by Lee Bond
“All right, DarkBook, refresh my memory.” Garth waited for the machinery of his Geared Armor to do that, running through different scenarios for the upcoming mega-battle while he waited.
: Dark Iron matter connections being made. 35% complete:
DarkBook illuminated sections of the vault door –behind which a King’s ransom in Iron and machinery did indeed await, just as Eric had known- that would be the best for grabbing hold of and then showed a wireframe sketch of said door being ripped from it’s moorings.
“Okey dokey.” Garth did as the rudimentary AI suggested, digging his hands into the exposed locking mechanisms, curling his fingers around some heavy bolts deep inside the guts of the thing. He set his legs for proper lifting –you couldn’t play it too safe, even if you were in probably-indestructible super-armor and, after a series of deep breaths and some good, solid mental visualization of goals, ripped the heavy vault door right out of the wall.
“See?” Garth bitched to his old Eye, even though it’d been fucking silent the whole time he’d been in Arcade City. “See? It’s not like I’d be running around punching holes in people’s heads, like, the whole time. Having access to super-strength is kind of an important thing this far into the future. I was like the only dude in a million light years who couldn’t karate chop a building in half. Shit like that can give a dude an inferiority complex, you know.”
: Dark Iron matter connections being made. 35% complete:
“Yeah, yeah, yeah. I hear you. Keep your robo-pants on.” Garth peered into the dimly lit vault, grinning into the darkness when his lensed eye spat out a thin hologram that covered both eyes; acting exactly like a visor, he was now able to wander around Agnethea’s bank vault with both eyes open.
“Nanotech kicks ass.” Garth commented happily. “It is like, one of the best things ever. When this all over and before I drop kick King Barnabas Blake the Enormous Asshat off a mountain, which I shall build with nanotech, I am going to spend a week or so perfecting a foodarackacycle. How awesome would it be to walk up to something like that and say ‘I want chocolate covered pepperoni pizza with pineapple on top’ and have the damn … Ahhhh, there you are.”
The huge brass-and-glass cylinder full of Dark Iron squatted in the relative darkness of the bank, a grim monster waiting for it’s next victim, surrounded on all sides by things that visitors to Ickford imagined were important enough or irreplaceable enough to warrant extra protection.
Barnabas’ smithing gear was off to one side, dominating one whole section of the floor. With all that was going on, Garth found himself wondering if the bastard would ever come back for the machinery. If there was one thing Garth knew about the old codger was that the man had been a proper smith. It’d been obvious from the nitpicking manner he had from how a screwdriver was to be used to the precise orientation of the flange-valves for the aerator in the main tent.
Even though Barnabas was hell-bent on ripping Ickford out by the roots and salting the earth with Dark Iron, it was really hard to imagine he’d leave his precious tools to be crushed beneath the massive boots of his marauding Gunboys.
Running a hand across a glass panel of his Dark Iron capsule, Garth toyed with the idea of wrecking the gear. A dry whisper inside his mind said that Specter agreed with the notion, hinting that for best effect, doing so outside, under The Dome, would kick the King right in the pills.
Garth shook his head. There was a time and a place for shit like that, and this was neither the time nor the place. Dismissing the petty notion for what it was, the Engineer grabbed hold of the brass-and-glass container and pulled it outside. Once the full brilliance of the invisible sun struck his face, the holographic visor snapped out of existence.
“Love nanotech.” Garth gave the burdensome container one last pull to make sure it was all the way out of the vault. He wasn’t sure what was going to happen when he gave the Geared Armor and DarkBook full access to all that crudey-crude, but there was one thing he knew for certain: he didn’t want to have any damn buildings or anything fall on him while everything was being upgraded.
Staring at the black goo as it swirled around inside it’s prison, Garth reflected on how funny life was. Not long ago, he would’ve rather died and gone straight to hell than have a single gram of Dark Iron anywhere near him and here he was, getting ready to expose himself to gallons of the shit.
