Cloneworld - 04 (9 page)

Franco nodded. "Let's do it," he said.

Mrs Strogger suddenly reared up, and slammed both fists against the doors, wrenching them from their hinges and catapulting them across the prison kitchens. The doors
whammed,
spinning and crashing through pans of bubbling soup and a hundred steel plates and trays and pans, and the air was filled with an eruptive, explosive cacophony of clattering metal, of screaming steel, of raining kitchen appliances. In the midst of this sudden chaos, Franco saw about twenty chefs, identifiable by their trademark starched white uniforms and their cheery tall chef's hats. Each chef was a big, cheery-looking chap, with a bearded, happy, fat face, wobbling jowls, and a serious overhang of gut from maybe ten thousand excessive tasting sessions. In any other setting, the whole scene would have appeared friendly, convivial, a jolly jaunt into the world of prison cooking; but within the blink of an eye, the cheery plump chefs had armed themselves with knives and cleavers, machetes and skewers, and a hail of weapons flashed through the air like the deadliest of archery fire...

Franco unleashed a burst of green laser bolts, which fizzed across the kitchen expanse, blackening steel, knocking over pans of bubbling broth
,
and knocking two chefs backwards with chomping, hate-filled faces and waving machetes. They disappeared behind the steel cupboards as Franco grunted and hit the ground fast. Knives and skewers clattered overhead, falling around him with a musical tinkling of steel. Franco glanced left, at the razor-sharp cleaver. His eyes narrowed. "The cheeky bastards," he said, reaching up to grab a steel tray from the work surface. He stood, holding the tray up as a makeshift shield, and looked down to where Mrs Strogger was cowering behind a large cupboard. "A bit of help wouldn't go amiss, you big quivering pussy!" he snarled.

"I need my recharge socket!" she whimpered. "I need more power, more energy, more zaza
zoomph!"

Franco stared at her, then sighed. "Great," he muttered. "Stuck in a firefight with a useless bloody pacifist pussy org!" Something heavy bounced off his tray with a mammoth
clang!
and Franco cursed, raised his laser cannon, and shot a chef in the chest, blowing the hapless culinary maestro backwards through the swing doors and out of sight. "That's for making fucking celebrity TV programs," he muttered, and ducked as another chef appeared, this one with a rifle.

There came a
whiz
and
ping
as a projectile ricocheted off the wall behind Franco and embedded itself in Mrs Strogger's thigh. She didn't seem to notice.

Franco aimed his laser cannon over the steel cupboard, watched the chef reloading an ancient battered Crack Rifle, and Franco shot him in the stomach. "That's for flooding the Festive Market with shite cookery books," he snarled, spittle launching from his aggravated lips.

"Aaah," said Mrs Strogger, as if taking a huge and relieving dump, as Franco watched, nervous now, as fifteen chefs appeared carrying Crack Rifles. They started to load the weapons, hunkering down behind steel benches, their tall white hats wavering.

Franco glanced down. Mrs Strogger had slumped down, opened a flap at her groin, and extracted a long thick black cable, which she'd plugged into an IWS - Industrial Wall Socket.

"Er," said Franco.

"Yes?" said Mrs Strogger, staring at him.

"You got shot then, you realise?"

"So?"

"Didn't it hurt?"

"Should it?"

"Hmm," said Franco. He stared at her recharge socket. "So, that thing, then."

"What thing?"

"That, er, that big tube coming from your groin."

"My recharge cable."

"Odd place to put it."

"Your meaning?"

"A-ha-ha," said Franco. "What I'm meaning to say, is that you're a, y'know, female org. A girlie. And that there big sausage thing, well, it looks a bit like a..."

"Yes?" Each letter contained knives.

"What I mean to say is, somebody, a pervert or something, or a comedian, might say it looks like you've got a massive black..."

"Yes?"

"Nothing," said Franco, and smiled, clenching his teeth.

At that moment, a volley of ammunition slammed across the prison kitchens, and Franco cowered on the floor, tray held over his head as bullets
pinged
and
clanged
, and one neatly removed the bottom inch of his little finger.

"
Aargh!"
screamed Franco, staring in disbelief at the minor amputation. Blood pumped from the wound, and Franco's instant reaction was to put it in his mouth.

