Cloneworld - 04 (39 page)

"A nice trick. What is it? A pulse accelerator under your palm?"

Ziggurat shrugged, discarding his robe with the same motion. Pippa blinked. He was now naked, his body twisted and scarred -
heavily
scarred - from either acts of torture, or a hundred battles with a blade. His small, shrivelled penis swung between his legs as he took a weird kind of wrestling stance, one shoulder low and stooped, the other pushed back by his spinal deformity.

"You going to kill me, or fuck me?" snarled Pippa.

Ziggurat smiled. "Show me what you can do."

"Come on, it's one thing trying to kill you, but I shouldn't have to look at your tiny dick at the same time. That's an unfair advantage," but even as she spat the insult she was leaping, sword whistling in five beautiful, precise strokes. Ziggurat, despite his deformity, moved with practised speed and an agility that stunned Pippa. He swayed, shifted, danced, and avoided each and every swing without seeming to make any effort. He was a dancer, he was a ghost. He was
untouchable.

Pippa took a step back. A light sheen of sweat grazed her brow and upper lip.

"Shit," she said.

"Submit. We do not want to kill you. We want to question you. About the Junkala Soul. About how we can access its data. You can help us. We know all about you, Pippa. We know your Combat K history. We know you have the skills to decode this alien trinket."

"Fuck this." Pippa grabbed her MPK, rounded the weapon on Ziggurat and pulled the trigger hard. Bullets screamed, Ziggurat shifted posture and... Pippa blinked, then
howled
as the weapon was torn from her grasp, removing a layer of skin, and slammed across the Pod Vault's interior. The MPK hit the wall so hard it broke into three pieces, which skittered across the ground, shedding bullets from the blasted magazine.

Pippa charged, yukana whistling for Ziggurat's head. He brought both hands together with a clap like thunder, and Pippa smelled ozone, everything seemed to go red and black, and she was picked up and her yukana sword
bent and distorted into a twisted ball, and that was impossible, fucking impossible, and the pain exploded through her, and she was burning with hot hellfire as she was lifted, floated, accelerated, and she burned, and burned, and burned without flames, and tears ran down her scorched cheeks and she got one final glimpse, of Ziggurat, naked and grotesque, his green eye and yellow eye watching her, unblinking, uncaring
before the pain became too much and she fell down an infinite well of darkness and welcomed the bottom of the pit; welcomed oblivion.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

AN ORGY OF ORGS

"What we gonna do, what we gonna do, squawk buster? I didn't shack up with you guys to die a pointless death on a pointless bloody ocean, I thought you had a better plan than this, I thought you knew what you were bloody doing squawk and here I'll be all lost and alone and lost at sea, and I'll burn me bleedin' motors out tryin' to fly all the way to dry land 'cos we're in the middle of bleedin' nowhere, so we are! What we gonna do? What we gonna squawk do, I ask yer?"

"Shut up," said Franco. "You ain't helping the damn situation."

Tarly was pale. They were in the shit, and here, and now, there was no magical Quad-Gal Military to bail her out. No expensive computer like Alice ready to calculate a solution to the problem in the blink of an eye. Tarly Winters might be one of the richest women in the whole of QGM, she might command more respect and power than Franco could ever dream about in a trillion years, she might be at the very top of the ziggurat - but here, she was just as helpless as the next woman being dragged into a four-klick wide whirlpool.

"Do something, Franco," she said, clutching his arm.

Franco grinned, and puffed out his chest. "Hey, they don't call me Franco 'Bodge Monkey' Haggis for nothing, sweetness. Leave this one to me!" He pointed at the parrot. "You! Parrot! Find me a screwdriver."

"A sonic one?"

"Eh?"

"A sonic screwdriver?"

"No, duckweed, a bloody Phillips one! And a hammer. Can't fix nothing without a hammer."

"What are you going to fix, Franco?" said Tarly, looking over her shoulder at the impending whirlpool - and their impending deaths - in a sweeping, crushing, watery grave.