The would-be Engineer for Reality 2.0 shook his head ruefully and laughed. Somewhere deep in the city, gearheads and Gunboys provided explosive counterpoint to his inappropriate amusement. How far he’d come.
The ravages of the stuff were well documented in the faces of every gearhead alive. The stuff was undiluted evil and burned straight into the deepest part of the human brain. Were it not for that quadronium buffer, it was all too likely that he’d’ve wound up looking like Nicked Jimmy or Mental Marc or any one of the other thousand or so freaks he’d seen along the way.
“That might be better, though, than what I have to deal with.” Meaning, of course, Specter.
Garth knew perfectly well he was incarnating a psychological condition who didn’t really exist, but he couldn’t stop; ‘Specter’ was a part of him that he’d lived with for a long, arduous decade, and ‘he’ was precisely the kind of personality that the Kith and Kin –not to mention the Kith’kin and Kin’kith- had had to struggle against every step of the way. Trinity Itself had either known or recognized the inherent predisposition towards megalomania and … monstrous behavior that he and Lisa Laughlin had done their best to hide from the Army of Man, executing what had to be the best long con perpetrated by a machine.
Errantly, Garth caught himself wondering just how Trinity had planned on dealing with a fully Dark Side Kin’kithal the moment It won before deciding it was a waste of time. As far as he knew, the only way to stop a Kin’kith or Kith’kin was with one of the brood. With all of them dead now, there was just him.
Just him.
Garth put his face to the glass to peer deep into the churning black liquid, fantasizing the microscopic machines inside the fluid were visible to the naked eye. If only he’d been able to devote more time to coming up with a solution similar to Barnabas’, the people of Goreene might not have been turned into dust. As vile and vicious as Kingsblood was, there was a kind of … demonic elegance to the structure. Had he come up with something similar to the King’s solutions, something less pervasive than Cloud, the old particulate could’ve just been … turned off.
Garth shook his head irritably. Goreene had been a mess. Nothing would change that. There was no point in reliving the nightmare.
: Dark Iron matter connections being made. 35% complete:
“Just gimme a fucking second here.” Garth summoned up the diagrams that DarkBook had been working on and zeroed in on the revised system for the arms. It was tremendously important that the slender needles hooked into his veins were pulled loose before too much ‘Vicious Elixir’ was fed into the machinery. It was inevitable that some would leak in, and he was prepared to deal with a fresh infusion, but it couldn’t be too much.
There was very little point –and insurmountable danger- in giving an utterly Ironed Specter access to a set of fully functional nanotech armor.
The specs verified the procedure was as safe as possible under the circumstances. Still only a basic AI –in comparison to what he was used to- DarkBook nevertheless had detected the paramount urgency in preventing overexposure to the crudey-crude. From the way the wireframe sketches floating through his HUD connected together, it looked like no more than a quarter-gallon would seep in before full disconnection.
Garth laughed at the joke. It was a lot. He’d come out okay that first time, and those subsequent and lesser doses of Kingsblood hadn’t really affected him that badly.
A quarter-gallon, though. He probably had that much in him right then, thanks to the altercation with Mickel and Harvard’s men.
Gunboys screamed and tossed building-sized chunks of debris around.
Garth licked his teeth, ran a gauntleted hand through his hair.
Somewhere out there, a woman who’d done horrific evil for most of her unnatural life undoubtedly fought alongside those hot-metal freaks, fought with them and for them, as a true monarch.
Weighed against that kind of heroism, that kind of sacrifice, a quarter-gallon didn’t even matter.
: Dark Iron matter connections being made. 35% complete:
“Let’s do this.” Garth yanked the top of his Dark Iron container off and jammed his hands into the roiling tarry substance. He shut his eyes and did his best to think of anything other than what was happening, because it felt precisely as gross as he remembered.
The heavy substance, the stuff from which King Barnabas Blake the One and Only claimed his legendary power, started moving.
