by Lee Bond
“I will need to write code that will translate your mental commands into useable biological effort.”
“Do …” Slizzer shut her eyes. “Do whatever the fuck you’ve got to do. Just … unhook me from my goddamn body. We can look into getting a new one when this bullshit is all over. And Suit?”
“Yes, Slizzer?”
“Make good goddamn certain that the neurokinetics are off the charts. That guy moves like lightning. If I’ve got to stand toe to toe with him without weapons, I want an advantage.”
“There is a chance you will experience…”
“Fuck’s sake. If I burn out my fucking hippocampus or whatever, I’ll just jam a fucking implant in there. Get to it!”
“By your command.”
Slizzer grunted a bit as something dug into her neck. She lost consciousness, again, though this time, it was a welcome feeling of falling into a deep ocean.
***
Dominic woke up with a start and to the taste of hot-copper blood in his mouth. He pawed blearily at his head for a second, then leaned over on one side to spit out several long, thick streams of bloody spittle.
“Bollockin’ ‘ell.” He grunted as he flopped onto his back. “That were a rough landin’, hey, weren’t it just?”
Nowt were coming from the lass in the armor plating, and, as he lay there, listening on to the sounds of battle raging all about him, Dom reflected that he were quite interested in taking a bit of a breather.
‘twere only right, weren’t it? The Arcadian were positively certain he’d only just gone and done summat that no one else in the entire Outside had ever dreamed possible, hey? Head-butting the lady in the flying armor so hard it shut down?
“Got to be some sort of record or summink.” Dom ran tentative fingers around the bruises on his forehead, concerned enough for his health that he paused as if he’d been stung when sensitive tips found wetness there. He pulled his fingers down to eye level and heaved a sigh of relief.
Nowt but blood. Worse thing in the world, doing as he’d done. Could’ve cracked his braincase wide open to spill forth the clear juice on the inside, hey? Fellas not only died from that kind of injury, but they went all sorts of wonky in the meantime. Howling at the skies, talking about colors that tasted like things, smelling words.
Dom hain’t have the time for that kind of lunacy. He had himself an armored vixen to finish killing and then –in the parlance of one Master Nickels himself- he needed to shag ass onwards to the reason he were in this shithole in the first place.
Destiny or fate or summat similar had contrived to bring all four of them to this level where Book did hide, but that didn’t mean they all had to finish up wi’ their particular tasks at the same time, now did it? Nay, he were going to do for his lassie right there on the spot then off he’d pop.
By the time them other Arcadians –smug Chevy alongside- e’en got close to Book, they’d be too late, hey? They’d all come traipsing 'round the corner, all ready to settle down to fisticuffs o'er who got what, only to see him already there, languidly flipping through the pages of Garth's mind. And then he’d show them what were what, wouldn’t he just?
Dom struggled to a seated position and had himself a wee bit of a chuckle when he saw that he’d fallen to the ground alongside his foe in the ‘big spoon’ position.
“Alas, sweetheart,” the Arcadian –head still rung like an old school bell- worked his way over atop the unmoving armored figure until he was straddling her, “I hain’t got the time nor the inclination to taste your sweeter wares. ‘tis a broken …”
Faint sounds of scurrying that most definitely did not belong to fresh armored enemies or e’en wandering Arcadians reached his sensitive ears. Dom was up like a shot, looking this way and that until pale blue eyes fell ‘pon the backsides of hastily departing Scallywags.
“Well, hain’t that a kick in the pills, hey?” Dom looked down t’ the vixen at his feet. “Can you believe this shite? I offered them everyfing and anyfing, and the moment my back is turned, they is all fuck off for the hills like a load of cowards.”
Angrily, Dom booted an armored leg. “I mean, really. This just is not the way to do things. Scallywags? King Bless Me, if I could have my druthers at this moment, I’d druther have a pack of slavering gearheads wi’ lamps for eyes and chains for teeth rather than this pathetic lot. Leastways they’d stick ‘round to the end.”
Armored Vixen said nowt. Moved nowt. Mayhap she were dead. Mayhap she were playing opossum. Either way, there were far more important things to do right that second.
