Cloneworld - 04 (12 page)

"Oh yeah? Why's that?"

Bullets screamed across the black space and spat sparks along the rail where Franco nonchalantly rested. He eyed the sparks flickering past his face, and -- cool now, mad now, pissed now - he levelled his laser cannon and sent shafts of green fire lighting up the abyss. Across the way, on a narrow stone ledge, an ejaculation of rock from a hidden tunnel, three Clone Terra soldiers were punched backwards, chests and faces on fire, skin burning, voices screaming. As one, they buckled and fell forwards, diving, flaming, into the void, lighting it all the way down to its nadir.

Franco stood up. He glanced at Mrs Strogger. "I'm getting fed up of this shit."

"You going soft, boy?"

"Just tired of the killing," said Franco, dejectedly. "It never seems to end."

"There's always some bad sort needs a bullet in the cunt."

"Er. Where's you sense of optimism? Where's your positivity on the nature of the human beast?"

"I ain't no human beast," said Mrs Strogger, and glared at him, eyes glowing green and feral.

"Yeah. I see that. Shall we... move on?"

"After you."

"You sure you're happy behind me?"

"You sure you're happy me being behind?"

Franco smirked. "Well, at least you ain't got no rogue dick!"

There was a whirring sound, and Franco caught a glimpse of shining steel spikes, gears, meshing cogs, thumping pistons. He looked away hurriedly and started to run. He felt it was the best course of action.

"Wouldn't bet on it," muttered Mrs Strogger, following at a secure, sedate pace.

"Looks like a castle to me," said Franco, peering down from a high arched walkway, only a foot wide and perhaps two kilometres high. It was playing havoc with his vertigo. He was just glad his underpants weren't white. Well, not any more.

Stretching away into infinity were curved walkways, gleaming like black steel. Huge twisted portcullis irons dominated the walkways. Franco could see guards patrolling the walkways. It seemed the alarms hadn't reached this far down.

Even as he thought the thought, alarms rang out across the vast, subterranean caverns and red lights flashed. Franco cursed and kicked the steel wall, then cursed again as he cracked his toe. "Damn all flip flops to Hades and back!" he snarled.

"We'll have to ride it," said Mrs Strogger.

"Eh?"

"Ride it. Like a rollercoaster."

"Well," said Franco, curling his lips into a snarl, "life's like that, ain't it? Life's a rollercoaster. Na-na-na-na-na-na. An' all that. I remember the dude, with his pink quiff. Whatever."

Mrs Strogger stared at him, then shrugged with a clanking of machinery. "I'm going to do something now. Something to save our lives. But you must promise me you will never speak of it."

"Er," said Franco, taking a step back and gripping his laser cannon in ever-more-sweating hands. "Okay."

"You ready?"

"This ain't sexual, is it?"

Mrs Strogger frowned. "No. Should it be?"

"It's just, with you tonguing me back in that there cell, and getting all frisky like; well, I know I'm a sexual athlete," he puffed out his chest, "but as a dirty Harry once said, a man needs to know his limitations."

"No, no, nothing like that. This is... a transformation."

"Another upgrade?"

"V1.7 metalbot," smiled Mrs Strogger.

"Ahh," said Franco, and watched as Mrs Strogger did weird and wonderful things, and pistons slid, and covers clanked, and machines moaned, and machines groaned, and flesh
twanged
and
popped
and metal stretched and screeched and Mrs Strogger bent over, and wheels emerged, and grew, and her head became a big flat steel battering ram - with eyes.

"Er," said Franco.

"Don't say anything."

"So you've transformed?" said Franco.

"Yes."

"You're a transformer?"

"Shut up."

"But look! You transformed! Into a transformer! Into a kind of, well fuck me, what the fuck are you, love? A kind of old-woman car-tank thing with a steel hammerhead shark thing thrown in, for ramming things, I presume? Er..."

"Shut up."

