Bring Me the Head of the Buddha

by Bloom, A. D.

  “Never fear, noble Bonnie Levi-Mei, we will rewrite the story of your death as a tale of loyalty and glorious ultimate sacrifice for the good of the world... After we have secured the Ziggurat. Excuse me.” Delvaux turned away from Bonnie and directed his attention back to the DjiniSys AI. “MUNI 5-7, release the N-Hex gas into the Ziggurat and eliminate the insurgent threat.”

  “There are seventy-three remaining G.S.A. personnel that have not been killed by the insurgents,” MUNI 5-7 informed Delvaux. “Fifty-four are defending the level below you from insurgent assault. They will all be killed.” This caused Delvaux's ten-man personal guard to share glances of concern amongst each other, but they knew Delvaux's level had its own sealed ventilation system, and they'd been chosen for unwavering loyalty to Delvaux and nothing else. Nice try, Delvaux thought.

  “Now, please, release the N-Hex gas.” Delvaux was growing impatient but he could only shoot Alvin dead once before losing all leverage over the rogue AI. “Release the N-Hex. After the threat is eliminated, you can flush the Zig's atmosphere and do what you like with your Buddha. Delvaux chambered a round in his pistol and set the muzzle against Alvin's temple. “I will confess to you that destroying something, the importance of which I will never understand, will be,” Delvaux admitted, “...a relief.”

  “Our negotiation is based on trust. Even if I comply with your request it is highly improbable,” MUNI 5-7 observed, “that you will adhere to the terms of any agreement between us. It is more probable that you will attempt to delay handing over the Buddha for another hour and fifty-six minutes until the Chicago, Dallas, Singapore, Los Angeles, and Mexico City AIs have negated my control of the reactor, after which you will destroy me. These terms are unacceptable, so I propose new terms. Deliver the Buddha safely to the DjiniSys Core in the Sanctum or Case Thunderbird self-destruct protocols will be initiated and the thirty minute countdown sequence to detonation of the Big Baby device will commence.”

  Delvaux realized with a surprised chill that MUNI 5-7 not only knew about Case Thunderbird, but somehow might have found a way to arm the secret Big Baby Bomb. Delvaux's scrotum contracted as he realized that he was no longer negotiating for anything but his life.

  He would have been more chilled, and his testicles might have tried to crawl upwards and hide entirely inside his body if, like MUNI 5-7, he knew that the self-destruct sequence and the arming of the Big Baby device had already been initiated by the G.S.A.'s Security Council two minutes earlier, after a swift unanimous vote to declare Security Condition Case Thunderbird for the Baccha Bay City Ziggurat.

  The Council was presently enjoying a round of fine scotch and Hi-5 cigarettes to celebrate a Problem Solved. A very large hole in the ground, they reasoned, was better than a captured Ziggurat in Goddie hands for all the world to see. History could be rewritten later, they were quite sure, to show that the terrible detonation had been caused by suicidal, martyrdom-minded insurgents, intent on causing destruction in the name of their God. The Lie would vilify religion itself and strengthen the Global Secular Alliance. Millions of wavering, undecided minds would side with the G.S.A. against the religious fanatics that perpetrated this unspeakable crime. As she sipped her scotch, Dame Julia complimented herself on her transformation of a short-term defeat to a long-term victory.

  -68-

  “Two minutes and ten seconds. Nine... Eight...” It was the voice of Caine with the Crane tattoo – Crane Caine. He and five more golden robes appeared from hiding spaces above, under, between, and atop of the dishes, antenna arrays, and vent shafts on the roof behind the elevator. Crane Caine counted down, reading the timer on the bloody data-pad he held. “Seven... Six... Five,”

  Immediately after Hi-5, Coco, and Catherine dismounted the Wasp, it ascended. It went straight up without breaking off in any other direction. It just went up and kept going, leaving them with Crane Caine's countdown. “Four... Three... Two...”

  Hi-5 knew a cue when she heard one. Coco was more than ready. She'd already scattered a few cameras, and she was holding a holographic imager with an itchy trigger finger when Hi-5 decided to fill the void. Casper heard Beats. They were loud, and like many of the loudest things in the world they came from Hi-5. Her belt, slung with guns, gear, and AniLux images of crashing waves, carried a portable beat box that had been designed for personal protection details to use for crowd management. It could blow eardrums, but now it blew trumpets and mighty Beats.

