Cloneworld - 04 (41 page)

"Cuff them," snarled Anklebolt, and glared in hatred at Queen Strogger. "We have evidence,
mother.
We have the tapes! We know what you did, selling our precious org secrets to the gangers so they could build their army! You have betrayed your own people! You have betrayed your own race! You have betrayed the orgs! You are going to hang,
mother.
You are going to be exterminated with maximum prejudice!"

"Er?" said Franco.

"
Shut up!"
hissed Tarly.

"Excuse me? Yes, you there, the big org with the gun dick. Yes, you, the fat one with a metal arse." Anklebolt turned her vitriolic glare on Franco. He grinned at her in a friendly, amiable fashion. "I'm sure there's been some huge kind of mistake here. Queen Strogger here, she was a
prisoner
of the gangers. I helped to
rescue her,
I did. I am a dashed and darned
hero,
I am!"

"Funny little man. Be silent! Strogger was a prisoner because the gangers betrayed her. But not after she betrayed us all. She sold every single one of our mechanical designs to the gangers. Now, they have intel on our every weapon, every shield, every device for human upgrading. They have been busy building an army. A vast army, of clones, and of cloned
orgs!
Yes, you heard me, funny little ginger man, the gangers have gathered a huge war host at the heart of The Teeth mountains - and they are preparing to attack! They have cracked the GASGAM AI units, and can now use air support,
air support designed by the orgs!
We will be wiped out. Annihilated, and all..." she pointed, "because of Queen Strogger."

"Ah," said Franco.

"Yes," said Anklebolt.

Franco thought about it. "So, they'd be clorgs, then."

"
What?
"

"Cloned orgs. Clorgs."

Anklebolt stared at him as if he was something particularly distasteful she'd found on the bottom of her steel boot. She waved a hand. "Take them to the brig. Chain them up. Shackle them! They will all stand trial at the Org Palace in Org."

"Hey, wait a minute!" said Franco as the platform drew closer, and several huge orgs started to spin lockchains. "Hey, wait, stop, why the buggering bugger are
we
being bloody arrested?"

"Accessories. To treason." Anklebolt smiled a horrible smile from her metal, upgraded face. "It carries the death penalty."

Chains soared out, snapping and locking like live snakes around Tarly, around Franco - even the parrot was captured with a wounded "squawk!" - and they were hauled onto the platform, hauled onto the battleship. Finally, without a struggle, Queen Strogger was chained heavily and dragged onboard. The platform lifted, and they were all dumped on the steel deck.

"Take them below," snarled Anklebolt.

"Bugger," said Franco.

Franco and Tarly were chained up together in a sterile steel cell. It had a small barred window overlooking the rolling Teeth Ocean. To the bars of the door, was chained Polly the Parrot. The Special Friend was curiously quiet, except for the occasional, pitiful, mewling "
SQUAWK!
"

They were given cups of water, and plates of dried, er, "sludge," Franco christened it. It looked like engine oil on a bed of engine scrapings, topped off with a dollop of engine grease.

For long hours they stared through bars in a state of shock, not just at their more recent near-starvation, death-by-ocean, pirates and whirlpool, but at the total failure of the one bit of good fortune that seemed to come their way. It was worse for Franco than anybody else; after all, he lived day by day in the hope of constant hedonism. To have his future perceived pleasure at the Org Palace removed so swiftly, so mercilessly, so
unjustly
, by Princess Bloody Anklebiter, seemed somehow just
wrong.

"There, there," said Tarly, patting his shoulder.

"We could just..."

"No."

"Aww, go on."

"No! Not here, not now, not like this. I want it to be romantic! I want us to fall in love, not have a quick wham-bam in a cell wrapped in chains."

"What makes you think it'll be any different when we're married?"

Tarly stared hard at him - after a while, he started to wriggle like a worm.

"What?" he said.

"You used the
M
word."

Franco frowned. "What, masochist?"

