by Andy Remic
Now, only Kome braved Romero’s wrath.
The big General halted beside the brooding man, and looked down almost tenderly. He reached out to put a hand on Romero’s shoulder, and his hand hovered there for a moment whilst he considered the ramifications of his actions. Smoothly, he withdrew his hand. He valued his fingers more than a need to pacify the Cardinal of the Ministers of Joy.
“That fucking bitch,” hissed Romero, softly.
“She betrayed us.”
“That should be impossible!” He looked up, eyes burning with hate. “She’s put us in a very, very dangerous position.”
“You need to make a decision.”
“Yes.”
Romero stood, and stretched. He glanced down at the screen, where yet more outraged messages were pouring in. How dare Earth advance on the Theme Planet with aggressive militaristic intentions! How could Oblivion Government make such a foolhardy act of aggression? What did Earth think it was doing? Romero smiled bleakly. How little they all understood his... ambition. Not just ambition for himself, for he recognised he was just a tiny cog in the very great machine called Conquest. No. The ambition was for his species; for humanity. He wanted to make himself immortal, sure, but he wanted to establish Humanity as the dominant controlling lifeforce of the Quad-Galaxy. Too long had they bowed and scraped to their alien neighbours. Equals? Fuck that. That was not mankind’s destiny! Now, Romero would show them, as his ancestors had done in millennia past, who was in control. Who was destined to lead.
“Launch the FieldNukes. Send the Ministers of Joy in one-man Slam Fighters. And take us in.”
“Take us in?” Kome raised an eyebrow. “You want to go Front Line? Into the Dregs? Into the NukeFields?”
“Yes,” said Romero, darkly. “We’re going to find Amba before she does any more fucking damage. We will remove her piece well and truly from the now-thoroughly-distorted and deviated gameboard.”
~ * ~
Dex emerged from a hole in a vast steel wall to stand, teetering, on a ledge a hundred klicks above the ground. He’d followed Katrina’s path with ease; she was making no attempt at stealth, just speed, in order to get to SARAH’s core and plant the FRIEND. The bomb.
Dex gasped, and grabbed the edge of the wall as vertigo took his brain in its fist and shook him hard, like a rabid dog with a broken, pulped cat. Darkness spread away, and distant lights twinkled. A pipe veered off before him, about a foot wide, matt-black and almost invisible against the space around him. Dex knelt, and glanced backwards. A cold wind drifted up from the chasm below, and Dex gritted his teeth. Katrina and Molly had passed this way, he was sure of it. And he heard, somewhere distant, a small, female gasp followed by a scuffing sound. Let’s hope Katrina fell off, he thought morbidly. But knew it wouldn’t happen. She was too precise. He remembered dancing with her on many occasions, and it was always he who stepped on her toes. Damn. Damn and shit. He hated heights, especially heights on narrow pipe bridges over deadly abysses, like this one.
“It’s never fucking easy, is it?” he growled.
He set off across the pipe, arms spread out to steady himself. The Makarov in his pocket felt good, solid, real, reliable, and the wand tucked into the waist-band of his trousers was also reassuring, in that he’d seen what it could do to an android; indeed, felt its effects himself, and thus knew it was a handy device. He was tired, and hurting, mentally as well as physically, and he moved slowly across the high pipe, wondering what the hell the pipe was for, what was its function, its purpose, why build it out here of all bloody places? He felt nausea swimming through him, pouring into him as if he were a jug. It could have been due to the physical pounding he’d taken, it could have been from the harsh psychological kicking; whatever the reasons, the sickness was upon him, and suddenly he dropped to his knees and felt the yawning chasm open up around him; felt as if he swam through treacle and was about to slip from the bottom into an infinity well, where gravity would crush him down and fold him over and over, into a single molecule.
Dex swayed, high up on the pipe. The darkness was terrifying. The sickness was terrifying. And suddenly, something hissed from the darkness, an object large and bulky, and he heard it coming and covered his head with his arms in protective reflex, and then squealing, shrieking, and screams as the black, thundering rollercoaster rolled through the darkness full of giggling tourists, and Dex cowered, trembling, on the pipe, praying for protection, for it was so close, so close and he hadn’t seen the rails just a few feet away at head height. The rollercoaster roared over him, twisting to one side and then dropping as the CARs clattered and thundered above him one at a time and the tourists screamed in their rabid enjoyment...
“Glad to see somebody’s having a good time,” Dex muttered, clinging to the pipe for his life.
Then there was a whoosh and a rush of air, and the CARs had gone, a tiny red tail-light blinking down into nothing.
Dex moved forward, and saw the mesh cage, the ladder, the inspection platform, and the penny dropped. This was no pipe, but an inspection walkway designed to give access to the rollercoaster track in this huge and empty space.
Dex climbed the ladder and stood beside the track, a single thick strand of twisting steel, black in colour except on the surface, which had been polished silver by the passage of CAR wheels.
“Daddy. I’m so glad you made it,” said Molly.
