by Lee Bond
Blanketed in the flames of Intelligence -this time of her own volition- Cianni discovered she could see right into the … what had the voice called it? The substrata of the Universe? She nodded, unaware that she was smiling once more. Yes. That was apt. The coding of the substrata of the Universe shimmered and spun before her.
It was breathtaking. There was so much more out there, so much more depth to the Universe in which they lived than anyone could properly appreciate and it was more beautiful than any AI could…
“Shit.” Cianni whispered, a million miles away from her body.
“You found me.” Lady Ha whispered back. “I did not think there could be anyone else in the entire Universe like me and my love, the Engineer, the man you all call Garth N’Chalez, but you are. All of you are like me. Paltry, incomplete echoes, but close enough, as Garth would say, for horseshoes and war.”
“Who are you?” Cianni asked. “What are you?” The … concentration of mind hovering just on the horizon of her own perceptions was daunting. It was too much for her to deal with all at once. If she had a week, a month … a year learning how to read and comprehend this kind of information, perhaps … perhaps she’d be able to deal with this threat on her own but not yet. Not now. It was too soon.
There were convoluted corners and strange … folds … to the … essence already impinging it’s will into the substrate that screamed living mind, but there were also brutally hard edges and crystalline formations that said the ‘woman’ she was communicating with was anything but living. Endless equations, complex beyond proper comprehension, spiraled out and away from where the outlandish mentality crouched.
Cianni impulsively tried to grab hold of one such problem.
The shriek erupting from Cianni had everyone at her side, forming a protective barrier against all threats, real or imagined. Telgar immediately formed the strongest shield he’d ever manifested in his life, boosted by the reappearance of the Soul-HUD. It took on the appearance of solid diamond, catching and spilling refracted light in all directions.
The warrior spoke brusquely, voice full of concern for his wife. “We are safe from all harm.”
Lady Ha tsked, the queer distortion in her voice chilling Armageddon Troop Too to the bone. “That math is beyond you, Cianni Wren. It is very nearly beyond me, and I am the greatest mind in the Universe. I will solve it, though. With your help. With all your help.”
Eddie cleared his throat one more time. “I say again. Who are you? What do you want in this system? And how do you know Garth?”
“I,” the voice sounded much clearer, much stronger, less distorted, “am the Lady Ha. I don’t want anything with this system in particular, Captain Eddie. I … arrived here in a moment of panic, that is all. It could’ve been any system at all. It is fitting from an ironic point of view that I came here, though. I am certain my father would find the punishment I wreak on the Yellow Dogs quite righteous, given what they did to him so many decades ago. In practical terms, this system has all the resources I require. And I know Garth N’Chalez because I am his girlfriend.”
“N… Naoko Kamagana?” Babel stammered. There was no way the … weirdo they were talking to was the same woman Garth had described to them even as he’d stolen their ship.
“One and the same.” Lady Ha’s voice was now completely empty of distortion. “Though I do prefer my proper name, the name of the goddess that will hack this Unreal Universe’s code down to the bone so that it can be properly reconfigured for maximum efficiency. It is what I was learning to do back in Latelyspace, though there, I would have been nothing more than a very good coder. Out here, in the Universe proper, there is so much more I can do.”
Armageddon Troop Too turned as one, slowly, dread crawling through them like a living thing. They didn’t know how it was possible, but the ever-growing strength and clarity of their … visitor’s voice was prime proof that somehow, in some way, the so-called ‘Lady Ha’ had manifested herself in the command center of My Other Ship.
The woman once known to Garth N’Chalez as Naoko Kamagana, later kidnapped by the CyberPriests of Watt so they could transform her into Savior 2.0 only to find they’d vastly underestimated the overwhelming nature of Garth’s almost feral ability to rewrite men and women into things he could later use to assert his vision with, stood before Armageddon Troop Too in all her glory.
