by Lee Bond
“I’m on my way.” Dagon said across the link, heavy granite voice thundering in their ears.
“Negative.” Eddie gasped as yet another of Tiv Solom’s thunderous, pile-driving fists hammered at him. “Ci’s fucking with the targeting systems of the loose drones, Tel’s got the rest all bottled up and Babel…”
“Babel is looking for a fucking cannon, which we should of fucking brought when I fucking said we should of.” Babel griped, frustration eminent. “And this has got to fucking end soon anyways because even though those asshats emptied out this entire hotel for our benefit, including servants and guards, there’s no fucking doubt in my mind that ninjas will be on the way.”
Telgar grit his teeth against the … well, it wasn’t precisely pain, but … whatever the Enforcer had done to mess with the shield field was personally unpleasant.
The drones, for all their miniscule size, were unleashing a surprising amount of damage against their amber prison. Sooner or later, those attacks would weaken the field, and they all knew through Ci’s dispassionate analysis that each drone was autonomous, running its own semi-sentient attack patterns, meaning each would need hacking. She was at her limit with the one hundred thirty-two drones currently flying around their heads like robotic gnats, shooting the bejesus out of the walls and ceiling. When –not if- when she was overwhelmed, they would be at Solom’s mercy.
“We need him, skip.” Telgar grunted as the onslaught inside his shield fields continued. Each of the small red beams emanated by the drones jarred and shuddered this projected energy, which in turn made the warrior feel as though he were being hit very gently with a large sack of oranges.
Eddie deflected another pile-driver blow from the Enforcer with his deep black soulsword. The captain of Armageddon Troop Too could feel the man behind the Suit grinning at him. Truth be told, Eddie realized, he was enjoying himself as well. The Enforcer came at him again, and Eddie spun on a heel, dragging the impossibly sharp tip of his summoned sword across the Enforcer’s back.
As had happened last time, the furrow rent by his wicked blade sealed immediately. “Fine. Get here.”
Dagon nodded. “I shall take the short route.”
“Before … before you do, kindly inform Yellow Dog Elder Alastair Katainn that the solar system has acquired Armageddon Troop Too free of charge.” Eddie threw a silent burst of thanks to Tel as a wavering, thin shield field settled in front of him just as Tiv Solom’s fist came slamming towards his head: the blow didn’t take his skull right off, but his bell was rung pretty thoroughly.
***
Alastair Katainn stared wordlessly at the rock … man … hovering outside his bedroom window, arcs of fire bursting from … his … lower half as though he were a stationary spaceship. The … man … was talking to him, which was in itself an affront to all things decent and proper. Making matters worse, the Katainn household security system and online armory were having zero luck in determining what, if any, methods could be used to stop the flying rock man from talking.
Somewhere behind him, his mother and his manko were still embroiled in their wailing argument, but Alastair didn’t want to take his eyes off the flying rock man long enough to deal with that situation. Somewhere in the recesses of his mind, the Elder Dog noted with grim amusement that he’d much prefer to deal with flying rockmen all the time as opposed to anything to do with his mother.
A crash reached his ears, but again, the Yellow Dog Elder was fairly captivated by the sight.
“It is with deep regret,” Alastair began speaking the moment the rockman … paused … for breath, unleashing ‘Apology Number 4’, “that we cannot at this time move forward in this discussion.”
“Yes.” Dagon noted. “Your mother and your whore are about to kill one another with what appears to be antique weaponry liberated from a cabinet. Armageddon Troop Too wishes for you to know that we will handle the situation with your pirate free of charge. We will do our best to ensure that damage is kept to a minimum. In light of maintaining peace between the Yellow Dogs and SpecSer, we will also refrain from … liberating … things for our purposes. If you like our services, feel free to tell your friends. Future clients referencing your name will get a discount. If we receive five or more clients who are known personally by you, you will receive one free level 5 Specter maneuver. Thank you, have a nice day.”
Alastair Katainn watched the rockman, who apparently worked for the uncouth and altogether disreputable EuroJapanese yarou, fly off into the night air, trailing twin spikes of fire that burned his eyes. There was a boom, and the fires vanished.
