by Lee Bond
“Time to reorient.” Iago brought up a quick and dirty schematic of their location, half an ear trained to the sounds of Tanker falling through the roof of the bay beneath his personal living quarters, and then through the floor of that bay into the shuttle area where they parked the bulk of their fliers. From the visual flicking up on his shivery, Wraith-sigil loaded HUD, it was highly unlikely that they’d go through that deck. The Wraithgear picked the most suitable location…
Something roughly the size of a small moon punched him square in the head.
“Hey.” One of the Goddies said pleasantly. “How’s it goin’, Rittu?”
Iago heard a sound that turned his blood to ice. His shrouded cowl, screaming.
The other Goddie appeared out of nowhere and punched him in the head as well. “Dude, don’t be like that.”
Iago tried skittering up the wall, using the Wraithgear’s long, whispery tendrils like legs, but … but something was keeping his precious gear from solidifying enough to grab hold. The high-pitched animal screams issuing from somewhere inside the cowl split the air a second time, earning him another punch in the face; this time, the blow was sufficient enough to send bright cracks through the HUD.
“Hey.” Ellerton looked over at Durn. “You think those idiots are okay down there?”
Durn looked down at the hole they’d blown into the ship, unable to keep the smile from his face. He really wanted to be there when the commander for the ship learned of the damage. Guys who had big ships like this were generally kind of spastic when it came to them. “Yeah, pretty sure. I mean, Wincitt got shot pretty badly,” Here, he paused to flick the Wraithed out Heavy in the ear, “by this asshole, but she’s a big girl. What’s his nuts is down there already, and when Brillix digs himse … yep, there he goes, down the hole.”
“How …” Iago struggled to be heard over the shrieks from his suit, “how are you doing this? I’m in fucking Wraithgear. I’m invincible.”
“The funny thing about Rittu.” Ellerton trained his gaze to where the guy’s eyes probably were. “Yeah, it’s pronounced Rittu, not Wraith. Least you’re not too far gone, but damn, man, you can’t wear the symbiont for as long as you do. You’ll lose your mind. Anyways. Rittu. Super susceptible to short-wave bursts of gamma radiation, of all things. Shrivels the sensor-organs right up. Really nasty. Hardly anyone noticed that of all the worlds in all the systems these assholes conquered, all of them had very low levels of gamma radiation. We got these implants, see? Does stuff for us, like broadcasting gamma rays. Sucks for you.”
“Makes ‘em slow.” Durn added. “So slow we can just fuck you right up if we wanted.”
“But we don’t want to do that.” Ellerton pulled the sheet of paper from his pocket.
“What do you want?” Iago struggled to break free, but the … the Rittu he was wearing was utterly immobilized, literally stuck to the bulkhead by whatever emanations were coming directly from the God soldiers.
“I’m getting there.” Ellerton snapped. “I got no idea why the Chairman wants us to read directly from this piece of p… ah, shit!” An errant gust of wind –kicked up by the ship’s aircon systems and three times as powerful because of the abyss torn into the structure- yanked the important letter right from his hands. “The fuck do I do now?”
Durn watched the white piece of paper disappear. “Mmm. Hey, Wraithhole. We’re going to freestyle the Letter. If anyone asks, we read from it. All right?”
Iago didn’t say anything. He was confident he was hallucinating. That happened, sometimes, when he wore the ‘gear for too long. Then the one who’d tried reading from the paper poked him in the stomach with one of his big fingers, so he nodded. “All right, okay. If anyone asks, you did the thing with the thing.”
Ellerton smiled and nodded. “Okay, good, that’s fine. Um. ‘We, the representatives of the Latelian Commonwealth mean you no injury … no … that’s not right … uhhhh, harm. Yeah, Harm. We engaged in no activity, implied or otherwise, to cause this conflict between ourselves and you, a member of the Trinityspace Combined Galactic Center. This is awful boring. We only want to bring this …”
***
“Conflict to an end so that we can …” Wincitt clanged a booted foot against the Heavy’s metal eyeball and snickered when an echo bounced through the loading bay. Out cold. “Focus on preparing for a much bigger conflict.”
