Slide On The Run

Episode Nine Workers Of Mars Unite!

Across the span of the bridge, mob chaos confronted mounted geometry. As Slide watched from his vantage point on a high balcony of the Turquoise Tower, several thousand workers from the Morlock Foundry, a mixture of humans and red and green Martians, united and marching under black banners emblazoned with the emblem of a crudely stylized clenched fist, swarmed across the final bridge that led into the city of Extrosylvania. At the nearer end of the bridge, a double, line-abreast formation of Red Martian cavalry waited for them. The huge war-thoats

snorted and pawed at the ground, but the plumed and turbaned riders seemed calm and impassive, as though they believed that the throng would, at the last moment, turn and retreat in the face of such an impressive show of force. This was the first time that Slide had seen Queen Mina's troops deployed for a confrontation. He had only previously observed them in ceremonial mode, parading for the colonial Victorians.

The workers were clearly in the motivating grip of a powerful and long suppressed anger, but all combat logic dictated that the strikers from Bolivar Morlock's hellish steel and munitions mills - even though some carried wrenches and spanners as makeshift weapons - stood no chance of breaking through the armed lines and into the city. The show of force arrayed for their benefit was simply too overwhelming, and their only real options were to turn back or be cut down in their tracks. Behind the cavalry, a second formation of Martian civil police, in black and tan uniforms, stood with equal menace, some leaning on the leashes of snarling calots, the tusked and ten-legged Martian equivalent of attack dogs. Behind them a solid, defensive square of red-coated infantry, armed with repeating radium rifles, provided a final, and apparently unassailable bulwark against working class heroics.

Slide knew, however, that uprisings didn't always play out the way they should on paper. He had seen the similar confrontations on the St. Petersburg timeline in 1917, and in New Damascus in 2209, when the Dionysian Bolsheviks had risen against the Tharg, and everyone knew the unexpected outcome in those conflicts.

Lupo the Vampire, who stood beside Slide on the balcony, must have read his mind. "That's always the question, isn't it? Will they open fire on their own kind, or will they mutiny in the final moment of truth?".

Slide didn't like his mind being read by a nosferatu just because the nosferatu could do it. He grunted with irritation. "The moment is pretty fucking close."

"Who was it who said that war is a bayonet with a worker on each end?"

"Damned if I remember, but you can be sure it wasn't one of them." He gestured to where Bolivar Morlock, Sir Richard Barton, Harriot Marwood, Prudence the Kitten, the elderly generals, plus a growing crowd of courtiers, both military and civilian, human and Martian, surrounded the Queen in this moment of emergency, babbling what could only be conflicting advice. Slide and Lupo had both decided that they wanted no part of this and stood off on their own.

Even the babbling ceased, though, as the distance separating the mob and the cavalry was progressively reduced until it was less than a hundred yards, and the mob showed no signs of turning back. A hundred yards became eighty yards, then eighty became sixty. A thoat reared, as though anticipating what was surely going to come, and a calot started barking hysterically and could not be quieted by its handler. The front ranks of the workers seemed to falter for a moment, but then they surged forward again, either having regained their courage, or simply pushed forward by those behind who weren't so precisely aware of the threat that faced them on the bridge. At the fifty yard mark, the cavalry drew their sabers and cruel curved blades flashed under the orange Martian sky. A roar went up from the mob and the leaders began to run forwards, as though impatient to meet either death or glory. An order was shouted, and the mounted troops also plunged ahead. The helmeted riders struck left and right with their swords, but did not achieve the instant rout that might have been expected. The strikers might have been sparsely armed, but, on the confining span of the bridge, their numbers were enough create a problem. Workers by the dozen reeled away with blood pouring from horrible wounds, and others were killed where they stood, but no matter how many times the sabers rose and fell, more pressed forward. Thoats were hemmed in by the press of the crowd, and hands reached for the riders, dragging them down in a mass of hobnail boots, iron tools, and pounding fists.

Urgent whistles blew, and now the civil police moved into the fray. The calots furiously attacked with bared fangs, and policemen with drawn sidearms opened fire. As the first reports of radium weapons were heard on the palace balcony, Lupo glanced at Slide. "Now the shooting starts."

