by Lee Bond
Some few of the Nannies had seen that straight off, from the very moment them Big Gunboys had climbed out of the earth, giant metal avatars for their king’s nihilistic revenge; though they’d been pleased as any of their Matronly sisters over the undeniable destruction awaiting foul Ickford and all who lived there, their old robotic circuits weren’t chiming quite as exuberantly as their counterparts, forcing them to do something they would never have done in times past.
They’d plunged as deep as they could into the operational matrices of the Gunboys, as far as their own minds were permitted to burrow into King’s Will.
They’d returned, terrified.
“Oh, the King’s got a nasty streak in ‘im a mile wide, don’t ‘e, my luv?” Chad tsked disapprovingly. As intimate as he personally was with the Dark Iron King’s sadism and pointless cruelty, somehow, Barnabas Blake had managed to keep those things secret from the creatures he relied on most heavily.
Perhaps it was programming, perhaps it was those cracked AI minds turning a blind eye to anything that didn’t make any sense, perhaps it was just ‘one of those things’, but those Matrons trying to figure out ways for the Gearmen –held in reserve, should the Gunboys turn their efforts outwards once the they were done with Ickford as they were destined- to do for the Brobdingnagian soldiers were in a tizzy.
“An’ well they should be, hain’t that right, Miss Bliss?” Chad missed Bliss. If he ever got free from Arcade City –which were a laugh to think about, he weren’t goin’ nowhere never again- he’d make his way back to Latelyspace. The thought of the AI he’d christened Miss Bliss, trapped and alone in an AI-hating solar system, well, it were enough to make a bloke feel like right proper dink. “No one’s seen nuffink like these Gunboys before. I do believe the King has unleashed summat as is beyond his own power too, hey?”
Down below, the pleasant aspects of the King’s deconstruction broke apart, cementing the division of the Matrons most firmly. They started screaming and hollering at one another and it looked as though battle lines would soon be drawn up.
Never had Chad seen the King’s Matrons so riled up, or so evenly opposed. He was loving every minute of it, because their dissolution served his father, the King, right.
Chad remembered the worms sliding into his brain, thin, tiny electronic hinky-jinky slender worms sparkling and burrowing into his memories, a long-forgotten but unmistakable sign of the Kingly intrusion.
Pressing a stark white fingertip to a temple, Chad tried dispelling the grotesque feeling of King Barnabas Blake’s intellect crowding into his brain, and managed to succeed once more, but only just, and only for a short time: it took overlong to forget summink like that, oh yes, decades upon decades of drugs and alcohol and highly motivated savagery disguised as art.
The prisoner who was trapped inside his own mind had understood the King’s motives instantly, one of the few ‘perks’ of being so accustomed to an invading mind, and had begun … ‘negotiations’ … as soon as the queer old bastard had settled in properly; Chad had learned quite a few tricks on the Outside, had done some pretty significant damage to his brain through prolific and enthusiastic experimentation with drugs and alcohol, making outright theft of the Gunboy particulars more work than the King’d been willing to spend at the time.
Chad grinned craftily. He’d given the King his memories of the Gunboys because who didn’t want to see a horde of giant robots terrorizing people? It were good for a laugh. In return –as Chad had known had to happen- the King had restored unto him some small modicum of stolen power, enough –though Blake couldn’t know it- for an imprisoned assassin to watch the Matrons and their antics that much closer. Though –were he to be totally honest with himself- he really hadn’t minded the solace of his own brain.
“Hain’t good for much else, now is it, Miss Bliss?” Chad pressed his face against the glass windows looking out into the Matronly control room. “I can feel the power in me old bones, I well and truly can, but the King, ‘e’s a crafty one. Reckon he saw as I’m more awake in ‘ere than I was lettin’ on. The juice ‘e give me, well enough to watch them silly bitches do their thing, hey, but that’s it. No gettin’ out, no pokin’ through the Dome walls a second time.”
