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Post By A return to our core cast (plus special guest stars), major new villains (plus one very old one), and life-changing plot threads in this new jumping-on point from... the Hooded Hood. Wed Jul 06, 2005 at 04:50:13 pm EDT |
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#220: Untold Tales of the Parodyverse: Yuki Must Die! | |
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#220: Untold Tales of the Parodyverse: Yuki Must Die! There are two kinds of young women who meet men in cheap motel rooms at 2.30 in the morning to pick up their fees. Yuki Shiro was the second kind, the kind that was a cyborg private investigator who had just recovered valuable client accounts for Donny “the Domino” Fabrizi from Hogo Slazlav’s boys. The Domino could hardly go to the cops to get his books back, but Yuki needed some underworld types to owe her some favours and her rent was due. As usual, Yuki checked out the room before entering. Audio picked up the sounds of Fabrizi and one goon, and a quick electronic scan caught his mobile, his companion’s digital watch, and the motel telephone. There was a strong smell of cheap disinfectant over the odour of badly-cleaned body sweat and slightly rotting wood. Yuki knocked and entered. Both the men were armed with concealed Browning BDM 9mms, but neither man went for their holster as she entered. A quick infrared scan showed nothing unusual except that the Domino was sweating. “You got it?” he asked nervously. “It’s safe,” Yuki agreed. “You have my fee?” Fabrizi hefted a small briefcase. “Sure. But you give me my files before you walk out of here with this.” The briefcase was lined with a substance that baffled Yuki’s scans. “You open it,” she said. “Carefully.” The trap was sprung as the lid lifted, but it wasn’t what the cyborg P.I. had been expecting. The electrical discharge pulsed though the Domino, frying him instantly. A dozen metal tines shot through his body zapping out coded electromagnetic pulses. Yuki was moving before Fabrizi’s body even hit the shabby carpet, before the goon in the other chair could even react. But fast as she was, the room around her kept pace. There was a snap of released retaining pins and the walls and ceiling all began to shift. Yuki had just enough time to admire the handiwork as huge plassteel bars swung down at her. The whole design was entirely mechanical, run by clockwork; nothing electronic for her to pick up on at all, and most of the parts made from plastics, silicates, and wood. The whole hotel cabin folded round in an elegant, lethal trap. Fabrizzi’s thug rose from his chair fumbling for his Beretta. One of the swinging sections of the wall sheared his head clean off. Yuki realised that somebody who had a reasonable idea of her nature and capabilities had designed this trap. But it didn’t seem designed to kill her so much as imprison her. The tungsten steel reinforcements in her own neck could have resisted that shearing surface. She’d have been pinned, not slaughtered. The twisting room pulped Fabrizzi’s corpse. Yuki ducked low as a series of bars rose out to fold round her, then somersaulted up to balance on a counterbeam that was closing the roof in. She grabbed the remains of the thug’s firearm, pulled out the cartridge, and hurled it with pinpoint accuracy at one of the exposed gear cogs during the three point two seconds the shifting room left it exposed. The cog teeth bit into the casing and the whole clip exploded, shattering the mechanism. The room faltered with a grinding sound. Yuki rolled low before the next set of default clockwork could drop into place and take over the hydraulic shifting. She concentrated a blow on the mathematically exact centre of a thick wooden wall, just where her scans showed the minor fault line. The wood shattered and she squirmed out atop the mechanical nightmare as it folded in on the space where she’d previously been. A series of free-floating detainment platforms no more than a foot wide rose up a van in the parking lot. The low tech mechanics hadn’t worked, so plan B called for a state of the art assault package. Yuki hit the ground running before the first epoxy pellets splattered around her. Poverty, GMY was a small village nine miles upstate, about three miles off the road to Shyminsky Falls. It had a 50’s quality to it, perhaps because that was the last time anything