Theme Planet (57 page)

“Okay! Okay! Don’t hurt me!”

Strangely, his fat wife remained silent.

Molly snarled, and took a step
back. Dex looked down the barrel of the gun at his eldest daughter, with her
dark hair and dark eyes and dark moods and undying love for him,
her father.

There came a gasp from the
surrounding tourists.

“Don’t hurt me, Daddy,” said
Molly, putting on her best
little girl
voice.

“You’d kill me without a second’s
thought,” snarled Dex.

“Of course I wouldn’t, Daddy,”
she whined, lower lip pouting a little.

“You evil bastard!” hissed the
fat woman, and thumped Dex so hard in the balls he thought they’d come out his
mouth. She was strong, that woman. Strong as an ox. Dex grunted, and the
Makarov slipped in his slack fingers, and Molly was there like a dark demon, a
glossy, evil angel, and she took the gun, and grinned, and looked down at the
fat woman with glass-dark eyes before putting a bullet in her skull. The
blam
made the tourists gasp and
shudder, and the second
blam
silenced Gerald as quickly and as harshly as any of his wife’s carping
put-downs. Blood sprayed the rollercoaster CAR and pooled in the footwell, like
ink.

The Makarov turned on Dexter, as
the cars lurched and chains clanked and the CAR climbed some more, then
levelled out after yet another huge, huge climb...

Molly smiled.

She pointed the gun.

“Daddy?” she said, and squeezed
the trigger... as the rollercoaster jerked, lurched forward, and dropped
vertically into oblivion. Dex was tossed around the footwell of the CAR like a
marble in a sock, and he vomited violently as the words,
if you haven’t been
sick, you soon will be
reverberated around the inside of his dumb-ass
skull. He felt the fat legs of the dead woman kicking him spasmodically as her
lifeblood pumped from her deflating body.

The drop left Dexter’s lungs in
his mouth, his kidneys in his lungs, his balls in his stomach. It felt like
dying. Felt like being turned inside-out.

They plunged back into darkness,
and the rollercoaster slowed for a turn, and with a
whump-whump-whump
Dex
realised they’d passed the
start
position
and were going to do it all over again! Yay!

I need to get off,
he realised. At the same spot. I
need a damn exit!

He dragged himself up from the
confines of the car, and looked about for his daughter.

Molly had gone.

Uneasily, Dex cast about for the
dangerous little girl; he didn’t want a Makarov round in the back of his skull.
That wouldn’t help him in his quest to save SARAH; in his mission to save the
Theme Planet.

Dex stood, and the rest of the
rollercoaster passengers were subdued, failing to meet his gaze.

“What happened to the little
girl?” he asked the nearest couple, a young man and woman who looked almost
exactly alike.

“You... you let her fall,”
stammered the man.

“The hell I did! She was trying
to kill me!”

“That’s not how it looked to us!”
yelled the woman in a sudden burst of anger. “You killed those two fat people,
and then the coaster did the tumble and you pushed the black haired girl over
the edge... we saw you, we’ll testify!”

The lad nudged the girl, who went
suddenly silent as she realised she was threatening a murderer.

“No,” said Dex, rubbing at his
tight closed eyes. “It didn’t happen like that; you saw it all wrong!”

“I know what I saw,” said the
young woman, face grim and tight.

Dex pulled out the wand, which
gave a sudden burst of fizzing energy. He knew what he had to do, and as they
plummeted through darkness and once more the rollercoaster picked up speed for
its second pass, Dex knew the pursuit of Katrina was back on the cards... she
had a head start, sure, but her ploy to use Molly and Toffee to kill him had
failed.

Now, all he had to do was catch
her up.

Catch up the woman he loved, and
kill her.

And he knew.

There would be no other way.

~ * ~

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

REBOOT

The Theme Planet.

It lay far below, a glittering
gameboard, a beautiful slave, a colourful cartoon of wonderful, incredible
rides. The world seemed to move slowly, through thick jelly, and rollercoasters
spat ride CARs in slow motion, huge mechanical arms swung punters high into the
sky or deep below the oceans, vast robots carried squealing children across
mountain ranges, and on spirals of cloud and excited spittle, screams and
laughter rose, rose, rose up to the gods, up to the heavens, and everything was
in
primary colours,
the world was a dazzling brochure of
fun,
and
every single living entity down there was there for pleasure, and joy, and to
be uplifted and surged up and out of body, away from the grim miserable reality
of what could be, cf what might come to pass. The sky was filled with a
distillation of pleasure. Theme Planet basked in the contentment of a billion
happy souls.

The ships crawled across the sky,
like insects across the carcass of a paralysed, unseeing mammal. Soon, the injured
animal would realise it had been invaded,
soon
the injured animal would
realise they had come to feed, and they were amoral, and had no joy and had no
care, and they would use talons and claws and teeth and stings, and would take
what they wanted, what they wanted being a pound of flesh - whether the flesh
was dead, or still living.

