‘You are the one!’ the little girl with the grisly stick said. ‘You can arrange for our release.’
Even on the reptilian face, the confusion was obvious. ‘I cannot, I am afraid. I am just here to take him. Would you excuse me, please?’
The little girl stared at him. Even with most of her face concealed by a dead-skin mask, Vic was pretty sure she was about to have a tantrum.
Mr Hat watched the words form in the girl’s mouth. She was about to order the inmates to attack him. He sighed inwardly, pretending to himself that he didn’t want violence, but had that been the case, he wouldn’t have left his comfortable bath chair behind. His automaton worshippers were perched in trees, or on the roofs of the surrounding houses, like a silent murder of crows.
The girl opened her mouth to shout the order and her head went spinning into the air. For Mr Hat, everything slowed down. It took an age for the other people in the dead-skin masks to react. The three thermal blades on the smart monofilament rotated around his hat at speed. Normally he couldn’t use this weapon because most of his opponents wore armour, but here he could walk among all this soft flesh, the white-hot blades spinning like a rotor. The smart monofilament changed length and height, guiding the weapons to where they could cause the most damage. People went down as if they were being reaped. There was a nearly constant circle of red spray around him. He moved forwards, making for Mr Berger.
Mr Hat lowered his tail and fired the clustered-disc grenade from the launcher attached to it. The canister flew out and then transformed into secondary munitions. The tiny razor-sharp, spinning discs cleared a cone-shaped hole in the people who had closed in behind the lizard.
Mr Hat had synched the needlers with the revolutions of the three spinning blades. He target-locked one of the inmates and ’faced the order to fire. The needles would only fire when they could travel through the spinning blades cleanly. Each needle load had a different neurotoxin – again, they weren’t weapons he got to use very often, but the non-augmented environment was allowing him to have some fun. Some of his targets’ hearts stopped, others had their respiratory systems paralysed, a few tried to flee in abject terror and died from shock, several hit the ground in the throes of a terrible, final orgasm that would eventually overwhelm their nervous systems and kill them, and a couple were caught in the throes of powerful hallucinations.
Still they kept coming, charging him. Few of them made it anywhere near him, and those who did were mostly limbless when they got there. They were, however, slowing him down, particularly when he had to start walking across a carpet of slippery corpses. He used his clawed feet to dig into the human bodies for more purchase.
Vic found himself lying on the ground, painted red from head to foot. Elodie was standing over him, a knife in each hand. She was also covered in red. Vic looked up at her, panicking.
‘When I said I’d cut off your face, I didn’t—’
‘Get up!’ Elodie demanded, not even trying to hide the contempt in her voice. She did, however, hand him one of the red knives. ‘Down!’ she shouted and landed on top of him, forcing him to the ground. The multiple bangs of superheated air came so rapidly that they merged into a long ripping sound. The night became red as two G-carriers rose over the houses firting their forward rotary lasers, reducing hundreds of people to a humid red mist. The G-carriers stopped firing but remained hanging in the night air above the houses.
‘C’mon!’ Elodie said and rolled into a crouch.
‘I don’t wanna!’ Vic protested.
Elodie turned on him, the young boy’s face a mask of fury. ‘I will stab you in the fucking stomach and then tell them who you are!’
Vic thought about killing her right there and then, but she was too frightening for him to act against her. He started to get up.
The slaved G-carriers had momentarily cleared a path for him. Mr Hat’s augmented vision pierced the red mist as he quickened his pace. He couldn’t risk firing the strobe guns too close to Mr Berger. As quickly as the rotary lasers killed hundreds of people, still more filled the gap, charging into the spinning blades and deadly needles.
Now, he thought. His automaton worshippers launched themselves from the roofs and out of the trees. They landed in a line and charged the dead-skin mask-wearing inmates. It looked like a wave breaking. Soft, unaugmented human flesh met the armoured superstructure of the eyeless, anachronistically dressed automatons, and broken human bodies went flying through the air.
