Cloneworld - 04 (55 page)

There came
another
stab.

He flapped his hand again!
Gerroff...

Then something tiny, like a pincer, took his finger and
pulled
. And in Franco's oxygen-dwindling brain he realised
something was trying to help him, to guide him...
He swam in the direction of the pull, in which he was being drawn, and more stars were fluttering until -

There came a slow, languorous
pop.

Like a greased baby eagerly ejected from his panting mother's womb, Franco slid from the balloon, covered in a thick silver membrane, and hit the deck with a useless slap. He sucked in great lungfuls of air, and opened his trembling eyes, reaching up to scrape the silver liquid out of his eyes.

Above him, there came a second
pop
and his saviour was revealed. It was Polly the Parrot, [ejected] a few moments after Franco from the crashing Fast Jet. It was his Special Friend. His Special Friend who had
saved him
, guiding him to safety with the tip of her metal beak.

Franco groaned.

Oh no!

Not again!

He sat up, as a hundred gangers surrounded him. They pointed MPKs at him, snarling, and Franco slowly climbed to his feet, crippled by the liquid anti-grav matter. "This shit is worse than treacle," he muttered.

"You there! Haggis!"

The Mistress was marching towards him, her face gone, a hundred snakes waving and spitting venom. Franco put his hands on his hips, a snarl on his face, and spat out a long quivering gloob of spittle.

"Yeah, bitch?"

"How... how... how dare you! I am the Queen of the Gangers! I am their Goddess! Their Mistress! I am about to destroy their enemies! Look!" And she pointed, to where the Disintegrator was practically dancing against its restraints. It was so filled with energy, with
charge,
that it looked pretty much ready to
burst
.

"You dumb-ass point is, venom-tits?"

The Mistress pointed to the clones, then to Franco, snake-hands trembling with suppressed rage and a need to strangle the little ginger bastard. "Kill him," she said. "Do it. Do it
now..."

Teddy Sourballs lowered her head, and accelerated, and behind her, her faithful squadron of gangers followed in close formation. She realised, in a moment of clarity, that this thing had to end. They had allowed the Head Mistress to rule them for too long - from School to Politics to Media to Global Domination. Absolute power corrupts absolutely, guaranteed, and the Mistress had wielded way too much power for way too long. So much power, she even
believed
her self-created legend.

You think us gangers have no pride?

You think we're just slaves to your fucking entertainment? To your Rule? Your Dominion? To your impending Quad-Gal Empire?

The gangers are nobody's slaves.

It crept up on us.

Like a bad dream.

But now.

Now, we're going to change that.

"General Banks?"

"Yes, Ms Sourballs?"

"Send out the message."

"Yes, Ms Sourballs."

Franco stared at the clones with a snarl in his beard. "Come on then, fuckers, one at a time or all at once, it's all the same to me!" He lunged, kicked one ganger in the balls, punched another across the jaw, breaking it, then took an MPK from a pair of stunned hands. He whipped the gun barrel around to face the Mistress's wavering snake-head.

"Anybody
moves
and I'll blow her, er, snakes clean off!"

Nobody moved.

The Mistress began to chuckle, a weird hissing, chuckling, gurgling sound, as if a hundred tiny snakes were making the noise; which, of course, they were. Suddenly, a huge snake head erupted from the centre of the Mistress's neck stump and, with a single, terrifying bite, chomped the MPK in half.

Franco took several steps back.

Behind him, the gangers likewise took several steps back.

The snake roared, and it was as thick as a human carcass, skin pale white like the bulging, rotten intestine of a disembowelled corpse. Maggot flesh gleamed. Black eyes stared hard at Franco - and at the thousand clone soldiers who, as one and without order, turned their guns
from
Franco and
towards
the Mistress.

Franco backed away further.

He sensed, somehow, that she was now the Common Enemy.

It's not every day your War Leader turns into a big snake.

"You fools!" hissed the snake, tongue flickering so fast it was a blur. The Mistress's legs staggered a little, as if struggling to hold the vast weight of the huge beast within. Around the thick scaled head, smaller snakes wavered constantly, like a hundred stalks of AI spaghetti biowire. "You think
any of you
can stand in the way of my Quad-Gal domination? Fools!"

Franco stared down at his half-chewed MPK, and dropped it with a clatter. He pulled free one of his faithful Kekra quad-barrel machine pistols and pointed it at the big snake.

"What you gonna do?
TV
everyone to death?"

"When you control the media, you control the Empire," said the Mistress and opened her mouth, opened it wide, slick skin spreading back over pale white jaws until only yellowish fangs could be seen - and then, from this huge orifice, poured snakes, hundreds and hundreds of white snakes, which hissed and slithered, rearing up to attack the clones...

The gangers yelled in sudden panic, turning to run. Bullets whine and slapped. Snakes struck out, biting, injecting venom...

A snake reared at Franco. He yelped, and shot its head off in a slurry of pulped snake-meat. More snakes flowed past, heads darting out to strike the clones. The poison was fast-acting, and many were dead before they hit the deck.

Suddenly
everything
was a crawling, slithering, bullet-yammering chaos. Franco's guns boomed and clattered, and he danced sideways, yelping, watching blasted snake heads go slithering across the deck. He suddenly realised what was happening: a diversion.

He glanced up. The Mistress, with her huge, thick, pulsing snake head, was walking unsteadily towards the Disruptor. It was ready to fire; damn, it looked like it was ready to
ejaculate!
And it'd take out the entire Org Palace in one blast! Strogger's entire family! Then, the city beyond... and who knew where it would stop? Neither the Disruptor,
nor
the Mistress, would stop until Cloneworld was a barren wasteland. What did she have to lose? She'd got her Live TV programme.
And
she'd massacred the Orgs...

