Cyber Circus

by Kim Lakin-Smith

  Without the smell of dead kin to attract them, Cyber Circus was just another creature in that vast hive. Men were the fodder and, so far, they were staying in the shadows. Moulding with the ship.

  The closer they drifted to the shoreline, the sparser the number of insects. Cyber Circus set down with a soft displacing of dust.

  Inside his private pod, Herb put a hand on the door handle and told his unexpected house guest, “My boys know their knots, lady, so don’t go rubbing your wrists raw trying to get those loose.”

  He stared back into the opulent gloom. The woman was seated in the chair at his desk, wrists trussed.

  “I’m sorry to treat you so, but ain’t a thing known about a hair on your head. Except that you sent those kids out there on some mischief, and I ain’t entirely sure you’re sane.” The ringmaster tapped his large forehead. He closed the door behind him and, this time, he locked it.

  Descending the lift rig, Herb marched through the backstage area and out into the ring. The HawkEye and the Scuttlers joined him. Behind the calliope balcony, Nim remained aglow.

  “Okay, so let’s see if you kids understand the way of it?” Herb pointed to the huge boiler, located beneath the calliope. Thick ropes of ornate brass looped around and back on themselves, decorating the boiler’s base. “Whaddya do with that lot?”

  “Drag it, drag it,” the boy offered.

  “Where’d you drag it to?”

  One of the girls said, “To the black water where we slip it in.”

  “Good,” said Herb, and the girl looked pleased. She danced her great limbs, clattering dreadfully.

  “Sssh! You gotta keep it down.” Herb brushed a hand over his forehead which was shiny with sweat. “Whaddya do next?”

  “Come back here and say ‘start it pumping!’” said the second girl.

  “Start it pumping!” parroted her siblings.

  “Good kids. And then you reel them hoses in again once the boiler’s full and we can scat.” Herb glanced at Hellequin. “They’ll have to go out the main flap. Hose won’t reach otherwise.”

  The HawkEye nodded. “I’ll let them out. Keep an eye on them too.”

  Herb bustled off to the brass staircase and climbed up and out onto the balcony alongside Nim. He squinted against the blaze of her, laid a hand on one of the girl’s which gripped the rail tightly, and felt her jump.

  “Time to turn your light off now, gal,” he told her softly. “We’re about to open the floodgates.”

  EIGHTEEN

  The circus was silent but for slight eddies of air through the pipes of the calliope. Drawing the heavy material of the tent flap aside a crack, Hellequin waved the Scuttlers out. The children rattled away into the weird twilight, pulling the hose like the body of a giant worm.

  Hellequin kept the flap open a small degree and peered out. His steel eye piece ticked in small revolutions, the red lens burning out. The cavern teemed with locusts; they crawled over one another, forming ant hills of squirming brittle bodies. Others crisscrossed the roof of the cavern, wings reverberating with a low, woody whisper, or clung to the walls, mandibles dripping luminescent bile.

  He tried to dismiss the swarm as no more significant than a savannah full of clothhods and concentrated instead on the lake and the Scuttlers, just another breed of insect drawn to the water’s edge. Hellequin half expected enormous arms to solidify out of the black fluid, grasp each child and pull them under. Certainly the lake struck him as an entity that attracted worship and demanded sacrifice.

  “Hush little children,” he said under his breath. The hose unravelled off the framework of hooks beneath the calliope, dragging out of the tent with a small ‘slush’ of sound. Hellequin mapped the quadrants of the cavern in his mind, the whirring insects overhead and those milking bile on the honeycombed walls. Nothing reacted. The children were mites to be tolerated.

  What couldn’t be relied on was the randomness of the insects’ movements. One of those in flight came in to land nearby, clamping down on top of the hose and forcing the Scuttlers to come to an abrupt stop a couple of metres short of the lake. The children rolled in their shells, instinctually defensive.

  Hellequin collated the movements of the swarm, his circuitry working to make sense of the options. They had to get the hose to the water as soon as possible. Sooner or later, the flesh-eating locusts would nose their way into the crevices of the circus tent and, with just one kill, bring their brethren swarming.