Chad amused himself for a moment with the memory of Miss Bliss hanging off his shoulder, looking at him with that wee sad smile of hers. Cor, but she’d helped him through some of the worst times, that little dolly had, hadn’t she? The King had never been much of a good father. More of a raging tyrant, really, stealing a son’s memories, giving them life, forcing that same lad to call forth all the old hims, the hims he’d been, the hims he might of been had things gone different…
“Don’t matter now, I suppose.” Chad shrugged. “Nuffink I can do.”
The King was doing for Ickford, and them Matrons as wanted to stop the Gunboys were wasting their time. Chad knew it. The King was well and truly done with Arcade City. Well, to be more specific, he were done with everything except The Dome itself.
The changes to The Dome were complete. The King’s thirty thousand yearlong odyssey of destruction was coming to a close.
Chad had gleaned that from Blake’s mind only because the bastard King had been thinking about nearly nothing but. The whole inner shell of the vast Dome was now one tremendous circuit of nearly profane complexity, sections of which were finally gleaming with dire purpose.
Chad’s mind fairly spun when he thought about the King’s intended use for such power, with such a machine as he’d built. He were –and it were well rough to admit it- humbled by King Blake’s plan. It were impossible to believe that someone could hold fast and true to a plan over thirty thousand years, but their mad monarch, their crazy King … he’d done it.
When Blake was done tormenting Agnethea and Ickford, them Gunboys were going to fall on the rest of Arcade City. When that were all said and done and there weren’t no living things anywhere at all –excepting, Chad hoped, for himself, as he’d quite like to see what were going to happen- then it were a guarantee that Blake ….
“Well now, what in the goodly fuck is goin’ on down there, hey, Miss Bliss?” Chad squinted.
The Matrons were reeling back from their monitors as if someone had tossed an invisible bowling ball into the mix, scattering the mad nannies about the room like pins.
It weren’t enough. He could almost see. Something … unexpected … had happened in Ickford.
Chad imagined Miss Bliss whispering into his ear. There was a way he could see, to find out what was going on in that lovely dark city that he would’ve loved to visit, only …
Only it would mean giving up the little bit of freedom ‘e’d stolen for himself. It’d mean goin’ back inside his own head. Maybe Taint were there, maybe she weren’t. ‘e’d done for her in a pretty good way, and when Chad rummaged around in the cellar of his brain –so to speak- ‘e didn’t feel that dark, grim pressure anymore, but that could just as like be simple wish fulfillment.
Outside, in the ‘real’ world, the Matrons reassembled in front of the monitors, only to be blown back again, physically pummeled by whatever was taking place in Ickford.
Chad made up his mind. If whatever –or whoever- was doin’ such fantastical things in Ickford as to make the Nannies react as if they were being hit for real and for true, then he needed to know.
“All right then, Miss Bliss. If you is still in there somewhere, I would like to ‘ave a nice cuppa ‘ot an’ ready for me when I is crash landin’, hey? And if that old nasty robo-twat is in there, possibly a ‘and of Glory to jam sideways into ‘er keister, hey?” Chad took a deep, deep breath.
Power, drawn from somewhere deep inside him, from a place he hadn’t properly visited since vacating Arcade City so long ago, trickled through his veins, an icy-hot burning sensation that set his nerve endings afire, set the fine hairs on his arms, legs and the back of his neck quivering with anticipation.
Oh, he’d forgotten the joy of this, hadn’t he just? In the Outside,
it’d still been with him, only buried deep beneath layers and layers of emotional scar tissue, hidden out of a perverse –and utterly subconscious- terror that the King could reach out through The Dome and snatch him back.
But here, here in Arcade City, here, where his Old Da had given some of that power back in exchange for the Gunboys, here it was safe to remember, safe to reach for it with both hands instead of through a haze of drugs and maddened insanity.
Chad looked at his hands, looked at the platinum fire etching themselves across his forever bloodstained fingers, across his bare arms.