Mr Hat brought the spinning blades in closer to his hat and followed behind the automatons, pausing only momentarily to dispatch an inmate they had missed. More came from behind. He turned and began firing as the blades started spinning again. He was almost at the car.
It looked as if houses, trees, ground cars and road had suddenly thrown themselves into the air in a long line. The heavy electromagnetically driven shells fired from the window-frame-mounted cannon batteries all but disintegrated any inmates they hit and churned up the earth where they impacted. The air was filled with fragmented of bodies and larger chunks of spinning debris.
‘No!’ Mr Hat screamed in rage and frustration. ‘What the fuck are you doing?’ he demanded over the ’face link.
‘We—’ a frightened-sounding Isaiah began.
‘Not you, the other moron!’ he demanded. A chunk of concrete hit his hat and sent him flying. Only a chemically and neunonically controlled nervous system allowed him the presence of mind to continue ’facing.
‘We detected a large-scale disturbance,’ Al told him. ‘We were dealing with it.’
‘Cease the barrage immediately. That large-scale disturbance is me committing mass murder, you fucking idiot!’ He’d stopped the blades spinning as he fell and the monofilament had sucked them back into the mechanism of the hat. Crouched in a ball on the ground, he was suddenly underneath a pile of automatons. He was receiving information about how many of them had been destroyed in the cannon barrage. Another was destroyed when a large chunk of masonry landed on the pile of automatons shielding him. They kept him safe, but several at the top of the pile were badly damaged.
‘You’re in the privacy nano-swarm,’ Al explained.
‘That’s what the macro-cams are for! Do you think I’m fucking lying to you? Stop fucking firing! Or I will find an immersion to keep you in that will allow you to be constantly anally raped to death!’
The hypersonic bang of the cannon fire stopped, followed by the sound of debris falling to the ground. Slowly the automatons started disentangling themselves and standing up. Finally Mr Hat pushed himself back onto his feet and brushed himself down. The air was full of dust, which was causing his lung filters problems and obscuring his vision. Even through the dust he was able to see that the suburban street had been turned into a series of craters. He walked quickly through the red-smeared rubble towards the ground car. A cordon of his automatons killed any of the surviving Dead-Skin Masks who tried to charge him through the dust. The ground car was mostly intact. Berger was gone.
‘Nooooo!’ he shrieked. ‘Find him! Bring him and anyone with him to me!’
The automatons spread out. When they left the blast area, they leaped upwards and started moving from rooftop to rooftop, tree to tree.
‘Well, try and fucking run!’ Vic said, all but dragging the Alchemist with him after Elodie.
‘I’m a fucking dolphin. We’re not built to run!’ Berger/the Alchemist complained.
‘I’m an insect. I’m coping with the lack of limbs!’
‘It’s not the same. It would be like asking you to echolocate!’
‘No, it’d be like asking me to swim! Which I can!’
‘Shut the fuck up! Both of you!’ Elodie hissed. She was crouched down and looking all around. All three of them were covered from head to foot in blood and dust after running through gardens at the back of the houses.
‘Where’s the rendezvo
us?’ Vic demanded.
‘Here,’ Elodie said, pointing at the garden they’d paused in. They’d managed to flee about two miles away from Eden Street.
‘Where are they, then?’
‘You get that we can’t communicate with them, right?’
Vic’s human eyes widened. ‘So when are they coming?’
‘Another two hours?’
‘Two hours!’
Elodie stood up and strode over to Vic. ‘You have not contributed. In fact, you have been nothing but a whiny pain in the arse since we started!’ she hissed, waving a bloody kitchen knife at him for emphasis. ‘Now either cope, or I end you right here, right now!’
‘All right, calm down,’ Vic said, a little taken aback.
‘Inside, now!’ She pushed them into the closest house.