***
He’d never seen nowt like this in his entire life, and he were one of the oldest gearheads under The Dome, he were; Old Mackie had been back and forth around the outer tier of Arcade City nearly two hundred times, and in that time, he’d done battle with hundreds and hundreds of Big Kings. He’d been there when the first proper batch of Shaggy Men had come screaming out of their underground warrens, eyes blazing red, claws eager to be dripping with blood. He’d done single-handed combat with a Bolt-Neck and come out on top and the same too for one of them newfangled and somewhat ridiculous Widow’s Peaks. So too, weren’t he the man as had come closest to doing for one of them Water Lady’s all on his own, though summat about them women as plied the few waterways of Arcade City struck Old Mackie as … wrong.
He were nearly full to the brim on Dark Iron, so much so that his skin had turned the same dusky hue as an old stove, complete with the rough-to-the-touch feeling. Old Mackie’s eyes were metal orbs that rolled inside metal sockets, his teeth were solid grey steel, his joints and his fingers and his legs and even his old whizzer, they were all suffused with Dark Iron. He clanked when he walked and when he took a piss –which were once every year or so- it were nearly liquid metal as come out the end.
Old Mackie were a legend, and he’d come to Ickford to hide in the dark places offered up by Queen Agnethea, as he’d never had no desire to move inward, and he’d lost the desire to do for any more Kings, or to go up against any of the things that crawled or hopped across the land. Other greyskins like him had come to help the Queen build her home, but he’d been first, oh yes he had, and because of all that, he were the first and only to live within the walls free of charge.
Sometimes the young’uns, fresh to turning grey, they came ‘round his little hole under the ground to ask what it were like, only he hain’t never had no answers to that, no sir. Going grey were different for each lad or lass, and about the only other thing he’d ever said on the subject were that he’d never been like them other angry gearheads afore so he didn’t even know what it were like to be a reg’lar gearhead anyways. Then he’d cautioned them fledgling greys to mind their manners ‘round softer folk, as it were easy as pie to poke holes in people if you didn’t watch your fingers and toes.
Well, that last visit had been ages and ages ago. Truth be told, Old Mackie hadn’t missed the young’uns with their questions at all but he’d always been nice enough, he had, dealing with ‘em quick and neat to get back to the silence of his dreams, hey?
This new thing, this terrible noise rousing him from his slumber, though…
He didn’t like it, not one bit.
Now he were upstairs, so to speak, lookin’ on in silence as the city he and his had helped build was bein’ torn down by giant green metal men. He watched on as brothers and sisters and cousins and nieces and nephews clambered like monkeys up the shattered leg o’ one of the screaming metal monsters, only t’fall seconds later, all twisted and mangled and bent like they’d been run through the grinder.
Mackie didn’t like these new Kings. They didn’t feel right, just as them silly old Water Ladies had never quite fit in. Felt to him like they’d been birthed just to kill, and that weren’t right.
There’d be no learning from these, no gifts, no bragging rights. Only dead gearheads.
Old Mackie didn’t like it, no sir, no he did not.
Clanking as he moved, Mackie stepped closer to the corpse of the lady gearhead that’d fallen further than the others, ignoring the rumbling, tumbling ground and the noise of the beast. Oh, it were well pissed, weren’t it just? Mackie’d never seen no weapons like them as the mad bombers had used to turn the Green Man’s leg into a torn open wound from foot to hip, revealing scaffolding and leg-bits that weren’t much different than a regular old King, and he could tell from the way their enemy were hopping and stomping and screaming that it weren’t too pleased at all for damage.
Mackie nudged the corpse. It didn’t move. He watched and waited for telltale signs that there were summat still crawling about inside the girl, some twitch or titter of ’sblood that told those as who knew how to look when it were busy bringing someone back from the dead.
Nothing doing. “Welladay, there, hey? That hain’t right, nosir.” Mackie looked up and down the flattened, smashed area the Green Man had set up shop, so to speak, counting the dead quickly. More than three hundred, looked like, all done for, simply by climbing up the leg, and that weren’t including them as had been zapped into char.