had been painted there. And in true 50’s B-movie form, it was being attacked by giant locusts that had just knocked over the water tower. “Got it!” Nats called, steadying the falling structure with his telekinetic abilities. “Er, I think…” “Keep it steady,” Hatman called, powering past with his Torpedos hat to slam into one of the ten-foot long insects. “We’ll keep the creepy-crawlies off your back.” “Yo is not understanding why cuting monster locusts are to be being so mean,” Yo worried as s/he grabbed the lead robinia pesudoarcacia by the antenna and steered it away from the main street. “Is not to be nice to be trying to eat cute-humans.” The Manga Shoggoth replicated his mass to form a gooey wall to hold back the lumbering insects. “They are operating on swarm instinct,” the elder being observed, “Although interestingly mutated by the ambient metaradiation of the area they remain by instinct a predator gestalt sentience.” “I felt so much better fighting them before the Shoggoth started explaining them,” De Brown Streak admitted. “So they’re big glowing bugs. Um, my hair’s not gonna fall out if I fight them, is it? I don’t want to go bald, or y’know, suffer erectile dysfunction or something.” “They’re just your standard giant monster trying to eat America now,” CrazySugarFreakBoy! assured the LL’s probationer. “All the transnuke radiation in the blast zone got redirected into making weirdo monsters for us to fight. Yay!” “That still doesn’t tell us why Harper’s geek-ray force-wall gizmo suddenly busted,” Trickshot pointed out. “Or whut made these little hoppers suddenly decide to snack on a whole town.” “Yo is worried that is to be something to be making of these poor creatures of coming here,” Yo warned. “Yo is to be feeling something at the edge of Yo’s senses…” Hatman soared into the air with his Rockets cap. “We’ve got them contained,” he reported. “But we can’t hold them for long. Send up the flare Tricky. Time for the air support.” “You got it, oh glorious tactical advisor,” replied the irritating archer. He sent up the flare arrow as Nats and the Shoggoth tried to ride herd on the seething mass of giant insects. “I could run and get about ten million cans of Raid,” DBS offered. “No need,” grinned Nats. “Boy, I’ve missed this. Then the huge Makluan dragon swooped down and seared the entire swarm with a wall of fire from his massive jaws. “I’ve kind of missed it too,” admitted Fin Fang Foom. Yuki came home by a very roundabout route. She noticed two or three rooftop snipers covering the Sheldon Bay Bridge. She approached 111 Charnall Street with extreme caution. She wasn’t quite sure why people were going to such great lengths to kill her. Certainly “Domino” Fabrizi hadn’t realised his part in the intended plot. But it made sense that anyone who’d researched her well enough to arrange a briefcase that discharged taser pulse lines had probably worked out her office address. It was right there on her business cards, after all. Yuki considered her options. She hadn’t contacted anyone for help because the communications lines might be monitored. She hadn’t gone to any of her usual haunts. Instead she’d come to the one place we was certain there’d be another trap waiting for her. And there it was. Three strange electromagnetic signatures in her office. Another seven or eight dotted round the area. Sixteen people with exotic firearms positioned around her little area of Gothametropolis York. Three dozen more that seemed not to be carrying firearms. Odds were at least some of them were metahumans. Yuki turned up her hearing to try and pick up what was happening in her office. She heard the near-silent whirr of well-oiled servos. “She’s near,” said a perfectly modulated male voice. The waveform was too regular to be human. “The local mobile phone node has found her telephone.” Yuki quickly grabbed the slim Nokia 6800 and lofted it as far as she could over the rooftops. “Keep the noise down, Diagnostic Machine,” a smooth even female voice replied. “We don’t have access to her full specs. We don’t know how good her sensory capacity is.” “Like it matters,” a grating metallic speaker answered. “Just find me the hybrid and I’ll take her out however good she hears or sees.” “It’s not that simple, Mean Machine,” the female replied. “Remember Master Machine’s briefing. She’s not got to die quickly, remember?” Robots, Yuki concluded, and one of them a diagnostics