Errata: Eighteenth Episode - Gunishment

My last apartment was a brutal disappointment. Some kind of damp cardboard confection on wasteland between slums, I’d have turned it down flat but the landlord won me over saying it was built on a real ley line. I went out for cigarettes and returned to watch as my new home and few remaining possessions were smashed to pâté by a rumbling locomotive. Turned out I’d misheard and it was built on a railway line.

The inside of the environmental suit stank of bacon and resentment. Gazing out through the mirrored visor I finally saw the world through the eyes of a City Peace trooper. The suit cut off all peripheral vision. It was just like wearing blinkers.

Two Blade had lured out a small phalanx of Peace by bounding down the street wearing a pink dino head wrapped in fairy lights left over from mardi gras. Mistaking him for a libertarian the troopers had chased him into a gloom-drenched alley where Nessa broke them like fortune cookies. Me and Teeb stripped two of them down, took their SafeStaves then snuck over the road to Apostrophe’s Gym. Grunts were mustering next to the fire escape, waiting to do the thirty-six storey hike up to the converted cannon dome on the roof.

‘How d’you go pee in one of these things?’ whispered the Blademeister as we stood in line.

‘You don’t. Grunts don’t have johnsons.’

Two Blade’s grip on his SafeStave tightened. ‘I need to make water.’

‘Shhh! You’ll blow our cover.’

‘I can’t hold it.’

‘Then go! You’re under five layers of protective material. No one ‘ll know.’

‘I’ll know.’

‘Lie to yourself.’

The queue shuffled forward.

‘I really need to urinate.’

‘You know what?’ I turned the twist-lock mechanism that switched on the SafeStave’s superhot prong. ‘Queues make my lumbago flare up.’ And I drove the spear-point into the back of the next grunt in line. It bust out the middle of his chest impaling his two buddies in front of him as the prong seared through golem-paste like a lit cigarette through shrinkwrap. The next in the queue turned brandishing his stave but Two Blade ran at him, knocking the weapon aside with the haft of his own then slicing the grunt’s stomach open with a horizontal stroke. Two Blade grabbed the second SafeStave then whaled on the last four Peace between us and the steps, wielding one sizzling pike like a sword while he used the second to stab a grunt’s ankle, pinning it to the tarmac. A black, noxious stench rose from the slash wounds but without noses to smell it the Peace already on the fire escape kept clanking up towards the roof. Peace don’t have mouths to scream either, so the whole business went down to boots on grit and the occasional thump of a body.

When we were done I was greased with sweat and my visor was steaming up. The suits weren’t big on human comfort. I felt like a goddamn theme park attendant.

‘Okay Teeb,’ I gasped. ‘You can pee with impunity.’

‘Uh… sorry, Chief. False alarm. Turns out I was just nervous.’

‘Beautiful.’ Our visors met each other, anonymous images concertinaing away into infinity. ‘I swear I wear this get-up much longer I’ll start believing I’m on the side of justice. C’mon – let’s hit the roof.’

We belted up the fire escape with the zeal of heroes but three flights in I felt like my chest was in a trash compactor. Two Blade took my wrist and led me panting delirious on toward our goal. I clutched at the side rail, staggered, sobbed a little. The temperature inside the suit kept climbing until my feet squelched with perspiration. Events got oozy like a pod dream. I think at some point he carried me.

I came round staring into a star-spackled sky. I eased onto my elbows and saw Two Blade across the roof working a control panel, environmental suit stripped down to his waste and his hair banging with turbulence. Peace lay scattered like peanut husks round the huge gleaming needle of the launcher. Everything was lit up red.

Teeb worked two touchscreen interfaces simultaneously, making hundreds of adjustments with a touch like a concert pianist. ‘Strap yourself in, buddy.’

I peeled a wingset off a snuffed grunt and snapped it into the buckles on the back of my stolen suit. A cable hung from the launcher pole like a dare.

‘The wings aren’t designed for a non-standard body, Chief.’

‘You implying these pixie-flaps make my butt look big?’

Two Blade grinned. ‘I’m saying you try to fly on hope alone we may be burying you in a pizza box come sun-up.’ What with the hazard lights and shrieking wind he had the maniacal Hell-fiend look nailed. ‘You’ll need some extra lift.’

I clipped the cable to my wing harness, strode up to the doughnut-shaped runway that ran round the roof edge. ‘I can solicit some upthrust, no danger.’

‘Yeah, that’s all well and good Chief,’ he was yelling over the boom of turbines, ‘but once you get within around twenty metres of City Hall the anti-psionics ‘ll kick in and you’ll be on your own.’

‘What?’ Magnetic brakes disengaged. ‘What am I supposed to do when that happens?’ Gradually, the launcher began to turn.

