Theme Planet (56 page)

Damn her!

A door slid open, and General
Kome strode along the metal walkway. Nobody else would dare enter, probably
down to Romero’s screams of, “Get the fuck out! Everybody get the fuck out now
and if a single motherfucker comes back in I’ll personally blow that
motherfucker’s head off! “

Now, only Kome braved Romero’s
wrath.

The big General halted beside the
brooding man, and looked down almost tenderly. He reached out to put a hand on
Romero’s shoulder, and his hand hovered there for a moment whilst he considered
the ramifications of his actions. Smoothly, he withdrew his hand. He valued his
fingers more than a need to pacify the Cardinal of the Ministers of Joy.

“That fucking bitch,” hissed
Romero, softly.

“She betrayed us.”

“That should be impossible!” He
looked up, eyes burning with hate. “She’s put us in a very, very dangerous
position.”

“You need to make a decision.”

“Yes.”

Romero stood, and stretched. He
glanced down at the screen, where yet more outraged messages were pouring in.
How dare Earth advance on the Theme Planet with aggressive militaristic
intentions! How
could
Oblivion
Government make such a foolhardy act of aggression? What did Earth think it was
doing? Romero smiled bleakly. How little they all understood his... ambition.
Not just ambition for himself, for he recognised he was just a tiny cog in the
very great machine called Conquest. No. The ambition was for his species; for
humanity.
He wanted to make himself immortal, sure, but he wanted to establish Humanity
as the dominant controlling lifeforce of the Quad-Galaxy. Too long had they
bowed and scraped to their alien neighbours. Equals? Fuck that. That was not
mankind’s destiny! Now, Romero would show them, as his ancestors had done in
millennia past, who was in control. Who was destined to lead.

“Launch the FieldNukes. Send the
Ministers of Joy in one-man Slam Fighters. And take us in.”

“Take us in?” Kome raised an
eyebrow. “You want to go Front Line? Into the Dregs? Into the NukeFields?”

“Yes,” said Romero, darkly. “We’re
going to find Amba before she does any more fucking damage. We will remove her
piece well and truly from the now-thoroughly-distorted and deviated gameboard.”

~ * ~

Dex emerged from
a hole in a vast steel wall to stand, teetering, on
a ledge a hundred klicks above the ground. He’d followed Katrina’s path with
ease; she was making no attempt at stealth, just
speed,
in order to get to
SARAH’s core and plant the FRIEND. The
bomb.

Dex gasped, and grabbed the edge
of the wall as vertigo took his brain in its fist and shook him hard, like a
rabid dog with a broken, pulped cat. Darkness spread away, and distant lights
twinkled. A pipe veered off before him, about a foot wide, matt-black and
almost invisible against the space around him. Dex knelt, and glanced
backwards. A cold wind drifted up from the chasm below, and Dex gritted his
teeth. Katrina and Molly had passed this way, he was sure of it. And he heard,
somewhere distant, a small, female gasp followed by a scuffing sound.
Let’s
hope Katrina fell off,
he thought morbidly. But knew it wouldn’t happen.
She was too precise. He remembered dancing with her on many occasions, and it
was always
he
who stepped on her toes. Damn. Damn and shit. He hated
heights, especially heights on narrow pipe bridges over deadly abysses, like
this one.

“It’s never fucking easy, is it?”
he growled.

He set off across the pipe, arms
spread out to steady himself. The Makarov in his pocket felt good, solid, real,
reliable, and the wand tucked into the waist-band of his trousers was also
reassuring, in that he’d seen what it could do to an android; indeed,
felt
its effects himself, and thus knew it was a handy device. He was tired, and
hurting, mentally as well as physically, and he moved slowly across the high
pipe, wondering what the hell the pipe was
for,
what was its function,
its purpose, why build it out here of all bloody places? He felt nausea
swimming through him, pouring into him as if he were a jug. It could have been
due to the physical pounding he’d taken, it could have been from the harsh
psychological kicking; whatever the reasons, the sickness was upon him, and
suddenly he dropped to his knees and felt the yawning chasm open up around him;
felt as if he swam through treacle and was about to slip from the bottom into
an infinity well, where gravity would crush him down and fold him over and
over, into a single molecule.

Dex swayed, high up on the pipe.
The darkness was terrifying. The sickness was terrifying. And suddenly,
something hissed from the darkness, an object large and bulky, and he heard it
coming and covered his head with his arms in protective reflex, and then
squealing, shrieking, and screams as the black, thundering rollercoaster rolled
through the darkness full of giggling tourists, and Dex cowered, trembling, on
the pipe, praying for protection, for it was so close, so close and he hadn’t
seen the rails just a few feet away at head height. The rollercoaster roared
over him, twisting to one side and then dropping as the CARs clattered and
thundered above him one at a time and the tourists screamed in their rabid
enjoyment...

“Glad to see
somebody’s
having a good time,” Dex muttered, clinging to the pipe for his life.

Then there was a
whoosh
and a rush of air, and the CARs had gone, a tiny red tail-light blinking down
into nothing.

Dex moved forward, and saw the
mesh cage, the ladder, the inspection platform, and the penny dropped. This was
no
pipe,
but an inspection walkway designed to give access to the
rollercoaster track in this huge and empty space.

Dex climbed the ladder and stood
beside the track, a single thick strand of twisting steel, black in colour
except on the surface, which had been polished silver by the passage of CAR
wheels.

