The Goddess Gambit

by B Michael Stevens

  Another impulse from his brain sent the arms and mounted swivel into action, swinging the enormous rifle into position.

  "I'm loving these brain-wave controls!" Carbine announced gleefully.

  "Enough chatter, it comes," Lucy warned.

  Sure enough, the cleaner appeared around the bend of the trash-tube’s curve up ahead of them. The machine was as big around as the tube itself, circular and spinning. Jon thought it similar to a boring machine for digging tunnels, only this one was moving at the speed of a Pre-Storm bullet train, descending on them like a strafing attack by a Republic Hopper unit.

  The cleaner’s nose was conical and around it in concentric circles spun dozens of what looked like deep-earth drilling bits. Only along the outside diameter of the machine were there the tiniest of gaps here and there. Jon guessed the purpose of these was to allow the remains of whatever the cleaner had chewed up when it was turned around and heading back up to pass and then fall, without slowing the machine down; like the blood groove of a sword.

  The cleaner was closing fast. Carbine took aim while Jon crouched behind the Mini-Mech's leg; Lucy simply knelt on one knee and lowered her face, giving one the impression she was praying. Carbine tracked the rushing death and then, when he was ready, gently pulled the trigger of his railgun like one would pluck a harp.

  BOOM!

  The tube shook with percussive force, and Carbine watched the cone-shaped nose of the machine collapse in on itself like a rotting carved pumpkin in time-lapse photography. The dying machine continued to spin and promptly tore itself apart, transforming into a wave of fast-moving debris that shot down the tube and pelted the Mini-Mech, parting like a fork in a stream at both of its legs. Jon kept his head down until the tink-tink of shrapnel had stopped its torrential onslaught against the suit. When the dust settled, he crawled out from behind the legs of Carbine’s suit, dusting himself off.

  "Good shot, bud," Jon offered.

  "We need to double-time it now. They will send a maintenance drone soon; we don't want to be seen yet."

  "Yeah, but I don't think this thing has two speeds," Jon said, retrieving the N-Tab from his dump pouch.

  Luckily, they soon came to a split in the tube. Lucy ordered Jon to stop the platform, and then they waited to see from which direction the drone would come. Once they heard it and confirmed its direction of origin, they chose the other path and continued to float on up into the city fortress.

  After another few short minutes, they could see the end of the tube above them. Just below the ceiling they also saw a darkened ledge and with it the promise of the Ziggurat.

  "We made it," Carbine announced, as if in surprise.

  "Of course," Lucy scoffed.

  As the rising platform reached the edge of the alcove, Jon fingered the screen of the N-Tab, stopping their ride’s upward motion.

  The recess gave way to a larger cavity, which opened up just behind the threshold of the trash-tube. Inside, mindless robots labored to collect compressed squares of trash and place them in the collecting bin, preparing it for the next dump-discharge. Lucy also spied the robots and reached one of her lower hands down to her right leg, where her thigh parted, opened and produced her pistol, the BFG.

  "Don't," Jon cautioned. "Those droids are too simple to raise any alarm. They aren't programmed for defense. We have nothing to fear from them. Now, a shot from your hand cannon..." Jon let the thought go unfinished.

  "Point taken," Lucy said, but she still retrieved the pistol, keeping it at the ready. "So then," she continued, "where to, hotshot?"

  "I think we are near the D furnace area," Jon mused, studying the signs and placards placed throughout the trash receptacle area.

  "And how far are we from the Ministry?" Lucy asked in hushed tones, unable to convince herself that she wouldn't alarm the working droids.

  "A ways. But there should be a service elevator nearby we can ride up to the Ministry’s level and avoid the entire city, for the most part."

  "Good. Alright, listen up. We move like lightning. Jon, you take point, since you know the way,"

  "I never said—"

  "We run, got it? We get my Lady and the girl, shoot our way in, shoot our way out."

  "The way back is going to seem like an eternity if the entire Republic Military comes down on us, Lucy," Jon warned. "We should try to be careful. Besides, we don't need to kill everyone we see. Most people in the Zigg are innocent. Privileged citizens, sure, but innocent, like Carbine and me. Can we please stow the bloodlust and think with our heads?"

