by Lee Bond
Expensive and silly notwithstanding, Garth could’ve stayed in that shower until they landed wherever they were going to land, but since he was a prisoner, he’d been the last to be thusly honored by the Captain’s largesse, and the other bastards had only left about thirty seconds of hot water.
But it’d been enough, oh yes. Enough to make him feel normal, if only a bit.
“First,” Captain Eck took a sip of lapsang souchong before continuing, “First, Scourge, I should like to thank you for your understanding.”
Garth nodded politely and took a sip from his own cup of tea. Tea. On a spaceship. Proper FrancoBritish citizens were lunatics. When he’d been loose in Ha’Penny House, he’d hung out with criminals and other degenerate ilk. Their ships had been the kind he’d been used to ever since his time in Special Services. Cramped hallways, endlessly recycled water, weird smells, claustrophobic cockpits, the whole nine yards. And, to a degree, the Baskerville was the same; the prisoner section of the ship was the same as any other vessel he’d ever been on, but the crew section …
He was on a goddamn space yacht.
“When does the polo match start?” Garth asked cheerily, slathering butter onto a scone. There were moments when he couldn’t get over Trinity’s diligence in maintaining a culture over thirty thousand years, and this was one of them. Scones. With butter. Out there, in the stars, there were creatures with shared hiveminds, talking sponges, and, of course, a deadly dangerous threat against the Spheres of Existence and True Reality, but he, Garth N’Chalez, was sitting on a spaceship eating buttered scones and drinking real lapsang souchong with a terribly British captain.
Even in an Unreal Universe, some moments were too fucking surreal for words.
“I’m afraid I don’t understand, sir.” Captain Eck exchanged glances with the two men standing directly behind their prisoner. They understood that they were to blow the man’s head off should he even show the slightest hint of rebellion. It was all very well and good that they’d been ordered to deposit this Scourge on Arcade City’s doorstep, but … well, when one of the Escapees went all dodgy on someone, occasionally that someone went a tad off the cuff themselves.
Garth fluttered a hand. His eyes fell on thin chocolate wafers. “I was talking out turn, Captain. As for my understanding, well, I gotta tell you, I don’t understand much of what the fuck … er, what the deuces happened.”
“Ah.” Eck slurped some tea. Images of Meechy bursting apart at the seams flashed. “Well. He was an Escapee. From …”
“Arcade City, yeah. We, uh, we totally covered that.” Garth said around chocolate wafer, spluttering and snorting when the six bickies refused to go down properly. He grabbed his teacup and drank to save his life. When he was able, he asked a question. “Is this something Meechy did often? The whole getting strong and shouting nonsense thing? Obviously, the exploding thing is new. Unless … he’s not going to reassemble, is he? I … I hate it when they do that.”
That was something that the matter zombies on Gorensworld had learned how to do, just before he’d figured out a way to shut the remodelling process down. There was something seriously gross about watching an entire persons’ worth of body parts creeping and crawling towards one another.
Captain Eck blanched, then shook his head. “Oh my, no. That’s quite the image. No, Meechy was a regular chap, truth be told. A bit dodgy from time to time, but then, he was an Escapee.”
Garth scratched the back of his neck thoughtfully. “Why do you call them Escapees?”
“Hain’t us as calls them that, sirrah, but themselves.” Captain Eck was positively entranced by the man’s blue eye. It was quite magnificent. “Near about the only thing any one of them will say ever is that they escaped. Odd thing, though, about that. Whenever Meechy said it, he sounded sad and angry.”
Meechy’s machine-grinding warnings about Dark Iron being a poison, about the King walking the streets and even his incoherent shouts about these Obsidian Golems and other frightful things that went on inside Arcade City were making Garth restless.
The similarities between Meechy’s Dark Iron and the Cloud might be imaginary, but it was difficult to imagine otherwise; the Cloud, like many of the things people were running into lately, were all part of his Grand Design to reboot the Unreality. They’d been developed concurrent with Alpha and Bravo’s creation and implemented either before he himself climbed into Alpha or left by his father during his flight to the very farthest corners of the Universe.