Pendler, holding a compress against where an eye used to be –it’d gotten poked right out of his head by what he planned on swearing was an actual spear made from pieces of hull- made a sound. “I don’t think it counts if he’s unconscious.”
“Who’s unconscious?” Brillix landed right beside his buddy Pendler, then took in the slumbering giant. “Oh. Darn. What happened?”
“Face planted.” Wincitt explained. “Drilled his mug right into the floor. Pretty sure I heard something snap.”
“So he could be dead?” Brillix frowned. That was the kind of thing that’d get them in hot water.
Wincitt clanged her foot against the Heavy Specter’s eyeball again. “Nah. He farted a few minutes ago, and Holy Pete, I nearly barfed. Prolly just paralyzed for life or something. No way of knowing until we build some kind of fucking x-ray machine or whatever.” She waved the Letter at her boys. “You guys mind?”
“No, go ahead. Oh, hey, how’s that wound?” Pendler had to twist his head a bit so he could focus his one eye on Wincitt when she lifted up her shirt. “Holy cow! I can see organs and stuff.”
“Yeah.” Wincitt said, beaming with pride. “Gonna make a really awesome scar when it’s healed.” The Twoesie cleared her throat and resumed, “A conflict that is much more serious than anyone can…”
***
Shumanski had seen better days. He could see them quite clearly whenever he closed his eyes so the … strictly speaker it was a hammer, but every hammer he’d ever seen had been ordinary colored, not bright red, and had never squeaked with each blow … anyways, he relived those good moments whenever the bright red squeaking hammer got too close to his eyes. It wasn’t capable of hurting him, but … it was just the principle of the thing.
Like the time he’d had to singlehandedly fight a Draven Gladiator. That’d been fun. He’d gotten skewered right through the middle by a sword that looked more like the spinal column of some great beast that’d been dipped in metal and honed to razor perfection, but he’d come out of that one with a story to tell, some good scars, and a fresh new duronium undercoat beneath skin that was tough as the dickens.
Or how about the time they’d all accidentally swung too close to that black hole out there in the Sirillia System? They’d decided to do it on a lark and had spent an unfortunate afternoon trying to figure out how to keep from dying until Trinity’d whisked them all away. There’d been an awful lot of terror-sex that day. And just like with the Draven Gladiator, he’d walked away with a few new scars, a great story to tell and a persistent chaffing that’d taken a week to heal properly.
Shumanski smiled. Such great memories. Why … he closed his eyes and the bright red mallet bounced off the center of his face –the fucking thing smelled like strawberry-scented plastic but was, in fact, hard as hell- why, even today, spiraling through space, hot on the heels of his brothers and sisters as they launched themselves towards the ships carrying deadly weapons. Hundreds, probably thousands, of Goddies –mostly Onesies, so not a terrible loss- vaporized by hungry cannons. A few green-clad gomers right beside him had gone up in a puff of smoke! He’d been close enough to feel their death throes through Harmony, for Pete’s Sake!
“Better times.”
“Why. Won’t. You. Die?” Toon growled angrily as she tucked the red mallet behind her so she could pull out the grinning saw. It winked at her and flexed it’s teeth.
“I’m not meant to die at the hands of Rigby the Shubin.” Shumanski ground the words out, then tried moving again.
Nothing doing.
He was held in place by –and he actually prayed he
either died or broke free very soon- long strips of what appeared to be the brightly colored Heavy Elite’s actual body. She was wrapped around him like a hideously colored python, using some kind of weird, incredibly powerful, incredibly flexible musculature beneath that rubbery skin of hers to keep him completely immobile.
If she didn’t figure out a way to kill him, Shummy decided he might just choose to die of embarrassment. Of course, if he decided to skip the whole part about following orders and making certain that you killed as few people as possible, he figured he could break free in a few seconds, but that’d mean killing the cartoon lady.
Shummy was of two minds about killing the cartoon lady.
