I followed suit, not sure what was waiting for me next.
(I mean, apart from the poop. I knew that was coming next. I meant in the larger sense. With foreboding.)
---=◈◆⬤◆??◆⬤◆◈=---
The guns went off.
Having fired all of the bullets in the guns Tempus had closed the time bubble and returned the normal flow of time.
As time returned to itself , it was almost as if all of the noise we had expelled in the time bubble came back stronger and louder. A dozen low, flat reports thundered through the air and rattled every batwing door in town. The smell of acrid smoke hung thick in the air now and the street was blanketed in white gunsmoke.
I was back where I was supposed to be- the horse trough- and I slowly peered out over the rim of it to check on my fighter. He was still standing, which is what was important. None of Tempus’ bullets had gotten through my line of defense. I grinned at that. A dozen fused bullets plopped down in the sand again between him and Raoul.
Raoul’s men- and the black rider himself were murmuring at this. Some crossed themselves, others muttered ‘dios mios’ whatever the devil that meant. It hadn’t come up in my previous language research, but I could infer from the context that they were a little uneasy about the fact that both gunfighters had so far shot a dozen bullets out of the air, a feat which I supposed was a bit out of the usual, but then again I had never before seen an old west gunfight. The Sheriff seemed to be taking it in stride, certainly. He was unperturbed by his unerring aim and was presently calmly slotting some more brass cylinders into his gun.
“Gotta admit it, Raoul, you’re not too bad of a shot,” he called.
“I…..uh...what is happening…?” The criminal seemed a touch more uncertain.
“But, y’see now, I’ve gotten warmed up, amigo. Reload, pardner. Let’s go again”.
With unsteady hands the outlaw refreshed his weapons, casting dubious looks at his posse, each of whom was eyeing the man with alarm. I could see him try to affect some of his previous bravado, but more than anything I was just waiting for them to reload their guns and get back on with it. I could see Tempus peering out of his hiding spot now and he, spotting me too, gave a sarcastic congratulatory salute as he motioned to the spot where the bullets sat.
The Sheriff started his countdown again and I tuned in my trousers as I now knew to do. This time a little apprehensively.Before he had locked eyes with me, you see, I had seen Tempus eyeing the guns being held by Raoul’s men.
I had the feeling that this duel was about to escalate.
---=◈◆⬤◆??◆⬤◆◈=---
Pants.
Why’d it have to be pants? Pants had haunted me today more than any other time in my life.
Just because the prison had holographic clothing generators didn’t mean they didn’t have laundry. The guards were afforded the luxury of cheaply made polyester uniforms and with this came a laundry service. Last time I had stowed away in the first laundry cart- the one with all the shirts in it. Unpleasantly sweaty and annoying in their choice of fall colours in the spring season, but it was bearable. This time? Erdinger seemed to be on a mission to make me hate him. He jumped into the first available cart to hide himself in which meant that I was in a tub full of Y-fronts and I was worrying about the diets of all of the guards. In my unpractised medical opinion it seemed like they were subsisting on a diet of cabbages, gin and turds.
I gagged as the cart hit a bump on its automated track and the sea of unmentionables shot up into my face to greet me like an excited puppy but I kept my composure and only swore once. After all, if anyone saw one of the laundry carts shouting expletives they might, I suspect, suspect something was wrong.
The laundry ride would only be for a few minutes though. The automated carts would dump these into a room in the bowels- and I use the term advisedly- of the station in a minute at which point we could initiate the next part of the escape plan. We would have to cross the Bridge of Truth, get past those two sentient doors (one of whom spoke only truth and the other who only lied), brave the Labyrinth of Everlasting Fog, and best the Minotaur. Then if we managed all of that we’d get to the laser grids.
---=◈◆⬤◆??◆⬤◆◈=---
As the gunfight settled into its sixth hour, I was starting to get tired.
