by Lee Bond
None of them were being insulted. He hadn’t even known what a buccaneer was until he’d done a search through the Suit’s database.
She was calling him a reckless pirate.
Shuman wasn’t entirely certain just how that was supposed to be an insult, but the way Agnethea had uttered the word left absolutely zero room for misinterpretation.
And none of the other Enforcer’s bad guys were wandering around showing no signs of wear and tear from their encounters. Old Guy in Metal Coat was marshalling his forces very well, but had a nice gash in the forehead and one of the wardogs had pretty well definitely had his ass handed to him in the form of the harshest bruise known to Mankind, so Terrex was acquitting himself very well. Asshole with the Hair had taken a few choice shots to the chest and was moving a bit slower now and beside that, Terrex had melted a solid fifty of Asshole with Hair’s impromptu raiding horde, so that was bonus points all around. Abercoign wasn’t faring as well as the others, but at least Horrible Woman with Melting Face was moving a lot slower.
And crying. There was a lot of crying, which Shuman found to be more on the weird side than he was willing to admit, and as he galumphed towards where he expected Agnethea would wind up, there was no getting around the fact that he’d rather continue being verbally assaulted by a woman who apparently had a difficult time believing someone was trying to kill her than to deal with a crying banshee for even one single second.
“Nope. Not even once.” There. One of the gridades had located something out of the ordinary and was scanning the scene. Shuman grinned triumphantly. If Agnethea was smart –and she’d already proven herself to be a least a little quick on the uptake- she’d stop moving, leaving her wide open for an aerial bootstomp that’d drive her smug face right into the thick ferrocrete beneath her feet.
If she wasn’t, if she even twitched, that deadly gridade’d turn her into runny oatmeal.
Enforcer Shuman, blood singing with anticipation of a nicely executed kill, decided to jump over the shattered remains of the building directly in front of him.
This was going to be good!
***
The impact against the Enforcer's impenetrable armor knocked Agnethea's breath loose and as the two of them winged their way towards uncertain destiny -be it death, doom or survival- the Pirate Queen held within her bosom a fair confidence that something had been knocked loose.
Aye, where before she may've imagined it as well, it was now apparent that her friend the Bastard Buccaneer was indeed yelling and cursing on the inside of his helmet; so close was the proximity of her head to his that she could make out every fretful syllable tripping off his lips.
"Language, Buccaneer, language." Agnethea chimed merrily. Aside from the rattling wheeze in her lungs that felt uncommonly like a marble bouncing around on the inside, this were a well-deserved breath of fresh air.
Shuman flipped his helmet comms on and proceeded to explain to Agnethea precisely what he was going to do to her the very second they hit the ground running. It was less than polite.
"Well now, that is hardly the sort of thing one should say to a lady, especially one of regal bearing such as myself." Agnethea drilled an elbow into the Enforcer's armored solar plexus, smiling in blissful pleasure as pure sounds of confused doubt erupted from the Buccaneer's impertinent mouth.
"What in the unearthly fuck is going on here, Clint?" Shuman howled, both through the helmet's audio comms and through the helmet itself. "This crazy bitch is doing my Suit real, actual damage! This is insane. I'm done with this bullshit!"
"Language, Buccaneer! Your language is most unwelcome. Ah. We do bear downwards now." Agnethea hammered on the Enforcer's armor with elbows and heels a few times for good measure, then rolled herself into as much a ball as possible, shielded from worse impact from the ground by the said Enforcer's temporarily immobilized arms.
"Lissen, lady, I don't give one enormous rat's ass what you think about anything." Shuman snapped, well and truly disgusted and done with every goddamn thing he was being asked to deal with; Clint wasn't even responding to his pleas for explanation, and while he was probably more than a little involved in helping out the other Enforcers -who were having just as hard a time- with their Arcadian, still.
He'd run into Agnethea first. By that virtue alone, he deserved all the help he could get.
