Pippa growled, but held her tongue.
"You are dismissed," said Tarly, turning her back on Pippa.
Pippa stood for a moment, face burning,
furious
at being spoken to in such a way. If anybody else had done it, they'd be wearing their spine as a necklace. In fact...
Pippa's hand touched her pistol.
"Do that, and I'll remove your hand at the wrist," said Tarly, softly, her words barely audible.
Pippa disappeared.
Tarly smiled, and finished unpacking.
"What a fucking bitch," said Pippa, strapping on yet another weapon from the armoury. Her bunk was strewn with kit, guns and knives and her twin
yukana
swords capable of slicing hull steel. Her kit bag was filled with field rations, med kits, her PAD computer with a billion different functions and several tools and gun tools.
"I advise caution," said Alice, ever the diplomat.
Pippa cast an eye skywards, a movement she saved for when she fancied she was eyeing the seemingly omniscient ship computer. "Oh yeah? Is that because you're contracted to report back on my every word?"
"I am, yet again, deeply offended."
"Well she's a fucking scrote bitch. She's sucked and fucked her way up the ladder, taking it up the arse all the way to the top. I know that sort of bitch, and I'll be damned if I'm working under her, taking orders from her, or lying on my back with my legs spread wide for her. Tarly Ice Queen is a slap bitch of the lowest order, and I'm going after Franco whether she likes it or not."
"She'll place you under house arrest," warned Alice.
"Well, she'll have to kill me to stop me."
"That can be arranged," came Tarly's smooth, silky voice. She stood in the doorway to Pippa's quarters. Pippa didn't demean herself by looking back.
"Yeah, well, better do it from where you're standing, bitch, 'cos the only way you'll ever take me is from behind. Better believe it."
"I worked my way up through the ranks," said Tarly, her voice still soft, distant almost, as if recollecting a dream, or a nightmare. When Pippa did look back, Tarly had her eyes closed. "I was married once. I had two boys, lovely little creatures; my babies. But I loved the job too much, was married to the job, and when Jonny filed for divorce and custody, my scrawled '
yes'
was the first non-mil contact I'd had for two years."
"So?" Pippa was used to sob stories. It took more than a broken family to bring out her tears. Despite describing Tarly Winters as an
Ice Queen, Ice Bitch
and
Mrs Nitrogen,
Pippa had something of a similar reputation in Quad-Gal military circles. One frisky young man ended up with his SMKK shoved so far up his arse he had to have it medically removed. News like Pippa travelled fast.
"Well, I worked my way up the ranks," said Tarly, and her eyes flicked open, like a robot's. "I carried out infiltrations, demolitions, and assassinations before I went pro-pol and spook. I carried out three hundred and seventy four hits - solo. I never missed my fucking target."
"And your point is?"
Tarly stepped close, so the two women were only inches apart. The atmosphere could have been cut with a laser. Sliced with a digital chainsaw. Spliced by cankers. Pippa's hand was on her
yukana
, lifting the weapon by instinct, with no thought to the consequences; only what she
had
to do.
"You will follow my orders," said Tarly, "or die for insubordination. We're at war with the junks. We have no time for slackers, no time for cowards, no time for fucking
wildcards.
"
"I'm going after Franco Haggis," snapped Pippa, and they were nose to nose now. "He might be a sodomising, womanising pain in the rectum, but he's
my
sodomising, womanising pain in the rectum. I sent him in there, and yeah he fucked up, but I'm going to get him out. Shoot me in the back of the skull for looking out for my friends if you like,
General
, but believe me, if that's your angle then with generals like you, the junks will eat us for breakfast and shit out our devolved remains."
There came a hiatus; a splinter in time.
Aeons passed, stars formed and died, galaxies spiralled into oblivion...
"Good," said Tarly, eventually, and forced a smile. "Because that's our mission."
"
What?
