by Andy Remic
Franco squinted again at the alloy business card. Van Gok's. Wasn't he that bloke who cut off his nose? Or something? A poet, or summat? Used to paint poems? Or was it the one who helped fat women disguise the wobbles? And wrote that bestselling celebrity navel: Hide the Fatty? Or maybe it was a celebrity shit? I mean, chef?
Franco stopped. He could see Van Gok's up ahead, through the haze of sweat and heat. And gods, it was hot. Like a furnace. Hotter than Hell. But a damn sight more fun...
Purple neon glittered. Come to Momma, said the neon letters.
Franco tottered forward like a baby taking its first steps.
Pippa would beat him for being such a Bad Boy!
He brightened. Hell yes!
Outside Van Gok's stood three tall gangers. They were identical. They had the same fluorescent purple hair, the same silvered breasts, the same powerful, beautiful features. One moved to Franco, and touched him lightly on the arm.
"We have many pleasures inside," she said. "Pleasures of body, mind and soul, pleasures of which you could never dream, pleasures only allowable to gangers but here, you can have anything and everything, anything filtered from the magic of an infinite mind, anything you can dream, we can provide..." She licked glistening, moist lips.
"Anything?" breathed Franco, hoarsely.
"Anything," she crooned, her voice music.
"Can I have sausage and horseradish?" he said, almost whimpering like a naughty little schoolboy.
"As much as you can spread across your mighty, hairy body!"
"That'll do. I'm home, chicken, I'm home..."
The three gangers led Franco under a dark archway, and into Van Gok's. The last one halted on the threshold, turned, and made eye contact with a woman across the street. She was tall, and thin, and gangly, and looked like a man. She wore simple black clothes and hair like a fused tangle of lightning-struck barbed-wire.
Their eyes remained locked for a few moments, and the watching woman gave a nod, as if dismissing the ganger. The ganger promptly disappeared from sight, leaving an open archway: like a maw leading straight down into Hell.
With a sound, the woman shifted, merged with the crowd, and disappeared into the heaving mass of Downtown Nechudnazzar.
"And so you see, technically, I was simply walking down the street. Yes, I did get dragged drunkenly in Van Gok's weird and wonderful emporium, but then it went black, and that can't be my fault, right? I mean, how can it be my fault that everything went black? I'm just an honest geezer, a lad, a bloke, a dude, and I'm riding through life on the bubble of chance that is my existence. Yes, I'd had a few whiskies, but who doesn't? One certainly doesn't expect to be kidnapped and put into a kidnap situation and then brutally abused to the extent where you think, y'know, that your very existence is threatened and so you get a bit violent, in a purely self-defending kind of violent way, and Opera accidentally cuts off her own head in the kerfuffle and bam! You're in a cell with an enraged but deactivated org who thinks she's the shit, but, no offence meant, crone, she's not. Because she's been deactivated. Made safe. You see what I'm saying?"
"Do you ever shut up?" said the old org who had, indeed, been deactivated. Yes, her lasers targeted, but there was no laser in the laser. It had been a very tense few moments when Franco Haggis had thought he was about to become a Franco Haggis kebab. But no lasers came. No burning red purification emerged, and the clanking old org had sighed and grumbled and muttered and consigned herself to the corner of the cell cube, as far away from Franco as she could get. Unfortunately for her, it wasn't far enough. Franco could talk for the Quad-Gal board. Or bored. He prided himself in it. He'd won medals. Or at least, time in the brig.
"Actually, I have been known for my scintillating conversations," said Franco, primly, puffing out his chest, which was currently naked, as befitted his prisoner status. He had been allowed to wear only his Big White Asda Underpants (BWAUs). And flip flops.
"You got any more gifts, wanker?"
Franco completely ignored, or was simply oblivious to, any form of sarcasm. "Actually, yes. I am considered a sexual athlete." His eyes gleamed. Then they fell on the mechanised mess that was the old org. She was indeed an old model. One of the first. What flesh hadn't been replaced by metal and machine had been replaced with bad skin graft. She was like a merged explosion of car factory and female sex doll.
"A sexual athlete?" She sounded interested.
Uh-oh.
"Er, ahem. I'm married, you know."
"You look like the divorced sort, to me."