"I don't know what you … oh for fuck's fucking sake! This day just keeps getting worse and worse." Shuman mentally struggled to lay eyesight on the gridade controls, but as with everything about Suit when Agnethea was close by, everything ran so sluggishly.
Down below, mere seconds away, the remaining gridades, having targeted Agnethea, were winging their way towards them both.
***
Clint, high above all of them, brain almost burning with the effort of keeping track of four Enforcers and the positively insane levels of resilience and sheer effort being brought to the table by their Arcadian opposites, simply could not believe Shuman's terrible, terrible luck; of all the 'immigrants' coming from Arcadia, they'd all pegged the woman Agnethea as the least impressive of all.
Appearances, however, were proving not only deceitful, but downright full of shit. There were few things in the world that could handle a direct assault from a fully primed gridade, and one of the things that was most definitely not capable of doing so was a tiny woman.
As much as he didn't want to involve the machine mind in this terrestrial matter -even though It was responsible for the whole damned debacle- Clint knew that the situation had progressed to the point where they needed to deal with the possible repercussions. Beyond the possibility of losing more than one Enforcer, they were looking at the theoretical destruction of the entire Stack, not just this one level; the pre-existing devastation -in the form of ravaged buildings and completely disappeared people- had to be a direct result of the Arcadia-tech being unleashed on the level, and nothing else. If the undocumented tech didn't flatten everything that was left remaining, it was more than likely that the powerhouse Arcadians would do just that.
It was all too likely that the conflict between the Arcadians would spill over to the other Stacks in the vicinity, possibly even to all of Zanzibar itself.
Zipping through the menus that'd bring him to the Emergency Trinity Broadcast layers, Clint ran into a wall he didn't expect to see; everything related to their master, the machine mind known as Trinity Itself, was offline, with no indication when they could be expected to be treated with It's reappearance.
Pulling out of the menus, preparing to build a log for the nearest data buoy -all in case the scenario playing out down below him went so incredibly pear shaped they all wound up in some other kind of fruit-based awfulness altogether- Clint happened to turn his eyes to poor Shuman, humping after Agnethea on foot like some kind of schmuck.
"Are you kidding me right now?" Clint blinked his eyes, in the hopes that he was hallucinating, only to have his Suit confirm the nightmare unfolding down below.
He'd never seen anyone physically catch a gridade homing in for the kill before, and even if he had, he would've never expected to see that same person not only survive the explosion, but use the detonation to launch themselves at an Enforcer at speeds upwards of Mach 3.
Readouts from Shuman's Suit were decidedly wonky. Whether that was from the impact or from the deleterious effects it seemed that Arcadians had on Trinity-based technology, they'd never likely know, but more than half of Shuman's Enforcer Suit screamed into the redline almost instantly.
"Well." Sounds of increased fervor at the other battle sites around 17 reached his augmented ears and data started spilling in from the other Suits, but Clint kept his eyes on Shuman and Agnethea. "Never thought I'd live to see … ah, shit."
More gridades, homing unerringly towards Agnethea and missing Shuman -thanks in part to their control systems being one of the many instruments either flat-out not working or not functioning properly- altogether. They came zipping around corners and swarmed on the hu
rtling Enforcer and his unwanted Arcadian parcel.
The explosion was powerful enough to rattle the few remaining windows on 17.
Also?
More than adequate to slam Shuman and Agnethea into the ground fast and hard enough to pulverize even the most obdurate of bodies into gruel, turn ferrocrete into blazing plasma, melt steel VII into glowing puddles of death and to generally ruin the surrounding environment. Smoke and fire and hazardously noxious fumes reached hungrily for the ceiling, hinting for the other Arcadians and Enforcers that no, this day wasn’t going to get any easier for anyone.
"Ouch." Clint winced at Shuman's high velocity introduction into a smoldering hell of blazing fire, blanketing smoke and poisonous gas before turning back to the remaining three Enforcers. He felt a bit guilty about the whole affair, but based on the redline readings radiating from Shuman's Suit, the man was all the way on his own.