  Hi-5 was never shy, and she figured she had two minutes until Something Unknown, so with an impromptu dance routine and her gyrating hips she rocked those two minutes.

  Her Hi-ness is swingin low like the chariot,

  Hi-5 is hatchet-swingin n' simultaneously burying it.

  Carry my video home and you can watch me give the bone,

  To hot curs while wearing spurs while they're burning up Rome.

  So Aloha, Baby!

  Aloha-oy!

  Bein' what's expected don't in-spire joy!

  So Aloha, Baby!

  Aloha-oy!

  C'mon Let's mix our metals in-to a fresh alloy!

  During Hi-5's second stanza, her eyes were fixed on Hannah. The G.S.A. nutritionist was obviously a gushing fan. She was hypnotized, staring like a bird into a snake's eyes. Hi-5 extended a hand and Hannah ran to her. She knew it was rare Hi-5 shot a solo video, and nobody had to tell her to strip off her armor. She lost the camo and the pink top, too.

  She smells like G.S.A., but it's all the same inside,

  Pink n' crimson clover 'n wanna go for a ride.

  Yeah slidin' and slippin', slip-slidin' away,

  Looks like Bitch Camaro gets paid early today!

  Coco got low and pulled in a beautiful shot of an au natural Hannah hanging backwards off Hi-5, who used both hands to hold her underneath, pressing spread fingers into her flesh. Hannah's swinging torso and bare, inverted breasts moved in circular motions created by Hi-5's hip gyrations. In the middle of the roof and its buzzing antenna forest, Hi-5 stared down into google-eyed Hannah's pleasure-filled face with surprising tenderness and sang to her almost in whispers.

  What's your name, baby,

  “Hannah”, she said.

  Fuck that, tell me mine.

  “You're Her Hi-ness, of course, Her sexy spy-ness, Hi-5,” Hannah improvised, keeping her frictionless diction in time.

  Do you know what I do to bitches who spontaneously rhyme?

  I butter 'em till they're sputterin' and they're sayin' they're mine.

  Hi-5 spun Hannah a half rotation clockwise, while she lowered her down and sang to the crown of Hannah's head that now strained to touch her own beautiful, arching spine.

  Arch it, baby, arch it for Her Hi-ness Hi-5!

  We're steamy and we're creamy 'n we're shootin' it live.

  Dive, Hi-ness, dive down to full fathom five.

  Time to ride you like a cowboy like the Duke was alive!

  Whack! Hi-5 slapped a jig-gling demi-sphere. Smack! A love tap on the half-globe of her rear.

  Yee-Haw! C'mon and tell Hi-5 you love her,

  Say it to Bitch Camaro if I'm buried deep under covers.

  “Oh...oh...oh,” was all that Hannah could manage.

  Baby, here comes one D-sexty of polyhedral-tipped damage!

  You can thank Hi-5 later if you're not too Drain Bamaged.

  Hannah was on the Verge, and she wept heralding tears that ran salty into her open mouth as she awaited the Moment.

  Coco was getting a fine shot, but it sounded like maybe there was something wrong with her audio. There was a whining roar that she momentarily mistook for descending Judgment Day. Then she recognized it. Coco kept the camera on Her Hi-ness and Hannah.

  Hannah screamed in Dutch as the explosions began behind her.

  -69-

  Two minutes and ten seconds was the amount of time required for the commandeered Wasp to rise to what MUNI 5-7 had calculated to be sufficient altitude, and then descend, screaming fury and hellfire, straight down into
the roof of the Ziggurat, thirty-five yards behind Hi-5 and Hannah, directly over Oskar Delvaux's office.

  When the explosions began, Delvaux looked up and marveled at the blossoming fiery detonations. He knew the strength of the rosy-pink, granite hard, XinCryst of which his ceiling and the Ziggurat were made, and he felt no fear for the first few seconds, but the salvo of cannon fire didn't stop. It continued for ten seconds in a thundering stream of ordinance that seemed to be coming from nowhere but straight up. Then, as he watched in profound relief, the incoming stream of explosives ceased to rain down. The last fireball cleared in less than a second, and though chunks had been blown off his transparent, doped XinCryst roof, he could see it was intact.

