“How-”
“Don’t,” she murmured.
“How-”
“For God’s sake, leave that woman be,” Brecon called.
“How long?”
Grace turned fully toward me. “Five minutes. Five. Minutes. Five minutes of uninterrupted work and I’ll be ‘in’. Unless you can help me or unless you have some kind of magical, advanced hacking tool which I’d absolutely love for you to have, by the way, I will be five standard galactic minutes. No sooner, maybe a bit later but certainly no shorter. Five. One, two, three, four FIVE.”
She turned dramatically back to her console and started typing. She was typing faster and angrier than before, fired up by my motivation. I know she just needed one final push.
“You’ve got TWO.”
“You motherfu-”
Honestly? About a Minute Later…
“Where are we with that firewall?”
She didn’t even turn her head. “Firewall? What the bloody hell are you on about?”
I pounded my fist against a new computer. “Damnit, we need IN!”
“Actually...actually, oh no! Look at that, a new firewall has popped up,” she said, eyes bugging out, her tone becoming slower and simpler.
“A firewall! I knew it!”
“And it’s made of viruses! And it’s inside a trojan horse. I’ll need to...hack this, in the groupchat. This will take...twenty minutes.”
“Twenty minutes?” I asked sceptically.
“Yup.”
I slapped her shoulder roughly and lowered my voice to a gruff and authoritative whisper. “You’ve
got eight”
“Okay great.”
“What?”
“I said, ‘damn, you’re pushing me to my limits here’.”
I smiled at her; a smile of gruff encouragement. “You can do it. Look, I know it seems like I'm
asking too much of you, but it’s because I believe in you. Now I may not know much about computers, I may not know much about hacking, or what it is that I’m asking you to do, or the processes it takes to accomplish the vague outcome that I-”
“I’m in,” she said.
From around the room the rest of the group craned their heads around.
“Really?” Delroy asked
“Really,” she said, as if I hadn’t empowered her to do this in record time. “I’m into the mainframe.”
“For God’s sake tell me that’s good,” Brecon demanded, a quaver in his voice. “Tell me these computers can shut this whole thing down.”
Delroy answered before she could, drawing around the machine and shaking his head curtly. “No such luck. We’re too far from control to do that. Can’t delete holos from here.”
“Groan,” said Flex loudly, lending voice to the other five of us. Q’uinc’y, groaning the loudest and longest out of all of us.
“But can’t you just, y’know, hack into the main systems? All this has got to be of some use.” He gestured to the expanse of thrumming computational machines. “It’s got to be.”
We all looked at Grace. We knew we were on the backfoot here, five insignificant dots scuttling up through air ducts. Even I held my breath in hope. Hacking was so often a solution to problems I did not or would not understand. It seemed to be the sole use of the pallid and asthmatic specimens I would rescue and gently bully, this ability to ‘hack mainframes’, ‘de-frag viruses’, ‘blast firewalls’, a/s/l’ and ‘cyber in a chatroom’. I know that I myself often barked ‘hack the mainframe’ at Funkworthy when things seemed dire and about thirty percent of the time he would actually run off and do something good on a computer.
“Can you... ‘hack in’?”
She seemed to give it a lot of thought. “Well, I can access the mainframe database fabricator from one of these maybe, but to stop or even reverse the creation of this army I’d need far more. Maybe with some kind of quad-core pentium giga-”
“In English!” I yelled, shaking her roughly by the shoulders.
She snapped out of her tech reverie. “Maybe. Maybe I can change what’s made, but I can’t halt-”
“In English!” I yelled, shaking her roughly by the shoulders.
“I can change what’s made but I can’t stop it being made.”
“Plain! Damn! English!” I yelled, shaking her roughly by the shoulders.
“No delete. Edit”
“Thank you” I said finally, shaking her roughly by the shoulders.
We all took a minute to think. Finally Brecon put words to our collective question.
“So does this help us in any way?” We all shrugged. “I mean, we can change the skeletons, right? Why not make them all into…big fluffy friendly dogs?”
Grace, shook her head sadly. “We could, but then we’d just have to fight nine million big fluffy dogs. We can change what their appearance is but not their behavioural pattern-”
“English damnit” I yelled, shaking her roughly by the shoulders.
“We can change what they look like, but not what they do,” she said, looking seasick and wary.
We sighed, groaned and otherwise let out sounds of annoyance at the same time. It was quite a challenge for Flex. I pounded my fist into my hand.
“Well gentlemen and Grace, it looks like we have a choice in the appearance of our murderers. “ I sighed. “What colour of skeleton should we choose? How tall?”
The survivors grumbled. Flex said “grumble grumble” to himself, and Kim Jong Un nodded quietly along. It was looking like another dead end, and we were wasting time in a room that could be infiltrated at any second.
We all looked up towards the ceiling grate but none of us could bring ourselves to scooting back inside. We didn’t want to simply fall back to another compromised position. They were gaining too much ground, leaving us no time in a room like this to settle in, take stock and make a plan. I knew that the six-no, seven- of us could get it done if we could just get enough breathing room. We were missing something. Something obvious. We all paced, each of lost in our own thoughts.
