Screaming came from below us, intensifying as more panicked royals joined in.
“Whatever you’re going to do, Space, do it now”, I pleaded as I gripped the wheel.
I had absolutely no idea what I was going to do.
My shoulder sockets screamed in protest as the crack appeared in the bay doors. The gap was growing. I couldn’t hold it.
Machinery droned into life above me. There was a set of tubes in the small opening between the bay doors-the tubes that had hoovered up the mess of bread and flour were being powered up to spit that stuff back out. If I could somehow jam up the vacuum machine, I thought, I could wreck it, but I could think of no way to do that now.
A fine mist of flour hit me in the face and made batter in the corner of my eyes. A flapjack brushed past my hair and tumbled into the screaming green blur below me. The doors groaned further open, and my arms wrenched further apart.
I screamed.
“AAAAAArgh-womph?”
My manly scream of sacrificial torment was blocked. I centred my eyes down my nose and found that my screaming mouth had become the receptacle for a stale baguette. I craned my neck back and went to spit out the length of bread before the imagery bothered me. I suspected the vengeful ghost machinations of Eduardo were involved in this. The baguette, which had so recently been my Excalibur, had now tumbled out of the zeppelin and jammed in my mouth as if to mock me.
Or had it?
I paused as I was about to spit it out, instead choosing to dig my teeth in. It was tough-a weapon from the Master Baker gone stale was nearly as sturdy as steel, or so it seemed. A plan formed.
I whipped my head to the side, biting the side of the bread deftly between my teeth, and angled it into the first handle where my heroic right hand gripped. For several horrible seconds, the tip of the bread just bobbled and nudged at the handle, but finally, with a violent twist of my neck, it slotted through. I stopped biting it and immediately rammed my head against it, pinning it to the surface of the opening door. Now would be the hard part.
The heavy steel doors pressed down upon me, rudimentary mechanisms and gravity dictating that they fall on me and tear my grip apart. I had to stop all that.
I summoned all of my strength and pulled against their force. My shoulder muscles bunched and my hands burned. Still keeping the bread in place, I hung there, spread out in a T-shape and pulled against the doors. All of my will went to my arms and I screwed my face up, feeling blood pump it full and red. I didn’t even scream or make a noise, instead channelling every ounce of me into the doors.
A clunk sounded above me, along with a squealing of gears. But my hearing was soon overwhelmed by the sound of a distant crashing wave. All that was left was the sensation in my arms and the feeling that the drift of flour hitting my face was... slowly... lessening....
The flour cascade dried up and I opened my eyes. Miraculously, the doors had closed above me. My arms quivered like over-taut cables. The baguette was still in place. Before my strength left me, I released the grip on my right hand.
It wanted to fall limp by my side.
I didn’t let it.
With a final quick movement, I slammed the end of the baguette through, and it passed through the left handle like a door bolt.
I hung both of my arms from the left bay handle and felt wrung out. Below me, on the green grass, the fleeing upper class of Aplubia screamed and fled from the shadow of the blimp. Above me, the doors clunked again, straining against the bolt I had put in place. Behind it, I heard the whine of the hoover engines cycle up an octave as they struggled to eject more of its cargo against solid doors. The engine of the great machine choked and bucked. It looked like I had been able to jam the thing after all. The baguette bent slightly under the strain, but did not give. I smiled at it.
That’ll do, Hardcore, I thought.
And as I looked down at the rushing ground, I felt my hands loosen as the blimp above me rocked.
Right on target over the drop zone, over a small ceremonial dais containing a row of plush seats, a viewing platform and an adjacent horn quartet, the Queen’s blimp rocked, as if from a physical blow.
I prepared the air brakes and tried to be ready for anything. The ship skittered around in the air, going from left to right. But it had built up so much speed that it could no longer stop and correct whatever error had gone wrong in its holding bay’s drop mechanism, so it continued on to the other side of the garden, careening close to the ground and then pulling up madly in the air. I matched my course to the best of my ability. Then it started its climb.
I had been watching the blimp's path with all of my being for a while now, and I thought I could read intent in its movement. Its sudden climb read of pure panic. I looked beyond it for a second and saw the source of the panic: a wall of buildings was in front of us at the other end of the royal gardens, a sheer cliff face of Aplubian architecture that we were both rocketing toward. I pulled up on the wheel and the nose of our blimp tucked up under the belly of hers as we pulled into a vertical climb. I could see the cabin now, frothing with flour that should have been dispersed through the bay doors; it was spewing the fine mist out of its portholes. A sick tearing sound from our hull indicated I had pulled into the climb with too much thrust, and the bottom of our hull was now fighting a losing battle with the surface of the building. I looked up at the rear end of her craft as it did likewise and saw a familiar figure just as I heard him.
“Funkwooooooorthy!” came the strangled scream, in a tone slightly higher than usual.
Laying aside all caution and reason, I pushed both thrusters to maximum and chased that sound.
I worked my legs. I had never run up a building before, but now was as good a time as any to learn.
The baguette held, but the strain put upon the internal hoover as it clogged unrepentantly had caused the machine to explode inside Hydrangea’s blimp. It shook as if trying to buck me loose.
