by Lee Bond
Chevy looked at Crudesucker and a little exasperated chuckle escaped his lips as the Gearman recalled the hot surge of fear coursing through them all not more than ten minutes ago. He’d been convinced that they were all done for. How in the world did you outrun something that big? How did you survive the attentions of something that could sweep the Iron out of a hundred year old gearhead in a few seconds?
And then the blasted thing had tripped over it’s own feet, sending it colliding into an array of five and six-storey structures with considerable furor. Bleating and blatting and howling incomprehensible yowls –presumably some sort of ‘Egads, I’ve gone and tripped myself, do send help!’ to his brothers across Ickford, eventually Crudesucker had found it’s footing, so to speak, rising up from his embarrassing supine position with a gear-laden howl of mechanical frustration that sent chills up all their spines.
Only to find his feet wedged betwixt –according to Master Pete- Canal Street and Wedgewind Alley.
“Oh, aye, I’d agree with that.” Chevy’s nose caught whiff of someone smoking a cigar and for a long moment he thought it might be nice to share a puff or two, but held back. The gearheads seemed willing to tolerate his presence thanks to Master Pete, but the Dark Iron Bastards would only let that go so far. “Oh, Bless, ‘e’s trying to punch the buildings down again. Poor fella. Were ‘e not such a threat to us all, it’d be adorable.”
Chevy rather thought that gearheads had a strange sense of humor, though he supposed –in a strictly limited sort of way- that watching Crudesucker trying desperately to reach buildings falling far beneath the range of his grasp was somewhat funny.
No one save a few outside Queen Agnethea’s original building crew knew just what had gone into making all the homes and things she called ‘high rises’, but there were two things every gearhead who spent any time at all in Ickford knew: the damn things were perishingly difficult to damage -which was why Crudesucker was having a terrific time trying to yank his big, booted soldierly feet free- and that they were built so high and mighty so as to encourage everyone still left alive beneath The Dome to move to her kingdom within a kingdom.
Crudesucker bellowed his frustration loudly as he shifted his hips left and right, left and right, trying frantically to somehow wiggle his way loose. The uncompromising buildings of Canal Street and Wedgewind Alley had him held fast.
Master Pete laughed aloud as Crudesucker tried reaching once more for the taller buildings to either side of his trapped position. They were tantalizingly out of reach, quite literally a few feet beyond outstretched fingertips.
“What you working on there, in the dirt, Master Gearman?” Pete hawked up a gob and spat it over the edge. Crudesucker stopped reaching for the buildings on either side and just sort of stood there, screaming like a five year old child who’s been told by Mummy it were time to go to bed.
Chevy pointed at the math. “Well, Master Pete, it’s like this. Brain-damaged though our Crudesucker apparently may be, he is nevertheless going to work himself free sooner or later. Several of the buildings by his left foot are weakening, and when they crumble… we cannot hope to imagine he shall wedge himself in again straightaway.”
“And them circles and squiggles and all? Wot do they do?” Pete had heard tell of Gearmen who could use King’s Will. He’d always thought them fairy tales, but in Arcade City you could never tell, no you couldn’t.
“On their own, nowt.” Chevy jerked a gauntleted thumb over his shoulder. “Some of these numbers and all are the distance from there to here, and where our bonny robot should need to fall from in order to hit The Wall. Other bits of the math are tensile strengths of the things we might have at hand to assist Crudesucker’s rapid descent once more. Because as I’ve said, he simply won’t fall on his own again.”
“Cor blimey, hain’t you a smart ‘un?” Master Pete stared at The Wall, a great huge grin splitting his ugly face. Of course. The Wall. Sure, their weapons were doin’ a fair bit of damage, only Crudesucker seemed capable of soaking all that up.
But The Wall separating this slice of hell from the next slice in?
There weren’t a thing under The Dome it couldn’t kill. Leastways, that’s what everyone claimed. There were stories that bored gearheads had led their summoned King to a section of Wall, curious to see what would happen, and there were tales of what happened to those who were foolish enough to use one Dark Iron King tool to do for another.