"The Hyperdrive," said Franco, proudly, scratching his beard and puffing out his chest once more. "You just stay here watch that, love," he said, as the parrot dropped a screwdriver into Franco's fist. He waved the screwdriver around, and without any hint of irony whatsoever, said, "I'll be back."

He disappeared below deck.

The hyperdrive was whining and belching, the power nozzles set on full power. Plumes of black smoke were emerging from the port side of the galleon, and Tarly and the parrot looked at each other.

"Pretty Polly," said the parrot, weakly.

"Fat lot of good you are, AI. You couldn't think your way out of damn Connect Four game. When we get
out
of this shit, I'm going to drop
you
in the shit."

"Hey, this ain't my fault, buster!"

Below decks, Franco was staring at the hyperdrive, hands on hips, a big frown on his face. He heard somebody on the steps and turned, seeing Tarly descend to stand beside him. He brightened, visibly.

"Ah! The Heckler and Steinberg 52pnm co-rotational Hyperdrive!"

"You know it, then?" Tarly looked uncertain.

"Er. No. But I've read about it."

"What did you read about it?"

"I read, er, that it was... a... good... hyperdrive."

Franco started forward, and Tarly shivered. Here was the most dangerous thing known to woman - a man with a screwdriver. Franco crouched by a huge panel and undid the screws holding it on. He dropped one, which rolled away and was lost in the galleon's interior gloom. He grinned back at Tarly. "That always happens," he said.

"We're going to fucking die!" she screamed at him.

"Okay, okay, don't hassle a dude when he's on a gig, reet?"

He held up his hand, flat palm outwards.

"Back up. Back up."

Tarly, with great exaggeration, took several steps back.

"A dude needs room to breathe, yeah?"

"Just fix the fucking engine!"

"Okay, okay, don't hassle me."

Franco started to poke around inside the hyperdrive, which fizzed and popped. At one point, he was illuminated by bright white light. Then he tapped his teeth with the end of the screwdriver.

"Just as I thought."

"What did you think?"

"It's damn complex in there."

"Hmm. You don't know what the hell you're doing, do you?"

"Hey, just hang on there, trixie-knickers. Give me a few moments to codge... to codga... to think about it." He tapped his teeth again. "If I bypass the dytronium relays to the fusion hyperindex, then we should back a backpressure upsurge which negates the bipedal contrafugal..."

Tarly crouched in close beside him. "Do you feel that sideways pull?"

"Uh-huh." He nodded, meeting her gaze.

"That's us, spinning around the edge of the whirpool. You've got a minute, fucknugget, then we'll be revolving so fast we ain't getting out of this shit-heap alive.
Ever.
"

"Don't pressure me, lass, don't pressure."

Franco reached into the hyperdrive and poked about with his screwdriver. There came an almighty scream, like worlds colliding, and the hyperdrive shut down. All lights flickered off.The engine was
dead.

Franco grinned backed at Tarly. "Whoops," he said.

"You fucking, fucking, fucking idiotic, fucking, nim-witted dim-witted fucking stupid mind-frazzled drug-riddled numb-skulled brainless bowel-wrenching dog-fucking horse-fucking goat-fucking erection-obsessed fucking useless lump of fucking lard..."

As she'd been ranting, Franco reached into the hyperdrive once more. With a whine, the lights on the hyperdrive came back on. The galleon gave a
jerk.
The whole machine started to vibrate insanely.

Franco grinned. "Hey." He hooked his thumb in his belt and there was a swagger as he stood. "Get yo ass up there and give her full juice, baby, this baby's going home! Or, at least, out of the sucking whirlpool and over the ocean towards The Org States!"

Tarly disappeared, and Franco, holding his screwdriver as a cowboy would hold a six-shooter, swaggered up the steps - to be hit by a blast of wind as they were sucked around and around at the brink of the whirlpool. Queen Strogger was hanging onto the mast, her face grim, and the parrot was squawking and flapping, caught by random air-currents and the violent wind.