"
"Three hours. I've primed Alice. We're dropping vertical, slamming in low under the gunbots arcs - or at least, that's the theory. We're going after Franco Haggis. That's why I'm here. That's why I was sent. To dig you out of your shit puddle. To take you two back to Steinhauer."
Pippa stepped back. She observed Tarly for a while. "There would have been a lot less aggravation if you'd just said that to begin with."
Tarly, still smiling, gave a modest shrug. "I like to know the sort of people I'm working with."
"And what kind of person am I?"
"Somebody who'd kill and die to save their friends. I like that. It's so... retro."
"Yeah, well, don't get too comfy,
General,
I've yet to decide whether you're friend or foe."
"Don't worry about me," smiled Tarly, easing back out of Pippa's quarters. She stopped, and again their eyes were locked. Neither looked away. Neither submitted. "But if you threaten me again, you will be wearing your spleen as a fob."
And Tarly was gone, leaving a subtle scent of sweat and gun-oil in her wake.
Pippa scowled, and continued to pack her kit, with jerky, violent movements. Alice gave a polite cough.
"Yeah, fucker?"
"No need to vent your anger on me, Pippa. I'm your friend, remember?"
"I'm sorry, Alice. She got to me."
"Not hard these days."
"Meaning?"
"There you go again."
"I miss Keenan, Alice. I miss his hands, his face. His scent."
"I know that, Pippa. And there's nothing anybody can do. You have to be strong. You have to move on; savour what you have, move forward, do your best. That's what Keenan would have wanted."
"It's all my fault. If it wasn't for his dead girls, he wouldn't have felt the need to sacrifice himself to VOLOS. To merge with that machine motherfucker. He showed... showed he loved his dead babies more than he loved me. More than he loved life."
"Do you understand that?" asked Alice, her voice gentle.
Pippa gave a shake of her head. "I'll never have children. It's something I know I'll never truly understand."
"Better get some sleep," said Alice, and Pippa realised she'd dimmed the lights. Her voice was soothing, hypnotic. "We're going after Franco in two hours, if my predictions of when and where he'll pop back onto the grid are accurate. You get some rest. You'll need your strength. This is going to be a tough one."
Wiping away tears, Pippa nodded. "Aren't they all?" she said.
Mrs Strogger attacked, and Franco held up his arms over his face as a rampaging wall of steel and flesh and org flailed at him, and he had to admit, he might have screamed like a little girl. Strogger halted inches from Franco's soft human flesh and flexing human toes. Steam ejected, and thick black fumes belched over him, making him choke and gag, and then came silence, then a slow churn of pistons and machinery in reverse. Mrs Strogger took a step back. She looked almost sheepish.
"Sorry about that," she said.
"What? You're sorry about almost mashing me into a pulp with your mechanised appendages?"
"Yes. Sorry. It happens sometimes. Too much evolution."
"Evolution? Or devolution?"
"There you go again," said the old org. "Being smart. Being clever. Being
human.
You need to stop with the quips and the whines. I'm an org, and we orgs don't have no sense of humour."
"I can see that," muttered Franco, and slowly lowered his arms. "Er. So you're not going to kill me?"
"You're too valuable. And if we run into more trouble, the Mistress obviously wants your skinny arse for her shows. You might be a valuable bartering tool."
"So I'm your prisoner?" said Franco, incredulously.
"Not quite," said Mrs Strogger, smiling with her metal teeth. "But let's just say you've lost your right to party, Party Boy."
Franco scowled, and nodded, and hoisted his laser cannon. He toyed with shooting her in the face, but recognised she was as much use to him as he was to her. Together, they might get out of this shit alive. Maybe not with all their limbs - he wiggled what remained of his little finger - but at least with their spines in the same damn line of vertical.
"Okay. We can help each other," said Franco.
"Deal," said Mrs Strogger.
Franco didn't point out they'd already made a deal, and she'd broken it. Which made her as slippery as a turd in a bucket of shitty eels. As dodgy as a five-week raw kebab.