specialist. She was glad she hadn’t used active scanning. And if the thee electronic signatures in her office were androids then the other anomalies she was picking up in the rooftops and alley must also be machines. Then the building she was crouching on splintered apart with a deafening series of cracks as something literally ripped it to pieces. “We found her!” called out Threshing Machine, his adamantine scythes whirring as he tore through the rubble. “Over here!” Yuki was already somersaulting away from the collapsing ledge before the first bricks fell. She vaulted to the next roof, only to be strafed from above by what she could only describe as a giant transformer rocket. “Locked on!” called Flying Machine. “Target acquired.” The cyborg P.I. raced along the roof as the slates shattered around her from the hollow-point bullets. She reached the edge of the building and kept on running. Behind her Mean Machine and Diagnostic Machine broke out of her office, but it was the lithe Fitness Machine who easily somersaulted over the fallen building opposite to duplicate Yuki’s every manoeuvre. “Okay, this isn’t good,” Yuki said to herself. Yet she found she was grinning at the chase. Her reflexes barely saved her from Speed Machine’s first attack. The razor-edged robot was lighting fast. Yuki devoted a huge chunk of her processor power to enhance her reflexes, relying on her automated systems to avoid his lethal assaults. Fitness Machine moved in behind, flexing long tensile coils to enmesh her quarry. Yuki caught one of the strands and used it to hurl the shining mechanism into the path of Speed Machine. The whirring of giant blades warned Yuki that Threshing Machine had caught up. She jumped away from the temporary tangle of Fitness and Speed, barely avoiding the flamethrower blasts of Mean Machine as she sought to safety of Gothametropolis’ narrow alleys. “Twenty-three meters at sixty-one by two two eight,” Diagnostic Machine called to Flying Machine. “Go in tight.” Yuki switched her power from reflexes to muscles. As Flying Machine came in low she heaved a Ford Pinto at him. A couple of bullets pinged into her back. “Hey,” she objected, “this is my new jacket!” These assassins were quite human, up at a window above the deli. She jumped up and crashed in on them. This close she could see the dilation of their pupils and register the sheen of sweat on their bodies. They weren’t in their right minds. “Did you get them boys?” asked the rich lush tones of Sex Machine over their two-way radio. “No, they didn’t,” Yuki told the transmitter before hefting it out of the window to impact with Fitness Machine. Then Threshing Machine crashed into the deli and the whole building came down. “Anything?” asked the Librarian, peering over Al. B Harper’s shoulder at the fuzzy monitor screen that was trying to interpret sensor data from the devastated wasteland beneath the SPUD helicarrier. “Not much,” the Lair Legion’s archscientist admitted, “but I’ve just invented a new algorithm that might clean up the data. Can you collate the imagery I’ve just enhanced and see if there’s anything in there?” The great flying aircraft carrier shook slightly under them as its mortars shot down more of the giant mosquitoes that were billowing from the green clouds over the desolate wasteland. Colonel Dan Drury chewed his cigar butt and watched with ill-concealed impatience while the techno-weenies did their voodoo. The Librarian laid his hands on the computer panel and used his gift to absorb written information and images to download Al B.’s entire database. “Ouch,” he said, squinting as he tried to mentally focus on several million fuzzy images. “Hmm, I’m getting something peculiar at some co-ordinates around three miles from the perimeter. Some kind of movement.” “The locusts’ nest?” “Maybe. But I’m reading sonic vibrations there that are nothing like a locust chirrup. And there’s something else about two miles further in, near the epicentre. An electromagnetic reading.” “Git hold of Yo,” Colonel Drury decided. “Tell him we need some of his guys goin’ into the wasteland ta check those two sites. Al B. whistled softly. “Right now that wasteland is about the most inhospitable environment on Earth. Radioactive winds, mutated creatures, gravity shears, dimensional instabilities, electromagnetic dead spots, and not a fast food franchise for miles. I’m so glad I’m not on the Field