Franco reddened. How did she know that? How could she know that? The bitch! The bugger! Franco was indeed divorced. He had married the girl of his dreams, but through a very strange set of esoteric circumstances, his bride-to-be had transmogrified into a kind of zombie genetic super-soldier - a one-way process, which left her eight feet in height, mucus of skin, disgusting of flesh, an eight foot monster who looked like she was inside-out. Doing the right thing, the best thing, the honourable thing, Franco had indeed married his betrothed - and gone through with the evil deed. Several times, if he remembered right. Often in his nightmares. However, after a further series of adventures, Mel - for thus was her name - had filed for divorce. She cited reasons such as Franco being unreasonable to live with. And lusting after other women... which wasn't that surprising when you considered his wife was a zombie, and Franco would lust after a one-legged whore in a vat of supermodels. He was that kind of dude.
"Actually, I am divorced," Franco said primly, "but I have a long line of women lining up to be the next Mrs Haggis."
"So that's your name? Haggis?"
"Yes. Haggis. Franco Haggis. Shaken, not stirred. Except, you know, when I've been shaken."
"Which would be right now?"
"Er, yes. Opera decapitating herself, that was hardcore shit. Left me a bit rattled. After all, I'm here to, er, yes, well. I've said enough."
"And killed enough, by all the sounds of it." The old org started to cackle, rocking backwards and forwards. Her machinery hissed and spat occasionally, and she belched old oil smoke, and Franco stared at her, as he would a particularly mangy dog.
"So then," said Franco, conversationally. "What you in for?"
"Murder."
"Aaah."
"Well, they call it murder, but I call it self-defence. After all, they was only gangers, they was. And we're practically at war. Damn police shouldn't have come poking around my neighbourhood. We have walls and things. And gates. Their disguises didn't stand up to much."
"So you killed the Royal Ganger Police? Wowsers. How many?"
The old org shrugged. "Thirty, forty. It's hard to count when they all get mashed up in a slurry pulp of severed limbs."
Franco shuffled along his bunk, until he was as far away from the aged psycho as was humanly possible without actually merging into the steel of the cube prison's wall. He felt suddenly, deeply vulnerable in his BWAUs and flip flops. It wasn't exactly War Grade Armour. It wasn't exactly nuke-proof Permatex.
"Wonderful," he said. Shit. Just my luck. Put in a cell with a police-murdering metal psychopath machine-woman! Hot damn and bloody hot bollocks. How does I get myself into these damn situations, eh? I ask you, eh?
And Franco slept.
In his sleep, he dreamed. He dreamed Pippa came to him, naked and voluptuous, and his hands ran down her naked flanks, along the powerful muscles of her arms and belly, and she smiled at him, and there was love in her eyes, and Franco chuckled to himself because this was just natural, and normal, and good, and the way it should be. She moved into him, pressing her body against his, and he groaned in longing and lust, but something more, something deeper, for he had always loved Pippa, always been addicted to her worse than any injected narcotic, or even a lightly fried sausage/horseradish muffin.
"Franco," she said, and kissed him, and their mouths pressed and her breath was sweet and their tongues entwined, and she groaned in fast-rising lust, and need, and hot bubbling ecstasy - and Franco's eyes flared open in
sudden, wild, hard, insane panic, as "Franco," she said, and kissed him, and their mouths pressed, but her lips were metal, and her breath was foul like broken old engines, and their tongues entwined and her tongue was scaled, metal, like a robot snake, and she groaned in fast-rising lust, and need, and hot bubbling ecstasy -
"Get off!" screeched Franco, shoving the old org away. She clanked back, leg hydraulics hissing, and grinned at him, licking her lips.
"You taste real fine, wanker!"
"Eurch! Ouerch! How could you do that? How could you take such advantage? I feel," he pouted, "quite abused." He spat out a mouthful of black engine oil. "Yeuch!"
"An old gal has to take what she can get." The org retired to her own bunk, and was soon snoring, oil bubbles frothing at her lips. Her mechanicals made whirring and grinding noises deep in her machine bowels.
Rubbing his lips on his arm at least a hundred times, Franco retired back on his own bunk, grumbling, and casting many a suspicious glance at the old crone. "Cheeky git," he muttered, and pressed his earlobe comm in a vain attempt at communicating with Pippa.