"What happened?" shouted Franco over the roar of the sudden storm.

"It came out of nowhere," growled Queen Strogger. "When you
fixed
the hyperdrive. I would suggest it could be centrifugal
blowback.
"

Franco staggered across the galleon's deck. "Whatrafugal whatback?"

"The hyperdrive's short-circuiting. It's drawing energy from the ocean, from the whirlpool, from everything around it. What the hell did you do to it, Franco?"

"Well, I hotwired it, innit?"

Franco staggered across the decks and up the planks to Tarly, at the control deck. Wind and sea spray raged around them, whipping Tarly's ginger curls around her face. Her hands were hovering tentatively over the controls, as Franco's hands would have hovered over a particularly delicate clitoris.

"Give it some, love!" he shouted over the rage.

"I don't want to blow it up, you psycho!" she yelled.

"Bah and humbug," snapped Franco, slamming the controls. The hyperdrive shuddered and whined, and they took off across the Teeth Ocean as if somebody had shoved a rocket up their arse. The galleon slammed through the waves like a missile-powered ship - which, indeed, it was.

"See!" yelled Franco, triumphantly, and ran to the prow, leaning over and into the sea-spray with childish glee. "I did it! We're saved! I saved us! It worked!"

"Franco," yelled Tarly, grabbing his arm and holding onto him for dear life. "You've got to slow us down! We're going too fast!"

"What rot!" snapped Franco, his cheek flaps wobbling like a naked astronaut on re-entry. "This baby will hold strong and true! She's an incredible piece of ancient technology! She's as strong as an ox, as tough as a teletubby, as rabid as a pitbull..."

There came a distant creak. And a
crack!
The sort of
crack!
that indicated a major section of timber breaking in half. Franco went a little pale. "Er," he said, as the parrot flapped past him, squawking and losing its alloy feathers.

Franco and Tarly ran for the control deck together. They were way past the pull of the ocean whirlpool - a good fifty kilometres past it. But at what cost?

Franco hit the kill-switch and, with a whine and a shudder, the hyperdrive slowly wound down. The galleon hit the surface of the ocean with a
slap
and gradually slowed, huge waves settling around her bows like the skirts of an enormous lady after a vigorous ballroom dance on a cocktail of whiskey, speed and methedrine.

Gradually, the world seemed to return to a normal state.

Franco sighed a big sigh of relief.

"Well, that seemed to work out alright, didn't it?" He beamed at Tarly, then over at Queen Strogger, who was scowling at him, eyes narrowed, but in all fairness that seemed to be the expression she always adopted for dealing with Franco Haggis. Most people did.

"You put our lives at risk!" said Tarly, hands on hips.

"Bah! They were already at risk! We was gonna drown!"

"Yeah, but it's always the same with you, out of the bloody frying pan and into the bloody fire! You seriously put this vessel at risk of sinking! And what? So you could see if Charlie don't surf? You've got to think things through more clearly," said Tarly.

"Ach, stop whining. We've only just started dating and already you're nagging me like a carping fishwife."

"
What?
"

"I thought you was my good woman by my side as we rode the ocean waves. Now things ain't looking so rosy and oh, yes, soon you'll be wanting to trim my beard and iron my shirts and get my tuff fixed." Franco was a mite touchy on this subject, seeing as his last wife - an eight foot genetic super-soldier mutation called Melanie - had made him trim his beard and iron his shirts and get his tuff fixed.

"What the hell's a tuff?"

There came another
CRACK!
only this
CRACK!
was a damn sight bigger than the last
crack!
that
cracked!
through the galleon. The ship lurched, then sat its arse back in the water, and began - very slowly - to lift its nose in the air.

"Er, that doesn't look good," said Franco, looking around frantically.

"That's because we're sinking," said Tarly, voice a centre of stoic calm.

There came a long pause.

"Er," said Franco.

"I
told you
to slow down."