There were other people who might be able to use his help.
If he could get over this sudden, crippling fear of going anywhere near Arcadians.
***
Since undergoing what she felt –and would describe as, if she were ever given the chance- was an unfair reorientation into a thing better suited for destroying the Platinum King and her original death, Agnethea deRois, self-styled Pirate Queen and hopefully destined to become such if this damned day would ever come to a proper close, had never felt more miserable.
This day –perhaps even her entire experience thus far here in the Outside, as she had yet to fully ponder the intricacies of ‘freedom’- e’en outstripped the time rambunctious and fractious Dark Iron King Barnabas Blake the One and Only had done her the severe discourtesy of tossing her out the window of his Dome-placed Castle in the skies, but only by a margin; then, she’d known she was immortal and entirely unkillable and had preoccupied herself on the journey downwards by composing the first in a long list of horribly unspeakable nightmares and fiendish occurrences to be visited upon mortal Arcadians in comeuppance for said short shrift.
Here, in the Outside, she’d already come into contact with a few things that should’ve done her in, hadn’t she just, and in an ever-increasing manner to boot, suggesting to Pirate Queen Agnethea as she plummeted to earth atop a steed comprised of an Enforcer in his Armored Suit that the Outside really did not like people.
“All those stories I heard from Master Nickels.” Agnethea prepared herself for impact, wildly eyeing the cherry red lakes of molten stone mingled with metal, listening to yon Enforcer’s cries of frustration and aggravation through the dented and malfunctioning helmet. “I did believe half of them were nowt more than storytelling, hey? Yet here I am, en route to a lake of fire in a town built inside a tower that reaches for the heavens, all the while furtively attempting to make my way into the middle of said implausibly situated city so I might lay hands on … ah. Here we go, Aggie old girl, hold on tight and maybe we’ll get through this with only … oof. Fuck the King and all seventeen of his bollocks sideways!”
***
Shuman digitally signed all the files generated by Suit and packed them into a huge, encrypted message to be beamed out to the nearest data buoy collector, personally resigned to a fate worse than death because who was he kidding?
Whoever or whatever this Arcadian was, she was a million times worse than any of the fucking wardogs that’d ever crawled out of the muck on the other side of the Dome, and he’d run into more than his fair share out there in Trinityspace. Rude, crude and altogether nearly incomprehensible because of their thick accents and awkward pauses that left you feeling as if you were standing a thousand miles away, your average wardog was a fucking nightmare made flesh.
Agnethea deRois was worse than that. It wasn’t even the fact that she was so goddamn durable or that she’d managed to survive the minimissiles or direct explosion by way of handheld gridade, it was the fucking commentary. The woman talked to herself nonstop. As if she were explaining her actions to people who were just out of sight, illuminating and otherwise entertaining invisible guests while she went about the business of killing an Enforcer.
Who did that? Not even the crazed old weirder than hell and creepier than thou wardogs with their million mile stares and their positively grotesque fascination with losing limbs and discussing the various scars, burns, gouges, diseases, infections and general displacement of internal organs as if they were going over grocery lists did that. When they weren’t talking about war or death or pain, they sat there in stunning silence.
Fucking Agnethea deRois.
“I want it known,” Shuman announced to Suit, “that I thought this was fucking bullshit all along, and everything that is happening to me today is not my fault. It’s all on Trinity.”
Unfortunately, Suit wasn’t listening. Suit was busy freaking out because in all it’s years of service to Trinity Itself in the form of armor for Enforcers, it’d never once endured such catastrophic levels of damage. It was running around inside itself, trying desperately to undo the worst of it all so it’s host, Shuman, could be saved.
But everything was red. Or gray. Or –and this was worrisome- blacked out entirely.