Another crash filled his senses. This time, Alastair turned and started hollering at his stupid mother and his even stupider whore.
***
Tiv Solom’s AI couldn’t decipher what Captain Tekmara’s sword was forged from, lamely suggesting that it was ‘energy-derived’. Any fool could tell that with his own damned eyes, especially when it was coming right at you with a glittering black edge that seemed to contain depths not normally associated with forged metal.
Still, the Enforcer was willing to forgive his AI pretty much any level of disappointment right now; in ways that again defied the artificial mind’s ability to process, the woman in the other room was keeping it almost completely occupied with an implausible amount of quantum attacks. The Enforcer suspected that –in addition everything else she was doing to his Suit AI- Cianni Wren was somehow also making the damned thing stupider.
The team was running ragged, though. Finally. The giant’s honestly impressive shields grew thinner and thinner with each iteration, the AI was slowly but surely getting a handle on the malware funnelling through the quantum substrate and Eddie’s ‘sword’ still really hadn’t managed to cause the Suit any lasting damage. The fool Babel was back in the other room after having fled the scene, expertly disabling drones with a laser pistol.
“Give up.” Tiv suggested as he routinely tried accessing his energy weapons. Nothing doing. Whatever the witch had done at the onset of the battle was permanently locked into place. Tiv feared a system reboot was required to bring them back online.
He hated doing that. Might as well run around Ground Zero in his underwear, for how safe he’d be.
“Not going to happen.” Eddie grit his teeth. His entire body ached; through no one’s fault but his own foolishness, the Enforcer had managed to get in two very solid whacks to his right side. Thoughts of lavish recuperation mingled with drinking and carousing were ultimately going to have to be just that; if they were successful in dealing with Tiv Solom, the last thing any of them would have was time for anything except running away. When the machine mind found out what happened, It’d blow several gaskets and if Katainn wasn’t already a frothing lunatic, that pale EuroJap bastard soon would be.
“What are you, then?” Tiv wondered as he pulled his head back a fraction of a second too late; Edio’s sword tip dug through seven layers of theoretically indestructible armor and came close to grazing his actual forehead. “Some kind of weird Deep Strike team Trinity knows nothing about? Psychics? Genetic experiments?”
“Neither.” Eddie was about to say something mean and spiteful in the hopes that it would upset the Enforcer so much that he had to sit down and cry, but the wall suddenly crashing inwards on top of the armor-clad supersoldier sort of ruined the moment.
Dagon stepped forward through the rubble. “I believe in these situations, our missing commander would say ‘knock, knock, bitches’.”
Tiv Solom rose from the rubble wondering if he’d done something wrong. Then he wondered if any of the other Enforcers were having difficulty securing rides to Zanzibar. The Enforcer moodily hoped this was the case, because he didn’t want to be the only one standing outside that Dome telling his peers about the time that a quintet of Specters had nearly done him in.
Sighing irritably at being forced to elevate the encounter to ‘Wildly Inappropriate’, Tiv pulled an auto_BAM from the bulbous portion of his right shoulder; held
in place by simple and un-breakable maglocks, the deadly weapon was one of the few things to’ve remained untouched by the cyber-witch’s quantum tomfoolery. Eyeing the squad thoughtfully, he started thumbing his way expertly through the settings on the silver-matte ball.
Unsurprisingly, both Tel and Ci started hollering tech specs for the auto_BAM the moment it started cycling. Whatever odd thing in the Universe that’d spawned the unreasonably deadly Specter team was going to remain unfound; he’d had it with everyone in the room and once the BAM went boom, not even atoms would remain.
Tiv sniffed. “When Trinity sifts through your ashes to determine what has been done to you, and rest assured It will learn, It will then cause everyone you have ever known, and everyone they have known, unlimited pain and suffering. Entire planets will be destroyed and countless lives lost because of you.”