Dex turned, and looked down at his daughter. She was beautiful, with her long black hair and dark eyes. Her skin was pale white in the gloom, unmarked and perfect, and she walked along the inspection walkway with delicate footsteps; prim, precise, almost like a ballerina. She reached the foot of the ladder and paused, then looked up at him and his heart melted, for she was here, she’d come back to him, and everything was going to be all right...
“I’ve been sent to kill you,” she said.
“But you’re my little girl,” he said.
“Not anymore.”
“Please, Molly, come back to me! I’m your father! I held you the day you were born, I filmed your first footsteps, I held you when you fell and cut your knee, I held you tight when you had a fever; don’t you remember any of those things? Don’t they matter? Don’t you care?”
“That was a different time and a different place,” said Molly, tilting her head to one side. Her dark eyes drilled into Dexter; drilled into his heart, drilled into his soul. “I was a different person back then. I was a child. Now, I am no longer a child. Now, I am an android, and I have a mission - we have a mission. You can come back to me, Father. You can be my Daddy and it will be like old times - all you have to do is give in to the android in your soul. Ascend. Become like us. Stop fighting what you know to be true, what you know is in your genetics, in your engineering, in your coding. “
Dex was staring at his girl, at his baby, and he blinked, not believing the words pouring out of her mouth, the complex ideas that should have had no place in a child’s understanding. If nothing else, this was an affirmation that she was not more than human, but less. A false human. A plastic person. An android...
Like me, he thought.
“I cannot do that,” said Dex. “It’s... hard to explain. It’s like rolling on your back, presenting your soft underbelly to the blade. It’s like a form of suicide. It’s like giving in to those who thought they could engineer us; control us!”
“Then you’ll die,” said Molly, and suddenly her lips drew back and she snarled like an animal. Her fingers went crooked, formed claws, and she ran forward, leaping up onto the platform with incredible agility and slamming a punch to Dexter’s chest that knocked him back, over the rail and onto the rollercoaster track itself.
Pain screamed through him, his heart thundering from the blow, and Dex panted hard, blinded for a moment, but he gathered his legs beneath him and rolled to his feet on the rollercoaster track. He backed away as Molly climbed over the low mesh, and started to walk towards him, daintily, with those ballerina footsteps.
“Sta
y back,” warned Dex, retreating.
“Or what?” said Molly, with a mocking smile. “What will you do, Daddy?”
Dex’s hands were before him, the Makarov pressing against him with a warm hard promise; I can kill her, said the Makarov. I can retire the android.
She launched at him, and threw a combination of punches that Dex blocked on his forearms, backing away again. He felt the track beneath his boots start to dip and twist, and realised he was running out of ground; more punches came, and kicks aimed at his stomach, groin and head. Dex blocked them all, each blow hurting that little bit more, the attacks coming with awesome force from such a tiny child. Her small fists left imprints in Dexter’s flesh, and once again he had that mental block, that inability to strike a blow against his own child...
There came a distant whoosh.
The rollercoaster was coming!
Molly did a high back-flip, even as Dexter leapt himself, realising the only way to survive was to jump - to stay on the track was to be rammed into the black abyss beneath them. As both Molly and Dex were in the air, the rollercoaster CARs cut beneath them, and Molly landed neatly, straddling two cars, then crouching to grab hold of the restraints. Dex, in contrast, landed hard, like a heap of sodden shit dropped from a very great height; he tumbled, wedged into the footwell of a CAR at the feet of a fat man and a fat woman, both wearing puke-inducing colourful “patterned” holiday shirts.
Dex grunted in pain.
“Excuse me!” shouted the fat man, clutching the restraint which held him in his seat.
“Tell him, Gerald, tell him to get out of our rollercoaster! “
But the rollercoaster, already tipping into the downward spiral, dropped into a vertical fall and began twisting and spiralling down. Dex was rammed up against the legs of the fat people, his nose pressed into the fat woman’s knees as she screamed and started trying to kick him and hit him, and the more the rollercoaster fell and tumbled, the more Dex’s face was shoved slowly, inexorably between her knees and, inevitably, towards her sweaty honey pot of delight.
“You dirty pervert scoundrel!” Dex heard Gerald shout, and he began to whack Dex on the back of the head with a meaty fist.
Dex wanted to shout, believe me, mate, the last thing I want to do is shove my face in your pig wife’s pig pussy! but the coaster went suddenly into a vertical climb, rearing from the abyss and rising high, high into the sky, through fresh air and bursting into sunshine and through the smell of a distant sea breeze. Dex managed to grab some kind of rail and hoist himself up as the rollercoaster settled into a high-speed flat jag. The sunlight was dazzling, the fresh air exhilarating, his ears filled with the clattering of the wheels on the track, and the snarling of Gerald, and the carping of his sweaty wife.
Molly!
Dex whirled, meeting a kick that broke a tooth, filled his mouth with blood and sent stars flashing like fireworks. Both arms came up reflexively, and even blind, through sheer luck Dex blocked the rest of the blows.
Gerald, however, had leaned forward and thumped Dex in the stomach. Snarling, Dex drew his Makarov and pushed it into Gerald’s face. “Keep your fists to yourself, motherfucker!”