Weren’t there just?
“Manners maketh a man.” Dom intoned seriously, quoting from the pages of the Book Club Regulars. Then off he went, flitting quickly towards the handful of departing cowards.
***
Morton, Gaddy, Silla and the others scurried quiet as church mice through the debris, once and for all finally taking into account what they were moving through: people’s lives. Their homes and their cars and everything that they’d known for most of the time they’d been alive here, in hollowed-out Stack 17.
Silla looked around to her companions. “I don’t know about you, but I am suddenly really fucking depressed.”
Morton nodded, ashen-faced. Once upon a time ago and even longer, he’d lived –like many people, he supposed- in an actual level of 17, had himself a place to work and a place to live and a place where he’d go and visit friends and all of those fine things, until work had dried up and the rent had increased and his friends had either moved on to different levels or done whatever and he? Well, he’d taken a look into one of Stairwells and that’d been that.
One minute a citizen of Trinityspace. The next minute, a Stairdweller, fighting over scraps. How long ago had that been? The older man mused as they trudged warily, ever-mindful of the Enforcer above their heads, watching everything.
If they were quiet enough, that Enforcer might forgive their trespasses this day and leave them well enough alone.
Gaddy cleared her throat. “What in the hell happened down here?”
Gaddy, who never had seen a real sky, had never seen a lot of ‘real’ things because she’d been born in the Stairs, had also never seen destruction like this. The most she’d ever seen ruined had been the Shantytowns that sprung up on one of those rare occasions where people were done with the killing, and even then, it didn’t take much; pull a few ropes loose, set fire to a few tarps, slit a few throats, and it was done.
“Reckon it’s on account of Book.” Dom said as he strolled around a corner directly ahead of where the traitors had been headed, grinning like the Devil himself when the fifteen or so survivors jumped out of their skins. “See, on the Inside, it were powered by King’s Will itself, hey?” He flapped his hands around like a bird. “All around on the Inside, Will gave things like Book life itself. Open it’s pages, hey, and ask it a thing, and Book would draw that knowledge onto pages wi’out effort nor pen, just … just so beautiful.”
Morton and the others were plenty scared, but they were Stairdwellers. They spent most of their lives scared. When Dom went off inside his own head, musing on the wonders of Book, they looked to one another and started shuffling their feet in the opposite direction.
Dom’s eyes snapped open and he glared so fixedly at Gaddy that the young girl’s feet froze right to the ground. Adopting tones of confusion, he addressed the traitors. “Where are you all going? We were talkin’ about this here patch o’ desolation, hey? You,” Dom pointed at Morton, “were asking me,” he fluttered fingers in his own direction, “as to wot’d gone on down here. Can’t leave in the middle of a lesson, now, can we? Bad for grades.”
Morton couldn’t get the image of Dominic sailing through the air on a collision course with the Enforcer, or how he’d head-butted the armored killer down to the ground. It was one of those things you couldn’t believe, even if you’d seen it, yet the madman’s forehead was covered in blood and growing bruises. “We were … shifting our feet, is a
ll.”
The others caught on to the lie and nodded like a single animal. Some threw in complaints about sore feet, to make it more authentic.
Dom tsked and made noises of consolation. “Oh aye, I know well that feeling. When your dogs is barkin’ like there’s a wolf in the henhouse, hey? Takes considerable time to get used to bein’ on the march. Now, where were I?”
Silla answered quickly, voice cracking. “You just finished telling us about Book’s drawings.”
Dom nodded, pointing a finger at Silla, who flinched. “Right, so I were. Now. That’s on the Inside. King’s Will were ubiquitous, hey? Everywhere, all the time, day in and day out. But here, on the Outside, there’s nowt like it, but wot there is, is a lot of energy.” The ex-Gearman pointed to thick wires popping out of the ground all over the place, massively thick cables twice as thick around as the biggest gearhead’s arm. “When I were fresh Outside, I didn’t know what all that was, but now I is know it’s like water, only for machines, and well, it does look to me like Book was over-thirsty. Drank and drank and drank all on this level until it’s thirst grew to the point where it started upwards and downwards, didn’t it just, oh so thirsty. Then?”
