by Mick Farren
"The Eloi want to know what input you might have regarding the current crisis."
"Our input?"
"They credit you with more experience in these things than they have." Queen Mina's voice was royally contemptuous. "The Eloi, I suppose, need all the help they can get? Having failed to grasp the tactical basics to avoid being eaten by flowers."
Sternwood gestured acquiescently with a prosthetic. "You could say that." Mina was suspicious. "I'd have thought the ship itself would make most of the decisions. It must have been in situations like this before?"
"That would be true, except the ship tends to be reactive. The Eloi hope for some kind of more outgoing suggestions, since, it would appear, they fear the ship might decide to reduce itself an eterna-pod in the face of danger."
"Eterna-pod?"
"A huge space seed, able to grow again after a period of dormancy. If that were to happen, the Eloi - and us - for that matter, would perish very early in the process."
Slide, the Queen, Lupo, and Rosa all received this news thoughtfully, but no one felt inclined to be the first to rely. In the end, Lupo turned to the wheeled half-man and shrugged a slight, uniquely nosferatu shrug. "What can I tell them? I've seen wars and am intimately familiar with death, but I have little or no advice in this context."
Rosa Coote nodded. "None us are exactly military experts, except maybe Slide, although if the tales told are true, he's more of a specialist in diversion and desertion…and maybe street fighting."
Slide was about to defend himself, when Queen Mina interrupted. "Actually I have some grasp of battle tactics. I organized a number of military campaigns against the Slimy Things on Mars before I entered my narcotic phase."
The Eloi again chattered at Sternwood. They seemed impatient. "So what should they do?"
"They should get busy masturbating that great sack of goo to ensure it keeps with the present plan and doesn't turn into a seed on us. Or something equally damaging and ridiculous. All available power to the screens. They can't fight off the pirate fleet, there are far too many of them, so everything depends on how much of a battering the screens can take. If they go down, then we have only one thing in our favor."
"What's that?"
"The enemy's intention is to plunder, not vaporize. The biocraft is a very valuable prize. The profit-taking on the tech alone would be planetary GNP. We might well find ourselves in more danger when the pirates fight over it among themselves. As they inevitably will."
Slide couldn't fault her reasoning. Mina Harker's mind had become far more acute since she had left the drug-soaked fleshpots of Mars. He was also calculating the odds, when the pirates stormed the Eloi ship, of being able quickly to change sides in the confusion since, in all their fancy battle armor, the four of them looked considerably more like pirates than Eloi. He, of course, said nothing in front of the Eloi. It might be necessary to grease a few of them for theatrical effect and authenticity when the moment of realignment came.
The Eloi chattered a third time at Sternwood. Impatience had turned to urgency. "They say that the shields will last…well…roughly translated into your time scale, about another twenty minutes."
Mina arched an eyebrow. "I can only suggest they stand by to repel borders."
Sternwood translated this for the Eloi. This seemed to be enough for them, and they hurried away, apparently issuing twittering instructions as they went, back to the center of the cortex. Slide glanced at Mina. "You think they have any chance of handling this?"
The former Queen of Mars shook her head. "None."
And her estimation of the Eloi Mina's was confirmed all too quickly and all too clearly, when they deployed their defending force, presumably, as Mina had told them, to repel boarders. The ones who came to make their stand in the cortex were in full fantasy, and there was no reason to believe that others in different parts of the ship were not the same. The first to appear were a squad of archers, moving in precise military formation, longbows a high port and light gossamer cloaks flowing. Lupo almost choked. "Archers?"
Rosa Coote more scornful than surprised. "They look like bloody elves."
The archers were followed by what Slide would describe later as a "phalanx of operatic fucking hoplites." By this point, Lupo had regained some of his composure, but still couldn't believe what he was seeing. "It has been a long time since I saw anything as fatuous as this."
Slide gestured as fatalistically he could in his heavy armor. "It happened all the time back on the Darogad. They came at each other from out of all manner of historical fantasies. You'd see mounted Mamalukes with lances and scimitars hurling themselves at Nazi-style panzers."
"And did the Mamalukes expect to win?"
"That's been a hotly debated point ever since that particular incident."