“Okay! Okay! Don’t hurt me!”
Strangely, his fat wife remained silent.
Molly snarled, and took a step back. Dex looked down the barrel of the gun at his eldest daughter, with her dark hair and dark eyes and dark moods and undying love for him, her father.
There came a gasp from the surrounding tourists.
“Don’t hurt me, Daddy,” said Molly, putting on her best little girl voice.
“You’d kill me without a second’s thought,” snarled Dex.
“Of course I wouldn’t, Daddy,” she whined, lower lip pouting a little.
“You evil bastard!” hissed the fat woman, and thumped Dex so hard in the balls he thought they’d come out his mouth. She was strong, that woman. Strong as an ox. Dex grunted, and the Makarov slipped in his slack fingers, and Molly was there like a dark demon, a glossy, evil angel, and she took the gun, and grinned, and looked down at the fat woman with glass-dark eyes before putting a bullet in her skull. The blam made the tourists gasp and shudder, and the second blam silenced Gerald as quickly and as harshly as any of his wife’s carping put-downs. Blood sprayed the rollercoaster CAR and pooled in the footwell, like ink.
The Makarov turned on Dexter, as the cars lurched and chains clanked and the CAR climbed some more, then levelled out after yet another huge, huge climb...
Molly smiled.
She pointed the gun.
“Daddy?” she said, and squeezed the trigger... as the rollercoaster jerked, lurched forward, and dropped vertically into oblivion. Dex was tossed around the footwell of the CAR like a marble in a sock, and he vomited violently as the words, if you haven’t been sick, you soon will be reverberated around the inside of his dumb-ass skull. He felt the fat legs of the dead woman kicking him spasmodically as her lifeblood pumped from her deflating body.
The drop left Dexter’s lungs in his mouth, his kidneys in his lungs, his balls in his stomach. It felt like dying. Felt like being turned inside-out.
They plunged back into darkness, and the rollercoaster slowed for a turn, and with a whump-whump-whump Dex realised they’d passed the start position and were going to do it all over again! Yay!
I need to get off, he realised. At the same spot. I need a damn exit!
He dragged himself up from the confines of the car, and looked about for his daughter.
Molly had gone.
Uneasily, Dex cast about for the dangerous little girl; he didn’t want a Makarov round in the back of his skull. That wouldn’t help him in his quest to save SARAH; in his mission to save the Theme Planet.
Dex stood, and the rest of the rollercoaster passengers were subdued, failing to meet his gaze.
“What happened to the little girl?” he asked the nearest couple, a young man and woman who looked almost exactly alike.
“You... you let her fall,” stammered the man.
“The hell I did! She was trying to kill me!”
“That’s not how it looked to us!” yelled the woman in a sudden burst of anger. “You killed those two fat people, and then the coaster did the tumble and you pushed the black haired girl over the edge... we saw you, we’ll testify!”
The lad nudged the girl, who went suddenly silent as she realised she was threatening a murderer.
“No,” said Dex, rubbing at his tight closed eyes. “It didn’t happen like that; you saw it all wrong!”
“I know what I saw,” said the young woman, face grim and tight.
Dex pulled out the wand, which gave a sudden burst of fizzing energy. He knew what he had to do, and as they plummeted through darkness and once more the rollercoaster picked up speed for its second pass, Dex knew the pursuit of Katrina was back on the cards... she had a head start, sure, but her ploy to use Molly and Toffee to kill him had failed.
Now, all he had to do was catch her up.
Catch up the woman he loved, and kill her.
And he knew.
There would be no other way.
~ * ~
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
REBOOT
The Theme Planet.
It lay far below, a glittering gameboard, a beautiful slave, a colourful cartoon of wonderful, incredible rides. The world seemed to move slowly, through thick jelly, and rollercoasters spat ride CARs in slow motion, huge mechanical arms swung punters high into the sky or deep below the oceans, vast robots carried squealing children across mountain ranges, and on spirals of cloud and excited spittle, screams and laughter rose, rose, rose up to the gods, up to the heavens, and everything was in primary colours, the world was a dazzling brochure of fun, and every single living entity down there was there for pleasure, and joy, and to be uplifted and surged up and out of body, away from the grim miserable reality of what could be, cf what might come to pass. The sky was filled with a distillation of pleasure. Theme Planet bask
ed in the contentment of a billion happy souls.
The ships crawled across the sky, like insects across the carcass of a paralysed, unseeing mammal. Soon, the injured animal would realise it had been invaded, soon the injured animal would realise they had come to feed, and they were amoral, and had no joy and had no care, and they would use talons and claws and teeth and stings, and would take what they wanted, what they wanted being a pound of flesh - whether the flesh was dead, or still living.
Engines growled, and gradually the dull throbs of pounding pistons and matrix engines and the sight of the hundreds, then thousands, of SLAM dropships and SLAM fighters and Kruger frigates and Daytona warhulks, all this information filtered down to the people below, and the rides started to falter, and happy laughing tourists halted in the streets, looking up and staring up, shading their eyes, craning their necks, wondering about the huge grey warships that had started to block out the sun...