Team.” “Well?” Mean Machine demanded of his neat silver comrade. “Did we get her? Where is she?” Diagnostics Machine scanned the ruins of the delicatessen. “No,” he replied. “She’s not under that. You can tell Threshing Machine to stop wrecking things now.” “He enjoys it,” Flying Machine noted. “It’s a hobby.” “It’s a compulsion,” grumbled Fitness Machine. “So where is the little hybrid and how did she avoid the devastation?” “She went down,” Diagnostics detected. “Through the collapsed floor into the sewers.” “Then she won’t get far,” Mean Machine growled, flexing his fire nozzles. “Sewer gas is explosive, right?” “Speed Machine can check the tunnels fast enough,” Fitness Machine ordered. “We don’t want to cause such devastation that we bring the Gothametropolis Authorities down upon us.” “I do,” Threshing Machine rumbled, grinding his gears. “Bring them on, little flesh bags.” “We won’t have any problems with Mayor Kline and her boys in blue,” Sex Machine promised. “Political Machine has already dealt with that. And Media Machine is making sure no calls for help can get out. Now I just need to contact my network of helpful libido-enslaved humans and we’ll soon locate the target.” “Make it fast,” grumbled Mean Machine. “I want to be in at the kill. And Master Machine will be plenty pissed if someone gets the bounty other than the Machine Shop.” “I’m talking to my boys now,” Sex machine moued. “Now we’ll see some action.” Princess Uhunalura Amalandriana Excelsior! awoke with a small shriek from the nightmare that troubled her. For a moment she thought there was someone in the room with her, a young woman in the long skirted gowns of another era; but as the Abhuman exile knuckled the sleep from her eyes she realised she was alone. “Bill?” she called, reaching across the tangled sheets; but Nats wasn’t there. Uhuna checked the clock. 4.41am. She slipped on a robe and padded out to the hall landing to see if anybody was around. “Hello? Hallie?” The Lair Legion’s resident artificial intelligence winked in beside her in hologram form. “You Hallied?” she said. “I had a bad dream,” the princess admitted. “Where’s Bill gone?” “We haven’t heard from the Field Team since they entered the devastation zone,” Hallie answered. “The background radiation there plays havok with electronics, and especially communications.” Uhuna realised that the red condition warning lights were on over the elevator to the Operations Room. “Devastation zone? There’s something happening?” “Swarm of ten-foot tall locusts in uptown Gothametropolis,” the A.I. answered. “Out of that radiation wasteland where the transnuclear weapons exploded.” “I thought Al B. had designed a force-field to contain that whole area?” “It went down at 23.22 last night,” Hallie answered. “The first giant insect attacks happened ten minutes later. The SPUD helicarrier is on station over the zone but the dust clouds make visual inspection difficult. Yo and Hatman took most of the Ops team out there to see what’s happened.” “Most of the Ops team?” “No response from Dancer or Visionary,” Hallie noted. “They picked a bad time to go AWOL. We’re getting some reports of metahuman activity over in urban Gothametropolis York too, and a bunch of crank calls from people seeing ghosts over on the Paradopolis U. campus.” Uhuna considered this. “Do you think Dancer and Vizh are in trouble?” “I think they’re in Ausgard. Dancer called to say she, Vizh, and Kerry were taking a little trip with Donar and Harlagaz. They probably lost all track of time, what with the compulsory quaffing and suchlike.” Uhuna shuddered for no reason she could define. “Did the mutant locusts hurt anyone? I could have gone and helped.” “You don’t heal people. You just shift their wounds around,” Hallie reminded the girl. “Sir Mumphrey said not to disturb you.” Uhuna still felt uneasy. The strange feeling lingered. “Can I borrow Flapjack to fly me to the SPUD helicarrier?” she wondered. “I just want to assure myself that Bill is all right.” “Okay,” admitted De Brown Streak, “This is a new level of disgusting.” The Lair Legion’s field team were two miles into the wastelands, protected from the residual radiation because they were squelching forward within the gelid mass of the Manga Shoggoth. Only Nats and Foom were absent; Yo had sent the fast flyers ahead to the deeper target site. “We’ve moved into dangerous areas before encased in Shoggoth,” Hatman