  There was a crater, a pockmark on the surface with a sooty starburst that radiated outward for many yards, but there was no hole. The crater was still semi-transparent, and at first Delvaux thought what he saw was just a shadow, a result of refraction and diffusion of light in the scar above.

  Within a half-second, he knew he was wrong.

  The shadow grew with alarming speed, and within two more horror-filled seconds, it was clear that it was an aircraft of some kind, and it was being piloted straight down on a kamikaze path into the roof. Delvaux had almost one second more to attempt flight. He bolted to the side of his office only a moment before the Wasp made impact, showering the room with fast-moving chunks of the ceiling.

  The wings tore off and the fuselage continued through to Delvaux's office. It was mostly pieces of drone by the time it burst through and penetrated in a cone of downward-flying, hot metal. It killed two of Delvaux's guards immediately. Delvaux was knocked backwards by flying chunks of XinCryst, and before he was thrown into the wall of his office, his flesh was torn by several whirling, spinning pieces of the blued metal fuselage.

  MUNI 5-7 had been well aware of the effect the Wasp's impact would have, and the AI had directed the drone to a spot where it calculated there would be the greatest chance of survival for Alvin – behind him. The semi-circular ring of guards that stood behind Alvin were first knocked forward over Alvin's tiny body, and they were hunched over his form in a protective flesh and kevlar dome as the cone of hot, metal fragments showered down. The guards over Alvin were peppered with sharp metal and chunks of XinCryst. Two of them died instantly from shards that burrowed, spinning into their craniums, and scrambled their brains. Over five hundred pounds of flesh fell on Alvin, bleeding in great jets of purple spray, pinning his body to the floor and crushing the Louis chair underneath him. The remains of the padded chair did nothing to cushion Alvin's impact with the floor. When the guards fell on him, the entire front of his body became a massive bruise. One broken cheekbone. Three broken ribs. He was alive and wishing he wasn't.

  Bonnie wasn't as lucky as Alvin. Nobody had bothered to strip her of her armor, so it offered some protection from the fragments that whirled towards her after Alvin's half-ring of guards absorbed the worst of the shrapnel. She and the four guards who surrounded her were hit mostly by chunks of XinCryst roof, a hail of bone breaking doped crystal. The standing guards got hit worse than she did. Several of them were struck in the head and one suffered a broken neck as his head was snapped back violently by a fast-moving piece the size of a beach ball. The others were knocked to the ground and thoroughly stunned by body blows. Some took shrapnel to the head, face, and chest, though none were killed outright. Two were able to remain semi-conscious, and one with a piece of shrapnel in his throat gurgled grotesquely next to Bonnie on the floor. Bonnie's left arm was broken, along with four ribs that made breathing painful. That was how she knew she was still alive.

  Delvaux hadn't been hurt nearly as badly as Bonnie had hoped he was.

  She saw him bloodied and limping towards the gold doors of his elevator. He bent down to pick up his pistol and fell forward to his knees, screaming in pain from the shard of blued metal that was pushed deeper into his knee by his fall. His Luger was in front of him, only inches away from where he'd fallen. He wasn't even looking at Bonnie. She could see him looking at Alvin, though.

  Almost all of Alvin's little body, wrapped in Shelby's orange bedsheet, was under two apparently dead guards who were bleeding all over him, but Alvin's head was still exposed. His oversized melon-head would make a challenging ten meter pistol target for an explosion-shocked man wracked in pain, but Bonnie saw Delvaux thought he was up to the challenge. He was eying Alvin and lifting the double-action automatic off the floor in his left hand.

  Bonnie had no idea whether it was a manifestation of a loyalty she truly felt, whether it was the loyal she just needed to be, or whether she simply didn't want Delvaux to get anything he wanted, and it didn't matter to her. She moved towards Alvin in a crawl that became a half-stumble that became a stagger. She heard her own weakened voice shouting as loudly as she could manage, with all the will of her being, “NO!” She'd never meant anything she'd said in her life as strongly as she meant that one word.

  It was twenty feet or more from Bonnie's fallen body to Alvin's bloodied, blinking face pressed against the marble floor in the growing pools of blood. Bonnie didn't look at Delvaux or see the way his arm wavered left and right. She didn't know that he was right-handed. All Bonnie knew was that she was slow and lumbering, there were still ten feet between her and Alvin's head, and that her vision was turning red with pain.

