Cloneworld - 04 (45 page)

"You okay?"

"Just... scared of the dark."

"
What?
"

"Hey." She shrugged. "Even psychopathic assassins have to have a flaw, right? With you, its beer and sausage. I pretty much guarantee you'd sell your mission pack for a crate of sausage and a keg of ale."

"Hmm. You got me there."

Queen Strogger followed on in silence, and Polly the Parrot fluttered off overhead, promising to "check things out," which Franco secretly hoped meant, "getting lost and dead."

The bridge wound on, and below them lights glittered like stars through oil.

They walked for perhaps a half-hour, through darkness, through gloom, through what seemed an eternity of
space.
Finally, Anklebolt stopped by a staircase, and Franco and Tarly, machine guns weighing heavily in their non-upgraded arms, also halted, the barrels
not quite
pointing at Anklebolt, but nevertheless locked and loaded and ready for action. Both Franco and Tarly were under no illusions that at the first opportunity Anklebolt would rip off their heads and shit down their necks.

"Why've you stopped?" barked Franco.

"Down there."

"Where?"

"If you had
org eyes,
you'd be able to see."

"It's the machines?"

"Yes."

Anklebolt and Queen Strogger exchanged glances. Then Queen Strogger said, "They have not been used for many thousands of years. What are you thinking of, Franco Haggis? I hope you do not intend to rearrange my city?"

"Oh no," said Franco, flapping his hand as if waving away a petty inconvenience. "Nothing of the sort." He pointed the gun. His face went serious. He felt serious. He felt seriously messed about. He felt like the sort of wounded, skin-flayed, false-fingered squaddie who might just shoot
everybody
if he didn't get his own damn way. "Now take us down. And no sudden moves or I'll fill you so full of lead you'll think you were a pencil. A fat one, obviously. And one with upgrades."

There were steps. Lots of steps. Hundreds of steps.

Thousands
of steps.

Anklebolt led the way, and Franco and Tarly started traipsing after her. Their assorted machine feet, boots and sandals slapped and thudded on the black iron steps, which spiralled, twisted and turned and shifted all the way down to the
ground.

"
Pencil?"
said Tarly, after a while.

"Shut up."

"Yeah, but...
pencil?"

"All I could think of at the time, reet? You want a better metaphor, you bloody come up with one."

"Touchy."

"It's this lack of skin on my back, and walking around in my shorts. Starting to get on my tits, so to speak."

Distantly, a "squawk!" could be heard, reverberating off metal and fading to a metallic silence.

"Damn bird," muttered Franco.

It was a long way down. A
loooong
way.

Gradually the dim lights grew closer, and Franco and Tarly, without upgraded legs, were as weak as jelly and quivering like a nervous schoolgirl on a first date. Still, the view got more interesting as they descended.
Much
more interesting, as huge, vast shapes started to loom out of the black. Some were as big as skyscrapers, vast machines, all angular and matt black, with cables as thick as a landcar tunnel drooping in coils around angular, mechanical shoulders. Some had scoops and spades so big they could have... well,
created
this space.

Franco looked around him in wonder, and with a twinkle in his eye, as they descended yet further. They came upon trucks, so huge they could carry city blocks on their flatbacks. There were more diggers, and bulldozers that could have created mountains. Which they surely had.

"There," said Franco, pointing.

Tarly squinted. "What is it?"

Franco grinned, showing his missing tuff. "You'll see. Oy! Ankleshite! Take us across that gantry, there. You see it? Eh? There's a good girl."

They walked across the gantry, footsteps echoing across the bleak, titanic chamber. Tarly stared down, and blinked, and rubbed her eyes, then frowned. There were six vehicles, all lined up next to one other. Each was about the size of a very large steam engine - complete with twenty carriages. But they were matt black and corrugated, and at the front were what looked like two huge arms, each hundreds of yards long and ending in rounded scoops.

"Oh no," said Tarly.

"Oh yes," said Franco.

"They're
Moles,
right?"

"That's right, sugar-plum tree."

Tarly stopped. She put her hands on her hips. "Tell me, please Franco, tell me you're not thinking of
tunnelling
all the fucking way to Clone Terra! Tell me that insane thought hasn't gone through your tepid skull!"

"Hey, have you ever seen these babies go? They
blast
through the rock so fast they're a
blur,
mate! I saw a documentary on them a few years back. About QGM using them to infiltrate enemy wotsits, and all that. You know. Tunnel under enemy lines. Plant bombs. That sort of shit."

"I remember that documentary," said Tarly, voice level, eyes narrowed. "The Moles kept hitting pockets of gas and
exploding
."

"That's the monkey!"

"And sometimes, they'd hit pockets of oil, and explode!"

"Aye! That's the donkey!"

"Sometimes," she said, with a narrow smile that had nothing to do with humour, "they'd just explode."

"Ach, just teething problems."

"Franco, they're fucking
dangerous
. Like
taken-off-the-market
dangerous, like
responsible-for-thousands-of-people-dying
dangerous. You getting this into your thick skull? You observing a common thread here?"

"Ach, bollocks to it!"

"What's that supposed to mean?"

They were moving again, down more steps and sloping walkways, towards the Moles. Up close, they were
vast
. Tall as a building, long as city blocks, with two big digger-arms up front for tunnelling. They were a serious piece of earth-moving hardware. They were also, unfortunately, a bit of a death-trap.

"It means," said Franco, turning suddenly and facing Tarly, "that we're pretty much out of options. If you can think of another way to get to Pippa and shut down this bloody ganger army, then come on, spit it out!"

"Hey! Calm down!"

Franco sighed. Tarly smiled at him, and reached out, and took him in her arms. "What you need, mister, is a bit of good friendly loving."