"That's pretty cool. You should be called Mrs Transformer."

"Are you going to get on so we can ram our way out of this shit, or should I leave you behind to rot and get shot?"

"No, no, no, I'll, ah, climb aboard, shall I?" He looked around, frowning. "But... where?"

"You sit on the twin mound command centre."

Franco stared, blank. "You mean your arse?"

"No, it's a
fucking
twin mound command centre, and if I fucking
say
it's a twin mound command centre, then a
fucking
twin mound command centre it is. Right?"

"Er. Okay. No need to lose your gerbils."

Tentatively, he climbed aboard. Mrs Strogger was much bigger now. There was more steel. More machinery. Franco cautiously sat himself down amidst the twin mound command centre, namely her
arse cheeks,
and looked around, warily.

I'm sat up her arse,
he thought. And felt a giggle coming on.

"You comfy?" said Mrs Strogger, head revolving a hundred and eighty degrees.

"Er."

"Just grasp the twin circular joysticks."

Franco stared. "They's your tits, right?" he said.

"No," said Mrs Strogger, voice level, face starting to scowl. "They're the twin circular joysticks that control me, in this mode."

"If I touch your tits," said Franco, squinting, "well, does that mean you're going to get all frisky again?"

"They're fucking twin circular joysticks, so get hold of the bastads before I eject your ass and ram my own fucking way clear of this prison shithole!"

"Okay. Okay. No need to get tetchy."

Franco grabbed the twin mounds/joysticks. He squinted again. "They feel like tits," he said, and chewed his lip, "and, as it is well documented, I certainly
like
tits, and indeed believe that there's
nothing nice as tits,
however, in this particular environ and in this particular situation I believe that I have a certain right, nay, I have a certain predisposition to understanding the precise..."

"Shut up."

Jets roared, and Mrs Strogger set off at an incredible rate. Her wheels squealed. She cannoned down the narrow steel walkway, flames ejecting from her boots like Robby RocketBoy on crack. Franco clung on for dear life, cheeks flapping, g-force ripping at him like an atomic blast through flesh.

"Aaaaaaaaaaaaarrrrrgh!" screeched Franco, in one long ululation any vocalist would have been proud of. Wheels squealed. Jets roared. Alarms chimed. Red lights flickered. It was a surreal nightmare filled with surreal nightmares. Franco kept his head down, and his beard whipped his cheeks with a violence to which he would have protested, if he'd been in any position to protest. Which he wasn't.

The first gate was guarded by two guards, who levelled their laser cannons and started firing. Green bursts cut across the darkness, a bright clarity, a stunning contrast. The laser light was deflected from Mrs Strogger's flattened hammerhead. Her speed increased, as did the roar of the jets.

Unable to do
anything
, Franco simply prayed from his seat scooped out of her arse -

And as the guards leapt from the walkway, falling, screaming to their deaths, and Mrs Strogger rammed through the semi-electronic semi-gothic portcullis, sending steel blades whirling and skittering off into enveloping blackness, so Franco buried his head in her twin circular joysticks and pretended, prayed, and deeply fantasised that he was somewhere else entirely...

It was quiet. A cold wind blew. Franco looked up, shivering, and realised for the first time in what felt like hours that they'd
stopped
moving. Like a clam releasing its grip on a rock after a storm, Franco unclawed his rigid claws from Mrs Strogger's metal tits.

He looked up. And saw daylight!

"Daylight!" he croaked, like a dying man crawling through a desert in pursuit of water.

"Time to move," said Mrs Strogger, and with bangs and whirrs and
cracks,
transformed into her former, aged cyborg self, her legs wrapping up and over and around herself, her torso turning inside out, with the mechanical seeming to take very little care of the flesh yolk inside.

Franco felt suddenly very odd.

Franco felt suddenly very
sick
.