It was a spacious open-plan bungalow. They entered through the kitchen door. From the lounge, five faces turned to look their way. The two adults had been tied to chairs placed back to back and looked like they had been pretty extensively tortured. The three children had just stopped dancing around the adults. The children were carrying a mixture of household utensils, tools and caustic cleaning products.
Elodie stepped forwards. ‘Get out of here, take the adults with you, torture them to death somewhere else,’ she told them. The kids stared at her. She stared back, the knife in her hand dripping blood. To Vic it felt as if the stand-off went on for a very long time. Then the kids bolted, leaping through the already broken lounge window. Elodie sighed. They’d left the adults. The adults immediately started begging.
‘Put him in the fridge and get the kettle on,’ Elodie told Vic. ‘I’ll deal with them.’ Elodie started walking towards the two tied-up adults, knife at the ready. They started to beg and plead for their lives.
‘Breathe,’ Elodie told Vic as he hyperventilated into a brown paper bag. She took another sip of the coffee. It was quite good, she decided.
Vic jumped as something landed on the roof. He opened his mouth but suddenly Elodie’s hand was over it. There was a scrabbling noise, and then the sound of breaking glass as a figure dressed in a blood-smeared suit complete with tails and tall hat dropped through a skylight and landed in a crouch. The tall, thin, eyeless figure stood up straight.
‘Just keep hyperventilating into the bag,’ Elodie said. Vic nodded and got on with his panic attack. Elodie took another sip of coffee as the automaton slowly turned around, looking without eyes. Then it stalked off to search the rest of the house. Vic opened his mouth to ask a question – between wheezing for breath – but Elodie held up her hand for silence.
The automaton stalked back into the lounge. Vic could feel his human heart trying to batter itself through his ribs. Elodie just looked back, her expression blank and uninterested. It stood there staring at them, without eyes, for what felt like a very long time. Then it turned, ignoring the two bodies still tied to chairs in the centre of the lounge, and leaped upwards through the broken skylight.
Vic tried to speak but was still hyperventilating.
‘Bag,’ Elodie ordered, and waited.
‘What the fuck?’ Vic finally managed.
‘Even with active scans, they’re basically looking for movement or heat. A forensic search screen will suffer information overload in this environment.’
‘Which is why you put him in the fridge?’ Vic asked. Elodie nodded. The Alchemist/Berger had protested a lot, but Elodie had managed to convince him that he should be quiet and still.
‘Nobody thinks to actually look these days. We just rely on technology.’ She paused for a moment. ‘Almost time.’
The ’face feeds from the bridge-point beacons were a few seconds old, but they showed the pulsing blue rip of the opening, and through it the crimson wound of Red Space. Al brought the footage to Isaiah’s attention. It wasn’t a ship that came through.
‘Oh,’ Isaiah said. Then he started to get really frightened.
Mr Hat stood at the crossroads. The two slaved G-carriers circled overhead, their strobe guns lighting up the night whenever anyone got too close to the diminutive lizard. He was using various neunonic search routines to sort through all the data his automaton worshippers were ’facing to him.
He stopped on the image of the hyperventilating woman and the child. He cross-referenced their images. He replayed footage from earlier in the night in his mind. When he first arrived to speak to the Dead-Skin Masks, they were there. Prisoners of the strangely organised flayed-face cultists.
‘Them!’ he snapped. With a thought, all his automatons started leaping from rooftop to rooftop towards the house where they had last been seen.
‘We’ve detected a change in pressure. It’s much larger,’ Al said. Isaiah didn’t answer. ‘Well?’ the AI demanded.
‘Enact Cauterise Protocol.’ Isaiah couldn’t keep the tremor from his voice.
A panel of glass the size of several football pitches blew out of one of the window segments. Huge daggers of glass were sucked out into space and destroyed by the point-defence systems of the naval contractor frigate. The frigate was buffeted by the escaping atmosphere as it made its way through the hole in the window segment.
He was so occulted that Suburbia’s defences didn’t even register his existence. He switched physical states as he sank through the glass and found himself dropping into the habitat’s atmosphere towards one of the scarred land segments.