“Daddy. I’m so glad you made it,”
said Molly.

Dex turned, and looked down at
his daughter. She was beautiful, with her long black hair and dark eyes. Her
skin was pale white in the gloom, unmarked and perfect, and she walked along
the inspection walkway with delicate footsteps; prim, precise, almost like a
ballerina. She reached the foot of the ladder and paused, then looked up at him
and his heart melted, for she was here, she’d come back to him, and everything
was going to be all right...

“I’ve been sent to kill you,” she
said.

“But you’re my little girl,” he
said.

“Not anymore.”

“Please, Molly, come back to me!
I’m your father! I held you the day you were born, I filmed your first
footsteps, I held you when you fell and cut your knee, I held you tight when
you had a fever; don’t you remember any of those things? Don’t they matter? Don’t
you care?”

“That was a different time and a
different place,” said Molly, tilting her head to one side. Her dark eyes
drilled into Dexter; drilled into his heart, drilled into his soul. “I was a
different person back then. I was a child. Now, I am no longer a child. Now, I
am an android, and I have a mission -
we
have a mission. You can come
back to me, Father. You can be my Daddy and it will be like old times - all you
have to do is give in to the android in your soul. Ascend. Become like us. Stop
fighting what you know to be true, what you know is in your genetics, in your
engineering, in your coding. “

Dex was staring at his girl, at
his baby, and he blinked, not believing the words pouring out of her mouth, the
complex ideas that should have had no place in a child’s understanding. If
nothing else, this was an affirmation that she was not
more
than human,
but less. A false human. A plastic person. An android...

Like me,
he thought.

“I cannot do that,” said Dex. “It’s...
hard to explain. It’s like rolling on your back, presenting your soft
underbelly to the blade. It’s like a form of suicide. It’s like giving in to
those who thought they could engineer us; control us!”

“Then you’ll die,” said Molly,
and suddenly her lips drew back and she snarled like an animal. Her fingers
went crooked, formed claws, and she ran forward, leaping up onto the platform
with incredible agility and slamming a punch to Dexter’s chest that knocked him
back, over the rail and onto the rollercoaster track itself.

Pain screamed through him, his
heart thundering from the blow, and Dex panted hard, blinded for a moment, but
he gathered his legs beneath him and rolled to his feet on the rollercoaster
track. He backed away as Molly climbed over the low mesh, and started to walk
towards him, daintily, with those ballerina footsteps.

“Stay back,” warned Dex,
retreating.

“Or what?” said Molly, with a
mocking smile. “What will you do, Daddy?”

Dex’s hands were before him, the
Makarov pressing against him with a warm hard promise;
I can kill her,
said the Makarov.
I can retire the android.

She launched at him, and threw a
combination of punches that Dex blocked on his forearms, backing away again. He
felt the track beneath his boots start to dip and twist, and realised he was
running out of ground; more punches came, and kicks aimed at his stomach, groin
and head. Dex blocked them all, each blow hurting that little bit more, the
attacks coming with awesome force from such a tiny child. Her small fists left
imprints in Dexter’s flesh, and once again he had that mental block, that
inability to strike a blow against his own child...

There came a distant
whoosh.

The rollercoaster was coming!

Molly did a high back-flip, even
as Dexter leapt himself, realising the only way to survive was to jump - to
stay on the track was to be rammed into the black abyss beneath them. As both
Molly and Dex were in the air, the rollercoaster CARs cut beneath them, and
Molly landed neatly, straddling two cars, then crouching to grab hold of the
restraints. Dex, in contrast, landed hard, like a heap of sodden shit dropped
from a very great height; he tumbled, wedged into the footwell of a CAR at the
feet of a fat man and a fat woman, both wearing puke-inducing colourful “patterned”
holiday shirts.

Dex grunted in pain.

“Excuse
me!”
shouted the
fat man, clutching the restraint which held him in his seat.

“Tell him, Gerald, tell him to
get out of our rollercoaster! “

But the rollercoaster, already
tipping into the downward spiral, dropped into a vertical fall and began
twisting and spiralling down. Dex was rammed up against the legs of the fat
people, his nose pressed into the fat woman’s knees as she screamed and started
trying to kick him and hit him, and the more the rollercoaster fell and
tumbled, the more Dex’s face was shoved slowly, inexorably between her knees
and, inevitably, towards her sweaty honey pot of delight.

“You dirty pervert scoundrel!”
Dex heard Gerald shout, and he began to whack Dex on the back of the head with
a meaty fist.

Dex wanted to shout,
believe
me, mate, the last thing I want to do is shove my face in your pig wife’s pig
pussy!
but the coaster went suddenly into a vertical climb, rearing from
the abyss and rising high, high into the sky, through fresh air and bursting
into sunshine and through the smell of a distant sea breeze. Dex managed to
grab some kind of rail and hoist himself up as the rollercoaster settled into a
high-speed flat jag. The sunlight was dazzling, the fresh air exhilarating, his
ears filled with the clattering of the wheels on the track, and the snarling of
Gerald, and the carping of his sweaty wife.

Molly!

Dex whirled, meeting a kick that
broke a tooth, filled his mouth with blood and sent stars flashing like
fireworks. Both arms came up reflexively, and even blind, through sheer luck
Dex blocked the rest of the blows.

Gerald, however, had leaned
forward and thumped Dex in the stomach. Snarling, Dex drew his Makarov and
pushed it into Gerald’s face. “Keep your fists to yourself, motherfucker!”