“So good to be back, even if for only a moment, hey?” Chad hastened now, lest older memories rise up out of the darkness to greet him; instinct warned him that if he tarried to long, if he held onto the glistening heat for more than a second, he’d recall some unspeakable truth buried long and long and long, and in that perilous weak moment, all would be lost forever.
Chad slammed his blazing hands against those faux-glass windows and they pulsed with brilliant platinum impressions. Power flowed through his real eyes then, and for a millisecond, Chadsik al-Taryin was able to see right through the Matrons. He dimly felt their awareness of the intrusion, and he laughed at what he saw.
Laughed and laughed and laughed, a howling, raucous gibbering of monumental hilarity, a steaming defecation of joviality that he left behind in the AI minds of each fucking Nanny even as his own thoughts receded back into the prison that was the Soul Cage.
No wonder King Barnabas Blake the One and Only was shitting in his kingly drawers. No wonder monstrous megalithic Gunboys as were nigh-on immune to all threat and danger ‘neath The Dome had been wrought by the monarch’s wretched hands!
Garth N’Chalez was in Arcade City!
Chad spoke, tried to shout into his old dad’s ears, using the last tatters of the power he owned. “You’re in for it, you stupid old man. You think you got ‘im, don’t you just? Well, now, I know that man’s best friend in all the rotten, stinkin’ Universe and let me tell you summat so I can wallow in the thought of you sweatin’ it out, tryin’ to fink on wot I mean. Just when you fink you got this man trapped and cornered an’ all sorts of beat, well, that’s when you is fucked. And wot you done down there, there hain’t no comin’ back from it. You got ‘im where you want? Aye, sure, you may at that, but now ‘e knows right where you is, too, hey? Now ‘e gets ‘is chance. You should’ve just l…”
The Soul Cage slammed shut.
15 And All The King’s Horses…
: metallurgical analysis complete. Bullet is of unknown design:
“Gee,” Garth gulped down fresh air like it was going out of style, “thanks for that update, asshat.”
Obviously the bullet was of unknown design, otherwise it wouldn’t have gone through his fucking shoulder like he was made of Papier Mâché. He was beginning to think the real reason nanotech didn’t work in the outside universe was because nanotech was stupid as dirt.
“The moment you give it a brain,” Garth took a peek around the corner from which he’d just taken at Mach speed, heart hammering through his chest. If he hadn’t zigged at that last moment –following inst … no, no … fright- one of Dom’s impossible bullets would’ve fucking drilled him right through his one good eyeball, “it turns into a fucking idiot.”
Garth jerked his head back just in time to narrowly avoid a second date with death: the deadly round caromed off a far wall and disappeared amidst a spray of brick and mortar. Nearly the only good thing about the perfectly forged weapon was that the Asshat Gearman had no fucking clue how to work it properly.
Another crescendo of noise erupted, followed quickly by yet another stormy whirlwind of dust and debris rocketing down through the few alleys remaining in their sector of town.
“Big Boy is playing it smart.” Garth commented to DB. “Taking his time flattening things out properly, unlike his idiot brother over by the wall.”
Which was kind of a shame, given how preposterously stupid that other Gunboy was being; forced to runrun across rooftops to the left and right of the wave cannon’s devastation after all in order to get the hell away from both Dominic the Spastic Gearman and His Bloody Dangerous Gun and Gunboy the One-Armed Cocaine-Fueled Linebacker, the fleeing Kin’kithal had been treated to a crash-course introduction into how the rest of Ickford was dealing with their sudden plague of towering super-bots.
Oh yes, parkouring through the damaged buildings of Ickford had been revelatory.
One crew, hilariously enough, had done enough damage to their monster to have it come at them, only to wedge itself pretty firmly between two buildings. From the split second view of the whole arrangement before leaping back down to ground level in a desperate attempt to trick one of the assholes trying to murder him, Garth thought he might’ve seen the other, less volatile and probably way more interesting Gearman, Chevy, loitering with his own pack of gearheads.