"No,
married,
idiot."

"Er. So I did."

"Did you mean it?"

"Er. Maybe. Depends."

"On?"

"On whether you like me that much."

"I do! You're special, Franco, real special!"

"And, er, whether you mutate."

"
What?
"

"Mutate. You know. Grow in height, have pus dribble from your oozing tits, that sort of thing."

"
What?
"

"Sorry. Long story. Last wife mutated. You know how it is."

"Er, I don't think I do."

"Still." Franco brightened. "As long as you don't mind a marriage prenuptial agreement."

"Why, have you got that much money?"

"No! I mean, if you mutate, then the marriage is null and void."

"Ah! I think I might be able to stretch to that arrangement. I can't see myself mutating any time soon."

"Yeah, that's what the ex-wife thought."

"So, does that mean..."

"Here, lass, let me do it properly." Franco, with a jangle of chains, got down on one knee. He peered up, like a man through a fog. A fog of love, naturally. Or maybe a fog of lust. Maybe just a fog of idiocy. "Will you, Tarly Winters..."

"
General
Tarly Winters."

"Will you,
General
Tarly Winters, do me the honour of becoming my wife?"

"I will!"

Franco stood, and they hugged, and the chain around his elbow whipped up and smacked Tarly a vicious blow in the face, nearly breaking her nose, and after she'd come round and they'd mopped up the blood, they laughed about it.

After all, being married to Franco Haggis, Tarly was going to have to have an amazing sense of humour.

"Dry land,
squawk
! Dry land, squawk!"

Franco swung for the parrot, but it flapped away with a rattle of chains and a smell of farting ozone.

The battleship docked, and from behind bars Franco caught his first glimpse of The Org States. A new country. A new continent. A new place to be tried and
hanged!

"Damn and bloody bollocks," he said. And he meant it.

The huge battleship glided into dock, engines thumping and pulsing beneath their boots. This was the Port City of Mekal, just west of the capital city of Org. Franco noted that the orgs seemed to have little originality in their naming conventions; but didn't have anybody to discuss it with. Tarly was tired of his blathering, and just wanted to sleep, Alice was odd and distant, the former ship's computer giving simple one-word answers to any question put to her, and Franco was damned if he was going to stoop to speaking to the bloody parrot.

Franco gently shook Tarly awake, and it was minutes before Anklebolt III was there, hauling on their chains and giving them a hard time with a personal touch. All four were dragged unceremoniously into the hot sunshine, and shoved along a thick gang-plank to the dock. Thousands of orgs had turned out to see their princess arrive back safely on dry land with her newly captured cargo. Her mother. The traitor. The Queen.

The huge crowd roared in appreciation as Princess Anklebolt III appeared and waved her machine-gun arms. On a length of chain she dragged a miserable-looking Queen Strogger, suddenly small and weak and vulnerable. She half crawled, and was half dragged along the gang-plank, and Franco couldn't help but feel a large pang of sorrow. Right up to the point where he realised he'd been duped, and she'd betrayed her entire country; indeed, her entire species.

They descended the steps to the dockside, and the city of Mekal reared around and above them. The city itself was a forest of huge, crowding steel towers rearing into the sky, not one of them less than a hundred stories in height. There were thousands upon thousands of them, leading away from the docks and up the steep hillside, dominating the skyline and sending long shadows over current proceedings.

"What a brutal place," said Franco, rubber-necking up as he was pushed down the steps.

"Brutal," agreed Tarly, staring around. "Look, every single tower has a cannon on the roof. That's some serious bloody defences!"

"Yeah, from a time when they feared aerial assaults."

"It was built," said Queen Strogger, wearily.

"Whatdya mean, built?"

"The orgs terraformed their cities after QGM terraformed the world. We used great machines to change the landscape, to fold and bend the land so we could twist and dominate the land with terrible towers and fortresses. Machines are our lives. They are our
religion."