Master Pete didn’t know nothing about whether those stories were true or not, but he did know one thing: Ickford were done for unless they found a way to do for these Gunboys. The leader scratched at his forehead. “’s a bit of a problem, innit? Only, we’s near about half again the height of the beast from the Wall, hey?”
“Actually, Master Pete, we are exactly twelve hundred and three feet away from The Wall. I will never ceased to be amazed at your kind’s abilities.” It was true. There wasn’t a being in Arcade City that was as good at solving things like distance, speed, angle of … “My good Master Pete, if you were to have Crudesucker fall face first into The King’s Wall, how would you go about it? Answer quick, mind, no thinking about it, no trying to be fancy, none of that stuff. We hain’t here to impress one another at the moment. We’re looking to save a city.”
“The Fool’s Basket.” The words popped out of Pete’s mouth before he’d even properly thunk them up.
“Say again?” Chevy knew what the Fool’s Basket was, but he failed to see how it … “You’re brilliant.”
“Aw, it ain’t nuffink, squire.” Pete blushed a bit at the compliment. “You was sayin’ as ‘ow you wanted to, like, trip the bastard up, yeah? Only, we hain’t got nowt in the city limits as could hold that kind of weight, even for a bit, you see. But …”
Chevy finished the sentence, nodding and smiling. “Pushing that bastard from behind will be just the trick, now. Big metal lad like that, he’ll go down and over like a big old baby, them big arms of his flinging out to stop him from fallin’ as ‘e’s done already once! Then, if we’re extraordinarily lucky, our Wall shall sprout up like a mushroom and electrocute the fellow in his tracks.” The Gearman turned to the ever-surprising gearhead leader and bowed. “Compliments are in order, Master Pete, oh yes, they are indeed.”
Pete chuckled, shaking his head. “Well, now, I don’t know about all that, Master Gearman Chevy, as I reckon two things. One, the lads as go to move the Fool’s Basket from thither to hither shall need to be our biggest, brightest and strongest, meanin’ if Crudesucker yonder gets it into his bonnet to be free and succeeds, we’ll be without our gunnery crew for that whole time. All the rest of wot we’ve got’d be mites against monsters. Second, if you pardon me goin’ on, squire, them same lads’ll need to keep mobile, yeah, as it’s like I said only a moment ago; our lad is a tall ‘un and we’ll need to have ‘im breathin’ right down upon us, and with that arm length, he’ll be like as not to sweep us right off the top of this here roof like an angry drunk. Those of us stayin’ up ‘ere’ll need to be serious staunch lads and lasses, to be staring down the gullet of that wreck-faced ruin, sure as I’m Pete.
Third,” Master Pete continued, unaware of the growing sense of pride emanating from Gearman Chevril Pointillier, “and again, I ask for a tad more patience on your part, Master Gearman, more of our crew’s goin’ ter need to be down there amidst Crudesucker’s left and right, hey? Swingin’ their hammers and maces and mauls and whatnot, as I can assure you that unless summat ‘appens and our big metal lad turns out the same sorts of tricks as a Big’Un, he hain’t gettin’ loose this side of next year. Then them first lads and lasses as brought about the Fool’s Basket are quite literally goin’ ter need to rush up behind Crudesucker, firing their payload into the gormless monster’s shiny Dark Iron starfish on the fly, as it were. Definitely doable, squire, definitely and no two ways about it. Though you probably had all that figured out a long time ago, didn’t you, and was just givin’ an old looker an opportunity to feel useful, hey?
”
Gearman Chevy shook his head, absolutely mystified. This was, Chevy suspected –in all honesty- the very first time any Gearman had ever had the opportunity to have an open discussion with a gearhead; out there in the wilds, gearheads were rampaging fiends stoked to the brim with Dark Iron, vibrating madmen reeking of hot metal and wreaking glorious destruction on their foes. It’d been the same further in, though the rank anger decreased the closer to Arcadia you got, but it wasn’t until –or hadn’t been- until hopefuls made the journey through Arcadia’s splendid gates that you could be assured of proper discourse.