Delroy had his brows knitted together. He was chasing an idea down. It felt like we all were, with Grace madly tapping at the control panel and Kim pacing by the door. Finally Delroy steadied himself on Jong-Un’s shoulder as he looked off into the middle distance.
“There’s something to that,” he said. “Damn. I almost had it for a second.”
“We can change them,” Grace muttered into the workstation, almost to herself, chasing the tail of an idea down.
Brecon held a finger aloft, as if pointing to a realization on the ceiling. “Delroy, you were saying that they’re skeletons because…”
“Because they’re so simple to mass produce,” he replied.
“That’s why there are so many!” Kim Jong-Un broke in.
“So if we change them-” started Q’uinc’y
“-Into something more complex,” said Grace.
“Then that would mean…” I said, eager to start a sentence that someone else would finish.
But no one spoke. Before I had time to get irritated I saw the look of alarm on their faces. It was pointed right next to me. At Kim Jong-Un.
We all looked slowly around at the dictator. A slow smile spread across his face as he looked between us. He shrugged apologetically.
“I think you’re really on to something there,” he said.
He wrenched his head back and let out an inhuman chatterring shriek, mid-way between a wolf’s call and a burst of static electricity. In answer footsteps drummed toward us.
The server room had only the one exit which was currently being blocked by the Glorious Leader and which was seconds away from being swarmed by any number of historical and fictional holograms. Sometimes your options narrow down to one single path.
I’d make a plan for victory later, I decided. Right now there was a despot that was in urgent need of a thrashing. I was only too happy to oblige.
Chapter Fifteen
A Historical Fight/
A Chase Through the Night
* * *
“There’s a fine line between genius and madness, Agent Seventy-Nine. A very…blurry distinction between the truly great minds and the delirious ones.” He said to the face painted on his thumb.
Delia J Rampant
The Wendigo Prophecy
Ѻ
Kerrack!
Kim Jong-Un elbowed me in the neck viciously and fatly.
It was almost impressive considering that he was roughly four feet of despot stuffed into a khaki jumpsuit but I had neither the time nor the inclination to be impressed by the dictator’s karate, I was too busy grasping at a bruised larynx. I’d never usually be caught by such a basic move. It must be one of those quirks of time travel, I thought as I gathered myself.
By the time I had recovered, though, the despot had already propelled himself into the room and fallen heavily on top of Grace. He began raining blows down upon her, pinning her with his heft. I started towards her but before I could get there, heavy hands clamped on me from behind and pulled me backwards through the doorway. I found myself in the arms of Jack the Ripper, who wrapped his historical arms around me and bundled me out of the server room as a gaggle of his cronies swarmed in the doorway.
Hunting groups, I thought bitterly as I struggled in the arms of the killer. It had to be. Bands of holograms sent out to stalk the facility and hunt down any non light-based life and snuff it out. Not for the first time today, I cursed the cunning mind of Grigori Rasputin. I should have seen it coming. I should have but I hadn’t. It must be one of those quirks of time travel, I thought.
But right now the only thing I could see coming was my own demise at the hands of a serial killer several hundred years dead. The Ripper had my arms twisted up behind my back and was wrenching the wrists into painful knots, tying up my arms in a pretty successful attempt to not be punched by them. My arms screamed out for relief. The Ripper was grappling at me painfully, working my arms like a squid tying a bowtie, and my guns screamed out for relief. I had to act. I crouched down and pistoned my legs out, throwing myself bodily backwards with all of my force and a little extra force I borrowed from the universe (it owed me one, anyway). There was a wall, must’ve been a foot or so behind us and we thudded into it with a sickening splat. The shock of impact loosened his grip for a half second and that was all I needed to wrench my arms free. I asked them what they wanted to do next. It turns out that they wanted to investigate how much force it would take to transform a face into a dim memory of beef soup.
I obliged.
I had a fist filled with the righteous justice of five angry, cockney ghost prostitutes and it collided with Jack’s face like a rocket powered train plowing into a chimpanzee, except not as sad and twice as messy. He fell back, face mashed and distorted by my fist but unhappily he was free of blood. I guess holograms don’t bleed. ‘Really?’ enquired my left fist, ‘but how can we know unless we conduct an extensive experiment?’
It was a good scientific question, as good as I had come to expect from my fists. I flexed my arms, fell into a fighting stance and we carried out some extensive research.
It turned out that preying on gin-addled sex workers did not make you the world’s most formidable pugilist. Jack was discovering this fact at roughly the same time as my fists were discovering how very more-ish Victorian faces were. I pounded on him enough to make jackhammers outraged. A team of aircrash investigators would take weeks to figure out that his head had once had a face on it. I destroyed him so completely that I’m pretty sure I killed the real Jack the Ripper through sheer focussed holographic violence.
But I was enjoying myself too much. Over my shoulder I heard the telltale boom of a shotgun blast cut through the air. I turned to see but the door was closed, though I could hear the melee behind it. The survivors would not keep that moniker for much longer if I didn’t help them, I knew. I’d have to finish off the Ripper and aid them.
