtedly deadly object almost immediately. ‘twas like a bird of prey, she decided, similar to them used once upon a time by the people of Arcadia, long ‘ere the King decided He loathed that which flew in the air, both for sport and to add fresh game to an otherwise vegetable-heavy dinner.
Wi’ one important difference. No bird she’d ever seen nor heard of could freeze in midair like that, nor had any of them sleek, glorious avian hunters ever looked with such ferocity.
And nor, the Pirate Queen added dryly to her internal monologue of the moment, were it likely any of them predacious feathered friends had within ‘em summat as to make very large things –such as Queens of a Piratical leaning, for example- into very thin, very fine mists floating about craters.
T’other ear, that fine third one listening for approaching Enforcers too rude to mention –honestly, were the man attacking her even somewhat polite in bearing or attitude, she might’ve gone out of her way to learn the man’s name so it could be inscribed within the pages of a brand new journal- did prick up, faintly sensing loud, metallic clanks as well as the sounds of earth being sorely treated.
The deadly silver bird moved a few paces closer, right towards her, as if some internal eye had finally spied her, yet summat about her were leaving the senses of the hunter confused enough to warrant closer inspection.
The closer it got, the more Agnethea could hear faint sounds of the engine keeping this new foe aloft in the air with nary the flap of a wing.
Agnethea reflected upon the nature of the Outside, and how wondrous the peoples beyond King’s downed Dome were when it came to the art of killing that which displeased them. Or that which had summat they wanted. Or that which they wanted to blow up or otherwise sully simply because it were there.
Reasoning that whatever else the silver predator was, it was easily greater in nature than the humming darts as had tried turning her into a deceased lady of bearing, Agnethea considered her moves very carefully.
‘twere obvious –leastways to her- that since the deadly thing had been deployed by Boorish Buccaneer, said foul man would almost definitely be ignored by it, which meant that e’en should he arrive on the scene and somehow miss her presence, ‘twouldn’t be for long; you’d have to be a daft blind fool to miss a Pirate Queen in tattered clothes playing freeze tag with a robotic emissary of death right in the middle of a destroyed street, hey?
Them sounds, them great clanking sounds, they grew louder still. Her friend, Boorish Buccaneer, were right around the corner, weren’t he just?
The only thing left to decide then, Agnethea reasoned internally, is, will the armor-clad moron jump o’er the remnants of this here building or will he go ‘round? For if he goes ‘round, why, that makes my plan all the more difficult, but if he is … ah. Yes. How wonderful.
The sounds reaching her ears right that second were unlike anything she’d heard yet in this strange world of the Outside, yet practical application of that thing which had given her many thousands of years of life –to whit, her fantastical mind- allowed her to suss that the powerfully odd reverberation flying to her ears that very second were indeed hints that Sir Buccaneer the Boorish of the Outside were letting a bit of boyishness zeal govern his movements.
“And that,” Agnethea twitched her outstretched hand so quickly it seemed even to her that there’d been no span of time ‘tween words and gesture, closing a dainty fist of unbreakable flesh ‘round deadly silver bird a fraction of a moment later, “is why ‘tis better to think before doing, in all things.”
Though she’d been hunting Big Kings for thousands upon thousands of years, it hadn’t been until her decision to turn Ickford from fantasy to reality that Agnethea had honed her skills in killing the towering beasts of metal and Kingsblood, transforming her from a merely enthusiastic practitioner into a force to be reckoned with, enhancing her skills and talents to the point where perhaps the only living thing to be better than her was Garth N’Chalez. Combined with memories of ancient Big Kings, them who used to use such things as the silver bird in
her pretty hand, though of course much larger and coarser, Agnethea knew precisely when and where Sir Buccaneer the Boorish would appear overhead.
Timed correctly with the explosive delivery of the sleek instrument of death e’en now growing surly within her palm, Agnethea knew she’d be providing the man with at least the beginnings of appreciation for what it meant to do battle wi’ an Arcadian.
The bird peeped once, a simple, almost comical underscore to the furious hell unleashed a scant second later as it blew right the hell up.
As she flew through the air on a seemingly unerring course for the foolish, leaping Enforcer, as most of her clothes were vaporized, as Pirate Queen Agnethea deRois did find herself wondering if all this were truly worth it, she did spy a familiar bright silver orb down below amidst the roiling fires and blazing lakes of superheated ferrocrete turned deadly.
“Well now.” Agnethea commented as she crashed bodily into the Enforcer as he reached the apex of his ascent. “It does seem some good has come from this after all. I shall be wi’ you shortly, Jarvis.”
As both her and Enforcer joined together in a path that would take them downwards back into the fire, Agnethea was certain she heard a scream of devout aggravation rattle around inside the daunting helmet.
And she smiled.
***
Enforcer Shuman had to admit to himself.
He was not having a good time.
Sure, sure, yes, okay, fine, his brothers and sisters weren’t faring all that well either, but from the side-reports filtering in from Clint through to his helmet-HUD, the others were having to deal with extra shit, so the difficulty of their lives was perfectly understandable; the old man in the weird coat had brought along with himself five or more highly trained wardogs, each of whom was outfitted with the newest and most-lethal of weapons possible to own outside of service to Trinity, the younger, brash guy who looked like a complete and utter asshole had brought with him an army of thugs and murderers from all the other Stack-levels and the woman with the face … well, yes, the woman with the face was all on her own as well, but she too had brought a party to the … party. Abercoign wasn’t the sort of Enforcer to risk human life when there was no need, and was working patiently to get the hideous Arcadian further away from the horde she’d arrived with, which was slowing his response times, but still.
