"Hey," snapped Franco. "What about a fair trial?"
"Did you help Queen Strogger escape from the gangers?"
"Er, yeah, so?"
"Guilty! Condemned by his own mouth! Condemned like the spineless rotfish he is! I'll see him crushed and pulped and spewed and cut, strangled and poisoned until he's deader than fucking dead! Take them to the gallows! Take them all to the gallows! Hang them! I want to see them dance and jig! I want to see them Diiiee
eee...
"
CHAPTER TWELVE
A PAINFUL UNIFICATION
Pippa swam through fire. Flames teased her flesh, caressing her like a demon lover, and she cried hot, molten mercury tears, which ran down her cheeks, scarring flesh, and she would be scarred for life, forever, as she died and became soil and ash and flowed through the waters and down to the centre of eternity...
Slowly, Pippa opened her eyes. She coughed, and pain was everywhere: it invaded her, infused every atom, and all she saw was darkness.
"Welcome back to the world of the living." The voice was sweet. Too sweet. Sickly sweet. The sickly sweet of somebody who was used to getting what she wanted, when she wanted,
right fucking now.
"What hit me?" groaned Pippa, becoming aware of a low-level thrumming buzzing in her brain, like motors, like engines. Through her groggy demeanour she became aware of movement. They were travelling. They were flying.
"That would be
Ziggurat,
my faithful little human. He is a good boy, isn't he?" Pippa was aware of movement beyond her blindness, and she heard a purring sound, like a cat being petted. She reached up to rub her eyes, and noticed that her hands were bound tightly together with chains.
Oh, it's like that, is it? You bastards.
"Yeah, well, what did he hit me with? A tesla coil?"
"Oh no. All Ziggurat's power is
homegrown.
He's like a camel, really. He stores energy in his hunchback, in his
hump
so to speak, then can fire it at will. As you found out when you attacked him, my pretty little Combat K princess."
The voice was friendly, chatty even, but Pippa could detect the power beneath, like a fault line below a stretch of desert.
Pippa rubbed her eyes. Now, she could see blurred colours. She felt sick, leaned forward to vomit into her lap. There came a slight tutting sound.
"Go and get a bucket, there's a good hunchback. And bring some wipes. We can't have her vomiting all over the TV Suite now, can we?"
Pippa groaned, and rubbed her eyes again.
So, the bastard dancing hunchback hit her with an electrical charge from his hump? Gods, she'd heard it all, now.
"You must be the Mistress," said Pippa, voice calm.
"I am."
"You're the one in charge. The Big Boss. The Top Dude. The General in command of the gangers and the Bad Army?"
"Yes. I am also Prime of Core Government, to give me my official Clone Terra title. I run all governmental departments from The Monastery in Nechudnazzar. I have two subordinate Ministers who carry out, shall we say, Acts of Worship. They are Ziggurat, who you met recently and I do
apologise
for his lack of clothing. I, too, find it quite disgusting when he dances around in the nude. But he has to, you see, or when he
pulses
all his clothes set on fire! Then there's Teddy Sourballs. You met her earlier." Here, The Mistress's voice altered subtly in tone. "You were quite violent towards her, I believe. Left her cabled up inside a hijacked GASGAM."
"You hijacked it first," said Pippa, grinning and shaking her head.
"Yes, but we have the
War Effort
to consider. Because without the War Effort we won't get the new commission for Clone TV."
Pippa's vision was swimming. She rubbed viciously at her eyes, and slowly the image grew in clarity until it seemed to
pop
into view. They were in a plush aircraft cabin. The droning sound was the plane's engines. Before Pippa sat a beautiful woman, with pale white skin and jet-black hair, neatly cut and running to her shoulders. But her eyes were solid black, like the eyes of an animal; like the eyes of a reptile. Beside her sat Ziggurat on one side, thankfully clothed and grinning at Pippa from his lop-sided face. On the other was Teddy, looking nervous and agitated, her hands wringing together, her barbed-wire hair bobbing as she constantly shifted.
"I see they rescued you," said Pippa.
"No thanks to
you
, bitch. That GASGAM nearly crushed me!"
"A shame he didn't."
"I'll see you die, whore!"
Pippa considered this. "I'm always up for a fight," she smiled, face contorted into a mocking grimace.
"Ladies!" snapped the Mistress. "Not here. Not now. There are more important issues at stake. Such as the impending War Effort against the orgs. We will annihilate them! We will destroy them utterly! And all on live TV!"
She laughed, hands rubbing together, fingers entwining and for a moment - for a
brief flicker of time -
Pippa could have sworn she saw those fingers
blur together,
as if the woman's flesh merged and joined like viscous liquid. She shook her head, rubbed her eyes again, and, as she accepted a glass of water and slurped it noisily, put it down to the after-effects of Ziggurat's joyful electrocution.
"Where are we going?"
"The Teeth, the mountain range you no doubt witnessed on your initial arrival on Cloneworld. It divides our two warring factions, keeping a low limit to casualties. Oh aren't QGM a wonderful father-figure? There to hold our hands and protect us! To stop one party becoming dominant and wiping out the other." Her voice went hard. "Well, we've fucked their ideas good and proper. We've overrun the GASGAM AA AIs, taken them over and secured the knowledge of Metal Meshing and Flesh Foundry from the orgs in order to further build and increase our army! The Bad Army! But now, with extensions and augmentations... let's call it The Bad Army-
Plus
."
"And that's why we're flying? You control
every
AI on the planet?"
"Yes," said the Mistress, licking a little spittle from her frothing lips. "Whilst the orgs have been messing about in their machine cities, improving their own augmented selves, we have been building aircraft! Weapons! Missiles! Then we
took
their knowledge and have applied it to the gangers. You saw the Slush Pits, right?"