Towards the end of the war altogether but before Kith Antal’s flight from Earth, with the Kin’kithal and Kith’kineen securely entombed inside Pluto, the combined might of the Armies of Man had to’ve been at its highest … and most desperate. Who was to say that they hadn’t discovered files and secrets left behind? Garth was more than willing to admit that he’d been hurried and harried at the end; developing the first of the Cordon nodes in secret –with the Armies of Man hounding him at every turn to help with the encroaching Harmony threat- had been nearly fucking impossible.
With that in mind, stuff being left behind for some intrepid ne’er-do-well to find was dead certain.
“I’m sorry, what?” Garth blinked and shook his head in apology.
“Did the man say anything to you?” Captain Eck waved his men away back to their posts; Scourge’s pensive silence had alerted them to the possibility that they were on their way to a sticky moment. Happily, that wasn’t the case. Eck looked around his private quarters and tried to imagine what he’d do if an actual brouhaha took place amongst his cherished things and shuddered.
Garth took a sip of tea and ate some more scone before answering. “A lot of nonsense. Totally spazzed out there at the end. It was really hard to understand anything, and his accent went all sorts of strange. All I can say for certain is that Meech was completely opposed to me going to Arcade City.”
“Ah.” Eck concurred with a brisk nod of the head. “Yes. Escapees, as I hear it, can sometimes react that way. As an employer, I’m given leave to have a bit more information about them than most. All I will say to you, sir, is that those as what are born to the City live lives of utter desperation and war-torn madness. Those that escape consider themselves lucky and even the strongest suffer intense survivor’s guilt. This is why most Escapees find themselves working only with others of their kind, in mercenary groups or in armies or what have you. It’s rare to find one in a job such as this. Likely, Meechy felt some maladjusted kinship with you and wanted to warn you away. Then …”
“Then you shot him with that fancy musket and he blew up all over the place.” Garth bit back the urge to laugh nervously. There were few things in the world as gross as having someone’s whole entire body dumped on you. “Where’d you get it?”
Eck could tell by the sudden gleam in the man’s shining blue eye that their prisoner desperately wanted to get his hands on the Musket. Over the course of their discussion thus far, Scourge had proven himself to be quite gentlemanly, incomprehensible violence and long list of awful crimes notwithstanding. Were it not for that, he would have gladly handed the museum piece over for inspection: it was the gentlemanly thing to do. Alas. Scourge was who he was, and that was both the long and short if it.
The Captain indicated the weapon at its place behind him on the wall. He was quite proud of the wooden mounting bracket, as he’d built it himself, with his own two hands and everything. “From the same place you are headed to, sir Scourge. As I was saying earlier, most wardogs separate themselves from regular folk, but some do not. In a group of wardogs, something like Meechy’s breakdown is readily handled. In a setting like this, where Edmund Meech’s lifetime of training inside Arcade City could prove monstrously difficult to control … the weapon is most efficient in dealing with recalcitrant Escapees.”
“You can say that again.” Garth replied enigmatically. What he wouldn’t give to have a gun like that in his hands. What he wouldn’t have given, so long ago on Gorensworld; back then, at the very beginn
ing, he’d had nothing beyond his wits to save his life, and … those wits had very nearly not been enough. The first time he’d witnessed a matter zombie crawling back together again, a never-ending stream of dust skittering and whispering across the floor … Garth snorted under his breath.
It’d been like waking up to realize you were trapped in a horror movie. He’d nearly shat himself. As it was, the ex-Specter was immensely glad he was the only one to’ve seen what he had done. Well, there was Shyla Sin, but the zombified Enforcer was –sadly- an automaton now, waiting for orders to oversee final activation of the Cloud. She wasn’t going to say anything to anyone.
If Meechy –and therefore some, if not all, of Arcade City’s ’escaped’ citizens- were somehow infected by a variant of the Cloud … A curious squirm of fear crawled through Garth’s guts. That … that was something terrifyingly awful to contemplate.