Which was nice. It was nice that someone was having a better time of things in Ickford, though Garth really had been hoping it’d be him enjoying the nice and easy path instead of, y’know, being chased by people trying to pull his face off.
“I mean,” he wheedled breathlessly as he shot around a corner, “I have a fucking nanotech suit! This is undignified bullshit!”
The other two Gunboys were pretty much settled in right where they’d breached Ickford and weren’t doing much more than killing gearheads as and when the metal-headed goobers got too antsy for their own good. The area surrounding those two monstrosities were completely bereft of buildings, enabling them to display their kill count for any who bothered to look in gearhead corpses littering the arena like so much chaff.
Were it not for the fact that he’d finally figured out what the fuck was going on, what was happening in Ickford, the invasion could easily be labeled The Weirdest Assault Since that Time With the Bugs.
: six minutes remain. Shotgun coming online in 3 … 2 … 1 …:
“It is about goddamn fucking time!” Garth forced a grin when his right arm started kerchunking and spinning into an actual weapon that might actually save his ass. Since killing Dom was essentially off the table unless he wanted the calmer and probably very good at his job Chevril Pointillier after his ass, switching from the overpowered sniper rifle to the marginally less murderous shotgun was the only course of action.
A chime not unlike a microwave announcing your tasty hot pockets are done pinged from his shotgun arm.
: vibrational patterns suggest Gunboy is en route:
“Yes!” Garth took a couple quick breaths, puffing air in and out, poked his shotgun-arm around the corner and squeezed off a few rounds just to give Dom something to think about.
Against better judgment, Garth then risked his beautiful hairline to get a personal view of the …
Yep. There it was. In it’s one-armed, roaring growling glory. Dom was halfway through leaping sideways through the air to avoid being turned into paste from the rapid-fire shotgun shells, turning the whole damn moment into something that would look perfectly awesome on the cover of Heavy Metal Magazine.
Garth pursed his lips and squeezed off a few halfhearted rounds at Dominic. “Being the good guy is kind of bullshit.”
: what about this for jetpack:
Garth rolled his eyes at the design flaring into life across the HUD. “No. Stop dist… fuck me.”
The Gunboy brought one of his massive size twelve thousand boots and slammed it down to the ground with all the force –which was tremendous- it could muster. The collision was enough to shatter heavy Ickfordian cobblestone for nearly a hundred feet in every direction. A shockwave of force whistled through the ravaged city block, grabbing the two antagonists and flinging through the air like ragdolls caught in a tornado.
Having learned his lesson from the last time –if he survived this next airborne moment of heart-palpitating terror, the goose egg on the back of his skill was going to be murderous- Garth took the split second warning he’d earned for hims
elf and spent it by turning himself into a teeny tiny Garth-shaped ball.
Dominic Breton –still mid-air and helpless- wasn’t so lucky.
***
Agnethea hawked a mouthful of bloody spittle onto a nearby monitor. It spackled the grinning King’s face with red and black striations.
She didn’t care. She didn’t care she didn’t look like a lady at the moment, much less the Queen she’d been pretending to be for so many long years.
She didn’t care that the King believed she was trapped until the end.
She didn’t even care that she was –against probability- doing herself permanent damage.
All she cared about was warning Master Nickels of the danger that awaited. Agnethea didn’t know precisely what the danger was or even what form the trap might take, but she was willing to wager both her rotten, twisted soul and her immortal flesh that the moment Garth took a single step inside a Gunboy’s head, all would be lost.
And that couldn’t be allowed to happen. The end had come to Arcade City. Whatever grand scheme King Barnabas Blake had been working on for so long was coming to fruition. The only thing remaining to be seen was whether or not Barnabas Blake would be successful.
If that meant she broke every bone in her body to break free of this bloody armored skull in order to prepare the one being in all of Arcade City capable of standing properly against the cracked King, so be it.
Agnethea pushed her shoulder back into place, grinding her teeth against the razor sharp pain cracking through her bones. That last hurtle had done significant damage, not only to her, but finally to the thick armor plate she’d targeted.