Slide nodded grimly. "It sure does."

He wished he knew the name of the bridge. Whatever the outcome of the head-on confrontation, it would preserved in Extrosylvanian history for as long as Extrosylvania had a history. More workers were felled by the gunfire, but they were also arming themselves. Snarling calots were hacked to pieces. Policemen were effectively mobbed and their pistols taken from them. An eddy of mayhem could not be contained by the balustrade of the bridge. Steel and stone gave way, and two thoats and a dozen of more men and Martians plunged, arms and legs like windmills, to flagstones of the underpass roadway a hundred and some feet below.

"This is getting messy."

"Very messy."

Slide could see the eventual outcome all too easily. The cavalry and the police had failed to put the workers to flight, and were, in fact, barely holding their own. It could only be a matter of moments before the infantry square was brought into play, and orders were given for the redcoats to clear the bridge with withering volleys. As Slide figured it, the only thing holding back such a slaughter was the indecision of the officers at the scene, and the many police and cavalry in the line of fire. He suspected, however, that a reluctance to butcher their own would not remain a delay or consideration for very long.

Those on the bridge seemed to come to the same conclusion as Slide. In the center of the span, a lull had ensued in the hand to hand fighting. The pistols still barked, but both sides were falling back, regrouping as best they could, and using whatever cover the dead and the debris afforded. Orders were being shouted and the infantry were assuming formal firing positions, but then the loud voice of a Martian woman cut through the general din.

"Warriors of Mars! Warriors of Mars! Listen to me!

The pistol shots dwindled and heads turned.

"Warriors of Mars! Listen to me! When did you become the slayers of the defenseless?"

Consternation broke out around the Queen. General Cairngorm was demanding to know why the infantry had not commenced firing, but, down on the bridge, an eerie silence had fallen.

"Warriors of Mars! We are the workers! We are just like you. We labor in the foundries and the mills just as you serve in the ranks. Will you shoot us out of hand? Are we not tied by blood? The very blood that you are about to spill?"

An injured and bleeding cavalryman got painfully to his feet, started limping back towards where the infantry stood ready. The woman's voice gained strength. "Warriors of Mars, when did you murder your own people at the command of humans? When did you slay your own for no good reason? Are you no better than the calot that kills at the word of its master? Have you forgotten that your ancestors and our ancestors were the Great Jeddaks?"

An infantry sergeant-major attempted to drown out the woman by yelling at his troops in heavily accented Martian-English. Already the native redcoats were starting to look confused.

"Kill the loudmouth bitch, lads! Kill them all!"

No one fired. Lupo again glanced at Slide. "A moment of truth, I think?"

"Any second now."

But the infantry failed to open fire, and the woman made a final plea. "Warriors of Mars, don't do this thing!"

As far as Slide could see from a distance, the sergeant major flew into a sudden rage. He turned and shot the woman. This was too much for three of his men in the front rank, who immediately aimed their radium rifles at him. Slide could only credit the sergeant major with having more courage than common sense. He rounded on the men and screamed at them. "You bastards all know the penalty for mutiny!"

Lupo sighed. "Now?"

But, instead of being resolved, the conflict for the loyalty of the native troops was interrupted by a series of explosions that came from behind Slide and Lupo, from the other side of the city. The two turned and looked. Lupo sadly shook his head. "I fear the Martian revolution has come too late."

Four of the tall, tripod fighting machines of the Slimy Things were attacking the walls of the city with the scarlet wash of heat rays and the poisonous green pulse of particle beams. Maybe a dozen or more were striding over the Grand Canal, smashing the complex pipework in the process, causing jets of water to fountain high into the Martian morning. Air support came with the fighting machines in the form of streamlined metal ovoids flashing with electrical charges that, when they had risen to a sufficient intensity, arced jaggedly to the ground to cause fires and more explosions each time they struck. Once a section of the city wall was burned and bombarded to rubble and ash, the breach was filled with battalion formations of metalmen, the human-simulacra ground troops of the Slimy Things, who were far too wet and vulnerable to do any of their own fighting. With more courage than common sense, a crisp detachment of Martian cavalry attempted to confront a fighting machine, and was burned to a crisp in an X-ray moment for its bravado.