Then came the climb.
It pulled up into the sky, and to my horror the surface of a building came flying toward me. Still dangling from the bottom doors, I put my legs out and found purchase on the walls of the building. I pumped my legs in a rapid sprint and held on to the bay doors, running on the vertical walls of the building in a desperate scramble but gradually the space closed in, and I was reduced to a crouched shimmy. Not good.
A tremor ran through my legs as something big hit the building, something fast. I looked over my shoulder and saw the prow of Funkworthy’s ship suddenly plough up the brick, shredding the walls and carving a broad furrow through the building with the pure force of a wrecking ball.
It gained on me, shredding parts of itself as it annihilated the front of the building.
I shouted to my friend, and in a deafening clamour, the ship jumped further up to meet me.
Squashed between a fleeing blimp and a building, I let my legs dangle and laid flat against the side of the blimp. We must have been travelling directly upwards. The building started to scrape my back as the space between us closed.
But the point of Funkworrthy’s ship didn’t let up. It reached up towards me, all squealing metal and buckling wood. The soles of my feet bopped off the front of the rebel craft for an instant, but it receded slightly.
I yelled for Funkworthy again.
Brick and masonry in my eyes, I was flying blind.
I heard the voice again, so close by.
Our small craft was tucked under the Queen’s, our balloon pressing up against hers. There was no possible room left to drive into. We were now just two crafts flying directly upward; mine nudging at her bottom and smashing through the walls of an ancient building. We were piloting at nearly ninety degrees into the sky, and by the sounds of it, we’d be lucky to make it out of this with a hull you could fit in a matchbox.
“More power!” I yelled to the men manning the engines as I scowled into the storm of destruction. “Give me everything!”
We powered on.
Sure and certain, the tip of Funkworthy’s ship leapt to meet my feet as they dangled in the air. I rested my haunches on them and they stayed solid.
“Let go!” came a shout below me. Hanging on to the walls of the ship was Ebenezer’s cycloptic buddy, his hand stretched out as far as he could, to catch me should I fall. He was so close. I let go of the bay doors and stepped on top of Funkworthy’s ship. Immediately I clambered down onto the vertical deck, taking this Felipe chap’s sure grip.
Above me, the Queen’s ship finally ploughed into the side of the building, tearing a hole in the ancient stone walls. I shielded my eyes and calculated how close I had been to being a smear. Four seconds at the most.
Metal, wood, stone, bicarbonate of soda: the very air around us was a storm of carnage and noise as two duelling vehicles carved into an old building in a mad bid at survival.
Then, as suddenly as it started, it stopped.
The Queen’s ship pulled free over the top of the building, and seconds after it we rocketed up into the clean, crisp night air. Funkworthy made the floor horizontal again and the rebels who had lashed themselves to the deck with ropes and belts and each other’s arms stood on watery legs. Our two ships hung in the air, idling and near motionless. The hull was tattered and torn, two sails were somehow ablaze, one of the engines was pouring greasy smoke into the night sky and all but one of our cannons had fallen to the ground in the ascent.
Funkworthy sat in the middle of it all, bound to the seat and piloting the mess. He looked at me and I marched over. No time for manly handshakes or congratulations. Not now.
We both dusted ourselves down and looked out into the blackening night at the craft before us.
“The ship?” I asked.
“Nearly totalled”, he answered.
“Our chances?”
“Non-existent.”
“The plan?”
“There isn’t one.”
“Our course of action?”
“We’re going to blow that bitch out of the air.”
I grinned. ”Let’s do it.”
* * *
Chapter Twenty Two!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
A View to a Kill
In which Ebenezer hacks the AI core as Space holds off a baying mob of the Albino King’s deadly clockwork attack hounds.
After the crashing tumult, the shouts, the rending apart of building and balloon, the screaming of a confused upper class and the roar of cannon fire, we hung for a moment in the still and glacial silence.
She moved first.
She was badly damaged, but still in one piece, the heavy brick walls of her bedroom having been chipped away in the crash while still maintaining its essential structural integrity. The cabin was leaking pastries and flour at an alarming rate, bursting through walls and joints and pouring out of windows, but now it was falling harmlessly into the valley below and not on the guests in the now deserted royal garden. As we watched her ship, I noticed the starlight winking white in the black sky. The meteor shower was over. Then slowly, through the chill night air, there came the sound of the engines cycling back up.
I sat at the controls and thought. We were in rough shape. The deck was a patchwork raft, pocked with holes and kept together by a few rivets and our collective warm wishes. The sails and balloons that had adorned our sides had burnt to a cinder, and their struts remained only to prop up their memories and jut out of our side like menacing ornamental spikes. We could move, sure, but our manoeuvrability would be erratic at best, and our chances of a safe landing-well, the chances of getting to land were obscene enough to contemplate, so I pushed that from my mind. But as her craft turned in a wide and slow circle, like a predator coming to finish off its prey before the carrion eaters got at it, my mind was on our weaponry more than anything.
“One cannon?” I asked, hoping to be corrected.