If it were true, even remotely so … the musket behind Eck’s head was a cloudkiller. That meant …
Garth sighed. It meant nothing. He was a prisoner. With prisoners, there were guards. The guards may have access to cloudkiller weapons, but it was definite that they wouldn’t be using them anywhere at all where either prisoners or natives could get their grubby hands on them.
Garth supposed he could do some of what Meechy had exhorted. He could subdue everyone onboard, take possession of the musket, then fly to Arcade City under the guise of being a guard looking for work. He could brandish the musket, prove to whoever was sitting watch at the front gates that he was well and truly proper FrancoBritish, yes sir, and in he’d go through the door when everyone was having afternoon tea, quick as he pleased.
“Wiser men than me have lost possession of their Arcade City muskets, sir Scourge, to men such as yourselves down through the long years.” Captain Eck waited politely until his guest realized he was talking. The flush of embarrassment on the criminal’s neck was a telltale sign that he’d hit the nail on the head, as it were. He waved a hand, dismissing the hasty apology that was forthcoming. “And I can appreciate –seeing as you have seen our poor old Meechy at his positive worst- your sudden need for a weapon that deals this much damage over such a short period of time, but I can assure you, whatever nascent plan you’ve concocted in that devious mind of yours won’t work.”
“Why’s that?” The Eye –trying to repair it’s tenuous worth- was doing its damnedest to interrogate the machinery aboard the Baskerville in search of anything worth anything. It was coming up as empty-handed as it had before. Level 3 artificial intelligences were barely more than brute force engines and certainly didn’t qualify as ‘intelligent’.
The gun behind Eck’s head was barely a blip on the Eye’s radar. Like Meechy, the weapon came from Arcade City, meaning once again that some form of Cloud nanotech was responsible. Annoyingly, the how of such a miraculous gun was probably going to remain a mystery until it was way too damn late for the revelation to be of any practical use.
His awesome quadronium implants and Eye hadn’t been built with the possibility of encountering nanotech outside Latelyspace. Why would it have been? That shit wasn’t supposed to work properly anywhere else.
Not unless it was Cloud. Cloud worked. Because he’d designed it.
“Weapons like these do not work under The Dome. The only things that work, I am told, are those things that he wills to work.” Captain Eck eyed the forgotten scone and bickies on Scourge’s plate. “Now, do be a good chap and finish your apology meal. We’ve got to get you back inside your holding cell. Should be clean enough by now.”
Garth did as he was bade, unable to take his eyes off the musket. Oh yeah, Arcade City was sounding like a fucking awesome choice. Hooray for being an idiot again!
Disgruntled and still feeling gross from the shower of Meechy-parts, Garth rose sullenly and grabbed a double handful of bickies off the plate. He stared down both the guards when they moved to divest him of his delicious bounty.
Captain Eck spoke up from his desk. “Oh, do be good chaps and let the man have his bickies. He’s only just been covered in human soup.” Inwardly, though, the captain was entirely pleased that their most notorious cargo was behaving as well as was; he had the whole report covering the Scourge’s time in Ha’Penny House on his desk, and … well, Eck supposed he couldn’t imagine why any man capable of the things this man was would seek to be imprisoned inside Arcade City.
With talent like that, even if he was mad, a much better fit would be Trinity’s other army … what was it called … Special Services? Yes. That was it. Special Services. A man like Scourge –if he was seeking thrills and challenges and suicide- should’ve gone off to join that legendary and violent cadre of criminals and maniacs rather than nutting poor Leftbridge so hard his brains liquefied.
Captain Eck stared reflectively at Scourge’s departing back, then shrugged. The poor fool had made his bed, as it were, now he was just going to have to lie in it, eh?
The FrancoBritish gentleman cast about his desk in search of the forms to fill out for Meechy’s sudden and unwarranted detonation, wondering if there weren’t some way he could arrange for another of the Escapees. Mighty helpful, Old Meechy’d been.