Engines growled, and gradually
the dull throbs of pounding pistons and matrix engines and the sight of the
hundreds, then
thousands,
of SLAM dropships and SLAM fighters and
Kruger
frigates and
Daytona
warhulks, all this information
filtered down to the people below, and the rides started to falter, and happy
laughing tourists halted in the streets, looking up and staring up, shading
their eyes, craning their necks, wondering about the huge grey warships that
had started to block out the sun...

Slowly, the pounding of engines
stopped. One by one by one.

Only silence seemed to flow
across the pleasure continents of the Theme Planet.

Then, a SLAM fighter dipped its
nose and screamed for the ground, pulling up at the last minute to unleash a
hail of missiles that slammed into playparks and kidpens and dancing robots and
thundering water rides - CARs and TUBs and trailers were spat up and out in a
purple blossom of detonation, silent at first when viewed from far above, a
raging howling screeching inferno of blasted brick and concrete, alloy and
glass; huge H-section steel supports were tossed aside like skittles, cutting
down families out strolling with buggies and candyfloss. Rollercoaster tracks
were smashed, bent up and out like random balls of wire wool screaming flames
at the sky as gas chambers detonated in quick succession with boom-BOOM-BOOMS
and the sounds of pleasure were quickly replaced by sounds of slaughter, the noises
of pain and anguish, of screaming and sobbing and begging and searching...

Above, Romero watched all this
play out on a hundred shimmering monitors.

His eyes were dark. Emotionless.

Quietly, he said, “Send in the
Ministers.”

~ * ~

Amba stood in
a
forest of circuitry, looking around herself carefully. The ships had smashed
overhead, missiles screaming, and distantly she heard the concussive booms of
HighJ and HighK explosives, could almost
feel
the heat from ravenous
missiles. But this was not enough, and she knew it, and she knew instinctively
that Romero would come for her. Or rather, he would send his Ministers of Joy.
The police force of Earth’s Oblivion Government. He would send his elite. And
they would want her alive...

She moved slowly, warily, FRIEND
outstretched.

This is a battle you cannot win,
said Zi.

Yeah, well I can die trying.

You really should listen to
Romero. He knows what he’s talking about. He’s nurtured you since you were andrembryo;
you should not turn against him now. I implore you to rethink. I beseech you.

Amba stopped, and stared down at
the FRIEND. Her sister of the flesh, her companion, the sidekick who kept her
alive when the going got tough; and now Zi was fucking
siding with Romero?
Something about Zi had changed. Something had... shifted.

What?
she said.

You have taken a foolish path,
Amba, and we never saw it in you. How can you make some pathetic proclamation
of love for some android reject who fights against his nature, against his
purity of engineering? How can you do that? It is a betrayal, and I want you to
stop, and think very carefully. Look, here’s one of the Ministers now...

He was tall, broad, powerful, and
wore a heavy black coat fastened up tight. His boots were black and dull, as
was his mask, which covered his whole face. The Ministers of Joy believed no
pleasure should be taken from visual representation. Thus, the mask was plain,
without features. Only the eyes, pale blue, shone through the narrow slits.

Amba stood stock still, as the
Minister strode across the carpet of wires, between the trees of twisted alloy,
between circuit-bank-bark and valve-flowers which popped as they were crushed
under his boots. Tiny sparks of electricity zigzagged through the circuit
flooring.

“Amba. You will come with me.”

Amba considered this, and shot
the Minister in the face... or rather, would have done if Zi had cooperated.
Instead, for the first time in her life, for the first time in the weapon’s
existence,
it simply went
click.

Amba stared down at the FRIEND
with a look of incredulity.

I’m sorry, Amba. Truly I am.

You... you bitch!

No need to be like that. This is
for the Greater Good. SARAH needs to be destroyed. The Theme Planet must be
shut down. And Oblivion
will
conquer the Quad-Gal, one way or another... with or without your help.
I don’t want you to die here, Amba. I’m doing this for your own good.

But you are my flesh, Zi... made
from my own skin and bone...

I belong to Romero now,
she said.
I always belonged
to Romero.

The gun touched Amba’s forehead,
and dropping her own FRIEND, the android looked beyond the cold hard barrel
into the eyes of the Minister of Joy. In the hierarchy of android engineering,
there were base androids, then there were the special units, the Anarchy Models
which formed the baseline of torture and killer mods; and then there were the
Ministers. Very special. Reserved Units. Nobody on Earth knew they were
androids. Nobody, in fact, realised exactly who - or what - ruled Oblivion.
Ruled Earth...

“Come with me,” said the
Minister, but Amba flipped sideways and the gun went
blam. As
she moved, her fingers formed a solid blade which
she slammed, knifelike, into the Minister’s flesh, cutting through skin and
muscle and driving between ribs. As Amba’s left hand swung upwards, knocking
the gun toward the heavens - still firing - her right fist
closed
around
a rib and she jerked back violently, pulling it out from the Minister’s flesh
in a shower of blood. He went down on one knee, and Amba punched him, still
holding his rib, and took the gun from him with her free hand.