  "We don't have a hope at stealth, not with that Mini-Mech," Lucy nodded her head sideways at Carbine, "and I'm not making any promises I don't intend to keep. As far as I'm concerned, no one in uniform is innocent." The last word dripped out of Lucy's skeletal painted mouth like acid. "If someone, anyone, gets in my way, I'm taking them out." One of her free hands produced a pair of polished mirror ballistic glasses which she slid over her bionic eyes and fixed them into place with a click.

  Jon clenched his jaw and his hammer, shook his head and then said, "Follow me." He stepped off the platform and began running past the droids working the trash lines, with Lucy and Carbine right behind him.

  Within two minutes of leaving the trash collection area, they found themselves sprinting through a lower-level furnace chamber, full of boilers, turbines, wellheads and a Byzantine superhighway of pipes and tubes, all carrying either fuel or heated water or gas. They were deep in the ventricle chamber of the Ziggurat's heart. As the path ahead became more constricted, the trio slowed their run to a walk. A moment later, they spotted the first human inhabitants of the city-fortress: a team of maintenance workers, old-gen citizen soldiers, who appeared to be making repairs on a flow pipeline. Between the loud rumbling of the surrounding pumps and turbines, along with their Zen-like focus on the task at hand, they did not notice the arrival of the intruders, not even with the mighty steps of the Mini-Mech heralding the infiltration.

  In the corner of his eye, Jon spied Lucy beginning to raise her BFG to firing position. Knowing he only had a second to save the lives of the repair team, he sprang into brash action. Heaving his hammer overhead and turning, he slammed it into a nearby pipeline. The head of the hammer tore into the wet and rusted steel casing, rupturing it and spilling super-heated glycol-tainted steam into the room.

  "What the hell?" Jon could almost hear the men shout the moment before alarm klaxons began their monotone wail, shouting to all in the Zigg's furnace area that the pressurized arteries that pumped the city’s lifeblood had been compromised.

  Their presence obscured by the cloud of steam, the team took the opportunity to add to the chaos. Unexpectedly, Lucy did not chide Jon for his actions, which had prevented her from simply killing the men, but instead quickly recognized what his strategy was and joined in without so much as a spoken word. Lowering the pistol with one hand, she raised the Macuahuitl with two others, severing some of the nearby infrastructure, which then poured oil and other unknown liquids onto the floor.

  Jon signaled Lucy and Carbine to follow him as he took off down a side passage, circumventing the incoming repairmen. Once safely away from the messy distraction they had created, he slowed his roll and explained to his companions the method behind his madness.

  "The best way to win a fight is to avoid it," Jon started, frowning at Lucy and stabbing his eyes at her over-sized pistol. "Those men didn't have to die, there was no reason. And now, by doing what we did, we have essentially cleared the path ahead. All the men on this level will soon be descending upon the chaos we created, trying desperately to stop the leaks and get the systems back online. It'll be a good hour or so before an investigation and subsequent report goes up the line, and people figure out it was sabotage. It should be smooth sailing from here on.”

  "It was a good move," Lucy conceded.

  Jon nodded at her. "We need to go farther across before we go up, in order to avoid the coming help. Follow me!"

  They
took off again through the bowels of the Ziggurat.

  Jon's plan had worked perfectly. They managed to avoid all contact with any further maintenance operators, and it seemed the magnitude of the mess they’d made had distracted any and all in the control room who might have noticed them on the few CCTV cameras they spotted as they went. Eventually, Jon led them to the service elevator that he believed would take them up to a level and grid that was very close to the complex housing the Ministry of Social Purity.

  "This is it," Jon said. "After this, shit gets real."

  Lucy nodded and stepped forward, pushing the button that would bring the elevator. While waiting, she stripped off her long coat and threw it to the ground. Her body was covered in a skin-tight black bodysuit. The coat had obfuscated the impressive arsenal she had strapped to her body: magazines for the BFG, grenades, two saddled Macuahuitls, and a long, serrated knife with a fierce-looking tanto tip. Deathly aesthetic aside, she truly looked like the Saint of Death.