“Jesus wept.” Telgar spat. Though he was a warrior born and bred, he was also –much to his family’s dismay- a poet and a lover, and when their old Captain had described the tall, willowy, jade-eyed woman that had so captured his heart, well, his own heart had been captivated.
Dagon’s curse was a noisy collision of rocks tumbling to the ground, which he followed up with a more robust, “Fuck me sideways.”
“I was gonna say that.” Babel replied bitterly.
Eddie didn’t say anything. There was nothing to say. He directed everyone wordlessly to begin assembling the Soul-HUD properly. There was a chance they could all get out of this if they were prepared.
Cianni merely shook her head and tried to extricate herself from the logic trap she’d fallen into and failed. The portion of her mind that’d tried to decipher that smidgeon of Universe-altering science issuing forth from the self-styled Lady Ha had her neatly bound.
Lady Ha nodded understandingly. She knew what she looked like. There was no way to miss what was happening to her, and over time, she’d come to embrace the changes. There were more important things to do than to waste time coming up with a way to undo what’d been done by those panicky, foolish ‘Priests.
“I understand that I am, hmm, frightful to look upon, now.” Lady Ha said simply. “When the CyberPriests were done with me, done attempting to transform me into a servant through which they could usurp control of this Universe only to discover that they had simply unlocked and enhanced the changes already made to me by my exposure to Garth, they tried to kill me.”
“With a head like that, lady,” Babel quipped, fighting a hot surge of nausea, “I’d almost wish they’d succeeded.”
Telgar slapped Babel upside the head.
“It is all right.” Lady Ha nodded. The thing she’d come to think of it as a halo was –truthfully- a baffling collection of scaffolding chimed weirdly as the gesture finished.
At first, when she’d come to her senses in Jade Song and gazed upon her reflection, the sight of the growth –then, just barely bigger than her hand, and nothing more than an … outcropping … sort of like a miniature communication tower- had driven her mad. It’d grown, though, as mastery over her power had grown until it was the thing Babel found so disturbing. Containing a myriad of whirring things that all seemed capable of doing the things she needed, its disquieting nature was no longer a reason to worry or complain.
“People are often disturbed by such glorious perfection.” Her voice lapped at the walls, laden with off-putting promises.
Naturally, that madness had displayed itself in various forms of violence and mayhem against the people of the solar system. If only Yellow Dogs had played fair, if they hadn’t been so petty and greedy and dependent on recognition from an Emperor that didn’t want anything to do with them in the first place, well, she would have never been born. Tomas Kamagana would have never fled to the only place in the Universe where the Yellow Dogs could not go, he would have never met and fell in love with Mara, they would have never had a child, that child would have never become the Lady Ha, Lady Ha would have never met Garth N’Chalez, would have never shown him how to find some inner peace, the Specter would’ve burned hot and bright across Latelyspace and the whole system would’ve been consumed with his rage, and then that rage would’ve spilled out into the Universe, turning this shambling mockery into nothing more than quantum cinders floating over an empty void.
At least, that was how she’d felt until she’d realized that -as she’d waged a one-goddess war against the pathetic Yellow Dogs- the array growing directly from her brain was allowing her to connect
deeper and more intimately with the Universe. The more she used the powers and abilities given to her by both the CyberPriests and by Garth, the greater she became.
After that, well, her mind had changed. She would hack the Universe. Hack it until it worked.
Garth’s plan –the plan he hadn’t dared tell anyone but one that, when she’d thought about it, was plain to see- wasn’t necessary. All she needed was to gain control of the extra-dimensionality. Bolstered by that endless sea of mutative fuel, she, Lady Ha, would have more than enough power to literally rewrite the whole Unreal Universe into something more orderly.
“Is that how you see yourself?” Cianni asked hoarsely. Trying to keep her mind inside her body while more than half her consciousness was bound up in ebony blocks of unbreakable quantum logic was killing her. “A goddess?”