pointed out. “That wuz when we wuz in the LairSub an’ he was outside,” Trickshot pointed out. “Oh man, I think he’s oozing into my shorts!” “I am not used to allowing beings to crawl around inside me,” the squamous elder being pointed out. “You tickle.” “Is not to be being much further, oozy Yo-friends!” the team’s Deputy Leader called out cheerily. “Yo is thinking Yo is very good at map reading and Yo is thinking we are near to be where Al B. Harpering is saying is mystery thing.” Trickshot wasn’t impressed. “If the mystery thing is another big mutated slug or forty foot wood louse again then I’m gonna take those co-ordinates and ram ‘em up Al B’s…” “There’s definitely something over there, guys,” CSFB! called. “In that natural bowl!” “Great,” grumbled DBS. “Let’s all squelch on over and take a look.” CrazySugarFreakBoy! took the lead, scrambling up the scorched rocks to find a vantage point where he could peer over the crater’s edge. Hatman and DBS hauled themselves up behind him. “Uh oh,” Josh Clement breathed. “Is it too late to volunteer for the other team with Finny and Nats?” The massive basin was filled with hundred of thousands of squirming crawling giant insects, writhing over one another in ecstasy to strange wailing echoes that reverberated from the rocks. CSFB! whistled softly. “If all of these guys decide to swarm towards Gothametropolis we’re gonna be shopping for a new city!” “Why are they all gathered together like that?” Hatman wondered. “Hundreds of different species, they should be fighting or eating each other. But they’re not, they’re just waiting, as if…” “As if they are to be being controlled,” Yo realised. “Look! Look!” The Legion looked. Standing on the carapace of a fifty foot long black beetle was a long haired human in a tattered kilt. The bagpipes across his shoulder were the source of the noise that attracted the mutant beasts. “Okay,” De Brown Streak admitted. “I didn’t read about this guy in the LL files Who’s Who. So he must begin with a C to Z.” “We’ve never seen this guy before,” Hatman assured the rookie. “We’d remember seeing him before. We have no idea who this is.” Then the piper looked straight at them over the pool of writhing insects. “Who I am? Ah’m the last best hope o’ the planet Earth, ye feekit eediots,” he shouted at them. “And ah’m your doom! Prepare to die by mah beasties, ye manky gommerils… by command of the Bagpiper… an’ his Sporran of Horrors!” Nats flew after Fin Fang Foom as the huge dragon’s wings beat through the thick roiling atmosphere of the wasteland. Bill Reed was straining his telekinetic powers to shield himself from the ambient radiation. The Makluan dragon simply ignored it. “So do you miss the LL?” the flying phenomenon asked the team’s former leader. “Some,” the wyrm replied, giving away nothing. “You coming back?” “Maybe one day.” “But you’re back with us for now.” “Yes.” “Why?” “Because Mumphrey asked.” Nats sighed. “You’ve been spending too much time talking to the Dark Knight.” Ahead of them there was a sudden flare of light in the darkness. “There’s something down there,” Finny warned. “I can smell… hot metal. Oil. Electronics.” “At ground zero of the transnuke explosion?” Nats argued. “Nothing could have possibly survived that.” “Whatever’s down there might not have been there when the blast went off. But it’s there now,” Finny replied. “Let’s check it out, search pattern J3.” “Back two minutes and bossing me about already,” grinned the plying phenomenon. “Okay. J3 it is. Going in.” The two heroes moved in closer. The choking green clouds parted to show a children’s playground, packed with happy playing children. “What?” Nats asked, swooping low. “That’s not top of the list of what I was expecting.” But Foom was already gaining altitude. “Back off!” he called. “It’s got visual and audio components but no smell! It’s an illusion. It’s a trap!” Dream Machine dropped her hologram. Then X-Ray Machine belted half a million roentgen of hard radiation through the dragon’s chest while Sewing Machine bracketed Nats with thousands of razor-sharp needles. Wind Machine hammered the heroes to the ground with brutal hurricane force. “Full marks,” agreed Death Machine, moving forward and uncoiling his rods of anti-life. “It is a trap. And now you die.” Yuki moved very stealthily beneath the row of parked vehicles along Frazetta Street. She’d exited the sewers at the first possible moment, but