  The cheerful ding! of the arriving lift snapped Jon out of his reverie and back to the dangerous mission at hand. As soon as the cargo doors began to slide open, Lucy flicked her tail, bullwhip-style, as Jon had seen her do when he’d first encountered her. Just like then, a small shuriken was released, nearly as fast as a bullet, and lodged itself into a CCTV camera that was mounted in the upper corner of the lift. A shower of sparks sprayed as the camera popped and fizzled itself to death. Before the last spark had fallen, Lucy stepped inside the lift, instantly turning to the side to make room for Jon and Carbine's Mini-Mech.

  No one spoke on the ride up. They stood in silent anticipation of the blitzkrieg to come. Jon unconsciously rapped his fingers on the long handle of his hammer as he watched the lights on the elevator’s console fade and illuminate the icons which represented the different floors. After several tense minutes of climbing up into the Zigg proper, they reached their destination. Jon's heart, juiced from the serum transformation, kicked into overdrive and a wave of adrenaline hit him like a bolt of lightning.

  The door whisked open, and Jon suddenly found himself face to face with a Ministry officer, a non-masked human aide in standard uniform holding a clipboard. The man gaped when he saw Jon, Lucy, and the Mini-Mech all standing there like it was nothing. When Jon hesitated, the man turned to run, prompting Lucy to shove Jon out of the way and launch her tail forward, knocking the man's foot out from under him just as he was bringing it down.

  The man tripped and fell face forward, his dropped clipboard skittering down the hallway. Lucy bolted from the lift, leaping into the air and landing on bended knee, just right of the fallen man. As she descended, she drove the pointed end of her war club into the man's back, severing his spine, instantly paralyzing him and preventing him from screaming.

  "Hesitate and we die!" Lucy fumed at Jon, looking back just long enough to scowl at him.

  Jon glanced up and saw another camera, missed by Lucy in the commotion with the Ministry aide. The camera was looking directly at them and blinking a red light. He knew they had been spotted. Even now, someone in a Ministry control room would be reaching for a comm, telling their superiors of the intruders. As if they had been reading his mind, some unseen soldier confirmed Jon's suspicions and sounded the alarm.

  “INTRUDER ALERT. INTRUDER ALERT. INTRUDERS ON LEVEL ONE SEVENTY, GRID SEVEN. REPEAT. INTRUDERS ON LEVEL ONE SEVENTY, GRID SEVEN.”

  "Move!" Lucy yelled, then pulled her bladed club from the man's back while simultaneously using a free hand to pull his hair back and slitting his throat with yet a third hand, this one wielding the tanto. Jon winced at the brutal execution of the man but reminded himself that the man, if only an aide, was still in the Ministry of Social Purity. Recalling a portion of his torturous vision, Jon suspected that Lucy was essentially putting the man out of his misery. Some kind of warrior’s code.

  Shoving aside his reluctance to murder, Jon bolted into action, sprinting past Lucy and down the hallway. The crashing booms of the Mini-Mech’s steps told him that Carbine was hot on his heels. Good. At the end of the hallway was a service door that would take them directly to the Ministry of Social Purity complex. Taking up four grids on three levels, the complex was like a small city within the city, and what went on inside was the stuff of mysterious rumors and terrifying nightmares.

  As he approached the door, Jon turned his run into a sideways leap, positioning his left foot out in front to catch the momentum of his sailing body. When his foot touched the ground, Jon twisted at the hips in a way that would have made a pre-Storm baseball player proud and let fly his hammer.

  The moment before his hammer contacted the door, its latch clicked and began to pull open from the other side. The head of the hammer struck the hinge side of the door and unseated the entire thing, shattering all three of the steel hinges and caving in the reinforced steel. The blow sent the door and the man opening it on the other side flying backward into the facility. Jon felt a blast of concussion wash over him as the hammer demolished the door and the guard. Following through with his swing, Jon returned the hammer to the ready position and surveyed the scene as the dust settled.

  Standing just on the other side, several meters back and out of the way of the fallen man and door were more guards. Aghast at seeing their colleague flattened by a door-cum-freight train, they stood in paralytic shock. Their hesitation proved to be their undoing, as a volley of explosive rounds from Lucy's BFG erupted behind Jon. The rounds riddled the men's torsos with waves of small explosions, each the size of a baby's fist. Jon ducked slightly, allowing Lucy to continue her barrage as he passed through the broken doorframe and into the Ministry proper.