"Better believe it!"

Tarly kissed him, and Franco was taken by surprise, but he responded, and their tongues entwined.
Wow, she can kiss, this lass! She's got a tongue like an electric eel, and hands like Mole diggers!

They snogged, a full-on hardcore snog, and Franco couldn't help himself. He grabbed her arse, and gave it a good ol' big squeeze.

As they broke away, Franco smacked his lips. "You're a chick who knows how to set a man's tonsils on fire! You've got bite, baby! You're a wriggler!"

Tarly paused, lips moving soundlessly. Franco grinned, turned, and stomped down the final set of steps, his sandals slapping onto bare rock. He moved up to one of the Moles and pressed a hand against its cold flank. "Baby!" he muttered.

"Shit," growled Tarly, who for a moment had thought the game was up. She shouted out, "These machines, they've been down here thousands of years. You'll be lucky if this one fires up at all! You'll be lucky if it even moves a paddle!"

Franco wasn't looking. Which was good. Because at that point Tarly's skin started to ripple, to pulse, to show that her flesh was not
whole,
was not
as one,
but instead made from snakes and joined, bonded, by strength of will. Tarly Winters was a clone. Not a clone of any particular individual, but a clone of
humanity
...

Quickly, she gathered herself in
unity.
She pushed her snake flesh back together again;
bonded.

"We'll see, we'll see," muttered Franco, patting the Mole.

He turned, just as her flesh became one. Became
human.
Tarly gave him a dazzling, beautiful smile.

"We'll see," he grinned.

The T5 jet came in through high cloud cover, dropping sharply with a roar of engines, and Pippa stared out of the window, heart pounding in her chest, and looked down over the vast range of mountains that divided the planet in two, known as
The Teeth
.

Peaks glittered, black rock beneath snow caps. A hundred mountains flashed beneath them, a thousand mountains, exhilarating and dangerously close.

The Mistress's War City opened up beneath them in a huge clearing on a rocky plateau, and it was vast, and it was terrifying. At the centre stood a huge raised compound - The Mistress's battle HQ. A Monastery, with high fortified walls and Big Guns. There were factories, a hundred at least, all churning out tanks and choppers, guns and jets. There were more
Slush Pits
like Pippa had seen back on Clone Terra. Only
here
there were
fifty
Pits, not one, and Pippa could only imagine how many clones were being churned out as soldiers for this new and terrible invasion. Around the high perimeter fences stomped GASGAMs - fifty, seventy, a hundred - and Pippa's eyes grew wide. The Mistress had not been exaggerating. She had repossessed them all; hijacked their cores, their programming, and bent them to her will.

Pippa observed infantry training. Thousands.
Tens
of thousands. Clones, but with a difference - for they had been modified, augmented,
upgraded
using the information supplied by Queen Strogger in the hope of gaining a truce. Instead, she had simply provided a new facet to the upcoming Reality War TV Show about to be aired on Clone TV.

The jet soared down, and turned suddenly vertical, jerking Pippa in her landing straps. It sank slowly to the roof of The Monastery, and Pippa was led down a ramp and outside by Ziggurat and Teddy Sourballs.

A cold, winter wind hit Pippa hard, like a slap in the face.

"This way," the Mistress gestured, almost lazily, back in human form now, but still the images of her
snakes
haunted Pippa's mind with a shiver. She would never look at the woman -
hell, fuck it,
at the fucking
alien
- the same way again.

The Mistress reached the roof barrier of The Monastery. She gazed out, over her armies, over her factories, over her vast War Host. "There!" She pointed.

"Satellites?"

"Broadcast satellites. We're running test signals now, to every single TV set on Cloneworld, and to all our off-world booster cubes. We wouldn't want anybody to miss the biggest show ever made, right?"

"You're going to broadcast throughout Quad-Gal?"

"Of course. Everyone will have the right to see this, the biggest and best, the most original TV Reality Show ever made! Nobody has ever televised war like this before. Nobody has ever made it
interactive
. Just think, each viewer at home could be personally responsible for shooting that roomful of school children! They can hold an enemy org soldier's fate in their very own hands! Choose whether a ganger org can cut off his enemy's balls or not! Incredible!"

"Awesome!" said Pippa, voice dripping sarcasm.

"Come on! I will show you more!"

Pippa was led (forced!) down a number of ramps and stairs, all metal, leading through the heart of The Monastery. True to form, it was built from stone and contained alien prayer walls and bells. Somehow, though, to Pippa it kind of lost its relevance.

Outside, they climbed into a HJeep. Jets whined, and the Jeep lifted several feet off the ground and accelerated, a cold biting mountain wind ruffling hair as they hummed across the flat rocky parade grounds, down paths from The Monastery HQ to the huge training fields of infantry.

"To give the show
originality,"
explained the Mistress, "we have cloned up battalions of different types of soldier. So there, for example, we have basic landbound grunts from various different nationalities of Quad-Gal. There, we have some standard Mongrel_grade, Simmo_grade and Jappo_grade infantry units. We tend to breed in battalions of a thousand, give or take, depending on defect and re-feed numbers from Pits and Vats. We're finding different properties of the Slush Pits dictate different success rates in the mass cloning."

"Interesting," said Pippa, eyes scanning the fields from the back of the HJeep. "Wait! Stop!"

"Yes?"

The HJeep hummed to a halt, bobbing for a moment, and Pippa stood up and stared. She stared again. She stared a little harder. "Holy Mother of God," she said, "tell me my eyes are deceiving me!"

"No. What you see is true."

"It cannot be!"

"Oh, it is," chuckled the Mistress.

There, before their watching eyes, all stood to attention, with a Battle Sergeant screaming orders as they ran through drills, were
a thousand Franco Haggises!