Mackie wrinkled his mouth into a frown. It took some doing, as most facial expressions did. He didn’t like it. He were out of the Kingkilling game. He could see fresh gearheads lining up on the walls all around the target, working their way through some plan or other, doing the tallies, counting their blessings, pumping themselves full of fresh Iron –as those who were good at Kingkilling learned to do sooner rather than later- and generally pretending they weren’t scared witless.
They, too, had seen those as had gone before simply fall to their doom. They had their field glasses, they had their weird eyes as could see far just by squinting, they had the feel of their enemy and his abilities, and they –as Old Mackie had just gotten done doing- were beginning to realize that there were more to these Metal Green Men than just how they looked.
Old Mackie gave a grudging sigh and leaped thirty feet towards the Green Metal Man, a Dark Iron cannonball of a man, crashing noisily against where the monster’s ankle used to be. Dense, hard fingers dove into the mechanics of the leg, heavy clawed feet gripped into the metal like he were going to climb a mountain. He were going to do for this giant and mayhap the other three as well and he sincerely hoped nowt noticed it were him. He were out of the game, hey?
This were … this were a special thing. A gift to the woman as had given him a place to stay where nowt judged him if they sawr him, hey? The old bonnie Queen Agnethea, she deserved summat to be returned to her in kind after all this time. It were the proper thing to do.
As luck would have it, the Man didn’t notice. Old Mackie were just one gearhead, barely a flea on the back of something so titanic, and so he started clambering up the leg quick as you please, tunelessly humming the ditty about how Specter had done for a whole room of rotten apples. He’d like to meet the man they called Specter, who was –or so he’d heard in his little hole in the ground- this very second somewhere in Ickford, doing for Golems and making a right proper mess of everything them high and mighty bastards held true.
The ancient gearhead couldn’t make heads nor tails of why them others had fallen, dead. There weren’t no pokers, no stabbers or cutters neither. Why, there weren’t even them little nozzles as shot fire at you, the bits and pieces he were using to climb up on didn’t turn so hot they could melt your skin off. This weren’t even a full King with a proper crown that shot bullets at you neither, it were … it were just a big green man made of metal.
There were a slight … shiver … to some of the heavy, riveted plates that’d resisted the bombing, but that weren’t nothing unusual. Old Mackie were climbing up a giant made of metal. Natura
lly, there’d be some …
“What’s all this then, hey?” Old Mackie stopped humming and stared hard at his metal fingers. They’d been greyish black for so long now, he could scarcely remember them being any other color at all. Why, there were days that he forgot he’d been born of a Mummy and Daddy, let alone being flesh and blood.
But this … this were … his wee little pinky finger, the one as had grown itself a long, slicing nail that needed trimming every few hours unless he wanted to have a sword growing out from the tip … it were …
Old Mackie blinked his tired metal eyes. It were pink. His pinky finger were … normal.
“Bollocks.” It were some kind of trick. A new challenger brought new tricks and traps that were something any bush-league gearhead could tell you straight off. Shaggy Men’s claws could swipe through the thickest gearhead hide. Bolt-Necks could pull you apart, limb from limb, all on accident. Widow’s Peaks could have you singing songs and dancing in your pants before tea time. Water Ladies, well. They could gut you with that sword before you even knew you’d seen one. Giant Green Men, it seemed, could make you think you were losing your Iron.
Old Mackie the Metal Man kept climbing, ignoring the flesh-colored pinky, ignoring how the swathe of color there seemed to be crawling slowly but surely across the back of his hand. Ignored that, and how his right foot, with it’s vicious toenails, weren’t gripping quite as well as the left.
It weren’t possible. It weren’t fair and it weren’t right. There were just no way under The Dome that these enemies could draw the Iron out through your skin. Them as called themselves gearheads had earned the right to call themselves that, by fighting and winning against insurmountable odds, by wedding themselves to the torch, by slamming that awful, horrid crud down their throats and into their veins.
The King would never take what were theirs by right of combat and death.