That was sufficient for Lupo. "I don't know about you, Slide, but I have seen enough cities fall in my time. I could miss the rest of this drama."

Slide glanced up. "I tend to agree with you."

High in the sky huge flying discs were converging to form a geometric hovering pattern.

"It looks as though the Slimy Things have acquired telezero technology from the Treens. Unless of course the Treens acquired it from them. It can get hard to figure who's doing what for whom, when time's up its own ass. "

As Slide had feared, a bolt of heliotrope energy flashed up from somewhere beyond the horizon and struck the discs. They in turn translated the dazzling light into a single, narrow-beam projection, directed down at the city. Where the beam touched, all was dematerialized, and it slashed the metropolis leaving scars of nothing over a hundred yards wide.

"Let's go while there's still some of this place left to leave." Slide avoided Lupo's eyes. "I hate to tell you this. Seeing as you're a vampire, and can't be too happy about all this exotic light radiation…"

"Tell me what, Slide."

"Getting out of here may not be exactly what you'd call simple without a howdy hole, which I don't think even existed this long ago."

Lupo looked old and dangerous. "So what are you telling saying, demon? That we're stuck here?"

"Unless we find ourselves a Carter machine or some good facsimile thereof."

Lupo blinked. "Well that's no problem."

Slide was surprised. It hadn't occurred to him that the Victorians had their own Carter machines, although it did make some sense. "It isn't?"

"There's the big one that brought me here. It's in a cental vault, deep under the tower, close to the stasis generator."

Slide blinked. "A Carter machine and a stasis generator in the same place? That's a wigged-out concept."

"Shall we go there instead of standing around discussing it?"

Slide nodded, and while Mina and her courtiers stood transfixed, watching the destruction of the city in horror, the demon and the vampire headed back inside the tower. Just as they were about to pass through the arch that led to the interior, Slide turned and gestured to the bridge on which the interrupted Martian revolution had been about to start. "You don't happen to know the name of that do you?"

"The Beckham Bridge."

Slide shrugged. He didn't understand the reference.

Lupo led Slide quickly along corridors and down flights of curved, Turquoise Tower steps, with what appeared to be an unerring sense of direction. Slide could only wonder how the nosferatu, who claimed to have been on Mars only slightly longer than Slide, could know his way around the labyrinthine layout of the place. He certainly proved that he did when they quickly arrived at the brass and steel gates of a multi-shaft, high-speed pneumatic elevator. Lupo dialed for an down-designated car, and one arrived in a matter of second. This was in no way too soon for Slide, who could feel the very structure of the tower trembling from what could only be the Slimy Things' assault on the city. They stepped into the car, and, no sooner had the lift gates hissed and clanged closed, it dropped like a stone, obviously descending to the deep bowels beneath Queen Mina's tower. As the elevator's free fall mitigated, and the two regained the floor under their feet, Lupo handed Slide the radium revolver that he had taken from him during the carriage ride to the tower. "You may find a need for this."

"Do you have a weapon?"

Lupo glanced at Slide with a noticeable disdain. "I am nosferatu, Yancey Slide. Among humans, I have no need of weapons."

The elevator's stop was abrupt enough to cause Slide to bend at the knees, although Lupo didn't waver. The gates of the car slid back to reveal that had descended to a vault of energy. The air smelled of ozone, positrons, and charged dark matter, and a high pitched hum rose and fell but never dropped out of the dogs-only audio range. Lupo hadn't exaggerated when he'd said that the place was deep under the tower. Slide felt as though they could not be that far from the Martian planetary core, and at least a part of the cavernous interior was only a faux-reality, kept in place by a stasis generator. Slide didn't like to be anywhere near a stasis generator. He's seen too may of them in his time with Billy Oblivion, and he didn't like the way their center never held.

Lupo again seemed to be reading Slide's reactions. "Let's just concentrate on the Carter machine, shall we?"

Slide put aside his dislike of stasis generators, and turned and looked the thing up and down. "That is one big motherfucker."