"No Mamalukes left to ask?"
"Exactly."
"Are the Eloi stupid enough to think they might win?"
Slide looked bleakly at the Eloi force. The best word was theatrical. The lightweight silver armor, the long slender lances of the infantry, their small circular shields, and the apparent fragility of their fused-glass swords suggested nothing less that a wholly negative and ass-backwards grasp of reality. When an archer was plucked at random by an orchid, apparently as a snack, his companions looked round wondering what to do, Slide could only, slowly and sadly, shake his head. "The bastards really are as dumb as an flower's lunch."
From that point on, there was really very little to do but wait until to see if the shields went down as the Eloi had predicted, and watch the apparently inevitable come to pass on the repro-vision display. Slide knew he should have acted on his original instinct to jump out of there. Now it was totally too late. No way was he going launch himself back to the Gantenbrink through all the flashing, throbbing mess of energy that surrounded the beleaguered biocraft.
A four-pod Treen fighter, that would have been more at home over the silicone flame belts of the planet Venus, suddenly double-eex-zee winked out and was gone. A second-generation Cylon craft, with the trademark, oscillating redeye, was consumed by a plasma fireball. A Steely Dan suddenly blew apart in spectacular explosion for no reason that was immediately apparent to Slide. The pirates were certainly taking a beating, but for each pirate that flared, burned, or merely vanished, a dozen more remained to take his place. The Eloi shields pulsed and shimmered under the constant onslaught of multiple weapons, and were taking on the violet-through-ultra sheen that indicated they were stretched to the limit. Spectacular as the battle might be, Slide kept at least one wary eye on the cruiser Starhawk that simply held its position and poured relentless phaser fire at the biocraft shieldwall. Although, right then, it carried no markings of planet or fealty, he knew that it had, in various timelines served as the grim flagship of Chacedon the Terrible, who's concubine had, more than once, been the equally malevolent Nuygen von Bulow. A part of his mind was kept occupied with an examination of the possibility that one, if not two, entities that really hated him were close at hand, an eventuality at high odds with his total disbelief in coincidence. Maybe it wasn't really the Eloi or even the orchids that had brought him to the biocraft. Could it be that he was really being set up for one, if not two, or his most sworn and vindictive enemies?
Needless to say, he didn't communicate any of this to his companions. They had more than enough on their minds right there and then, and he also was far from sure how they, especially Lupo, would react, if he revealed himself as a potential liability. The situation was plainly turning bad, and Rosa Coote's expression was grim. "It can't be too long now."
Mina concurred. "There does come a time when surrender is the best remaining option."
Lupo glanced at Sternwood. "You want to relay that piece of advice to these creatures?"
Sternwood wheeled his trolley around. "No. I doubt they know how to run up a white flag anyway."
Had the four not been sealed in their armor, they would have noticed the a distinct smell of burning vegetation,
but they couldn't miss the wreath of green-tinged smoke that drifted.
"I would say that boded bad."
Slide scowled. "Really bad."
Sternwood revved his chair. "I'm out of here."
Lupo, for whom desertion was a capital offense, reached for his blaster, but Slide stayed his hand. "Let the poor bastard find himself a bolt-hole if he can. I mean, look at him."
Moments after Sternwood had sped away a rip appeared in the outer shield's integrity. The edges of this energy wound sun-flared with such intensity that it momentarily blanked over the repro-vision. The inner shields briefly burned with white fire and died. A Convair saucercraft came through the resulting gap, flowed by a beamship, and then whole slew of assorted pirate vehicles. Although their gunports were wide open and still hot from the bombardment, no fire was directed at the Eloi ship.
"As soon as they get a few of the bigger ships through they'll be looking to board us."
"Soon as the burn through whatever passes for a hull, they'll doubtless send in a scouting part of war ferrets."
Lupo watched the pirates close on the biocraft with a detached, nosferatu interest. "I imagine they'll kill everyone aboard."
Rosa Coote checked the defenders as though assessing numbers. "They will preserve enough, I suspect, to sodomize and otherwise have their piratical way with.
"Does that mean the next episode will be seamless and shameless cross species rape and pillage."