Morton raised his hand. He couldn’t help but feel if they answered Dom’s questions properly and played along with the situation they might get out alive. When the crazed Arcadian nodded politely, he answered, “Trinity shut everything down.”
Dom slapped his hands together once, the retort loud as a gunshot. “Give that man a ham pasty! Aye. This here Trinity Itself, proctor o’ Humanity, shut it all down nice and quiet like. No more water for Book, hey? But … and on the Inside, this were renegade thinkin’, so mind your manners when you tell the story later on, hey, but some of us lads who wore the long coat and rode the steam steed, we did believe that there were power inside solid things, hey? How else could King’s Will find purchase? And let us not forget those times when King did engage in a bit of monarchic wroth and did cause things to unspool, whereupon we did witness explosions where no explosions should be? So Book, deprived of water…”
“Electricity.” Gaddy interrupted unthinkingly. “It’s called electricity.”
Morton shot a look of abject apology to Dom, who obliged with a curt nod. That being said, there was an unmistakable glint of steel in the stranger’s blue eyes.
“So Book,” Dom continued, as if he hadn’t been interrupted, “deprived of ‘lectricity, went ahuntin’ for summat as could fill the void in it’s belly, didn’t it just? And I warrant it found what it were lookin’ for.”
Dominic fell silent, but his hooded eyes full of steel were watching them all very intently. When enough time had passed –no more than a second or two, but it felt like an eternity- he spoke again. “There’s summat you lot are still missin’ about Book. Summat important. You, lass. With the smart mouth. Think on’t for a moment, won’t you, lass? Use that brain o’ yours as was quick to point out this word ‘lectricity for me, hey?”
Out of the side of his mouth, Morton whispered as quietly as he could do Silla and the others, suspecting that even as he did so, Dominic could hear him plain as day. It didn’t matter, not really. “We are done for. He’s bored, so he’s enjoying him…”
“People!” The word erupted from Gaddy’s mouth like a missile. “Where are the people?”
Dom nodded somberly, tapping a bloody temple with a dirty fingernail. “Aye, Chatty Lassy. Where are the people indeed?” The Arcadian pushed himself off the pile of junk he’d been leaning against and parked himself properly in front of the traitors. “Now, I don’t know if people and things have the same kind of ‘lectric in ‘em as does yon cables when they is pouring forth, but of those two remaining things, hey, I do reckon that lads and lassies and wee little babbies have got more of whatever it is in ‘em than does rock and metal and glass, don’t you think? Book’s thirst is great, so it drank down all them as lived here, didn’t it just? Full to bursting now, all on it’s own. Not hungry no more, no sir, but do you know what?”
Gaddy –full of youthful innocence even though she’d lived her entire life in the Stairs and had killed her first opponent at the ripe old age of six- believed she had a kind of ‘in’ with Dom thanks to the last few minutes, so she opened her mouth. “What?”
Morton took a few steps back, muttering curse words. Silla and some of the others started inching away.
“I am still hungry.” Dom stepped forward. “My thirst for Book is endless. I need it. I need it more than the others, and I will do anything to slap these bruiser’s hands,” the Arcadian flashed his bruised and bloodied knuckles to the foolish girl, “atop the metal-bound tome ‘ere anyone else. I did seek to offer those who stood beside me whatever their foolish hearts desired, all out of generosity and kindness, didn’t I? Stand by me, I only just fucking said, and I can give you anyfing you need. And what the fuck did you fucking lot do?”
Gaddy tried to answer, but nothing save squeaks came out.
“You lot ran away.” Dominic Breton, once upon a time a learned man, leader of the Book Club Regulars, closed a cruel fist around Gaddy’s throat and squeezed and squeezed and squeezed until he felt bones crackle. “You lot ran away and left me on my own.”
The Scallywags scattered the moment Gaddy’s lifeless corpse hit the ground.
Dom started the chase. He knew he should be taking this time to deal with his true opponent, but damn him, he just couldn’t let this kind of behavior sit. The people of the Outside needed to learn their lessons, and the sooner he started teaching them, the better.
***
“How do you feel, Slizzer?”