Mrs Strogger suddenly reached over, her face a scowl, and grabbed Franco's arm. He struggled for a moment, like a fish on a hook, as she dragged him towards her and produced, from a flap in her belly, what turned out to be a glowing soldering iron. Holding Franco in an unbreakable grip, Mrs Strogger cauterised the stump of Franco's little finger as he screamed again, gnashing his teeth as the stench of frying pork filled the air.

Strogger abruptly let Franco go and he slapped back onto his arse - as another volley whirred overhead. The chefs had organised themselves into two fighting lines, one line reloading ancient Crack Rifles whilst the other took aim and fired. Franco grabbed his laser cannon, his movements fired up by the pain not just in his finger, but in his pride, and started blasting away like a cowboy madman with pistols at a disco.

Chefs were slammed backwards, left and right, leaving trails of steaming cabbage soup, sending platters of rotten vegetables into the air, sending bowls of black braised beef scattering across the steel floor with dry, hard, drumming sounds. Another line of bullets whined across the kitchen, puncturing bubbling pans of donkey stew, and suddenly the air was filled with screaming alarms and more red strobes flickered into life. Behind them, in the corridor leading to the kitchens, Sourballs appeared with a squad of ten prison guards.

"Found you! At last!" she screeched, barbed-wire hair bobbing madly. "Kill them!"

Lasers whined from the corridor, and Franco scrambled sideways across the cupboards, miraculously missing a combined crossfire of laser blasts and ancient steel shells. He dived, slamming into a cupboard, and fired his laser cannon down the corridor without looking, squeezing off twenty bursts of crackling energy. When he peered round, three guards were dead, their corpses smoking, and the rest had fled for cover.

Franco glanced at Mrs Strogger. "We're in the shit!" he snapped, pain in his finger giving him an urgency he hadn't felt in a long, long time. "I could do with some fucking help, you old hag!"

"Almost charged," smiled the old org, her wrinkled face relaxed into the euphoria of a terminal Crack67 sniffer.

Franco started to crawl along a line of cupboards. His idea was simple: flank the chefs, take them out in a hail of laser fire, then get the hell out of the kitchens and away before Sourballs and her laser-shooting chumps caught up with him. To Hell with Mrs Strogger! The ancient mechanised bitch was too busy getting juiced up!

"I would call a ceasefire, if I was you," came the trembling voice of Teddy Sourballs.

Franco halted. He didn't speak; to make a sound would be to give away his new position. And he liked it just fine that nobody now knew where he was. Franco listened. The chefs had ceased their fire; obviously they recognised their illustrious Governor Sourballs and were loathe to fill her full of lead. Although Franco couldn't think of a better ending for the irascible bitch.

"I have a deal! You've run down here, thinking there is a way out, but you are mistaken! You're trapped! You are pincered down with pincered claws! As if caught by a crab! Ha-ha. You cannot ever leave here without my help! Well, what I offer is for you to come on trial, on TV, and get a fair trial, and we will get good TV ratings right across Quad-Gal and we'll all be winners. I can..." she paused, as if listening to commands through an earpiece. "
What? You'd give the little fucker those terms - oh, oh, sorry,
yes, I am now in a position to offer you a
guaranteed safety clause.
You are Franco Haggis, Combat K, and this will get us better viewings than
Torture!
In fact, the episode where you decapitated Opera - well, it appears my,
er
, boss and superior, the Mistress, has received the viewing figures. You are a star, Franco Haggis! By your act of violence, you have earned our TV network
more commissions, advertising revenue and new subscribers
in one day than we've had in the last three years!"

She paused, out of breath from gabbling. Franco considered this.

There came a
bang,
the whine of a discharged round, and a shot that nearly took Sourballs's head clean off. It parted her hair in a rush of spinning steel. Theresa scowled, and one of her guards lasered the chef in the face, leaving him burnt and broken and twitching.

"I said
ceasefire!"
screeched Sourballs. Here was a woman used to getting what she wanted via screeching. It was quite worrying.

Franco scratched his stubble.

"Well, what do you say? You are a Quad-Gal phenomenon, Franco Haggis! Okay, the people hate you for what you did to Opera, but in terms of monetary value, you are going to be... rich! Very rich. In fact, one of the richest individuals on the planet!"