The only thing that worked were the external cameras; the helmet cameras were amongst the many pieces of tech no longer functioning properly, leaving it and Shuman literally in the dark as to what was happening on the outside. Calibration devices told it that Agnethea was still with them, unbelievably riding out the storm atop the armor, and the few recording devices capable of picking up anything other than the sounds of destruction indicated that the Arcadian was still talking to herself, only not about anything that was happening.
In fact, it sounded as though the woman was lamenting the loss of a bagful of precious jewelry and other things that'd been stolen from Constance, and of their most likely destruction in 'a ruddy great lake o' burnin' fire'.
So Suit decided to activate those cameras, because if their unwanted passenger was more concerned about stories told to her by a Master Nickels instead of any potential maelstroms afflicting Stack 17, then it couldn’t be all that bad.
Could it?
Shuman sighed in relief as a few of his HUD-cams came back on. Sadly, because his life was now apparently a gag reel for disembodied people following Agnethea around like eager beavers, that blissful sigh of relief turned into an inarticulate shriek of rage heavily tinged with epic levels of disbelief.
“Are you fucking kidding me right now?” Shuman howled inside his helmet, ears ringing with the sound of his own apoplexy. “This is some kind of goddamn bullshit right here. Suit! Suit! You listen to me right the fuck now. I don’t care what you have to do or what it takes to get it done, but I am literally ordering you to use whatever you’ve got online to get us off this particular trajectory. Goddamn you, Suit. Do you hear … oh, for the love of Christ.”
Brace for impact warnings replaced every red, gray or dead light inside Suit’s HUD. Then, because it couldn’t think of anything better to do, it posted the average temperature of the molten lake they were going to collide with.
“You are a fucking asshole, Suit. If I live through this…”
Shuman and his malfunctioning Suit of Enforcer armor slammed into the lake of liquid fire, molten steel and flaming stone like a meteor. A meteor being ridden by an Arcadian like it was a surfboard, but still, a meteor all the same.
The splash was quite impressive. Shuman, inside his Suit, wondered what Agnethea’s monologue-receiving colleagues thought of it all.
***
Even though they were just that moment crashing into what amounted to a burning lake of endless death and she’d taken pains to brace herself for the collision, Agnethea nevertheless felt her knees and legs buckle worrisomely the very second they splashed into the ultra-hot liquescence.
All par for the course, naturally, as the Pirate Queen could hardly forget how tremendously she’d been introduced to the fair and fertile earth of Portenhouse’s Illustrious Gardens the day she’d fallen from the
heavens as a Golemnic shooting star. Fool her once, shame on her, fool her twice sort of thing.
But unlike that ignoble fall from grace –as it were- there were no gardens full of earth and flowers and pretty trees for her to crash into to slow her descent downwards, nor did she find herself at the bottom of a fairly deep hole from which she’d eventually climb to exact revenge on the entire Portenhouse family. Instead, what she found was herself, unfairly launched back into the bleeding sky, bounced off the Enforcer’s persevering metal body.
“I say.” A hand stole to Agnethea’s abused backside, displeased to learn that yes, there were indeed some things that her wonderful new body could not handle with ease, and that using a suit of armor as some sort of trampoline to freedom was in fact, one of those things. The bruise on her delicate posterior was already larger than her hand and if the pain radiating outwards from the scene of the crime was any sort of indication, it was highly likely she’d be piloting her Pirate Vessel from a standing position for many months to come.
Airborne once more –Agnethea had never heard of physics or the rules governing opposite and equal reactions but she certainly was receiving an advanced education on the matter today- the flying Queen of Pirates was treated to an upside-down view of poor old Brutish Buccaneer the Woefully Unprepared wallowing about in a bath full of deadly bathwater.
A bright peal of laughter escaped her. It wasn’t terribly appropriate, for e’en though the Enforcer was indeed a bastard for causing the loss of her clothing and the even more indelicate bruise upon her bum, he was nevertheless an enemy on the battlefield, and openly mocking someone was –or should be, at the very least- summat to be avoided.