  Delvaux saw her. He thought about shooting her, but she wasn't coming for him, she was going to Alvin. First, he thought, the haan essen Buddha abomination, then the vervelokt traitor. He thought he'd steadied his aim enough for a shot, and he took it.

  When she was just over half way there, the guard lying directly over Alvin's head looked like he spasmed, and then Bonnie heard the report of Delvaux's pistol. She stumbled another step, and the back of the guard's downward facing skull spit chunks of bone, brains, and hair. Delvaux missed again. Bonnie did her best to throw her body, but she couldn't push off the floor, and she just fell on her side – on her broken arm. Her head was a foot shy of Alvin's when she saw a bright flash that was everywhere, even in her still-patched emerald eye. She didn't hear that shot, but she felt it snap her head back when the light burst inside her skull. Her face was numb, and she saw a formless gray haze. She pulled herself forward blindly with her unbroken arm and felt another bullet hammer the broken ribs under her vest. The room was spinning, and there was a hot poker in her thigh. She heard that shot and felt her leg numbing. As the tingling and loss of feeling forced its way across her body, she wondered if she'd finally crawled far enough to block Delvaux from shooting Alvin. She decided that she must be blocking his shot because he was shooting her. She could hear the shots, but they sounded like firecrackers. Bonnie was in shock and losing feeling. Delvaux's bullets in her vest felt like being poked hard with a broomstick. The last one in her leg felt like a hot nail tugging at the cloth of her jeans.

  She didn't feel like a traitor anymore, so somehow, she didn't mind the bullets.

  Somehow, it was all okay.

  -70-

  Casper was the first one to reach the hole in the roof, and though his ears were still ringing from the Wasp's swan song of cannon fire, he heard the report of Delvaux's pistol before he got there. Looking down, it took him a moment to make any sense of the scene. There were G.S.A. guards on the floor. Some were obviously dead, and some were beginning to rise. He saw Delvaux firing from his wavering left arm, and when Casper saw what Delvaux was shooting at, he screamed with rage and anger as if the force of his willful expression might counter the perverted intent he saw below him.

  “NO!”

  Casper barked it in a short, sharp blast that he heard with his own ears before he realized he'd said anything. The man shooting Bonnie hadn't heard him, and it didn't matter because even if he had stopped firing at Bonnie's fallen form, stretched out thirty-five feet below Casper, then Casper still would have brought the submachine gun to his shoulder and fired out of anger, vengeance, and a hatred he'd never felt before.
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br />   The Korean MP-9 clone spat a three round burst, that went wide of the unforgivable figure taking Bonnie away with his strange, slim pistol. Casper pulled, almost yanked on the trigger instead of squeezing, and he missed again. He tucked the gun into his shoulder tighter now, enraged at his own ineffectiveness, and the next burst caught the figure below in the leg and made him lurch to his right side. It wasn't enough. Not nearly enough. As Delvaux drifted further to his right, Casper followed him, and his next burst hit Delvaux's other leg and dropped him to the ground, swearing in a language Casper didn't know. It still wasn't enough. Casper knew he'd been firing low, and now he corrected his hasty aim to prosecute this unimaginable monster with burst after burst from the vintage submachine gun while he vocalized his rage in a wordless, unceasing scream.

  Casper kept shooting until he emptied the clip. Then he fumbled to reload before he realized that the man who'd been shooting Bonnie wasn't moving.

  Bonnie noticed that she wasn't being shot anymore. She was pretty sure she wasn't dead yet, but she wondered if she was hallucinating because she was sure she'd heard Casper's voice screaming like an animal over the gunfire. Her mind was working slowly now, and it took her a moment to realize that the last shots she'd heard came from a submachine gun, not Delvaux's Luger. She began to put the pieces together. Casper... Korean SMG fire... no more bullets from Delvaux's Luger. Bonnie slowly realized that she was being rescued, and Casper had shot Delvaux. She was surprised Casper hadn't shot her for her betrayal. After all, she'd kidnapped Alvin and brought him to Delvaux. She'd betrayed them all... Didn't he care? Bonnie couldn't wrap her brain around the notion that Casper knew perfectly well what she'd done, and he didn't care. She thought the floor was beginning to rise up around her. No, she thought, I'm falling through it. She didn't know where she was falling to, but Bonnie Levi-Mei felt just fine about it. No matter, never mind.