It took Slizzer a second to realize Suit was talking to her. It was an odd question, coming from the Suit’s AI, and she couldn’t think of a time when the operating system had ever addressed her so directly.
Didn’t matter, though. Things were off the rails here. If Suit wanted to act like it had feelings and that it was genuinely concerned for her, then fine. Once they were all done here and they were back to where they belonged, she’d strip Suit down to the bones and perform a full-grade check.
For the time being, it was ‘keep calm and soldier on’.
“I don’t feel anything.” It was true. She couldn’t feel a thing. It was immensely disorienting. She couldn’t feel a heart beating in her chest, she couldn’t feel the twinge in her lower back where she’d gotten an injury as a child, an injury that plagued her more often than not, she couldn’t feel her fingers or her toes or … nothing.
She was a head in a suit of armor. The grin curling her lips was one full of grim madness. The things they did in service of Trinity.
“Are you in any discomfort because of this lack of sensation?”
Slizzer went to take a deep, introspective breath then laughed. Went to laugh. Realized she couldn’t. Realized that the belief she was talking with her mouth was a conceit, that she was in fact directly communicating with Suit through the neural mesh.
Trinity would undoubtedly shit a Galaxy-sized brick when It learned of the hasty procedure, but there was only It to blame for the whole thing anyways; if It hadn’t set this ball rolling in the first place, only to change It’s damned mind seconds before the Arcadians had set foot on the level, she wouldn’t be a goddamn head in a Suit, now would she?
“No. No, I’m … okay. I will be okay. Let’s just get this over with.” Slizzer nodded. “Are we fully powered?”
“Yes. Primary energy sources have come back online. Secondary and tertiary batteries are primed and ready to be slotted should there be any further disruptions. I am having difficulty analyzing the source or location of the functional disturbance, but I speculate it’s a feedback loop emanating from the item brought back from Arcadia and the Arcadians themselves.”
Slizz mimicked another nod as she ran the refurbished neural connections through their paces. Everything seemed to be fine, including the linkages connecting her thoughts directly into the powered limbs. When she was ready to
move, she had no doubt Suit would heed her commands.
She just hoped that the neurokinetics were as she’d asked. Dominic Breton was a tough customer.
“Makes sense. This is why we don’t let alien tech loose on the world. Causes all kinds of shit.” Slizzer tried accessing main weapons and came up blank. “What’s the deal here?”
“The feedback loop is … pinned … to primary weapons, Slizzer. Anything of a projectile nature is still offline.”
“Can we find a workaround?” She really didn’t like the idea of going head to head –literally- with Breton a second time. The man was an actual savage.
As it was, portions of Suit’s HUD-space were still malfunctioning thanks to the damage done by the Arcadian’s preposterously robust forehead.
“That is a negative.” Suit sounded apologetic. “I have located Dominic Breton. He is one hundred fifty feet to the southeast. When we engage, I encourage you to strike swiftly and without remorse. If we give him time to react, we will surely be in for a difficult and long fight.”
“Don’t tell me my business, Suit.” Slizzer gave the appropriate mental commands and the brain in a Suit lurched upright. The motion was a little awkward, but as they started moving quickly, the OS swiftly and smoothly worked on calibrating the interface so that by the time they arrived at Dom’s position, there was a perfect 1:1 ratio between commands and action.
Dom was just around the corner. Slizzer licked imaginary lips, booted up some melee combat routines and just went for it.
“Let’s get this … what in the fuck?”
***
The traitorous cowards ran from him, as expected; these people here in the Outside seemed as if they were made of tough stuff, acted it and shouted it from the rooftops, hey, but when it got right down to it, they weren't anything at all other than mollycoddled weaklings playacting.
It were pathetic and a downright rotten shame, weren't it just.
Dom reflected on all of this as he kicked someone's head until brains and eyeballs squeezed loose through cracks in the old skull, and more upon how sad it were that he were honestly wishing he had himself a handful of gearheads running along with him. Aye, they were right awful fiends, moreso when they were freshly full of treacle-thick Kingsblood, but at the very least, no matter how mad or bad they got, they stuck to it.