I was thirsty, I was getting a horrible sunburn, and my eyes hurt from picking the slow moving bullets out of the air. I cracked my spine, stretched and tried to push away the grumpiness. It was all because I was frustrated that seven men were shooting at me now.
They had looked surprised, Raoul’s men, when the guns had started going off in their hands.
It’s a pretty shocking thing, I suppose, when your firearm that you’re menacingly cradling in an saloon door suddenly swivels round in your hand and fires six impossibly fast shots at a town lawman. Even with all the bullets speeding toward me at half a hectare per hour, I still took a moment to enjoy the shocked looks on their faces as Tempus puppeteered them. Not that he paid them much mind. They were just sentient firearms to him, and I watched him jostle now between the posse members like an officious window shop dresser repositioning his mannequins. It was just that each of these mannequins was now screaming in confusion and firing guns towards me.
I waited for the time it took the hammer to fall and the explosion to propel my own round out. The gun in SH’s other hand was mid-firing. The bloom of orange fire would be leaping from the fat iron barrel any second and I could move it onto the next target.
Of course, my fighter was much more accepting of his superhuman abilities. As Space always assured me ‘ego is a two edged sword- it can slice two enemies with ease’ and though I questioned his saying and his grasp of swords I was at least grateful for his genetically inherited bravado. I looked up at the Sheriff’s frozen form now and looked at the smug grin plastered on his face as he was now discharging both pistols. Trust one of Space’s lineage to not question how their aim was so true, or how their two revolvers were now shooting out around thirty rounds each every duel.
If I could just pick off a few of the men...I thought. But Tempus had the numbers, the guns and the trousers and with those three, he was nigh untouchable. I couldn’t spare a round for any living target when the air was thick with bullets.I squeezed the trigger.
There had to be a way to end it.
---=◈◆⬤◆??◆⬤◆◈=---
The laser grid shifted dizzily on its axis. The red squares turned to diamonds, multiplied and became tiny, shifted outward again before receding and starting the whole merry dance over again. It was a shifting net of sizzling energy that would slice through steel like it was butter and butter like it was something even easier to slice through. Milk? A ghost? Behind that first laser mesh was another, and behind that two more. Behind them another three lay and behind that were nestled a further two. Behind those was another one and behind that one? Eight more.
There were an awful lot of laser grids, is what I’m trying to say.
Even without the automated laser grids there were the cameras, rotating on a swivel, looking to spot any intruder. And if you weren’t having quite enough fun yet each tile on the floor became electrified in a shifting pattern.
But there was a way.
I knew there was a pattern. The laser mesh reset every few minutes if you knew how to look and in every pattern there was a hole. You just had to know the rhythm and you could walk between the beams. It was like a song, hell it was a song. I had bought the knowledge of that song from an old timer in this lockup for a carton of cigarettes, a month’s supply of my own vintage of toilet wine and the use of my very private personal smuggling hole (it was a hollowed out space in my mattress).
I stood on the third tile into the room, as instructed and waited for the pattern to cycle to its start, then I bobbed my head to the internal beat. It had been terrifying doing this the first time round. A repeat did precious little to dispel the sweat on my brow.
“Sure about
this?” Asked Erdinger behind me.
“Quite sure. Just follow along. It’s an old piece of classical music.” I hummed the first few bars and started thudding hand against thigh in a steady metronome beat of music of that time as I squared off against the corridor, getting ready. My beat had to be precise. Erdinger drummed along too, keeping meticulous time, which came easier to his cyborg heart. He made a low bass sound with his mouth as well, and repeated the refrain as the pattern got ready to reset.
“A half step forward on ‘my, ‘I’ or ‘me,’” I reminded, “a step back on ‘you’. Jump at any ‘la’” An easy pattern to remember. Now, about the execution…
The pattern reset. My beat was steady, almost dope.
The laser grids reset. Erdinger hummed the last note of the opening bars. I lifted my foot.