  The soldier drew his bowie knife. It would be nonsensical to openly kill the beast since spilling its inner fluid would attract the interests of the swarm. But it went against his programming to leave the circus in danger. Rifle hanging off his shoulder, a fistful of ammunition in a top pocket of his combats, he slowed his breathing and slipped out of the tent. His steps were hushed by the dust underfoot. The further he got from the circus tent, the more he was engulfed by the illumined gloom. Locusts hauled their bodies over the rocks in all directions. The humid air was punctuated by weird sounds: creaking long limbs, p’ffing exoskeletons that lifted and sucked around soft meat, and the cack-cack of mauling jaws. Hellequin walked softly, but the children spotted him and called out him.

  “Hi! Hi!”

  Hellequin cursed their stupidity. He put a finger to his lips and motioned to the three to take hold of the hose again, which they did. Now it was his turn to act.

  The colossal locust nestled on top of the hose, churning its mandibles like a clothhod chewing the cud. Hellequin crept closer. The Scuttlers waited.

  Kneeling slowly, the solider fed his hands around the ribbed brass hose. It was lukewarm and surprisingly soft to the touch. He attempted to lift it, encouraging the bug to take flight of its own accord. The creature stayed rooted, rubbing its hind legs off one another and producing a long, sonorous note.

  Dulled panic set in beneath Hellequin’s ribs; he was programmed to use the emotional stimulus as a fresh shot of adrenaline. Muscles tightened and pulsed. His only option was to kill the creature swiftly, silently, and without spilling its inner fluids.

  He ran at the thing with swift strides, pulling up last second to stare into its roaming eyes. See me now? The locust answered with a toss of its head, spraying acidic matter. Its voice was a soft cack-cack. For an instant, Hellequin feared the insect might zone in on his hardware and dismiss him as fleshless. But then the great back limbs powered down and the locust sprung forward, displacing dust.

  Hellequin had seen the response a precious millisecond in advance. His eyepiece gridded and calculated the trajectory of the creature’s spring. He leapt up, rolling and going into a crouch an instant before one of the locust’s vast wings swept above his head, unsettling his hair. Hellequin grabbed for the wing, propelling himself up and onto it. The sinew and fibre mass rippled as the creature tried to shake him off. Hellequin kept low, desperate to stay incognito to the rest of the hive. When he was assured of his balance, he ran along the wing and leapt onto the beast’s back. The lethal head feathers washed dangerously close; he registered their stretch and concluded that he was safe.

  Snatching a glance backwards, he saw that the hose had been freed and the Scuttlers were dragging it the last few metres to the lake. Positioning his bowie knife at the base of the locust’s neck collar, Hellequin drove it in. He gave the blade a sharp twist. While unsure of the exact biology of the species, he’d enough desert experience to know he could kill a hand-sized spindleweb with that same method.

  The locust collapsed under him, exciting a small dust storm. Hellequin glanced up and around him. Had the swarm been alerted to his presence by the tussle?

  Nothing altered in the atmosphere. The trills and reedy notes of the insects still coloured the air. Their shadows continued to crisscross overhead.

  The bowie knife was abandoned in the meat of the carcass; Hellequin knew he couldn’t pull it free since the slightest trace of death in the air would attract the creatures. Instead he jumped down, readjusted the rock rifle strap on his shoulde
r and stared out to the lake’s edge. Having fed the hose into the water, one of the three siblings was in the process of toddling back to the tent. Hellequin followed after.

  When it came, the shot rebounded off the cavern walls with the sound of a tremendous whip crack. Rock ammo pierced Hellequin’s shoulder blade near his newly stitched stab wound. Feeling pain flash-fire inside him, Hellequin wheeled around. His HawkEye took in many different angles to form a cohesive panorama – the two Scuttlers by the shore of the lake, balling up inside their hard shells and rolling back towards the circus, the new twitchy awareness of the locusts, the barrel of a rock pistol in D’Angelus’s hand as he stood in the open cockpit of the burrower, and men pouring out the backend of that surfaced conveyance like a second swarm.

  Hellequin refocused on D’Angelus’s aim. The pistol was trained on his heart.

  Seconds stretched. The burrower coasted forward, D’Angelus riding high in the cockpit like the eye of the machine while his men jogged either side, rock rifles primed. Hellequin breathed long and slow. He couldn’t move since risking his life might mean abandoning Nim to the pimp.