One part of his brain wanted to see what her colorful insides looked like because he was a goddamn God soldier that was neck deep in the warm embrace of Harmony and you just didn’t do shit like this to honorable warriors.
The other part of his brain wanted to wait a little while longer to see if someone was going to rescue him because if there was one thing that very same caliber of Goddie could recognize, it was a valuable asset. Whatever else this weird little Heavy Elite was, she was an asset. Kith Antal’s stable of clone warriors would not know what to do with a thing like this.
“What the fuck is a shubin? Or a Rigby? You’re not making any sense.” Toon shifted her body closer to where the rest of her –pulled taught and tight and completely wrapped around the God soldier, keeping him right where he was until she decided otherwise- and rapped the smirking saw on her prisoner’s broad forehead. The saw blade sang, just the tiniest bit. “You guys are made of tough stuff, I’ll give you that.”
Though she was putting a brave face on things, the very smallest versions of her that she’d dared release into the ventilation shafts of their ship were reporting the same thing, over and over again, no matter where they peered; the Goddies were ripping through their defenses and offenses like there was nothing there in the first place.
Every single one of the trapped hallways, defeated. She’d seen with her own cartoon eyes a Goddie come strolling out of a corridor that’d just dropped ten thousand gallons of high quality acid on top of his head, humming a song about how wonderful it was to be properly clean for a change. The naked Goddie had then proceeded to wander into a roomful of Homolka’s soldiers, politely informing them of some Letter or something.
She’d watched on as some of Handsi’s troops –admittedly better trained than the ones left behind by Homolka- withstand about thirteen solid seconds of gunfight before rather pathetically giving up the ghost. They’d surrendered their weapons without provocation, though one resolute soldier had stuck a grenade in the pocket of one of the Goddies as he’d passed by, reading from a piece of paper. The resulting explosion had been pretty intense –Toon figured the grenade had ignited some ammo or something else equally volatile-, powerful enough to blow the clothes off the Goddie and to shred through about a dozen captives, but definitely not strong enough to do anything to the invader.
Toon’s tiniest versions had lingered long enough to watch one God soldier lambaste the also nude God soldier about killing people who’d only just surrendered, and about how this was going to look really bad.
It was the same all over the ship. The Goddies were rolling over and in some cases through the vessel without blinking, without taking any casualties. Her team, her wonderful team of Heavies, they were all bunged up with the ever-so-polite Goddies and against all odds, whatever was actually on the paper was having an extremely unanticipated effect on them.
They were all agreeing. They were laying down their arms, giving up, staying put.
“You know what doesn’t make sense, lady?” Shummy demanded throwing a little extra Harmony into his limbs. There had to be a finite point between him breaking free and him breaking the rubbery cartoon si into pieces. There just had to be. He flexed, felt the Heavy’s internal organs stretch and move beneath taut rubber-flesh. “You. You don’t make any sense. I’ve been all over The Cordon. We were there for nearly five thousand years, Heavy. We seen things you can’t even imagine.”
Toon snorted like a steam whistle as she settled down with the smiling saw. She was intent on learning whether or not she could cut one of the behemoth’s arms off at the joint. There had to be a physical weakness somewhere. As weird as the Universe was, it wasn’t that weird.
“You think you boys are tough. You think you seen stuff. Let me tell you something, God soldier. The fringes of The Cordon are a million times worse than what you lot pounded flat. They’re the youngest of colonized systems, sure, but they’ve got the oldest of technologies. There are solar systems out there littered with alien tech so ancient we figure it was left behind by previous versions of the Universe, and when these younger colonists lay their hands on it, there’s no Trinity there to stop them. They dig and they dig until they understand what it is they’ve got, and that’s that, Goddie. Sometimes, if we’re lucky, they just wind up killing themselves. Sometimes, they take the system with them, which is nice. We just roll on in and destroy whatever’s left. Sometimes, whatever tech they found does … stuff … to the humans who found it. Terrible things. What am I, Goddie? Fucked if I know. I’m a caricature of the woman I used to be. That’s it. I’ve got rubber bones and plastic organs. I can call weird shit into existence, like this fucking saw that isn’t doing anything to your skin but can cut right through this fucking wall if I want. My mind is rubber, Goddie. I can see and think things that make no sense to anyone but me. I can make tiny versions of myself that are mostly idiot-stupid but they can see and hear, and they can send what they witness back to me.”