And indeed it was. No simple chair, lever, and revolving power canopy like the one he'd ridden from Doc Zen's place what now seemed like an age ago. A towering Faraday cage, awaited them, topped by multiple spinning blades; a huge brass and steel construction that was a undeniable peak in the massive Victorian super-technology of time machines. For a moment, Slide stood and stared with undisguised admiration. Who had put Queen Mina up to all of this? She was so tenuously connected with even her own reality, he found it hard to believe she had devised all this on her own, and the set-up was way past the capabilities of Sir Richard Barton or any of the other self-important courtiers. Dracula? He doubted it. The cavern had nothing of the Tepes stamp to it. When Slide had last seen the Count, he hadn't even liked steam trains. Of course, there was no accounting for radical change in this cosmos, but he still wondered who the hell had Her Majesty been hanging with?

"Shall we use the damn thing, or just stand and admire it."

Slide blinked back to the challenge at hand, and waved Lupo ahead of him. "So go aboard, my friend. After you."

Lupo treated Slide to a dour look. "You had better go first, demon. I have no idea how to operate this thing."

"That might be a problem."

Lupo looked concerned. "You can't run the machine either?"

"I can probably figure it out, but the first question is where's the dope?"

Lupo frowned. "The dope? What are you talking about?"

"The dope. The tetradetoxin, the zombie juice. We can't ride the Gridley Wave without it."

"I took no potions when I came here."

Slide suddenly felt trapped. "Yeah, well, that may be your nosferatu metabolism, but I have to be seriously medicated before I can be hurled willy-nilly across space and time. You know what I mean? I don't want to get to where we're going and not have, for instance, a body. I've had enough of those games. I'm through pulling rotting rabbits out of threadbare top hats."

"You have to have this tetradetoxin?"

"Damn fucking right I do."

Lupo seemed to be considering the problem, but before he could proffer an answer, a loud pneumatic hiss, and a sudden gust of very cold air, announced the arrival of a second elevator car. It gates clanged open. Slide and Lupo turned and found themselves facing the Queen, escorted by Sir Richard Barton, Harriot Marwood, Captain Flashman, and three human guards in hussar's uniforms.

Barton immediately barked officiously at them. "Slide, Lupo, step away from the that machine, dammit. The Queen has to be removed from the war zone."

Slide knew he spoke for Lupo. "Fuck the Queen."

Lupo chuckled deep from his Italian roots. "I think you already did."

Barton and Marwood had weapons in their hands, and the hussars were raising their radium rifles, but Slide didn't even have to react. Just like it was 1880, and he was still hanging with the Curly Bill Brocius and the Cowboys. He laid fire from the radium revolver until the power pellet was exhausted, and, by that time, only he, Lupo, and the Queen were left standing. Queen Mina looked down dispassionately down at the dead, and then up at Slide. "Don't you think you perhaps over-reacted?"

Slide shrugged. "I never did like your crew."

The Queen nodded. "So do we get into the machine and leave this place? Or do we wait for the Slimy Things to come to either fry or digest us?"

Slide glanced at Lupo. He didn't have to speak. Should they take her, or was Mina Harker just an unwarranted complication? Lupo spread his hands. "She is a friend of the Count. And she might have the drugs you need."

Slide locked eyes with Mina. "Do you have the dope?"

"It's in the machine."

"I don't believe you."

"Trust me."

Slide turned and stepped inside the Faraday cage of the big Carter machine. "I don't know why I'm doing this."

Lupo and Mina followed. "Take a red pill from the dispenser."

Something akin to a brass and glass, double cylindrical gumball machine was bolted to one of the uprights of the cage. One tube contained red pills, the other green pills.

"A red pill?"

"That's right."

Slide clicked a green pill into a brass cup

at the base of the two tubes. He picked it up, looked at it, and then swallowed it. A blinding impact pain hit the rear of the base of his skull and reality

turned black.

Story so far: Yancey Slide, Idimmu Demon of the Tenth Continuum, attempting to escape the collapse of the neo-Victorian colony on Mars is slammed into unconsciousness by the green pill from the dispenser in the Carter Machine beneath the palace of Queen Mina.