I mean, it's just not natural, reet? I mean, splicing and merging all that flesh together like some kind of human-metal omelette! It's a mish-mash of titanium and pulpy liver and squashed brains and stretched skin, all bolted into steel and plastic and run by tiny machines inside. Urgh.

He shivered, and caught Mrs Strogger staring at him. He coughed. "Okay, okay. I'm moving."

Franco composed himself, and jogged through the tunnel, which grew ever-more rough-hewn and jagged. And, like a triumphant maggot bursting from over-ripe corpse-bloat, Franco emerged into sunlight. It caressed his battered face like a languorous lover with an oiled feather. Franco basked in this unexpected glory, breathing deeply, just damn and glad to be out of the Nechudnazzar Prison complex. "I love the smell of sunshine in the morning," he breathed, huskily. "It smells like... freedom!"

"We're not free yet," scowled Mrs Strogger.

Franco frowned at her. "Just stop. Stop with your pedantic negativity. You've done nothing but bloody moan since I met you. And I, my dear, am a man of" -- he puffed out his chest - "principles."

"Look." Strogger gestured through an alloy crack to the vast canyon beyond.

They stood in a tiny gulley, shielded from view by natural stone clefts. Shifting to the right, Franco got his first view, his first
full view
of the Symmetrical Canyon.

The first thing he noticed was its sheer
size,
its vast
scale,
like some alien god had swept down and scooped free a long narrow defile with a starship-sized spade. It was big. It was the sort of canyon that made other canyons run home to their mummy canyons.

The second thing Franco noticed was that the Symmetrical Canyon was filled with war machines. From flank to gill, from arse to tit, wall to wall bristled with metal upon metal upon crammed metal. Tanks and tracks, trucks and infantry transport, mounted guns and choppers, a hundred thousand vehicles squeezed like squashed sardines in a bulging tin, filling the canyon for as far as the eye could see - and all eerily silent.

"That's a lot of metal," said Franco, eyes wide shut.

"A lot of killing power," nodded the old org, her own orbs narrowed, her face twisted into an expression Franco could not at first read. Then he
understood;
this hardware was destined to be used
against
the orgs. This was part of their eternal, ongoing war. This new, crisp, tarpaulin-covered fresh-greased designer killware was created with one purpose: to remove all orgs from the face of Cloneworld.

The machines gleamed.

Mrs Strogger stared, face curled in metal hatred.

"Let's go," said Franco, eventually, uneasily, and started forward. Mrs Strogger stopped him.

"We should be quiet. There will be guards. Lots of guards."

"Great!"

"And, er, other
things
..."

Franco nodded and, grasping his Steyr laser cannon, and cursing the heat of the sun and his lack of not just armour, but
clothing,
he led the way through the sand-rimed rocks, out into the utter silence of the Symmetrical Canyon, out into the silent, still battlefield of waiting metal death.

"Okay," said Alice. "I've got locks on three hundred AI AA GASGAM gunbots in the immediate vicinity. They don't seem to move about, do they? They are, on the whole, stationary."

Tarly Winters leaned forward over the console, then sat back. She glanced at Pippa, who did not meet her gaze, but stared forward, face set in iron. A rigid mask. "They sit like a lizard on a stone, absorbing energy, waiting - ready to pounce. Believe me, Alice, I've seen these bastards in action. When there's a threat, a hive call goes out and all others within charging distance come in as back up. It's a terrifying proposition. They are very, very dangerous."

"And that makes me feel better how, exactly?" Alice's voice was sweet, for a ship's computer, but carried a sliver of implied menace.

"What sets us apart," said Tarly, "is that QGM put these machines in place to stop the orgs and gangers fighting; to try and bring a bit of sanity to the dinner table of the insane. To halt the escalation of their war! Now, they have pitched battles, and some small naval skirmishes, but it stopped their millions of cowardly air attacks on one another's civilian targets. Spared a lot of lives."

"How humanitarian of them," said Pippa, voice low, tone neutral.