"Get down there!" growled an org, a big fellow with knives for teeth, and Franco stared for a moment before remembering his manners. His
bad
manners.

"Shut your face before I ram your teeth up your arse!"

The org dragged his chains, and Franco fell over. It wasn't very heroic.

There was a huge, caged truck waiting for them. And it was being pulled by - Franco blinked - by a
robotic horse.
Franco eyed the beast warily. He did not get on with most humans, aliens, animals, or robots. Anything that could move, basically.

As he passed its snout, the great metal jaws made a lunge for him. Without thinking, Franco gave the creature a powerful right hook that sent its metal head spinning, spraying a mouthful of greasy horse spit over the org onlookers. They roared in anger, weapons bristling.

"Er," said Franco.

This was getting out of hand. As if his
whole life
wasn't already out of hand.

Princess Anklebolt III jostled Franco, Tarly and Polly into the truck. They grasped the bars and gazed at the hostile crowd imploringly. Finally, and with a savage display of filial love, Anklebolt III beat Queen Strogger to the ground with several hefty, mechanical punches, then dragged her up by the face and hurled her into the back of the truck, which rocked on protesting suspension.

The metal horse gave a metallic whinny and set off, metal hooves
clack-clippity-clopping
on the metal roads. They headed into the city. Amongst the towering towers. Amidst the metal
Hell.
The whole city was filled with the stench of old engine oil, of overworked machinery, of dying machines, of old grease and burning steel. Noise invaded the air, the
shring
of metal blades, metal saws, the
thump-thump-thump
of pistons, the clacking of gears, the spinning of cogs, the
thrum
of clockwork, and all these noises piled one on another, a million layered sounds from a million factories all working in a glorious crazy disharmony and filling Franco and Tarly's head with a metal buzzing like that of a massive, productive
hive.

"I didn't think it would be so...
mechanised,"
said Tarly, clutching the bars.

"We are a machine race," said Queen Strogger, sitting in the corner of the truck. She looked terribly mournful; she had lost all the anger and fury and attitude Franco had come to know and, er, hate. "Our entire existence is built on the premise that the human shell is inferior - indeed, the ganger shell is
far
inferior - and it is a
necessity
to our species to upgrade, or augment, oneself with machine components. How else could you possibly hope to increase your speed, agility, strength and intelligence without external components hard-grafted onto a flesh-and-bone chassis?"

"Er," said Franco. "Maybe you don't need to?"

"What?"

"Well, you know, you could just... stay the same."

They hit a series of violent bumps in the road, and were jiggled about inside the truck, holding onto the thick metal bars for stability. They passed children in the street, who pointed, with metal arms and metal hands, some even with metal machine faces. Not one org creature, no matter
how poor,
had not been upgraded. It was a constitutional right. It was
given free on the damn National Health Upgrade Programme.
Even beggars had digital eyes. Even vagrants had machine cocks. Even footballers' wives had mechanical mouths - for talking, as well as for sucking lots of dick.

"Stay. The. Same." Queen Strogger seemed to consider this, for a long, long time. "Why," she said, eventually, old oil running down her wrinkled old chin, "would I want to do that?"

"Because," said Franco, "because, that's like, what you are, like. You're born. And you get what you're given."

"Ha! Fine words for a race whose greatest physical upgrade was an enlarged tit."

"What does that mean?"

"It means your physically weak and shitty shell was a poor chassis to begin with, but when you held the jewel of medical science in your blossoming palms, what did you do? Solve all the riddles of the diseases of your age? No. Make yourselves stronger, fitter, more agile? No. Find a cure for death? Hell fucking no. What you did, what your decadent and basically
stupid
species did, my little ginger friend, was find a way to make bigger tits. I have seen the history filmys. For a whole ten thousand years of your civilisation's advancement, more research went into tit enlargement than any other single field of medical research. I don't see how this could be a positive and fruitful use of your resources."