Lady Ha stroked the tines of her halo. They sparked and shivered, threw weird shapes into the air. “Am I not? Who other than a goddess could do this?” Ha drew a symbol in the air, a complicated sigil that pulsed once, twice, a third time, blowing Cianni’s intellectual fire out.
“Or this?” Lady Ha continued, this time with both hands sketching codes in the air. “Soul-HUD. What a ridiculous name for something that is closer to godhood than you realize.”
“Now!” Eddie shouted desperately, willing everyone to launch whatever talent or augmentation they’d been hiding from each other.
Nothing happened. They couldn’t move. Whatever Lady Ha had done, they were trapped, flies in amber.
The terrifying Lady Ha stalked forward, jade eyes blazing with mad sickness. The closer the woman who imagined she was a goddess got, the more intensely the members of Armageddon Troop Too felt her presence. She was a dimple, a dent, a bent and warped indentation in the fabric of the Universe.
They groaned as one as Lady Ha moved to a stop no less than an inch away. Strange, skittering sensations licked up and down their bodies, crawling inside their heads, etching into their minds. They tried to fight, but whatever it was that Ha was doing, was something she’d had considerable time to perfect.
Lady Ha sighed happily. “I have an army, my loyal commanders, an army comprised of the men and women of this solar system who have fallen afoul of my wrath. They were easy to rewrite. A snap of the fingers here, a twitch in a ganglion there, but you five … ahhh, you will require some serious work.”
Lady Ha paused, head tilted to one side, CyberPriest-spawned ‘halo’ glittering like a mad carousel of moving parts. “Lucky for you all that I am a very good coder, yes? I did this sort of work once before, for an AI. You should be easier than that, I think.”
Armageddon Troop Too could do nothing. They were caught, with no way out.
Lady Ha’s codes continued eating away at them.
11. The Naming of the Beasts and other Amazing Things
Idle Eric dabbed gently at his split eyebrow, wishing that things had gone another way, wishing that he were more of a brave man, or a foolhardy man, or any other kind of man at all, but the truth of it were, that from the moment he’d woken up from that last fatal Kingkilling and he’d lost most of his legs, he hadn’t been that kind of bloke at all, no sir, not no more. Since that time, since his well proper legs had been replaced by the hippity-hopping things attached to him, well, Idle Eric reckoned he weren’t nothing more than a freak, and he reckoned that were saying summat, as he lived in a world of freaks.
Except where some other gearheads got eyes made of metal or turbines for mouths, he got wee little legs that couldn’t work properly no matter what happened, and that kind of thing did for a man’s self-confidence, didn’t it just, so while the rest of his crew had decided to go off and see what was going on down at Twisted Mickel’s and Havilland Harvard’s, he, Idle Eric, was leaning against a wall, listening to the sound of those monstrous metal men floundering through Ickford, staring miserably at the color of the blood betwixt thumb and forefinger.
“Well on my last life, I am. Well indeed. Nothing left to me save what I got in me already, and that hain’t much.” Eric shook his head miserably. The blood pumping out of the hole in his head were almost as bright red as the day he’d been born. Naught but a few runny, greasy strips of crudey-crude, more a reflection than anything.
Idle Eric pushed off from the wall where his best mate, Rick the Flicker, had slammed him and headed off towards where all of them were supposed to’ve been heading in the first place: Agnethea’s precious bank.
Before they’d gotten onto the topic of the invading giant men –who were unlike any King any one of them had ever seen in any of their widespread travels- they’d been intent on robbing everyone who’d dropped their precious goods off in the nearly impregnable bank.
It were a good plan! It were.
There was old Barnabas the Blacksmith’s precious cargo train, the only one of its kind in all of Arcade City. That alone would fetch the seller a king’s ransom in anything your mind could imagine. There was the smith’s tools, too, and those fell into that same unique category; the smiths and tinkerers of Ickford didn’t much like talking about Barnabas, nor did they particularly care discussing the rude, crude and abrasive older man’s talent, but if you worked on them enough, they would admit that yes, him that risked his life every day of the year by traveling the outer circle was better than all of them combined.