A suggested plan of attack slid through the Soul-HUD from Cianni. Dagon eyed Eddie, who nodded as he stepped out of the way, a faint curl on an eyebrow. Dagon took no offense at the unspoken concern; the last time he’d assaulted something with fire, things had gotten sloppy in a hurry. The Xenocryst had been practicing direction and control, but it was still sometimes tricky, especially when he was emotional.
Both Eddie and Dagon nodded. The rockman unleashed raw fiery golden energy at the Enforcer, enveloping the one hand clutching the spherical Balanced Automatic Massacre device. The ultra-hot fire turned the matte black suit cherry red up to the shoulder.
Tiv Solom screamed, this time in fear and quite probably pain as well. Dagon continued for another three seconds, long enough to turn the entire Suit hot red. The moment he desisted, Edio Tekmara rushed in with his soulsword and drove the thing into Enforcer Tiv Solom’s chest to the hilt.
One of the oldest and most influential Enforcers ever to wear the Suit didn’t even have a chance for parting, pithy words or to even lament his own death under such strange and unexpected circumstances. The deadly onslaught of fire had cooked him nearly through to the bone and the splintery-black sword wielded by the Specter had finished the job rather admirably.
Tiv Solom was dead.
The auto_BAM fell from the Enforcer’s lifeless hands and hit the ground with a shockingly loud ‘trink’. The deadly cannon rolled away, flashing lights hinting at spectacular doom.
“Shit. Deadman switch. Everyone, cover!” Eddie, Babel and Dagon ran towards Tel and Ci. The captain’s voice rang loud in his own ears. “Well! Now we get to have an experience just like the Boss, hey?”
Cianni shook her head, worry spilling through the Soul-HUD like a sweetly poisonous drink. “Gamma Plateaus have nothing on this, skip. ‘Balanced Automatic Destruction’ means ‘vaporize everything that is not earth matter until there is no matter left to vaporize’. Our only hope … this planet’s only hope is that Tiv Solom was careful in assigning parameters before he gacked.”
Babel clapped Telgar on the shoulder. “Doesn’t matter. Gigantor here’s got us. Right, big buddy?”
Telgar nodded silently, though he did wonder what would happen to them all if the planet was eaten around them. Cianni caught sight of their BattleBuddy Krang on the far side of the room and made a moue of sorrow. She’d liked Krang.
The auto_BAM went boom.
And kept on going boom for some time.
***
Alastair Katainn watched the explosion reach the heavens and nodded smugly. He didn’t know what’d happened, but the loss of the hotel and what appeared to be half the town center it’d been near was well worth the price of no longer having to deal with those awful Specters.
Disconsolate, the Elder went inside to deal with his mother, his favorite whore, and anything else that might seek to plague the noble House of Katainn.
22. All Hail the King, Baby
Barnabas watched Garth disappear over the small hillock, lugging Thumper’s old hammer behind him like a four hundred pound toy, glad to see the backside of the insufferable bastard. He’d been aching to be free of Nickels for days now –just for a little while- and running out of food had been perfect pretext to send the irritating man off on a quest to find more.
Ever since renegotiating the terms of their travel arrangement -a revision which had at first seemed to benefit Barnabas more than Garth but was, in fact, completely the opposite- it’d taken every ounce of the blacksmith King’s considerably frayed control to keep from lashing out at the outsider; when Garth wasn’t busy fiddling with his brass, gold and silver arms and musing at how ‘cool’ the science was, he was either moaning and wailing about the continual onslaught of murderous rage floating just beneath the surface, pressing about alleged possibilities about the now very outdated situation with The Dome –oh how Barnabas wished he’d been more on the ball there- or insisting he be allowed to fiddle with the fractured Kingspawn point control board.
And when he wasn’t doing that, Garth ‘regaled’ him with endless stories about people with unlikely names like ‘Batman’ or ‘John Jones’ doing the most improbable and wildly speculative things imaginable. It was a literal agony.
But now, with Nickels off and down the road … the opportunity was one that couldn’t be wasted, no matter how tricky things could get.