What miracle had Agnethea wrought in Ickford, to give these, the worst sufferers of Dark Iron madness, a chance to think for themselves, to rid themselves of being ridden so roughshod by the Iron coursing through their veins? Aye, they were still plagued with the vile physical defects wrought by the Vicious Elixir and they were as crude as the crudey-crude pumping in place of the good red stuff, but never in his life had a Gearman heard something quite so amazing as a proper gearheaded looker laying out a plan of attack with such simple effort.
“Actually, Master Pete,” Chevy admitted good-naturedly, clapping a friendly hand on the other man’s shoulder, “I’d just about gotten to the point where we’d spend an hour or two about in the city looking for a giant rubber band. From there… bloody bleedin’ fuck what the fuckin’ ‘ell is all that then?”
Far away, at the other end of the city, madness in the form of a brilliant blue lance of light so powerfully bright it cast diamond-hard shadows across the whole of Ickford erupted, slicing cleanly through the lumbering Gunboy’s left arm without so much as a pause before continuing ever upwards, a … a … a comet launched from the ground.
Every single one of the Dark Iron Bastards watched the glowing blue projectile illuminate the heavens before it disappeared. Hurriedly, they all turned their attention back to the de-limbed Gunboy.
It was not pleased.
“Well now,” Pete scratched at his noggin once more, “I reckon that were summat you’ve never seen before in your life, hey?”
Chevy stood there, lips pursed, gauging the damage; the arm, blown clean from whatever passed for a socket, was still soaring through the air, destined to make a nasty groove through whichever section of the city it eventually made landfall in. It was well difficult to tell from their vantage point, but the Gearman was fairly confident–based on the amount of smoke and echoing crashes- that whatever weapon Master Nickels had cobbled together to do for the Gunboy so efficiently had also done quite a bit of collateral damage to the surrounding environment.
It weren’t the best solution, wrecking the city to save the people, but Queen Agnethea was nothing if not resourceful. If she survived the day –not to mention Garth’s efforts at saving everyone- she’d have time to rebuild.
Chevy would make certain of that, even if that meant having a polite word with the King himself.
***
Agnethea picked herself free from the rubble gingerly, holding one hand to her woozy forehead, astonished at the damage done to Irondrinker’s control room from what had surely been a single blast; virtually every monitor save one of the heavy ones bolted directly to the metal man’s skull had torn itself loose upon impact, jostling and jouncing throughout the cavernous area and making a right hash of everything else left in the room.
Prodding her face for signs of actual injury beyond a thorough bonking –Eldest Golem she may very well be, but it seemed that all Arcade City’s rules had been chucked out the window some time ago- Agnethea took stock of Irondrinker’s mind.
The fancy control panel set in the middle, alluring and shining with lights and buttons, all flash and pizzazz to draw someone such as Master Nickels all the way into the trap, was gone, reduced to so many spare parts and bits and pieces.
Queen Agnethea turned her attention to the sole remaining monitor, salty quip on her lips. “Well, you old bastard, it does look as though…”
King Barnabas Blake the One and Only watched her, eyes alight with glee. “Yes?” he inquired quizzically, trying to hide his immense pleasure several times and failing each time. Finally, the King could bear it no longer. He tilted his head back and let loose a laugh the likes of which he hadn’t had within him for longer than he dared remember.
Everything … everything was going according to plan. Agnethea’s presence inside Gunboy Alpha was somewhat of a surprise, given everything he thought he’d known to be true about the abomination; the foul fiend wearing the skin of a woman had stayed, when all historical data concerning Golems showed they ran as soon as they were caught out.
Still, it didn’t matter.
Agnethea the Bitch wouldn’t be able to break herself free of Alpha before N’Chalez managed to destroy it with that truly harrowing weapon, and even if she did, even if she survived it’s destruction or broke loose ahead of time, N’Chalez would be consumed with survival at that point; Dominic Breton, Book Club Regular leader and Gearman extraordinaire was down there in the dirt, blood pumping with anger and rage and hostility and when everything settled down, well, wasn’t that Gearman going to do for N’Chalez his own self?