Idle Eric rubbed his hands and did a little hop for joy. When those precious goods became his, he could ask for anything he wanted from anyone he wanted. More importantly, there were a greater prize inside worth more than all else combined times thrice: Master Nickel’s unthinkably large vat of Vicious Elixir.
Far as Eric knew, it were the single largest accumulation of crudey-crude ever seen in one place. Rick seemed to believe there were similar sized concentrations of Dark Iron elsewhere in Arcade City, but Rick the Flicker had a tendency to imagine all manner of things. Part of his affliction.
Eric knew –had known- from the moment he’d seen Barnabas and Garth outside the gates of Ickford that his time had finally come around once more and the giant men –who even know rained down all manner of destruction and fiery wrath in ways that no man could lay claim to having witnessed before this dreadful day- could not have come at a more opportune moment.
“And this way,” Eric chirped happily to himself, “I won’t have to share none with my ex-crew, now will I?”
The diminutive gearhead could hardly believe his luck. It were well impossible to guess how much Dark Iron was truly in the vat, but it had to be somewhere in the eighty gallon range.
Eric stepped into an alleyway, ever-sensitive ears picking up the faint sounds of a crew running around the neighborhood. He stepped in, and shrank himself down as small as he could, turning himself into a wee shapeless form that –more often than not- got ignored as a bag of trash. They crew rushed past, shouting commands to each other as they prepared to deal with the … Big Green Man who was no more than four hundred feet away from where Eric crouched.
Folded in on himself, Eric grinned into his filthy sleeve. They were having a well difficult time, weren’t they just? He’d known from the moment the ground had opened up to spit those demons out that the King had lost his patience with Agnethea and her rotten little city. These particular beasts weren’t for education, or training, or growth. These were here to destroy, to crush, to kill.
There were a big difference. Eric didn’t know how he knew, but he knew deep down in his guts that these Men were going to be much harder to kill than anything any of the gearhead squads in Ickford had ever dealt with in their lives.
In truth, Eric thought to himself as he unfolded and resumed his hippity-hop journey towards the bank and all it’s endless riches, he rather suspected that were there any men and women from the inner circles out and about in Ickford, they, too, would find themselves at a loss for victory.
All of them as were trying to bring down the King’s Men were fools. But not Eric, oh no, not wee little mad Idle Eric. He were well brilliant
. He were going to find Master Nickel’s stash of Dark Iron and he were going to bathe in it, wasn’t he just? He were going to drink as much of it down as he could stomach in one go, and his legs were going to grow right back to the way they’d been before that King had squashed him flat so long ago, and everything else that were wrong with him, well that were just going to get fixed as well, right?
Idle Eric rubbed his hands gleefully, the sights and sounds of devastation surrounding him on all sides completely missed. He was a man on a mission. He couldn’t care less about anyone else.
***
“Oh really, now, this was completely unnecessary.” Agnethea frowned. Her entire dining room was coated in blood, guts and gore from floor to ceiling. Such a dreadful waste. “The man posed no threat to you whatsoever. He was normal in every way.”
“Which is why.” Thom crooned from his place at the head of the table. He was gazing deeply into the dismembered head of their so-called ‘Queen’s’ servant, an old grey-haired chap who’d looked quite surprised when they’d finally done for him properly. Thom snorted. The head still looked surprised, now he took a closer look. “Which is why we did as we did, Queen.”
The stench was revolting. It was one thing that she’d never managed to get entirely used to, not in eleven thousand years of long, punishing life. The pure, raw organic stink of the freshly dead curled inside her nostrils and took root in her brain, following her around for days. Back in the beginning, it would’ve driven her mad, had she not already been.
Agnethea pressed a lacy handkerchief against her nose. “You killed my servant because he was normal?” She laughed. “And would one of you have chosen to serve me in his stead?”
The assembled Golems –and there were more, many more than she’d ever imagined- mimicked her laughter.