Ever so cautiously, King Barnabas Blake the First and Only allowed his carefully maintained human aspect to fade. His senses immediately swelled with raw data accumulated by King’s Will. Wisely, it was only a trickle; folks with less than Nickels’ natural talent in manipulating Will –albeit only while blacksmithing- made them unfairly adept at sensing Kingly manipulation. His traveling companion was a step above all that, and so, wisely, wisely he trickled.
So while the King wanted nothing more than to follow behind Nickels as a disembodied mind, spying on all the things his hated ‘ally’ might get up to or say aloud –thinking he were all alone and unwatched, it was a dead cert Nickels would indeed get up to summat similar- Barnabas instead bent himself to the task of setting the stage for Garth’s ultimate defeat and, hopefully, the rising of the Specter. An Ironed-up Specter would be so much easier to kill than whatever Nickels was!
“If only the lad had been a titch more agreeable, hey?” The King groused. “Less irritable. Less … an arsehole. Wouldn’t be this way, no it wouldn’t.”
The King gestured, and his mind lurched to the nearest Kingspawn point, one he knew had remained unused and forgotten for far too long. The ancient machine passed all the checks with flying colors; though untouched, though unused, it was still properly connected to King’s Will. Not only that, it’d been long enough for the materiel going into the construction of a Big King to reach maximum levels.
Oh, that was a joy, wasn’t it just? The Big King rising up out of the earth was going to be one of the biggest and baddest Arcade City had seen in some time!
And then one of two things would happen.
One, this glorious mechanical monarch would stomp the ungrateful outsider flat, hopefully forcing the traitorous Vicious Elixir trapped within Garth’s body to behave as it should’ve. The mysteriously penned-in crudey-crude would heal all wounds, repair shattered flesh and hopefully –oh so hopefully- it would be Specter as came back to camp. From there, with the outsider firmly and fully corralled by Dark Iron, it’d be just a matter of Will to learn all Nickels’ secrets.
From there? Well, secrets learned were secrets replicated, hey? No need then for Specter, neither.
Two, Nickels would succeed in doing for the King. It wasn’t unheard of, and Barnabas had to admit that –after seeing Garth fight- the man possessed a martial prowess similar to any gearhead as had fought for long, long decades. Thinking of the rare possibility for Garth’s solo success only served to remind the King that it were mostly crews of three or less that seemed to be bringing down his Kings of late, and there was only one bitch to blame for all that.
Agnethea. Queen of Ickford. Damn her and damn that shame of a city. That unclean whore had broken the Gauntlet –a thing running for millennia- in a handful of years
. Damn her.
Barnabas prayed deeply that the gambit worked to his benefit and not Garth’s; not only would their next and immediate destination be Ickford with all due haste –a concept that ate away at his guts with fiery acid- the lad’s boon in doing for such a fully realized King would be the single largest deposit of Kingsblood seen anywhere in quite a long while. The fortune such as that would in truth allow Nickels to do whatsoever he chose, up to and including financing a trip all the way to Arcadia’s front doors.
The King had a difficult time imagining something more awful than that, didn’t he just?
A few finishing touches to the artfully arranged scene of where the ancient and unused Kingspawn point lay hidden and the King nodded in satisfaction. It were picture perfect! Oh, aye, Garth Nickels the Aggravating Blacksmith Fish were going to find himself right atop that old point well before he knew what were happening and ‘twould be far too late to stop the King from rising.
Joy of joys! Not too long ‘ere now and he’d be well free of an irritation he’d already suffered through for over-long. Then he could deal with Erg, that fouled smidge of electric waste.
Barnabas Blake looked over his shoulder. “That bastard had best find some game before my Big‘Un shows up. I don’t have time to be hunting with everything else I’ve got to do today.”
***
Garth sat himself on a rock, propping the haft of his pneumatic hammer against one side so that he could grab it in a hurry; Barnabas’ offhand comments about random gaggles and despairs preying on lone travelers rang loudly. He in no way wanted to be caught off-guard by those nanotech-riddled maniacs, not when he was as much of a brooding prick as he’d been lately.