Suddenly, gunfire erupted behind them. This was laser cannons, as used by the prison guards; this was heavy shit. Military ordnance. SMKK and D5 shotguns and Kekra quads and railguns. Franco knew the sounds, the tones, the symphony. He'd used them often enough himself...
He pounded along, blind for a moment, pain firing up his arm, panicking. This was bad shit. Real shit. He needed to focus - to keep calm. Franco slid to a halt by a corridor intersection, and Mrs Strogger pounded along, skidding behind him with a squeal and shower of sparks. There came some grinding sounds, and a minigun ejected from one arm. It whined and sent a mammoth volley of firepower screeching down the corridor whilst Franco watched, tongue hanging out like a warporn porn hound. He suddenly realised. The stakes had stepped up a notch. Before, with the guards, it had almost felt like...
playtime.
Now, however, this Sourballs, or the Mistress or whoever the fuck was in charge, had called in the heavy guns. With heavy guns. This was the army. The ganger army. The clones had moved in to take out the org... and Franco was in the middle of the shit.
Shit,
he thought.
It's always the same shit!
And so he ran. He ran down alloy corridors, across thick steel gratings with rivers of murky effluent speeding below. Bullets sniped after him,
ping
ing and
drring
ing from metalwork. It grew warmer. Always behind him as he ran was the old wrinkled org, terrifying in her mechanical magnificence, pounding along, hydraulics hissing, mechanics booming like some disgusting old faulty diesel engine in need of a service and new pistons rings. Occasionally, she'd halt and her hydraulic legs would eject, stabilising her as the minigun roared and sent a warning jab to the nose of their pursuit. Franco didn't stop to watch or listen. He knew what a minigun could do to flesh, and he knew what the mad bitch of an org could do to gangers; more twisted than a bucket of snakes, she was. Franco thought he'd touched madness in his life, but realised that some forms of madness transcended understanding. Madness which transcended madness! Such as the constant obsession to upgrade. Mrs Strogger had gone beyond the pale. Beyond the event horizon of personal "improvement," dragged ever on and on and on, a pull so powerful she could not head back to the light.
Mrs Strogger had gone one upgrade too far.
She was
heavy metal.
Franco sprinted like his life depended on it. Which it did. Up and down spiral staircases he ran, through a wonderland-like labyrinthine hell of prison corridors. Over high bridges he ran, sandals flipping and flopping like useless shitty bits of rubber. His underpants chafed. His finger and arm throbbed. Franco had lost his sense of humour.
He stopped by a high tower of a ravine, a chasm, an abyss. Franco looked down into an infinite
blackness.
Panting, chest heaving, he fought to regain his breath and realised he might - the horror! - have to lay off the Guinness for a while.
"What kind of shitty hell hole is this place?" he managed, once he'd regained his breath.
"Hell hole is a right description, bastad," said Strogger, pounding to a halt. Her minigun whirred, and her shoulder-mounted lasers targeted, but there was no pursuit. They seemed, for the moment, to have lost the soldiers.
Franco stood up, panting, bathed in sweat, and peered over the narrow rail and down into an abyss. "I mean, that's deep," he muttered, and frowned. "Hey, if there is a tunnel, where would it come out? I mean, we must be right down under the sea by now! Yeah?"
"To the west of Nechudnazzar there is the Symmetrical Canyon. We will emerge there."
"Hmm. And have guards lining every side with high-powered rifles? I know the stench of an ambush when I smell one. Is like bad CubeCheese, you getting me? And
that's
a fucking chemical cheese that takes some rotting! Although to be fair, it's rotted my guts on a few occasions, and I could spin you stories about some of the ladies back on The City, har-har-har, well, we had this big pot of melted cheese right, and these three drunken Astros came in, looking for trouble as Astros tend to, with their big pot bellies and wallets so bulging with Mine Pay they didn't know whether to fuck-a-ho or a diddle-eye-do."
"Maybe another time," said Mrs Strogger, voice level.