There was nothing but a muted, static hiss. Obviously, here in the cell, signals were blocked.
"Bugger," said Franco, and tried hard not to fall asleep.
"Good morning!"
She stood in the doorway to the cell, and she was smiling a Big Smile. Franco groaned, and sat up, rubbing at his tousled beard and scratching his shaved head. Where am I? What's going on? What happened? Consciousness gave him a kick. I'm in prison. I'm a prisoner. Ah, shit, that happened...
Franco squinted at the woman. She was tall and thin and gangly, and wore an asexual simple black outfit Franco had seen on all prison warders. She had a mass, a mop, a tangle of frizzy black curly hair, a mass so amassed it towered over her head by a good foot, and fell away down her back like a plate of chaos-spilled barbed-wire spaghetti. The hair was a mess. It was more than a mess. Franco scowled at the hair. It was a fucking abomination. And yet there was something different about this woman, despite the bad hair, the narrow, cruel eyes, the weird nervous ticks when she spoke or smiled. She carried a strange little air of authority. As if she was important. Or as if she thought she was important, which could amount to the same thing when applied to any individual's behaviour.
"I," said the frizzy woman, with an air of dignity, "am Theresa Sourballs. Teddy, to my enemies. A-ha. Ha."
"So?"
"I am Governor of the Nechudnazzar Correctional and Reintegration Facility."
"So?"
"You may address me as Ma'am."
"Fuck off."
Sourballs stared hard at Franco Haggis. "You will pay me some respect, young man!"
"Or what you gonna do? Put me in prison?" He sniggered. Nobody else did. He realised Sourballs was backed up by about six hefty guards with steel truncheons and Steyr laser cannons. Franco clamped his mouth shut. If he'd had a hammer and nails, he would have nailed it shut.
Sourballs's eyes had narrowed, and she turned, and waved to two guards. They wheeled in a terrible and frightening contraption, a huge black cube with trailing cables and weird sharpened spikes. Franco gave a little whimper as his mind tumbled back through the years to his incarceration as a mental patient at The Mount Pleasant Hilltop Institution, the "nice and caring and friendly home for the mentally challenged." This all felt terribly real and horrible, and Franco regressed, Franco mumbled, Franco shivered, and Franco realised that everybody was staring at him.
"Not the electrodes," he blurted.
"Pardon?" said Sourballs, frizzy hair bobbing.
"Don't stick 'em in me! I beg you! I'll tell you everything... not that I bloody know anything, nobody round here tells me nuffink."
"Haggis, this is a TV."
"Eh?"
"A TV. It shows TV pictures. Shows and filmys and the best show ever created: Torture! Until you killed the star, that is..."
"Ahh. Yes. That little misunderstanding."
"No misunderstanding, I believe, although we'll let the judge sort that one out. I think you'll find she'll find you guilty. And then it's the death penalty for you." Sourballs smiled. Her teeth were small, yellow and crooked.
"Who's the judge?" said Franco, scowling.
"The Mistress. My boss. She's also the Prime of Core Government, and owns the TV network that employed Miss Opera, the woman whom you decapitated. Switch on the TV!"
The TV, which was indeed a TV and not a torture contraption, was switched on.
Franco blinked, at an enlarged photograph of his very own face. At the bottom of the screen scrolled other news items - gang rapes, murders, false gangers, breach of gangercide, the impending war with the orgs, an earthquake in northern Clone Terra that killed one thousand, five hundred and eighty seven gangers - but here and now, Franco Haggis was the most important item of news.
Franco paled. This didn't look good.
The newscaster was speaking. Sourballs turned up the volume. "And as can be seen by this photograph, Franco Haggis, most abusive murderer of the lovely, talented and beautiful Opera, erstwhile TV presenter on the Quad-Gal phenomenon Torture! will go on trial tomorrow, but we all know how that one should go, heh, heh, heh, after all, look at the evil weaselly little bastard... And it has been confirmed that Franco Haggis was also responsible for the earthquake in northern Clone Terra with his illegal offworld spaceship landing, and thus directly responsible for the one thousand, five hundred and eighty-seven deaths... it can be deduced that Franco Haggis was an assassin sent especially to execute our lovely Opera, and so tomorrow be ready with your voting panels during the trial, as we wouldn't like the little bastard to get off with anything other than the death penalty after months of torture..."