it was too late to save her jacket now. This was becoming less of a thrill ride now. There was a knot of humans clustered in an unmarked pick up van parked near the corner. The cyborg P.I. could pick up their radio transmissions. She could even tell what brand of cigarettes they were smoking. She watched from less than fifteen feet away as they left the truck and separated to scout down the road. She was close enough to “make” some of the faces and match them with her internal criminal database files. Sure enough, Harry “Bloodbath” Doyle, “Long” Pacho Lopez, Julio Tortorelli, and Nick “the Dick” Purvis all came up on the FBI most wanted list. All of them were guns for hire. Tortorelli was the one who had spilled the most during his last arrest, which explained why he was out and walking around now when so many of his crime family were doing time. Yuki moved cautiously in the shadows and got near enough to approach him unseen by the other hunters. It was clear from their lack of deployment that they weren’t used to working together. It was more like open season on Yuki Shiro. Yuki mentally reviewed all her recent cases. Who has she pissed off that badly? She caught Tortorelli by the neck, restricted the flow of his carotid artery just long enough to make him pass out, then vanished away with him slung over her shoulder. The others would have a long wait for his report. “You want to explain why I’m suddenly so popular?” Yuki asked Julio when she’d found a nice private alley over in Hogan to conduct a proper interview. “While you still have your good looks?” Julio Tortorelli lost bladder control at that point. “We… we heard the Captor’s gizmo didn’t get you,” he admitted. “So they sent in the Machine Shop.” “The Captor?” He was a high-priced top flight consultant in capturing and confining sentient beings. The motel room trap had been the kind of baroque trap he loved. “The Captor’s behind this?” “I dunno. I just got the word. The word to take you down.” “Who do you work for?” “Nobody! Don’t hit me! I mean, I’m a contract hire guy. For Justus Screwdriver! Don’t hit me in the face!” Screwdriver was an underworld middle man, a financier and deal-broker. Any one of Yuki’s cases might have accidentally stepped on his toes. “Did Screwdriver order the hit, or is he just acting for someone?” “I dunno! Screwdriver don’t hand out our orders, he has people for that. He don’t tell us squat! He just said we had to take you down, send a message. That’s all. Everyone got the same orders, the Captor, the robot boys, the Zoot Suit Squad, everyone.” “The robot guys, who are they?” “The Machine Shop? Some contract killers built for the job. New players building a serious rep. Robots.” The hired killer smiled lustfully. “But that Sex Machine of theirs sure is stacked.” Yuki frowned as she picked up another strand of Tortorelli’s comments. “A message? A message to who?” Tortorelli’s handsome face screwed up with scorn. “Your secret’s out, super-lady! We know that you’re secretly a member of the Lair Legion. Everybody knows.” “The Lair Legion?” Yuki swallowed. “But I’m not…” “You confessed it,” Tortorelli sneered. “That’s why there’s the price on you. Three million dead, ten million alive. That’s why everybody’s out to take you down. Screwdriver, the Lynchpin’s boys, the Machine Shop, the Mendicant’s Guild, the Full House Gang, the Ass-Raping Ninjas, the Botherhood of Evil Mutates, the Picnic of Disaster, everybody.” He chuckled at the expression on his captor’s face. “That’s why you’re gonna die!” Next issue: The Machine Shop! The Necromancer General! Mayor Klein! The Bagpiper and His Sporran of Doom! Lots of huge creepy-crawlies! Ausgardian ravenjenbeasts! Uhuna’s nightmare! Who wants Yuki dead. More stuff if I can pack it in. That’s in Untold Tales of the Wastelands: The Machinery of War, or Lost Causes And to find out what Vizh and Dancer are up to, check out Dancer/Donar #19 and 20. Who says all this stuff doesn’t tie up eventually? Original concepts, characters, and situations copyright © 2005 reserved by Ian Watson. Other Parodyverse characters copyright © 2005 to their creators. The use of characters and situations reminiscent of other popular works do not constitute a challenge to the copyrights or trademarks of those works. The right of Ian Watson to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. |
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