Felipe looked over to me from the stern, where he was pouring a bucket of water down a smoking hole, and nodded sadly.
A ray of optimism suddenly hit me as I turned to Space. Of course! We had something more advanced than an Aplubian cannon. “Pew-pew!” I shouted at him, but he winced and looked away. I noticed his holster was conspicuously free of laser weaponry. “Where?” I asked.
“When I swung across, it must have come free and tangled up in the rigging on the side of her balloon.”
“Pew-pew? What is this thing, Pew-pew?” asked Felipe, walking over.
“I had a wife, once. Lovely woman-robot, you see-and-”
“Space, we don’t have time!” I broke in. “It was his sidearm. A T-81 subatomic handcannon. Off-world tech. A charged shot could have punctured a hole in her balloon easily. Damn!”
“Damn!” Space agreed.
Felipe sheepishly dipped his hand behind his back and took out a small firearm of his own, a rudimentary pistol of the gunpowder projectile variety. He proffered it to us. “Maybe this could suffice? I was saving this for the revolution. It is an old pistol my father handed down to me. He said that when it came time to set our people free, I was to use it. That was to be tonight. It’s only got one shot in it, but I took care of it. It seems silly now.”
We looked over as the Queen’s balloon gained speed and cut through a cloudbank, heading toward us at a slow, deliberate pace.
“We’ll take everything we can”, I said. Felipe handed the thing to Space, knowing that the puny gunpowder firearm would be as much offensive use against the balloon as flinging a custard pie.
“It’s your father’s”, Space protested, waving the gun away.
“I am a rubbish aim, Captain. No depth perception”, Felipe explained and Space reluctantly closed his hand around the small pistol.
“So we have two guns. One slightly bigger than the other, and we’re flying in the dogfighting equivalent of a wet paper bag. Great. This would be a good time for one of your famous plans”, I prompted, but Space looked thoughtfully out into the sky and stayed silent. I tried again. “So… what’s our next move, Space?” I asked hesitantly.
He looked around at me suddenly.
“Now? We duck!”
We collapsed on the floor just as the booming sound of the cannons reached our ears. Space had seen the cannons priming, and as we three threw ourselves to the splintered wooden slats, the air above our heads parted to accommodate the path of two speeding death balls.
“I have a plan now: bloody leg it!” Space shouted through a mouth full of shredded wood.
I sat bolt upright in the chair and shoved the wheel down as I threw the engines into their fullest thrust. The ship immediately pitched downward, giving out a high whine of protest and two more balls slammed into the top of our balloon with almost lethal force. Luckily, instead of tearing through, they buffered against it and rolled down to fall onto the deck, where unfortunately they fell through it, making two sizeable holes.
“We can’t take another hit like that”, cried Felipe from his position on our sole cannon as he fired it off into the vague direction of the Queen’s blimp, hitting a passing albatross instead. He really was a terrible aim, I thought.
But there was no time to ruminate as I threw the craft into a dive. Above us, our enemy responded by aiming its nose downward to meet us, but even in our bad shape we had the advantage of speed. I kept the course as another salvo of balls whined through the air in front of us, and seconds later another batch splintered some struts in the middle of our craft. We were just passing ourselves in front of her sights, I realized.
After another round, which rammed holes into our deck once more, I evened out and gunned the engines now that we were under her. But she was still driving her craft downward, chasing our tail. A brutal salvo rocked our nose upwards as the direct hit punched into our rear. I winced at the sound of tearing and looked back. The deck was covered in smoke as vast chunks of wood tore away and fell miles to the
ground. I gunned the engines once more, but found our speed steadily dropping somehow. I looked back again to see if there was a problem with our engines-
Or engine.
The portside rear engine teetered on the edge of the newly frayed end of our craft and, in horrific slow motion, fell off the side, ripping pipes and wires from under the deck in a spiderweb of destruction. Our speed dipped drastically as we were down to one main thruster, and as I looked behind us I saw that the Queen’s blimp had completed its broad turning circle and was now on our tail.
She accelerated as we sputtered in the air, and her prow barrelled toward us like the shadow of death.
I looked around frantically and saw an odd centre of stillness.
Space.
He had been by my side since I had asked him for a plan, but in the course of the chase had, I realized, been stood stock-still in a kind of meditative trance, his brow furrowed and his hand resting on the butt of Felipe’s pistol. As if activated by my curious stare, he suddenly came to life, turning to me with that demented look in his eye and a grin dancing around the corners of his mouth.
“Never fear, I’ve got a plan. Take the wheel”, he said dreamily, as if to himself.
“A plan?” I enquired faithlessly as he moved towards the rear of the ship.
“On my command, slow us down, let it catch up-then I’ll convince her to give up the pursuit.”
I raised my eyebrow at him. “That’s your plan, is it?” I said as a feeling of déjà vu washed over me.
“Don’t you know the first thing about about mad Aplubian monarchs? What did they teach you in that fancy academy of yours?”
Oh God.
He grinned wolfishly at me.
“Oh, you know”, I returned with a smile, “navigation, piloting-”
The Court of Crusty Killings: A Captain Space Hardcore Adventure Page 23