"I love a fair trial," mumbled Franco, dejectedly.
"...it has been officially announced, Franco Haggis is Public Enemy Number One - and on the off-chance that he escapes, every member of the public has a right to execute him on sight! Now, let's pray that he escapes, folks, so we can prime those high-powered rifles and get partying down on the range..."
Sourballs switched off the TV.
Franco held his head in his hands. Pippa's words rang in his ears like the screech of a military drill instructor.
No bringing attention to yourself, right? We can do without compromising the mission before it even begins! The last thing Quad-Gal and Combat K need is to be caught up in the middle of some dogshit dogfight.
And his response? Of course. I am a total professional.
Oh, how those words were biting him on the arse right now! He considered his face, beamed out all over Cloneworld, to gangers and orgs alike. So what, that they were about to go to war - if the truth be told, they were about to go to war on him!
Franco rubbed at his face as Sourballs wheeled out the TV and left. In the corner, the old org cackled.
"You're in the shit, dear boy," she grinned.
"You don't say."
"What you need to do is escape."
"You reckon? I hadn't fucking thought of that one."
"If you're nice to me, I'll tell you where the tunnel is."
Franco considered this. "Nice?" he said, squinting at the old cyborg and covering his nuptials with both cupped hands in a protective and defensive manner.
"Real nice," she said, licking her oily lips and advancing with hisses and clanks of org hydraulics.
CHAPTER TWO
HARD TIMES
The room was bare, except for a table and a wardrobe of steel. She opened the steel wardrobe and took out the WarSuit. Standard QGM issue. It was her size. She pulled it on, activated the Permatex protection controls. The WarSuit gave a tiny whine, a buzz, a reassuring hum. It felt like regressing; becoming an embryo, safe in a womb. She pulled on her boots. Tied back her hair in a tight tail. She weighed the gun thoughtfully. Took up the photo. Studied it, and placed it back on the table. With a click, she removed the mag from the gun. Fifty rounds. Then she drew her sword with a hiss. She stared at the gleamin
g dark blade, forged from a single molecule. She weighed the blade thoughtfully, then very carefully - so as not to slice off her own fingers - re-sheathed the weapon. She stared at the gun - it was a special gun. Very special. Nothing like it had ever been seen in Quad-Gal - it came from way beyond the Four Galaxies. Beyond the known Life Bubbles. The gun was alive. And it spoke to her. She nodded. She accepted the mission. It was why she was born. Why she was created. Why she breathed, why she ate. She tucked the gun into a holster at her belt. Walked to the door, paused. Studied the door. She felt new. Like everything was unique. Many past memories were gone; she had to make new ones. She reached out, opened the door. Rain was pouring from purple bruised skies. She stepped out into the rain.
The Mistress was made of snakes. Currently, she was enjoying a hot bath in a pit of molten honey-oil. The Mistress had broken into her many component parts, at least a hundred pink-white, writhing, snake-like individual entities, each one as thick as a man's wrist and a metre long, each with tiny black eyes and a flickering, cherry-red tongue. They squirmed, the snakes, squirmed in the oil, a blur of constant movement like a bucket of albino eels. The backing track was a gentle hissing, with an occasional slop of bath oil.
The Monastery was a huge edifice at the heart of Nechudnazzar. It sat atop a steel and glass tower and was fitted out with marble tiles, million-piece jigsaw mosaics, white stone statues and heavy velvet drapes. A cool breeze blew through the chamber, bringing with it the low-level drone of heaving city life below; indeed, all around. This was the Mistress's home, seat of business, seat of power.
There was a similar building at the twin Clone Terra capital city of Raifnazzar, two hundred klicks southwest, over the Bastard Straits as the crow flies. A third - making up the Mistress's triumvirate of Clone Terra Headquarters - was located in the city of TV, the heart of her media empire, some six hundred kilometres north of Nechudnazzar, and just east of the mammoth Wooky Peaks which cut across the continent like broken teeth, spilled from a World Leviathan.