"You want me to work for you?" said Franco, frowning as understanding bit his balls.

"Yes!" beamed Theresa. She had strode forward, and stood in the doorway, her confidence growing with each passing second that no bullet or laser round removed her head. "You can come, act on our network. We'll have a trial, milk it out, play to the media for months and months - it will be most lucrative for all of us!"

Franco stood up. The guards had followed Sourballs, and were crowding round her in the doorway. Everybody seemed to be smiling. From some dregs of distant memory, Franco remember watching filmy on how the gangers were
obsessed
with TV, with digMedia, with stars and reality shows and all manner of extreme digital entertainment. They had taken it to such an extreme that some gangers had, by a combination of genetic modification and basic evolutionary necessity, become huge mounds of flesh which sat in an armchair all day, one short arm used for the remote, the other for feeding food into a hole in their chest, alongside eyes and nose.
Blobbers,
they were called, and they existed simply to eat and shit and watch. Now, a little of the obsession started to dredge through into Franco's confused mind. These bastards were willing to give him a
reprieve
. Willing to let him go. And he could play along, if he was wily and cunning like a wily cunning fox - until he found a moment to either contact Pippa, or do a runner.

Franco rubbed his bristly beard. "Well, that sounds like a great deal to me," he said, and he was the sort of man who, if the truth be known, would trade in his old granny for a crate of PreCheese and a barrel of pungent horseradish. "Would I need an agent? What percentage would I get? Net, not gross, unless maybe I don't have to pay Quad-Gal tax because I'm, you know, exempt for being sometimes mad. I've had a few bad run-ins with the Quad-Gal Revenue." He twitched, remembering his ex-wife Mel, one time tax inspector and later zombie super-soldier. It hadn't turned out well - either in marital terms, or in terms of Quad-Gal Revenue fines. He was still making the repayments. And would be, for the next one thousand and eighty years.

"I am sure," said Teddy Sourballs, holding her arms wide apart, "that we can come to some kind of wonderful arrangement."

Through the silence of minds working out figures, there was a tiny
click
.

"Aaah," said Mrs Strogger, and with various clanks and clonks, she stood up. She looked around. "Aaaahh!" she said, and unplugged her groinal cable. There came a
phuzzz
noise as it retracted into her groin like a cheap spring-loaded lead from a vacuum sucker. "
Aaaahh!
That felt wonderful, brilliant; a full fast-recharge, and now I'm ready for battle." She squinted myopically. "Right, Franco. Where're the bad guys?"

"No!" said Franco, smiling frantically. "Wait!"

There came a huge roar, clanking sounds and ratchet thumps. Mrs Strogger suddenly seemed to
expand
as her cyborg upgrades, now fully charged and armed, came into existence. Guns sprouted along her arms, her legs beefed out with armoured plating, her midriff shot up on its piston so she towered over proceedings, and her shoulder-mounted lasers spun around, locating targets and locking on with tiny red beams.

"Happy days," said the old org, in a quiet little voice... as all Hell seemed to break loose. Lasers whined and spat, and Mrs Strogger picked up a
whole row
of benches and threw them at the gawping chefs. Guards returned fire, criss-crossing the room with red and green laser flashes, and Franco ran for it, diving behind a bank of steel cabinets as bullets filled the air from the chefs and Sourballs was screaming for another ceasefire and Mrs Strogger crunched over to her, legs whining and clacking, and reaching out with steel mandibles which seemed suddenly larger to Franco than before. She picked Teddy Sourballs up with a growl and threw her sideways down the corridor. Sourballs, whirling, limbs flailing like a ragdoll's, bounced from the wall and cannoned into six guards, taking them all out in a mash of tangled broken limbs. Mrs Strogger whirled back, legs hissing and clanking, and strode forward through the kitchen - quite literally
through
it - stomping steel cabinets down into platters, slamming through ovens, ignoring the bullets of the now frantically firing and reloading chefs until she reached the cowering, chubby, happy men with wobbling jowls and fat fingers, blasting them off their feet with her lasers as her claws lashed out on huge steel tentacles, grabbing chefs and tossing them around, flesh crunching against walls, bodies slamming into steel, bones breaking and skulls cracking.