“Well?” Blake demanded, gloating so powerfully that it was an almost visible emotion. “Nowt to say for yourself, Queen Agnethea?”
“You’re not this smart, Blake.” Agnethea stretched kinks loose from her back muscles. When she’d been thrown into the mix, several large and uncompromising blocks of metal must’ve arranged amongst themselves to hammer repeatedly into her. She ached, and fiercely. “I know you’re not. Everything you ever did was derivative of summat else, and then when you got your Son, well, you let him take the reins, didn’t you just? So what’ve you got planned, then, King of mine?”
Blake waggled a finger. “I’m not going to fall prey to that conceit, dear Agnethea. No shocking revelations of plans so deep that your pathetic little mind would burst at their discovery, only to see you break free from your prison so you might run straight to N’Chalez…”
“How’s that?” Agnethea’s ears quirked at the strange word falling from the King’s lips. It sounded familiar…
“That is to say, Nickels.” Blake wasn’t overly surprised Agnethea heard the odd lilting over-and-undertones in Garth’s last name. She’d been alive long enough to pick up a few traits. It didn’t matter. None of them would live long enough for it –or anything else, for that matter- to mean anything. “I’ve no desire to have you flock to your would-be paramour so you can spill your horrendous guts. That’s so terribly cliché.”
Agnethea’s mind buzzed with ideas. Getting to the brain of the beast had been simple as walking up stairs. The brain of the Gunboy itself was a honey pot if there’d ever been one. The King himself wasn’t even remotely upset at what’d already been done to Irondrinker. All of that –and like as not, a hundred other things she was missing as she’d just been bounced around like a bean in an empty can- added up to something the King was planning.
Blake watched Agnethea narrow her eyes thoughtfully. She was a smart one. Always had been, even when she’d been nothing but an irritating sprite of a girl, oh those eleven thousand years ago. He waved. “Well, Queen Agnethea, I do hate to mock and run, but there are other matters that require my direct attention. I should like to hope that you survive Master Nickels’ second firing of the weapon he used to sever the arm of my Alpha so that you can see the whole of my plan unfold before your damnable eyes, but I don’t think that’s all too likely. He’s not going to have time to restructure the weapon, not with what’s about to happen to him.”
Agnethea grabbed a chunk of ravaged metal and hurtled it at King Blake’s visage with all her strength. The monitor burst into shards of glass and twisted metal. “He’s not this smart.” She complained bitterly. “He’s got to be having someone help him along!”
Master Nickels needed to know summat was off with these things called Gunboys straightaway. And what was this about some sort of impending disaster?
“Bollocks.” Agnethea swore, then, as she couldn’t think of anything else to do, swore again so colorfully that her old servant would’ve blushed from toes to neck, even though she’d learned those words from him. “The bloody damned Gearman. Not The Pointer. No, he’s a good’un. Been around. No, it’ll be that younger one, the Regular, I warrant.”
Agnethea looked around at the thick walls of her prison, then down at the ragged remains of one of her favorite dresses. It was her fault, thinking that solving these problems would be easily done, and now her pretty frock was ruined.
“About to get more than ruined, isn’t it just?” Agnethea dropped into a sprinter’s crouch, aimed herself at where the door used to be, counted to three, then launched herself at that spot with all the speed and strength an ancient abomination could muster.
The Obsidian Golem bounced off the thick wall, tasted blood in her mouth. A few stars popped and wheeled in her eyes, but she was certain that there was a bit of a dent.
She went back to it.
***
“What…” Garth groaned as he struggled to a sitting position, wondering how in the fucking world it was possible for him to feel like he’d been run over by a train when he was wearing the Universe’s first appearance of full-on nanotech power armor, “what in the name of Buckaroo Banzai was that?”
: Wave form cannon:
Rubbing his jaw with his right hand, Garth considered his surroundings. The Gunboy he’d de-arm-ified was … Jesus, was nearly four blocks away, slapping it’s shoulder over and over again, filling the air with a hollow clanking sound that sent chills down Garth’s spine. Jagged arcs of electricity –or whatever it was the King was using to power the massive robots- spat from the shattered shoulder.