“Myyyy-” I took the half step and felt the first grid close behind me a millisecond later. The next set zinged in front of me. I closed my eyes and felt only the heat and movement. Trust the song.
“-Milkshake brings all the boys to the yard. And they’re like it’s better than yours. Damn right, it’s better than yours.” I tensed up but kept the beat steady. “I could teach you but I’d have to charge.”
Half step forward, a full one back and then half forward again. I felt the beams swirl around me as I stepped robotically through them, dodging each by a nose hair. My heart sped up. My drumming did not. I kept chanting the music of the old world.
“I know you want it,” (Half step. Keep it steady)
“The thing that makes me,” (That was a close one)
“What the guys go crazy for,” (Breathe, breathe, damnit. You’re fine)
“They lose their minds,” (Keep it steady)
“The way I wind,” (half step)
“I think it’s time,” (half step)
Now comes the hard part.
“La la la-la la.” I chanted in perfect time.
I took a series of small skipping jumps in place at each ‘la’ and felt heat pass swiftly underneath my feet each time. The first two were lasers. On the last three the tile on which I stood became electrified for a short time. Just about a half million volts. I slapped my thighs steadily and ploughed on. My voice cracked as I chanted the hymn. Time and stress made the words almost nonsensical.
Warm it up.
La la la-la la
The boys are waiting
After the jumps I couldn’t resist and opened my eyes a fraction. Two thirds of the corridor still lay in front of me, taunting me with its length the way corridors sometimes do. My hands were clammy and shaky. Focus was everything and if I broke it now I’d be diced to-
“My milkshake,” came the voice behind me. Damn him! Erdinger was meant to wait until I was clear of the field before he began his run, yet here he was starting his first verse as I was just readying mine. I swallowed a dozen rebukes each more vehement than the last and re-centred myself. Now was not the time, if I let him throw me off for even half a second I’d be made into jelly.
I took my half step on the first ‘My’ of my verse and swallowed a yell as a laser shaved a layer of skin from my leftmost buttock, punishing me for my momentary lapse. My unsteady hand kept drumming out the rhythm.
“Brings all the boys to the yard,” a pained croak now.
With an enormous effort I brought my beating heart into line and the blood singing in my ears almost drowned out Erdinger behind me.
“And they’re like it’s better than yours.”
I had to swallow my temper. I could be better than Erdinger.
“Damn right, it’s better than yours.”
Damn right, I could be better than him
“I could teach you, “
I’d teach him
“But I’d have to charge,”
I’d have to take charge.
---=◈◆⬤◆??◆⬤◆◈=---
It was almost fun, in its way.
Admittedly it was fun in a fairly specific kind of a way that every movement you made could kill you and your Captain’s genetic ancestor and the air in front of you was populated entirely by bullets and bandits but still...Kind of fun.
I had taken a brief sojourn to the General store a few minutes ago and fetched a long ruler which I could hold up next to the barrel of the Sherriff’s revolver to get a more accurate impression of the angle of aim and it was working wonders. A long length of string would have been ideal but I could source none right now in this savage wasteland. I squinted down the length of the ruler to the incoming bullet, lined it up just so and then squeezed the finger that was squeezing the trigger.
I shaded my eyes from the sun and looked around.
“Ooh, great.”
This time round I had had the foresight to toss an opened bottle of sarsaparilla (whatever the heavens that was) into the air just as this round had begun. Roughly half a second had passed in real time, thus a good quality of the bizarre brown mixture now hung in the air, gushing in super-slow motion from the bottle. I gobbled it out of the air in a long drink. Tempus had more shade on his side of the battlefield, the absolute cad.
“Back to it,” I grumbled to myself and went back to the guns.
The sight of seven armed banditos openly firing on me had ceased to frighten me. The bullets were now chugging annoyances rather than harbingers of old western death and I viewed the Sheriff- his duster frozen mid flap as he unloaded an impossible amount of ammunition from his dual revolvers- was now just a large, cowboyish golem I had to manoeuvre.