But this moment of looking over my shoulder was all that the Whitechapel Murderer needed. Quick as a viper but not as tall, he shot a holographic hand into his Gladstone bag. It came out with a cruel looking blade in it, a curved surgical knife that flashed coldly in the fluorescent light. His hand whipped out toward my neck in a killing blow.
I’d been saying for years- to Funkworthy, to my parents, to various pimps- that my reflexes and upper body strength far outstripped any sex worker you would care to meet. I proved it to Saucy Jack. As the blade shot out toward me, I caught Jack’s wrist, bent it back neatly and with barely a second thought and drove it through the killer’s eye-socket and through his head.
He fell back, as people tend to do when you stab their heads. Unlike most people, however, his head wound spilled a sickly yellow light from out of it. It pulsed once then his whole head exploded in this intangible yellow bloom of light. For a second I had the impression of the man burned on my retinas, but when I looked down to where he lay there was nothing. I guessed that I had just learned what it looked like when you murder a hologram.
Not too shabby. But I had bigger fish to punch. There was a room full of monsters tearing into my helpless group of survivors and each one of them deserved a face full of justice.
I turned back to the room and bounded to the entrance to save them but I have to admit that my hopes were not high. I am, after all, Captain Space Hardcore within the body of a younger Captain Space Hardcore; wisdom wrapped in exuberance- all the benefits of experience and all of the benefits of youth. I was age poured into beauty, an admiral’s brain crammed into an athlete’s pecs, a professor’s life of insight zapped into the body of an adolescent cheetah, I was fine aged whiskey poured into a baby’s mouth. So I was the only one to help them, especially if you consider that it was my own leadership that had guided this group to success the first time round.
I called out to them but silence was my only answer.
I came to the door just in time to catch the flying body of Moriarty as he was propelled backwards out of his holographic shoes, a shotgun blast smashed into his chest. He hit me like a bag of body parts then flashed out of existence in a halo of holo-light. Delroy stood in the doorway with my smoking shotgun, but instead of throwing the weapon to me as one would expect, he turned on his heel.
The room was a writhing mass of violence, each survivor wrestling with a different historical evil, in a brutal melee. Through the clatter one voice rang out clearly. Surprisingly it was not mine. I checked, laying a hand on my own throat to be sure. No, not me. It was Delroy Deloux; the man who was still not tossing me my shotgun.
“Q’uinc’y! Up!” he cried. I tracked the sound of his voice to where the man lay writhing under the dread form of Margaret Thatcher. Poor devil. At Delroy’s command, though, he pushed Thatcher away and clamped steely hands on her neck and hoisted her clear of himself as the Prime Minister screeched like a scalded Tory. Delroy took aim and blasted the Iron Lady’s head clean off as soon as the accountant hoisted her aloft, her coiffed helmet of hair doing nothing to protect her head from exploding like a right-wing piñata.
“Shorter!” Delroy yelled.
Shorter?
I couldn’t discern his meaning at all until I saw Grace at the console keyboard, battered and bloody but surrounded by the other survivors in a rough ring. She made a few keystrokes at Delroy’s command and looked around expectantly.
The remaining holographic monsters- the tenacious Kim Jong Un, Richard Branson and The Marquis De Sade- suddenly shifted and contorted uncomfortably. Each squirmed and writhed as a shining rash of what looked to be green computer code ran throughout all of their bodies, pulling their limbs inward, reshaping their bodies as rapidly as text scrolling down a screen. In seconds this hack attack had turned them into three identical Napoleon Bonapartes. The notoriously diminutive leaders stood at exactly two and a half feet tall, and the three copies of the man looked down at themselves in shock then up at the band of survivors, who towered over them.
“Now!” Delroy yelled
and with a few brutal kicks the French generals were lying on the floor. Flex and Delroy finished the job on two of the Frenchmen with their own hands.
“Fwoom,” Flex noted, as two bursts of light lit the room. I looked on in astonishment the third Napoleon wiggled his way out from under the scrum and made towards the door.
“I vill bring zee skeletons,” he chirped as he scuttled out towards me, deceptively quick and agile for his size and Frenchness.
“Fatter! Now!” cried Delroy as Napoleon scooted towards me and towards reinforcements. As I was already by the door I crouched and readied myself to catch the tiny general, but he was as lithe and swift as he was French. Behind him I saw Grace work at her keyboard once more.
I tried to block the doorway as best I could but the general, at the last second, dived onto his belly and slid towards me, aiming to shoot between my legs. I reached down but already I knew it was too late. It must be one of those quirks of time travel, I thought . At the last second the surprising heft of Napoleon exploded between my legs and carried me off of my feet.
When I looked back up I was staring into the face of Henry the Eighth. That most tubby of kings was crammed solidly into the door, sliding on his belly as he had been in his previous form. His girth meant that he was jammed solid in the entryway. He looked as surprised at his own dimensions as I was and we shared a puzzled look, both of us equally bowled over by his incredible weight gain.
The Time Trousers of Professor Tempus: A Captain Space Hardcore Adventure Page 18