Franco growled and started after her.

Five snakes reared up before him, slinking out from beneath an overturned HJeep, heads snapping, jaws clacking, poison spitting. He fired with a yell, bullets whining, churning through snake flesh. The Mistress glanced back, but then she was there, at the huge weapon. Blue light danced in her black snake eyes. It reflected eerily from her slick, pale skin.

She reached out, just as Franco's last Kekra bullet removed the head of the fifth snake in a messy pasta splatter, and he yelled, "
Noooo
!" But she was there, and the distance was too great.

He tried anyway.

Sprinted with all his might...

"Pink Leader, do you copy?"

"Copy you, Silver Leader."

"How's Franco doing, over?"

Pippa slammed around in the Q-Wing Fast Jet but, at this speed and distance, the decks were just a blur. And then she saw...
them
: enemy Jets coming popping up out of nowhere. She armed her guns and gritted her teeth, but a little voice inside her head saw their trajectory, saw the pulsing blue glow of the Disintegrator - and she gasped in realisation and pulled up at the last moment, guns silent.

Teddy Sourballs ploughed her Q-Wing Fast Jet straight into the heart of the weapon. There came a hiatus of total silence, then a sudden explosion of blue light and a deafening
boom
that sent every Q-Wing Fast Jet in a two-klick radius spinning uselessly through the skies. Pippa grabbed her control stick, wrestling with the stalled Jet as the
pulse
kicked her up and away from the War Balloon and the centre of battle. Panic rose suddenly in her chest. Around her, every other Q-Wing Fast Jet was suffering the same fate, describing a high arc until, as one, they started to fall from the skies like a squadron of detonated birds...

"You want
another cup of tea, motherfucker?"
screamed Teddy Sourballs, as her Jet ploughed into the Disintegrator. "Well fucking sip on this!" and there was a deafening roar that ate through her, and consumed her in totality, and as she was blasted into a billion atoms of oblivion by raging blue fire, Teddy Sourballs died with a smile on her face.
Now
that
taught her a lesson...

One second, Franco was reaching out to grapple with the distant figure of the Mistress. The next, a Q-Wing Fast Jet appeared in the heart of the Disintegrator and Franco knew, fucking
knew
bad shit when bad shit was going down, and he hit the deck hard and fast, rolling towards a HJeep as a roar blasted across the War Balloon like a nuclear detonation, and blue light pulsed and raged, and the wind was a firestorm of hot ash and metal splinters. The War Balloon rocked and swayed like a tree in a twister. Franco covered his head and closed his eyes, but then thought,
that's the way dumb bastards die
, so he crawled beneath the HJeep as, above and around him, clones were torn off their feet, screaming, smashing along the decks like tumbling dolls to be spat out the rear deck like bomb-blasted confetti. HTanks were rocking in the shockwave, and a HJeep to Franco's left was picked up and thrown down the decks, crashing and smashing into other vehicles and stranded clones as it went.

Through the raging wind Franco stared at the Disintegrator. It was gone, as was the Q-Wing Fast Jet which had hit it. But the Mistress was still there - just.

She was no longer a body, just a thousand long, wavering strands of flesh, not even recognisable as snakes. It was like an unravelling of intestine. It was spaghetti gone sour. It was a squid put through a squid-mincer. And it was hanging onto the detonated Disintegrator as all around it the world roared...

Slowly, determinedly, Franco started to crawl across the deck of the War Balloon.

Got to stop it,
he thought.

Got to kill it!

How could it survive that blast?

And how the hell was the War Balloon still flying?

His answer was soon answered.

The War Balloon wasn't...

There came more terrible roars, like secondary detonations. The War Balloon slowly, gradually tilted, until its nose faced the ground far below, and they were almost,
almost
vertical. Still the wind and blue fire from the Disintegrator rolled along the deck - from front to back. And as Franco looked up, he saw the problem immediately...

It was
melting
the balloon's anti-grav matter.

The balloon was gradually losing the one thing that kept it airborne.

"Why's it always me, eh?" muttered Franco, and continued crawling along the deck towards the remains, the
still-living
remains, of the Mistress, who was herself clinging onto the weapon console and reaching for -

The GASGAM nukes.

Franco groaned.

"What!" he screamed down the deck. The Mistress seemed to shudder. "Haven't you had
enough?
Isn't it
enough
that you're a pile of fucking torn-up tagliatelle? What more do you
want?
Carbonara sauce and a Caesar side-salad?"

Franco commando-crawled -

Then threw himself left, as a HJeep was picked up and bounced along the deck towards him. He rolled around, hands covering his head, as it left a three foot
gash
beside his quivering body and bounced off along the tilting deck to disappear, sweeping hapless clones off the deck with it.

On, Franco crawled.

Onwards, towards the Mistress.

Onwards, towards his bitter enemy...

And he realised.
Hey! The crawling's getting easier! At last! A positive bloody result! At last! Some beady-eyed god up there is trying to give old Franco a bit of a helping hand, a bit of lee-way, a bit of a hitch up the old ladder of positive progress...

Until he realised.

He was crawling faster, because the War Balloon was falling.

Franco peered up, and peered down, and saw the capital city of Org getting gradually bigger down below.
There,
he could see the docks, where the friendly party led by Anklebolt III had brought him in after his adventures with the org pirates.
There
were the narrow streets, surrounded by thousands of needle-like steel towers, through which he'd been transported in a bar-walled prison truck. And
there
was the Org Palace - seat of power for the pretty much crazy-as-a-rabid-dog Queen Strogger and her weird and twisted offspring.