Slide On The Run

Episode Ten Lost In Space

White, white, white, white, white, white, white, white, white, white, white, white, white, white, white, white, white, white, white, white, white, white, white, white, white, white, white, white, white, white, white, white, white, white, white, white, white, white, white, white, white, white, white, white, white, white, white, white, white, white, white, white, white, white, pain, white, white, white, white, white, white, white, white, white, pain, white, white, white, white, white, white, white, white, white, white, white, white, white, white, white, white, white, pain, white, white, white, white, white, pain white, white, white, white, white, white, white, white, pain, white, white, white, pain white, white, pain white, white, pain white, white, pain, white, white, white, pain white, white, white, pain white, white, pain, white, pain, white, pain, white, pain, WHITE PAIN!

"Motherfucker!"

Finally Slide could see. He was deep in the Gantenbrink matter, and that could not be described in any three dimensional language if you wanted to keep your sanity. A Dead Cat bounced by, morphing with every bound.

"Hey up there, Slide. Yo bro, wadda know?"

Slide didn't respond. In the Gantenbrink, nothing was real. Except the pain.

"Hey up there, Slide…" The last word reverberated long as the creature bounced away. "Slide-Slide-Slide-Slide-Slide-Slide-Slide-Slide-Slide-Slide."

"White pain on you too, motherfucker."

And then, for an instant, Slide was in a neon-shamrock-and-cigar-smoke Irish tavern-of-unreality among mobsters in double-breasted pinstripes playing cards with Roman soldiers and IRA gunmen, with the high voices of a boys' choir from the cloister singing in the background, but mercifully it didn't last. Slide knew it was a vignette from Hell, or, at the very least, Purgatory and Slide had no truck with Catholicism. All human, afterlife illusions were bad, but that was one of the worst, and the one most wholly at odds with what really happened when the oh-so-fragile fuckers breathed their last.

Fortunately, he quickly found himself free floating. Starfields were all round him and the Gantenbrink was gone. Somewhere, maybe a hundred million miles away, raw energy was spiral-sucked into the time trap of a black hole's infinite maw. The body of Johnny Yuma was faithfully reassembling around him, and more along with. Slide found himself being clothed in what seemed to be an ornate and very elegant suit of space armor, black byzantine plasteel, with the traditional clear Lucite bubble helmet, and the smoothest tuck and roll jointing. As more of the suit assembled from nothing, Slide could see that it was complexly engraved, with the Green-jade Basilisk of the Knights of Galifrey, to which, of course, Slide was actually entitled, emblazoned on the chest plate. A heavy, custom-crafted blaster hung from a strap-down clamshell, low on his right hip. The weapon was so serious, Slide would have considered it to verge on cumbersome had he not been all too well aware of its businesslike overkill. The 75-gig modified Raymond was top-shelf firepower, and clearly fabricated by some very particular, master weapon-smith, probably in the Rhebzad mountain caves of arctic Mongo, if the brass-knuckle, crow-foot grip was any indication. The blaster was off-set on his left side by a Capulet vibrafoil that swung from a breakaway Venezian sling, and tapped against the armor of his left leg as he moved. The outfit was fine by Slide. Slick, stylish, and it kept out the void, and he liked the fact that he was also heavily and elegantly armed, but, after so many immortal eons, he was under no illusion that its materialization was, in any way random. Either the work of an unconscious extension of his own greater demon-self, or an interested outside party, with too much power and definitely too much inside perception?

"But, either way, why am I all done up as if I was expecting the Pirates of The Lower Quadrant? And if I am, where the fuck are they?"

Neither space pirates nor any other thing else was visible anywhere in the proximity of Slide's immediate present. He free-floated in what appeared to be intergalactic space, which was about as dislocated as a body could get. Fear parabolics were cutting through his armor and, all round him, possibly sentient particles searched for partners in the dance of annihilation. Why all the palaver with the hardware if the Gridley wave had dumped him here in the middle of nothing? And where were Lupo and Queen Mina who had supposedly left Mars at the same time he had? Slide had no real idea how exactly a Gridley wave functioned, but he didn't believe that it would simply reassemble him in the back of the black stuff. Surely the double-damned piece of junk required some kind of destination in order to function. Even a free form time/dimension jump had to have a start and end. The starts and ends might be totally repugnant and unsuitable, but at least they came with a bit of workable reality attached. He had to believe that some substantial tangibility was somewhere nearby.