Toon smashed the smiling saw savagely against the God soldier’s face. It twanged, then snapped in half. Before the two pieces disappeared back to whatever nightmare place it’d spawned from, the sarcastic-looking saw blade frowned.
The Heavy Tech Elite took a deep, deep breath and held it, cheeks puffing comically. Toon released the breath slowly, so, so slowly. “What I am, God soldier, is a freak among freaks. And we’re going to sit here until I figure out a way to kill you.”
“Yeah, but why, though?” Shummy wondered aloud. It was a question all the Goddies had been dying to ask anyone from Trinity’s Military Services. It really didn’t make any sense. Well, it made sense, sense. They were doing what they were doing because their commanding AI had gone off the deep end and was looking to kill the Changemaker, but that wasn’t a very good reason. It was probably the stupidest reason anyone of them had ever heard in their incredibly long lives. “You guys are dying now. That seems ridiculous.”
“We do as we’re told, God soldier.” Toon answered the question half-heartedly; she was busy sorting through the different weapons she’d … uploaded? Uploaded into the weird portion of her mind, on the hunt for something that might do some real damage. “You do the same.”
So far, she was leaning towards dynamite. The dynamite was a fantastic weapon. She might wind up scuttling the ship, but victory was victory. She’d sort her difficulties out with Marker later.
“Nuh-uh.” Shummy struggled to get into a better position. Somewhere underneath his ass there was a chair, only it was digging into his armor-plated kidney something awful, and if he didn’t move soon, he just knew he was going to be all cranky and achy. “We’re protecting our planets at the moment. You guys are invading us. Not the other way around. We were just going to hang out until the End of the Universe, and then go kill some other dudes. We got nothing against Trinity. Not anymore. Bigger fish to fry.”
Saw. No. It was broken and besides, it hadn’t done anything last time around. Gun. No. Flamethrower, no. Toon had no desire to see another naked …
“Wait, what did you just say?” Toon looked into the Goddies ginormous eyeballs. They were oddest color she’d ever seen, like a brilliant blue, but underneath some kind of … pearlescent sheen. It was quite mesmerizing, if you let yourself relax into them.
Shummy, who’d realized the moment he’d stopped
yapping that he’d mentioned one of the things on Fenris’ Big List of Keep Your Mouth Shut, shook his head. “Didn’t say nothing. I was asking you if you had some food on you.”
Toon pointed a manicured finger at the big bozo’s nose. One big eye followed the lacquered tip while the other one continued staring right at her; as ever, a portion of her rubber mind recorded the fact that this God soldier –and therefore every God soldier- had independent control over their eyes, which led to some fascinating thoughts on how they processed data. She blinked her eyes and got back on task. “No. You said something about the End of the Universe and ‘bigger fish to fry’. What did you mean by that? From what I’ve seen here today, none of your people are really taking this seriously at all, and you’ve taken down some of the toughest Heavies I’ve ever served with, usually while naked. What’s up with that?”
“Most of us are over a thousand years old, Cartoon Lady. We don’t got what you’d call body modesty. Communal showers get a little frisky, if you follow.” Shummy shifted again, and this time, the chair jabbing into his kidneys collapsed, sending him slamming into the floor with a loud thump. His captor, who had parts of herself wrapped around four metal columns, strained and creaked under the sudden pressure, but the woman herself had a stoic expression on her face that suggested she’d rather snap in half than admit she was uncomfortable now.
“That’s gross. What about the Universe ending thing and the big bad enemy?” Toon thought about shifting some her mass around to ease the pressure on those parts of her that were moored to the columns, but she just didn’t like the speculative look on the man’s face. It was easy to forget that all of them were fully enhanced cybernetic soldiers with, as he’d just pointed out, more than a thousand years of experience under the ludicrously big belt buckles. They just all looked so stupid.