Two Blade shrugged, cranked a slider up into the red. ‘Try to make sure you’re high enough, and, uh… coast?’

‘Hey wait!’ The cable dragged at my waist, forcing me to break into a trot. ‘Teeb how am I supposed to fly back out?’

He cupped a hand to his ear, shook his head. ‘Can’t hear you, Chief! Happy trails!’

All at once I was running, skidding. G-force sucked at my skull. Lights blurred to streaks. As my feet left the ground, my visor filled with puke. I swore I heard T Blade squeal with pride.

* * *

Half an hour into the attack on Errata, the picket-fence fanged, cellar-black dinosaur vanished.

Oh sure, Parish remained real as ever, swatting grunts and felling grungy municipal towers like multi-tiered wedding cakes, but in the eyes of the general public the huge Tetradaemon ceased to exist – had, indeed, never existed. As with the Slow Bomb, the citizenry’s hypertrophied denial reflex took a short while to map the contours of this latest horror, then kicked in, shutting it out forever. Folks kneaded their brows, struggling to recall the vague unpleasantness that had disturbed their sleep. Most poured themselves a glass of water, knocked back a couple of tranquilisers and wrote it off as a bad dream, ornaments chatter-walking off shelves, the raw night blazing with sirens.

‘I’m so angry I could boil a ham in my gut juices, Benson,’ Parish growled, the air round his head rupturing with Hoax Bomb blasts. He slashed with his talons, cleaved a winged grunt clean in two. ‘If wishes were horses a frenzied mare ‘d be dragging you by your intestines through a sun-flayed flinty desert right this instant! Fie and fucknuts! A pox on’t! A box of pox on’t!’

‘Oh me, sir.’ Benson swerved to elude a plummeting Peace trooper and shook his head in mock opprobrium. ‘Can’t you talk nicely?’

‘Can’t you claw out your own eyes and perish shrieking in a shitty ditch?’

Parish’s rampage had taken him right up to the corner of Judge Street. All around dunes of rubble and shredded grunts lay in vulgar testament to how Peace resistance had slowed his progress to a plod. Some ten bus lengths from where he fought and gnashed, City Hall stood vulnerable and inviting as a heap of leaves on a sidewalk.

‘Do b-b-be nice to me.’

‘You’re a… a…’ Parish clutched at his throat. ‘You’re a bloody… ruddy… damn it all great chap. A fucking… asset. Arrrgghh!’ Saliva slopped from his jowls as his rage ran over.

‘Why thank you, sir. You know, watching you writhe down there like a pitchforked earthworm, I finally get an inkling of how it might feel to rejoice in acts of cruelty. You’re so easy to hate – truly a poster b-b-boy for b-b-bastards.’

‘I’ve always appreciated your candour!’ Parish ducked a swooping grunt. ‘Damn these rozzers!’ A SafeStave clattered off his dorsal plating.

‘Honestly,’ Benson sighed, ‘this is like trying to sweep a cathedral with a toothbrush. For every trooper you slay the Syphilis B-B-Barracks makes fifteen more. Stop wasting your time exterminating these mosquitoes. Storm City Hall!’

With the jerky compulsion of a marionette Parish dipped his head and charged. Tarmac tore like turf beneath his taloned toes. Twenty metres from City Hall he tripped a proximity mine and a blast of psychic white noise sent him staggering like a sot. He blundered sideways into the Errata Tribune’s chic bell-shaped chrome and glass headquarters, the whole campanular crapworks shattering around him like a crystal turd. His ankle snagged on a support stanchion but momentum carried him onward. There was a brief, resonant moment where the Tetradaemon stood poised on one foot, teetering in silent tableau while his absurdly high centre of gravity decided if it wanted to shift.

It did not. Encouraged perhaps by some vagary of wind direction, Parish crumped back down onto two feet. He gripped his skull, tried to shake off a pounding psionic hangover. Overlapping City Hall deterrent fields irritated the flesh beneath his scales, bathing his arms, back and chest in itching. Ache-pulses throbbed in his bowels and brain.

Benson flapped grimacing at the fringe of the affected zone. Behind him banks of dismal underlit fog rolled across the city; black for fuel fires, white for steam and flares, grey for the stuff in-between, organic matter, soft furnishings, all the blandishments of civilisation, urban toejam really. Wisps the colour of scurvied gums curled round monochrome clouds, creating giant gauzy barber’s poles amongst the cowering slums.

‘Hey! No lollygagging!’

Parish struggled to gather his limited wits. ‘It’s agony, Benson! The entire area’s laced with countermeasures!’

‘Is this the face of concern?’ Benson fluttered higher, potbelly jouncing. ‘We’re about to collapse the universe, sir! Don’t you think your cranial discomfort rather pales in comparison?’

‘I can’t stand it!’ Parish clawed at his head.