"I would expect so."
Mina Harker agreed. "Vertebrates and invertebrates, all going at it."
Story so far: Yancey Slide, Idimmu Demon of the Tenth Continuum, in the company of Mina Harker, Rosa Coote, and Lupo the nosferatu, finds himself cursing his continuing run of monolithic bad luck as the Pirates of the Lower Quadrant board the Eloi biocraft bent of an surfeit of rape and pillage far in excess of any old fashioned “kill the men and carry off the women.”
Episode Twelve
In Space, You Scream
The clear plexiglass helmet of Slide's space armor was locked down tight, and mercifully muffled him from some the cacophony that howled all round; the shrieking glossolalia of sexual depredation that fragmented the smoke-filled and still burning cortex of the biocraft as the Pirates of the Lower Quadrant exacted their savagely traditional tribute. He stepped back hurriedly as a bouncing sag-sack morphed into something quite unrecognizable; complicated, dripping, and obscene. The ugliness leaped high and then fell with a pornographic squelch on a pair of young Eloi, male and a female, hurling them to a deck that was already awash in loathsomely multicolored fluids, and wrenching furiously at their delicate protesting flesh. The helmet also preserved Slide from the overwhelming stench of secretion, distention, debasement, disgorgement, and bodily abuse, all around him, as Slime Things slathered any entity that came within range of their drool, and priapic molluscs rammed rampant appendages into orifices never designed to accommodate such calcium-based erections. Bodies heaved, mandibles snackered, limbs and tentacles waved and intertwined to the point of lewd and grossly indecent surrealism, and, all the time, protesting voices howled in the face of polymorphous violation. To his immediate left, a crew of quasi-amazons of Nardaz with cabalistic tattoos displayed under Lucite body armor, and sporting heinous strap-ons, slapped and sodomized more stripped and screaming Eloi, irrespective of gender, bending them over control consuls, forcing them spreadeagled against bulkheads, or simply taking the submissive casualties of onslaught on all fours on the befouled deck, hard-riding them like dogs amid the muck. And even Slide had to raise an eyebrow when one huge, chromadryn-soaked hot-for-the-lethal centurion dispatched her lust-object with a deathblast, execution-style, at the lustmorde moment of rapid-fire multi-orgasm. The Saphs of Nardaz prided themselves on knowing how to party, but Slide suspected the homicidal showing off as an attempt to exceed the extremes of excess, and a trying their damnedest to look the Baddest of Bad among Very Bad Company. Even in the confusion, and with smoke-impaired vision, Slide could see that the Saphs had their corruption cut out for them if they were to claim the dubious title they seemingly so desired. StormKlown Nialapods, with exposed ganglia seething in slop-sacs, locked cloud minds with random victims, and ripped the raw and glowing orgone-skeins of conscious energy straight from the brain. Meanwhile, the Corsairs of H'nad had secured a side ventricle of the cortex and were already setting up their ceremonial hempen devices, while Holy Rounders with electro-whips collected what they liked to call - while laughing nastily - their subjects for geometric stress experiments. The Treens simply killed. These were the crews from the x-quad Telezeros that Slide had watched performing in space, as the Pirates of the Lower Quadrant had swung into massed attack. As old-school Treens, they could do nothing else. All concepts of less drastic or more subtle sources of excitement had been bred out of them during the era of the Mekon. The zom that was with them had no such limitations. The indigenous and semi domesticated tusked tracker dog of Northern Venus had retained all of its physical instincts, plus a few additional and conditioned nasty cross-species conditioned habits. The Treens and their pet/mascot advanced down the one of cortex's radial access passages, fusing everything that moved with their raypistols, and soaking up the death-release energy shimmer in the horizontal flat-tubes of their purpose-modified gold band-wrap. Like the sag-sack, the Saphs, and the Corsairs, the majority of the invaders went after Eloi. The biocraft was, after all, the pirates' common-prize, and that made its inhabitants the designated victims. A few attackers, however, were not so discriminating. The Slime Things, the Nialapods, the suc-Grreeezz, and their ilk went after any creature, friend or foe that had an aperture that suited their purpose. The constant small arms fire also led Slide to suspect that, in the confusion, crew beefs and interspecies rivalries were also being settled, and when the butchers bill for the engagement was calculated, the reality would be that more pirates had been slaughtered by their own than by the pathetically inept Eloi defenders with their delicate bows and spears. What other reason could their be for the sudden attack by a motley crew of lipstick-lace pervo-humanoids on three Mk 1 Warrior Cylons except the yarons-old cry of "Remember the Galactica?" Slide was thinking of withdrawing from the cortex to some less active area of the ship, when Rosa Coote moved into his field of vision. Like him, she was still in full space armor with the helmet locked down. Her voice came over his helmet radio, like a throaty crackle. suggestive. "You're sitting this orgy out, Yancey Slide?" "I don't think the party needs my help." "I never took you for a voyeur, Slide." "I'm not here to watch." "And definitely not tempted to strip your suit and go carnal?" Slide shook his head. "I don't think so." "Not even after a couple of shots of mugwump juice?" "No way?" "Yellow-bug powder?"