2. Strange Bedfellows
The cloth bag over his head was itchy and stank like an animal had spent some time decomposing in it before being used again. The tip of his nose was itching like mad and if someone didn’t untie his arms soon, he was going to lose his mind over that itch.
“I can hear you, you know.” The prisoner shouted. “I can hear you moving around.”
The sounds of people moving to and fro in the room continued, though the prisoner thought he could detect furtive whispers not more than ten feet from where he was bound. He tried his wrists once more, flexing them against the cheap rope.
Nothing. These people were really good at tying knots.
“Come on, this is ridic… Finally.” Candall blinked against the harsh bright lights. “Someone is either going to have to scratch my nose or untie me now.” He nodded approvingly as a grey-shirted soldier displayed a knife, and sighed with satisfaction a few seconds later as he started working on the itch that was at the very tip of his nose.
Sa Candall rose from the chair, and, still scratching his nose, surveyed the room. Half a dozen blue-shirted techs were squirreled away at the far end, going over the data they’d yanked from his prote. At the other end of the room, one or two lieutenants were looking thoughtfully at some large Sheet maps; their Intel was good, because, for a change, they were correctly displaying the exact locations of the three Trinity encampments. Once they got his data uploaded and properly decrypted, that data would be even more exact.
Then, finally, they could get off their asses and do something about the bloody Trinity invasion. At least on this planet. Elsewhere … elsewhere would require different methods once again.
The leader of Landmark made his way over to a table laden down with food and drink. It was always buffet-style, always local food, and after having lived the last fifteen or twenty years on Hospitalis, there was one thing that Candall knew about ‘local’ food: he hated it. The bacon tasted different, the bread had suspicious smells, even the water tasted different. His men didn’t care. They’d cram fistfuls of military proteins into their mouths and give him a thumbs up.
“Sorry that took so long, sa.”
Candall turned around, mouth full of meat and cheese. He nodded gravely to the haggard and tired-looking Chairman. Not too far behind him, a giantess stood, dominating everyone in the area simply by breathing. He was surprised to see the small man so far from Hospitalis, but only for a moment; the other ‘leaders’ of the Latelian Commonwealth were spread throughout the solar system, dealing with these so-called Deep Strike Specters. He swallowed his mouthful half-chewed, wondering for a precarious moment if he was going to choke to death or spew food all over the most powerful man in the solar system.
Everything went down well. Candall nodded again. “It’s fine, Sa Chairman
. All in a day’s work.”
Herrig gestured for Candall to sit. He followed suit when the Latelian sat, sighing a tiny little bit when Sidra’s hand took up the traditional spot on his shoulder. “I’ll get right to the point, sa. Are there any suspicions?”
Candall took his eyes off the female Foursie. The rumors were true. For a brief moment, he tried grasping the corners of such a relationship before quitting; love would always find a way, he supposed. Why, one of his own men had sparked up something of a torrid affair with one of the opposition, an actual Offworlder, complete with horns on her –or possibly his- head and a split tongue. He shook those images clear. “I don’t think so, sa.”
Herrig twiddled with something on his proteus. “Thinking not isn’t the best of answers, sa. So I am told, at any rate.” He spent most of his days ‘thinking’ he was doing an all right job. No one had told him otherwise yet, so he kept on thinking, but Vasily had urged him during their teleconference to be as firm with Candall as possible.
“Look, Sa Chairman,” Candall gestured to the windows, “look outside and tell me if there’s any other way to proceed. This little moonlet, with all of eighty thousand citizens, is occupied. By two SpecSer tech squads and a formation of regular Army. The army guys are easy as pie to understand; they’ve got the population terrified that they’re demons. They’re playing on the fear and hatred that’s been built up in this system for five thousand years. They think they’re in control. The tech squad are different. They’re trying to learn everything they can about our technology, and they’re doing a damn good job. Haven’t cracked the encrypted comm signals between protes yet, and all they’ve succeeded in doing in replicating their own is blowing up most of the ones they’ve confiscated. They let me come and go almost as often as I please, so when I say I don’t think they suspect me, that’s all I can say.”