The wind sucked everything towards, and then through, the pulsing blue rip and into Red Space. Vic and the Alchemist were holding on to the house for all they were worth. Over the rush of escaping atmosphere and the lack of available oxygen, Elodie couldn’t even hear them screaming at her that they weren’t going.
She felt a hand touch her and pluck her off the breakfast bar she was clinging to. Elodie turned and her small human heart actually skipped a beat. She was looking at a surprisingly small and slight figure clothed in black liquid glass. She had a moment to feel fear, then a strange narcotic calmness flooded through her. She saw the beatific face of the small human body she was in grow out of the liquid glass the strange figure wore, and then she died.
Mr Hat looked up at the sound of breaking glass, which echoed the length of the prison. He saw the frigate slowly making its way into the cylinder. A sucking wind whipped at his smock, but it wasn’t coming from the hole in the window. The size of the hole and the volume of air in the cylinder meant that it would be a long time before they’d feel the loss of atmosphere. The sucking wind was coming from somewhere closer.
He had a moment to reflect just how badly Al and Isaiah had mismanaged this entire situation as he saw thick beams of dangerous light reach out from the blunt, armoured head of the frigate, and heard the hypersonic rip of multiple kinetic harpoons and AG-powered intelligent munitions being launched.
Vic was clinging to the breakfast bar for dear life. The Alchemist/Berger was right next to him. He saw some of the anachronistically dressed eyeless automatons appear at the doorway. Others were climbing in through broken windows, with difficulty in the sucking, roaring wind. He wasn’t sure what made him look at Elodie, but he did so just in time to see the Elite let go of her body. It was sucked out of the kitchen, bouncing off the window frame and into the back garden, where it was pulled through the rip into Red Space. Vic let go of the breakfast bar and grabbed the Alchemist/Berger, tearing him free. They hit the window frame hard. He was still conscious. The Elite was reaching towards him. Everything was red. He couldn’t breathe. There was no Suburbia. An arm encased in black liquid glass was spinning nearby.
The Elite looked at the missing arm with interest. He enjoyed the sensation for a moment, and then, with a thought, he started regrowing it. The black liquid glass of his armour wrapped itself around the flesh as it regenerated.
He changed physical state again as he found himself living within the fire and force from the frigate’s va
rious weapon impacts. He appreciated this at a subatomic particle level for a moment, and then flew through it. He hacked the frigate’s control systems, sending the ship plummeting towards the inner surface of the habitat. He weaponised the frigate’s internal security nano-screen into a flesh-eating swarm to finish off any survivors and burned the ship’s AI in electronic fire. He did the same to the C&C staff of Suburbia, and its AI. It wasn’t really their fault, particularly not the crew of the frigate, but you couldn’t attack one of the Elite without a response. He was aware of the habitat shaking as the frigate finished its slow, strangely graceful fall through its atmosphere.
His vision was full of blood and his joints were in agony.
‘Drugs!’ Vic begged from the floor of the Basilisk II’s cargo bay. He’d felt strong hands pull him through the airlock. He glanced over and saw Elodie kneeling next to the gasping body of the Alchemist/Berger, injecting him with nanites. ‘Please, help me,’ Vic pleaded. Then he realised Elodie was in her real feline body. It was agony, but he rolled over and saw Talia, a horrified expression on her face, and a bored-looking Scab smoking a cigarette. Words could not express how much he hated that man. The other Vic, the insect Vic, the Vic that wasn’t just a possessing program modelled on his personality, was pointing his triple-barrelled shotgun pistol at him.
‘But you don’t know what I’ve been through!’ the possessing program in the human body said.
‘Sorry, buddy,’ the real Vic said. Possessing-Program-Vic’s image was filled with muzzle flash.
Vic looked down sympathetically at the red smear on the cargo bay floor. Talia had cried out and turned away, shaking and looking sick. Vic wondered what she’d expected to see.
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