Pippa nodded, drinking more water. Her brain felt as if it'd been fried in a pan, and her mouth tasted of copper. Her breathing was laboured. She was in a poor state to continue this battle... and yet here was this raving lunatic, who was quite obviously in control of the entire
planet
and planning a massive military offensive real soon...
"I saw them."
"What you saw were the old prototypes. A thousand years old. What we've built on The Teeth is
something special."
"You have a factory there?"
"A factory?" laughed the Mistress. She looked to both Ziggurat and Teddy, who gave polite laughs of support. "We have built an
army training civilisation!
We have used some of the old terraforming machines, those which still worked and were dumped here by QGM Planet Designers. We levelled mountains. We built factories. A city! A city dedicated to war and extermination... and at the centre, oh beautiful thing, there is a new TV studio, Clone TV Central! And in precisely six hours we will go live."
"When you attack?"
"You're a smart girl. I hope you'll help us."
"By doing... what?"
"You will see."
Pippa raised her manacled hands to rub at her nose, then her forehead. "Your new TV station goes live the day you intend to wipe out the orgs? Don't you have any sense of perspective?"
"Meaning?"
"TV is an entertainment platform. It should be for filmys, music, art; stuff that entertains, stuff you can enjoy!"
"What's more enjoyable than watching orgs die?"
"Death is not entertainment," said Pippa, eyes narrowed.
"It is for us," smiled the Mistress, and her little puppets laughed politely. "There can be no greater pleasure than watching an org taken slowly apart with a chainsaw! Live! No greater love than watching their limbs coming away at the joint, with lovely bursts of blood and machine parts! Live! It is quite... sexual, in its gratification."
"You're fucking sick," said Pippa.
"Why so? You humans have been glorying over war for a million years! Do you, too, not have your own vast TV networks, displaying images of intense genocide to your suckling children? You revel in it! Pippa, I thought
you
of all people would understand."
"Bullshit. What we do
is report the news!
"
"And so shall I. News of the final ganger victory over the orgs! Each battle filmed and broadcast on live feeds! Each org death, slaughter, bombing run, machine-gunned baby, all filling our wonderful screens! We will raze their cities and factories to the ground! We will decimate their entire fucking civilisation!"
The Mistress had risen to her feet, screeching now, and as Pippa watched the flesh
pulsed
around her face, lumps straining under the skin, like insects trying to break free of a ripe flesh cage.
The Mistress took a deep breath, calmed herself, and sat back down. She smiled at Pippa, who felt suddenly sickened by the warped evangelical vision of TV slaughter.
"And then,
then...
we will nuke them."
"Nuke them?" said Pippa, aghast.
"Every city! Every factory! After we have watched the battles, played out our moves with interactive buttons -
press the red button to see the org child's head blown off, press the green button to see the school bombed, press the blue button to see the org holy machine-gunned from the air...
yes, yes! We will have TV votes, interactive war, Pippa, interactive gore! And when we've had enough, we will hit every org city and installation with bombs so big we'll raze their whole continent to ashes!"
"You're insane," said Pippa, voice level.
"Why? Because we celebrate
real entertainment?
"
"No, because you'll pollute the fucking planet. Nukes! Don't you understand? You'll kill the
world
. You'll make it uninhabitable! Only retarded backwater oldlords use weapons like that now. what's the fucking point of a parasite if it destroys the host? You're a dickhead, Mistress. With your head up your flapping arse."
The Mistress had pulled something from her pocket and now held it up for Pippa to see. It was a small chip. The 3Core. She waved it, enticingly, a smile on her face.
"You want this, don't you?"
Pippa said nothing.
"I know
why
you want it. To stop the invading junks. To turn them from their paths of evil!" Her voice was mocking, a broad smile on her white face, and Pippa's brows furrowed into a look of hatred.
How can you mock something so vast, and evil, and grotesque? How can you mock the deaths of millions? And the prospective deaths of billions more?
If she'd had a gun, she would have blown the Mistress's teeth out the back of her skull.
"And?"
"If you help me, I'll help you."
"Explain."
"Our warheads. Our nukes. We had to raid antiquated junk computers to get the motherboards. They need tweaking, tuning, programming. I know you can do this."
"You want me to help destroy the orgs?"
"In order to save the entire
Quad-Gal!"
hissed the Mistress. "I have seen the junks. Seen what they can do." Her face flickered, bubbles rippling across her forehead.
"You were there, weren't you?" said Pippa, softly, as understanding dawned.
"I saw the junks. A
long
time ago. I saw Leviathan! I have seen things you could never comprehend."
"How..." Pippa made a clicking sound in the back of her throat. "How
old
are you?"
The Mistress shrugged. "A million. Nearer to two."
"Two million years old, and nobody's put a knife in the back of your skull? You've done well, bitch."
"Will you help? I have the codes. The codes to unlock this shitty little junk chip. But
you
have the programming skill. I know you do. I've seen your Combat K files."
"
What?
That's impossible. The encryption is incredible - unhackable, in fact. You would never get the clearance!"
"Of course I could," said the Mistress, smiling. "I have a lover, you see. A fine woman, a beautiful woman. We are the same, so to speak; entwined, like" - she laughed, gently - "like snakes. We are of the same ancient race. From before the junks. Before Leviathan, before VOLOS, before everything you knew. There's only two of us left now, passing down through millennia, and bearing a millennia-old
boredom
. But still, we entertain ourselves however we can. To alleviate the tediousness of your petty humanity and the petty alien races who surround you."
Pippa swallowed. Her eyes were wide.