  "Which way?" Carbine shouted through his suit’s external speakers as they reached the end of the hallway, Lucy quick on their heels, which split in two directions. Additionally, there was a door in the center of the split, which led deeper into the complex, and by the placard next to it promised to lead to a stairwell.

  "I don't know!" Jon admitted, frustrated. "I've only been here that one time, and it wasn't on this level. None of this looks familiar! I would think that the holding cells would be down here in the lower levels..." he theorized out loud over the sound of the repeating alarm. Standing still, even for only two seconds, proved to be too much for Lucy.

  "Fuck!" she announced and began heading down the right hallway, throwing glances around, trying to find a map of some kind, or perhaps some signage that would point the way to the holding cells. The hallway itself extended quite a ways in their chosen direction, with several offices and other intersecting hallways breaking up the otherwise smooth, white, sterile walls. Jon and Carbine followed Lucy, and the three of them had only gone a few dozen meters when a response fire-team of six Ministry guards came around the corner ahead.

  Thank heavens it's just guards and not Scrubbers! thought Jon upon seeing the armed men. He preferred the odds against men with guns versus men who could melt his mind or sic vicious, cybernetically enhanced hellhounds on him.

  Unlike the men on the other side of the smashed door, who had fallen to the element of surprise, the fire-team was ready for the intruders. Gunfire filled the hallway. Lucy cartwheeled to the right and broke through the glass pane of an adjacent room, ending up in what appeared to be a small medical station. Jon likewise threw his back up against the nearest wall, trying to minimize his profile as much as possible. Carbine, recognizing the danger, stepped his power armor out in front and widened its stance, preparing to engage his opponents. Having made himself the easy target, Carbine proceeded to draw most of the enemy fire, providing ample cover for his friend.

  The bullets bounced harmlessly off the MISS’s armored hide, ricocheting all over the place back in the fire-team’s direction, knocking out lights and punching holes in the walls, filling the hallway with puffy clouds of gypsum dust and flying bits of detritus. Carbine tucked the suit down into a squat and swung the railgun around. A heartbeat later he squeezed three rounds off. The subsequent booms shat
tered every window on their level. Jon watched in sheer amazement as the cascading glass slowed, then sped up, as rippling waves of force distorted the air around them when the supersonic rounds sped down the hall.

  Two of Carbine's shots hit their mark dead on, replacing the men they hit with clouds of spray; one-part armor, three-parts liquefied flesh. The third shot passed in between two other guards and warped the air so much that the two men were pulled off their feet and collided with one another. The two remaining men were likewise knocked down when the missed shot struck the corner of two walls behind them, exploding.

  Lucy didn't waste a second. Before the third sonic boom had even faded, she was propelling herself out of the shattered window of the medical station and racing down the hallway. She was halfway to the four surviving guards before they had recovered from being knocked down. The closest two, while still lying on the ground, noticed her and let fly a volley of fully automatic gunfire. Never slowing down, Lucy pushed off the floor and began to run up the wall and then onto the ceiling in a spiral motion, continuing forward the whole time. With her unexpected maneuvers, she easily avoided being hit and once on the ceiling she fell, twisting in the air like a cat and landing on her feet amidst the fire-team. Her forward momentum carried on into her Macuahuitl, which took the head of the closest man in one clean swipe, while her tail stabbed at another. The man managed to block the lunging stinger with his rifle. The weapon snapped in half, but the force of blocking the tail knocked him backward onto his butt from which he had just risen. The third man resumed his small arms fire at her point blank. Quicker than one could blink, she leaned back a mere two centimeters and returned fire with her BFG, hitting him directly between the eyes. The embedded explosive round detonated and the man's head popped out, half again as big as before, its shredded contents now dripping out from a half-dozen fissures. Before his body hit the floor, she turned to locate the fourth survivor of Carbine’s volley. The muzzle of the guard's rifle, which was trained directly on her forehead, greeted her. Her cybernetic heart skipped a figurative beat, and she was about to launch into a backflip when the man holding the gun disappeared into a messy haze. Flecks of blood splattered over her mirrored lenses, and then the sonic boom hit her and shook her back two steps.