  As the disturbed nest came to life, the burrower seesawed over uneven ground. Hellequin took his chance and began to charge back towards the circus. Ammo fire bit at his heels. These are my final moments, he told himself. His one consolation was the fattened hose that led inside the tent and the knowledge that Cyber Circus was slating her thirst.

  He was nearly at the tent flap when a colossal shadow passed overhead. The lens of his eyepiece brightened, taking in a black mass of locusts. One creature landed a few short metres in front, blocking the tent entrance. Hellequin threw himself down into the dust as D’Angelus’s men discharged their rock rifles. Shot pierced the insect’s hoary shell. With no understanding of its true attacker, the locust thrust its tremendous head at Hellequin. The mandibles yawned, spit-gummed and pop-popping.

  The soldier zoomed in on the goo and knew that in spite of his advanced sight, he couldn’t shuffle back in time. Drops splattered his chest, burning through fabric and flesh below. Hellequin showed his gums and cried out. He struggled to reach his rifle. At his back, he heard the burrower sledging in. His steel eye focused on the face of the locust, moving closer.

  He freed his rifle and pointed it up at the last second. Before he could pull the trigger, the locust’s jaw exploded seemingly from within. He shuffled back on his hands, clearing the locust’s mammoth body just before it flopped into the dust. Riding the spine of the thing was Nim, rock pistol drawn, balance impeccable. She leapt down nimbly. The courtesan’s red eyes were livid with emotion.

  “Herb says we have to keep D’Angelus and the shitters with him outside the tent. We can’t close the flap until the boiler’s full. Anyway, that burrower could just tunnel in under us.”

  “So what are we meant to do?” panted Hellequin, joining Nim as she crouched behind one of the splayed wings belonging to the dead locust. Rock shot whistled past their ears.

  “We’ve got to kill them.” Nim thrust a hand into her hair and bit her lower lip. “There’s also the hive to worry about now.”

  Indeed there was. Hellequin scanned the air and here they came, hundreds of the creatures, tumbling in and over one another like the plague they were.

  “By the Saints,” whispered Nim, glowing faintly in the twilight as if in a bid to make sense of the whirring above.

  “Shit me!” Pig Heart appeared alongside, rock pistol tearing hunks off the next locust to zone in. Lulu brought up the rear, touting an unusual yet effective weapon. During one of his acts, he made use of two exceptionally long whips. He wielded them now with skill and a boldness Hellequin had not recognised in the ladyboy before that time. Whether the drive came from a desire to protect Nim, or rage at the kinds of men who would take what they wanted, no matter the damage, Hellequin had no idea. But Lulu slashed out at the bugs, taking out eyes and head feathers and wing scales and slices of neck frill.

  All the while, D’Angelus was riding closer in the burrower, his men taking out their share of the locusts with the sweet burnt scent of fired rock shot.

  Hellequin heard a new wave of artillery. He stared back over a shoulder. A great number of the pitch crew were assembled at the mouth of the circus tent, rifles and pistols raised and firing off into the half-light.

  “Guess you were right all along HawkEye,” Pig Heart snorted, sending a blaze of shot into the chattering skies, reloading in a clink-clunk and rip of action, and taking out one of D’Angelus’s men.

  “About what?” Hellequin peeled off a shot from his own rifle and dripped back down below the dead locust’s tattered wing.

  “Guess we carnie folk do support our own when the squeeze is put on us.” Pig Heart inclined his head towards the pitch crew. He stared Hellequin hard in the face. “Any idea how we’re gonna wrangle our way out of here alive?”

  Before Hellequin could answer, Pig Heart stood up and aimed for another of the pimp’s men. Hellequin tracked the bullet; before it had time to home in on its target, the pimp’s man was twisted chest from limb by the mangling jaws of a locust. The instant the man fell, he was left behind by the burrower. In the wake of the machine, the creatures clustered in, shredding the flesh of the man most likely while the breath was still working in his lungs.

  “We gotta beat off the locusts, we gotta punch D’Angelus’s brains from his skull, and we gotta fire up Herb’s gasbag and get us the hell out of here.” Hellequin exhaled sharply. “Simple as that.”