There were about ten rounds in the air that were about to be deflected by my own ordinance and four incoming that I’d needed to deal with. I wiped sweat from my brow and grimaced as I cracked my knuckles. Oh, to heck with it, I decided. Both bullets were leaving their barrels so I braced myself against his leg and gave an almighty shove. It was like shifting a cupboard out of the way of gunfire (I speak from experience). His dusty bootheels scraped along the desert floor maybe a half centimetre. I shoulder charged him again. Another centimetre. I shoved twice more and judged that that had put him out of the way of two of the other rounds which were about to tear through his throat and knee in a quarter second of his time and about three minutes of mine. Now they would just pass dramatically past him. I set my eyes to the last two bullets then stood in front of the Sheriff, took his sleeves in my hands and started pulling them where they’d be needed.
“Doesn’t this feel a little familiar?” A voice from the other side of the street.
I looked around myself. I was puppeteering a cowboy lawman in a moment of time slowed by a factor of a thousand so that he could shoot bullets out of the air.
“No. Not really.”
“Not at all? Breaking your back so that that buffoon will look like some kind of absurd hero? That doesn’t seem familiar?”
I said nothing. I was getting good with my estimations and I triggered the right-hand gun once more. Looking good. I clapped the Sheriff on the shoulder and set to work on the other.
“Did I hit a nerve?” Tempus called.
“You’ve yet to hit anything, Professor. Despite your greater numbers. My side is still quite untouched.”
“Give it time. But you didn’t answer me; does all this effort that you’re putting in for such an ungrateful man- does this action not ring a bell for you?”
“Oh don’t talk about ringing bells, Tempus. That thing’s driving me nuts.” I pointed vaguely toward the church's belltower. A stray ricochet had hit the thing and it had been warbling out a note for the last few hours like some kind of experimental dance song.
“No wonder you’re so good at this. You’re great at deflection, Mr Funkworthy.”
I fired his left gun and nodded in satisfaction. Every bullet in the air that I had set there was making its glacial path toward another that was set to perforate the good Sheriff and by my estimation the guns of the opposing side were now completely depleted. At least Tempus was abiding by that unspoken rule and not injecting fresh rounds into his
own men’s guns. Perhaps that might be a bridge too far for them. Not my man, I thought with a smile.
“You remember what he said?”
“Are we still on this?”
“Does it not vex you, Mr Funkworthy? To have that buffoon give no credit to you or your efforts. Not in any of his official reports, not in any of the stories he invited for that odious party of his, not even for this shootout. He thinks that he does it all himself.”
I thought for a moment.
“No,” I called.
And I smiled as I looked from my end of the street to his, from his fighters to mine.
I had spoken honestly, too, since I had just figured out my way of beating Tempus this time.
All I needed to do was to hold on.
---=◈◆⬤◆??◆⬤◆◈=---
“Hold on to this.”
Erdinger put the pry bar in my hands as the door squealed shut behind us. It sat heavily in my hands and I looked at the keen blade that sat at one end of the tool. Then I looked at Erdinger. Then back down at the blade. Then at Erdinger. Then at the blade. I tried very hard to remember the last traitor and turncoat that I had actively not killed for this long. I looked at Erdinger. Especially one who had made me jump in a sewer and messed up the timing to a very important milkshake-themed song. (then down at the blade) especially one who had been such a rotten cyborg bastard about it all (then at Erdinger)
After a lot of consideration and almost as much looking, I concluded that there were none I had let live this long.
Maybe it was because I was a few years removed from my initial mission briefing, maybe it was the strain time travel was having on me and maybe it was the time I’d spent being chased through the Manhole’s labyrinth by a team of spiderdroids but I was having a hard time remembering why, exactly Belson Erdinger was getting a pass on his crimes.
The Time Trousers of Professor Tempus: A Captain Space Hardcore Adventure Page 28