"Get thee behind me, Coote."
Maybe a century or more earlier, Slide might have gone into full demon rut and given even the Saphs a run for their money in debauchery, but too much happenstance had been battering on him for full twelve episodes and more. Inclination to debauch was at low ebb, drained by cumulative circumstance. Also he had more than a passing concern with what might happen next. The Pirates of the Lower Quadrant were going at their riot of rapine as though there was no tomorrow. But tomorrow never knows, and Slide was interested in having a tale to tell beyond the moment, plus some guarantee of a future in which to tell it. He was far from certain how long the biocraft would stand up to this kind of treatment. The big Eloi ship was, after all, a living entity, self-aware, and if the now-missing Sternwood was to be believed, sensitive, maybe to the point of petulance. In a more conventional metal and electron vessel, the cortex would be the bridge, the nerve center of all ship-board operations. It the command center had fallen to the pirates with such ease, he could easily image that orgies of carnage that were going on in other, less crucial areas of the ship.
A one-eyed simian chud, with hideous dueling scars, came at Slide, with a keg o'grog under one arm and a brandishing a cutlass and pike in its second and third hands, clearly intending mischief. Suspec
ting a crude, blind-tiger morph, Slide shot the thing, and then spun his blaster back into its holster with deft nonchalance. Rosa Coote looked around and frowned. "How long do you think the craft, and whatever passes for it's nervous system, is going to tolerate all this looting, burning, and fornicating inside its essential mind?"
Clearly demons, no matter how diverse their origins, thought alike. Slide shrugged, but not without unease. "I have no idea, but I can imagine a bunch of really nasty scenarios should the ship get multilaterally pissed off."
Rosa gestured to the huge misshapen dermal ovoid that was centrepiece of the cortex. "If that's the ship's brain, there's serious neural-damage going on right now."
Rosa didn't exaggerate. Thirty meters above them, the tree-like gantry that surrounded the ovoid was on fire. Where selected Eloi had previously serviced the soft-ovoid's function, the primary fun was now recreational hanging. Except the hangings would clearly be a temporary recreation. A gang that called themselves the Pyros of the Caribbean hadn't been able to resist the dramatic temptation of an extensive but flimsy structure that proved to be highly flammable. They had zippoed the catwalks and fire licked along struts and spars, and up stairs and ladders. The Roy Bean Society of Erotic Asphyxiators were forced by the flames to take their ropes and go elsewhere in search of a high beam, a long drop, and some suitable sacrifices to dance orgasmic on the empty air. The outer sheath of the biocraft's "brain" that held the essential sentient ooze was blistered and scorched already, and, in a couple of places, burned away, exposing an inner and more sensitive membrane.
"If that thing's got any capacity for pain, that's gotta hurt."
"I could be enjoying the experience."
"You wanna bet your continuance on that?
Slide shook his head. "Not me, lady."
As if in confirmation of Rosa's first observation, the banks of Eloi-eating orchids along the outer walls of the cortex were waving nervously, except for a few, clearly sterner flora, who grabbed all the digestible attackers they could reach. Slide grimaced. "For all we know, it could go into eterna-pod in the next minute."