  Except it wasn’t simple, he thought. It was the most outnumbered fight he had been embroiled in. Locusts streamed towards them from all directions and would keep up their assault long after D’Angelus and his men had succumbed.

  “Alright then,” said Pig Heart, sounding as unconvinced as Hellequin that they’d the slightest hope of survival. “How long ‘til the boiler’s full?” he shouted back at the wall of pitch crew.

  One man disappeared inside the tent. He returned a few seconds later and yawped, “Got a way to go yet!”

  Pig Heart cursed. The fire off the pitch crews’ guns was taking out the first wave of locusts. But in the chaos of battle, D’Angelus and his men were forgotten. The burrower dipped and arched over a difficult terrain of calcified boulders. Meanwhile, its hired thugs tucked in amongst the stones and launched an attack on both the swarm and the pitch crew.

  Hellequin was glad of the cover provided by the dead locust as he saw five of the pitch crew taken out or badly wounded inside a minute.

  What to do, he demanded of his natural mind and its cyber circuitry. He was the only one with the eyesight capable of taking out D’Angelus’s snipers.

  “Concentrate on the swarm!” he cried, yanking his bowie knife free of the dead insect’s neck collar.

  “Deserting me?” said Nim quietly.

  Even through the storm of rock shot and rustling wings, he heard her.

  “I’m doing what I’m programmed to do,” he shot back.

  A moment later, he was running towards the nest of boulders. Rock sliced by within centimetres. His eyepiece whirred, the concentric rings zoning in, and in again, mapping the locale of each of the pimp’s men amongst the burgeoning stones. His Daxware tracked the trajectory of fire from each man’s weapon. Hellequin weaved through the flesh-slicing shot, pausing now and then to defend himself against the jaws or weighty limbs of a locust.

  Fortunately the swarm appeared confused by him for the most part. Insects zoomed in half a metre from his head, but most seemed to see him as a box of wires and unpalatable metal.

  He didn’t stop to argue. Sliding in alongside the first of D’Angelus’s heavies, he put his blade to the soft throat and ripped. The man’s gargle was lost to the engine noise of the idling burrower. A second man occupied a pockmark in the stone. Hellequin slid the bowie knife into his ribcage. Guzzling for air, the man collapsed. Hellequin dragged him clear of the machine. Moments later, there was a great chattering of wings as the locusts
descended to strip the carcass.

  Hellequin went to work on a third man wedged between two slabs of rock like a meat filling. But the blood spill had attracted the locusts in number now. Hellequin fired his gun up at the brittle black mass – just as a fourth man launched a shot at him. The HawkEye dodged the fire which broke open the skull of a locust at his back. Before the man could take another shot, Hellequin speared him up under the chin with his blade. Dragging the knife free, he prompted his eyepiece to assemble a number of views across his retina – insects coming in to land among the boulders, the burrower reigniting its engines and ploughing head on at the circus tent, the pimp riding in the open cockpit alongside a driver and the Sirinese fighter, Nim shooting a locust an instant before its jaws struck and being showered with the poisonous head feathers...

  Hellequin was already on his feet and speeding towards her. At his back, the remainder of D’Angelus’s ground crew fell victim to the honey trap he had set – the bodies of their fallen colleagues arousing the gore sensors of the hundreds of locusts. The men’s screams echoed through the cavern, sharp and terrible and phenomenally lonely. Hellequin shut out the noise and raced back towards the tent.

  The majority of the pitch crew had retreated inside. He saw Nim collapse, the burrower sledging towards her while Pig Heart and Lulu drove back the scoreless locusts that hovered and dived overhead. Battling against the agony from his freshly wounded shoulder, Hellequin brought up his rock rifle as he ran and tried to keep the flesh feeders at bay.

  Two figures leapt free of the burrower as it struck an extra large boulder a few metres short of Nim. The huge machine idled; the HawkEye lens pierced the dense glass of the windshield, which had been slid back into place. He saw a man’s head, not D’Anglus and not the Sirinese. The driver, he concluded. No doubt the fellow had been instructed to hold steady while the pimp retrieved his precious runaway – who happened to be lying prone in front of the circus tent. Hellequin saw the pimp kneel down, slip a hand around Nim’s neck and bring her lips to his.