‘For pity’s sake, Benson! Stop this! Take my money! Take my rank! You can even have my thrice-damned little bolthole in the Fringe Planes – sixteen guest bedrooms and a swimming pool on every ceiling!’

‘I told you, sir. Such fripperies mean b-b-bugger all to me.’

The Tetradaemon squirmed and wept. ‘Please! I’m sorry! Oh Jenkins I beg of you! Don’t make me do this! In the name of all that’s sacred!’

Benson patted the Acquiescence Orb and smiled. ‘Come now, sir, you know as well as I do that nothing is sacred these days. And isn’t that precisely how it should b-b-be? Nothingness is a state of equality and peace, the last refuge of b-b-beauty. Matter exists in a state of constant remorse – what kind of twisted b-b-bastard perpetuates such suffering for his own gain?’

‘Benson! This is madness!’

‘No, sir. Madness is a form of self-defence. This... all this is sickness. We’re going to cure it.’ Benson beat his wings, turned a backflip. ‘Climb the b-b-building, sir. Destroy the Key. Kill the Governor.’

Hollering with pain, Parish lumbered towards the base of City Hall. Far overhead, scarcely visible amongst the smoke and searchlights, a grunt seemed to lose control of his wingset and peeled out of a gentle descent, crashing through the plate glass windows of the ninety-first floor.

* * *

Senor Bartholomew – as military top brass had jocularly dubbed it – had been the biggest and most brazenly destructive of Errata’s cannon. Mounted atop the colonnaded roof of the Hokum Museum, it had boasted such heavy recoil that the entire building had needed to be strengthened with a huge cage of thick interlocking steel rods. After the signing of the Disgrace Accord, most cannon-domes were stripped of their barrels and converted into Peace Launchers but, apparently in deference to its sterling service during the Distraction Wars, Senor Bartholomew was left intact, quietly settling into its new role as the museum’s largest, most lethal exhibit.

So it was a surprise then, when, in a drizzle of paint flakes and rust, the aged cannon barrel began to rise.

With the clunk-crack of cogworks and counterweights, it rotated through one-hundred-and-eighty degrees, bringing the horrid portal of its muzzle to bear upon the dinosaur scaling City Hall. In the shifting glow of multiple bomb blasts, the furious creature’s black-jeweled back glistened like moonlit wine. It was struggling, hand over hand up the side of the gargantuan Government building. Grunts swarmed over its body like white ants, dangled from its arms and legs on grapnels, several crowbarring at the monster’s scales with fizzling SafeStaves. Every so often, a trooper would scramble onto the notched plateau of the monster’s head and depress the thumb-trigger at his belt, detonating the Hoax Bomb payload snug in his Kamikaze Jacket.

But though daemonic blood ran in sizzling rivulets, dissolving grunts like hot broth on an ice sculpture, the vast saurian beast continued to climb, forty storeys, fifty storeys, higher.
Senor Bartholomew tracked upwards, adjusting for gravity, windspeed. At such a colossal calibre shell drop-off described a precipitous downstroke, a stark backslash. The barrel clunked a little higher, an observatory telescope angling towards the stars.

And it was as if, even from deep within the briars of its agony, the monster sensed what was about pass, for it stopped its ascent and, clutching the fractured grey stonework, peered over its shoulder at the cannon trained upon its head. Squinting through a film of blood, the creature frowned. It muttered something which nobody heard.

Impossibly, Senor Bartholomew fired.

Seconds passed, one, two, three… a thunderous nova chomped into the building, blinding onlookers. It seemed the dinosaur had been instantly vaporised; moments later, hunks of charred lizard meat began raining down upon the streets below.

Smoke cleared, revealing blackened cross-sections of floors. The blast had bitten a huge hemisphere out of City Hall. All at once, the structure seemed to wear its folly on its sleeve. Observers with an architectural bent quickly noticed that the central support column was missing for a whole three storeys. Occupants above and below leant from windows, straining to see the damage. Something deep inside the building gave voice to the terrible emptiness everyone was feeling, and released a low, guttural groan.

Auxiliary supports buckled, then fractured. Squatting atop the tower like a snot cap, the sludgy morass that was Errata’s Governor burbled his consternation. Dust billowed from its base like dry ice, then the whole edifice slid downward, as if disappearing into a trapdoor.

* * *

The Governor’s Aide sat at the controls of the smoking gun, wiping saliva from her lips.

‘Well Waltz,’ she said. ‘It’s gonna kick off now. Trust me twice.’ Her voice echoed through Senor Bartholomew’s cool dome as she rose from her seat, smoothed down the creases in her jumpsuit. ‘Let’s go.’ Purring to a sonorous, tidal rhythm, the panther lowered its three heads and allowed her to climb onto its back.