"But why the fuck can't I see it?"

And then, no sooner had he uttered the fate testing, synchronous words, he saw it. Huge and intricate and, at the same time, possessing a vast and fragile delicacy. "Goddamn it, to hell. When is destiny going to cut me a break?"

An Eloi bio-craft had floated oh-so silently into his perception. By Slide's reckoning, the petals of the sail stretched nine hundred Earth miles, and yet were insubstantial as gossamer, spread and trimmed, with constant adjustment, by a system endless and impossibly complicated rigging, to trap the starlight and be carried by its momentum, until after a hundred years of acceleration, the vessel all but matched the speed of light itself, slowing only enough to maintain conclusive mass and three relative spacial dimensions.

"From ancient Mars to the full flowers of evil. My fucking karma must have rotted and died." He looked around. "And what the fuck happened to Lupo and the Queen? Why aren't they here to deal with the goddamned Eloi?"

Slide didn't for a moment entertain any doubt that the Eloi bio-craft was his ultimate destination, or bother to wonder why he had come to it by such a roundabout route. He was not in the least surprised when a long and continually extending tendril, like a transparent, ghost-leaf tentacle, detached itself from a part of the complex main-mass closest to him, and started moving tentatively in his direction. Someone or something aboard the ship had sensed his presence in empty space and was bringing him in. He could only assume that Lupo the vampire and Queen Mina Harker were still riding to Gridley Wave to who knew where, or had dropped off it even before he had.

"I guess that's the last I'll see of them."

As the tendril came toward him, he unsnapped the Raymond's holster, but didn't draw the weapon. He had heard all the stories about bio-craft that consumed all other organic life as fuel, but, since Slide tried to avoid outer space, he had never seen such one of the fabled things for himself, and ignorance was a very good reason to be the one to initiate an overtly hostile act. It paid to be circumspect around the wholly alien, and although the Eloi were approximately human, the strange sentient ships that carried them were far from it.

The tendril was close, halted some three meters from him. Small sub-fibers

grew from the end, and made the final approach. Slide's left hand eased stealthily to the Capulet vibrafoil. If anything went wrong, he could at least attempt to slash himself free. The tendril either saw the move or sensed his intention, and hesitated. He raised his hand from the blade. The fibers came on. They touched the chest plate of his space armor, and instant feelings of well-being and euphoria swept over him. He knew he was being deliberately fed the goodvibes, but he gave the tendril the benefit of the doubt, and assumed the calming influence was well intentioned.

As with the fibers acting as an anchoring attachment, the tendril looped around him. When Slide was firmly in its grip, it began to retract, drawing him towards the body of the bio-craft. Too late to fight now. As the old-time Borg were so fond of putting it, resistance was futile.

In a matter of seconds, he was out of the void and in among a filmy, leaf-like outer-growth that covered the entire exterior of the ship, and, Slide assumed, was an organic means of trapping radiant energy from space. He was suddenly in a place of dappled light and limited visibility as he was pulled deeper into the canopy. He also noted the leaf things moved out of his way, as though informed as to the tendril's intention.

t only released him once he was inside what he though of as the orifice, a mouth-like slit in what he assumed was the hull of the craft, with fleshy, vegetable labia. When the orifice closed behind him, Slide was momentarily in darkness again, and this time he made no pretense at reaching for the blaster when the disembodied voice came out of some soft and sightless nowhere.

"Remove your helmet, Yancey Slide."

"Forget about it."

"You will find the air quite breathable."

"I'd rather confirm that for myself."

"As you wish."

Some inner portion of the orifice opened, and Slide found himself in a high cathedral place of grey mists, and blue and green light. A sudden return to gravity caused him to stumble slightly as he found himself on a floor that was covered in a thick carpet of lush moss. He walked carefully ahead until he reached what looked to be a path that wound between the moss-banks, and revealed that the moss flourished on a floor of yellow brickwork. He halted and looked around. Distances were hard to judge, but the lack of an horizon, and the way the floor curved up, until it was lost in some high distance, led him to believe that he was on the inner surface of some vast and hollow spheroid.

"Follow the yellow brick road? I don't think so."

The disembodied voice was back. "You could do worse, Yancey Slide."

"Would you care to explain?"

"The swiftest way to the Orchids."

"What?"

"The yellow brick road is the swiftest way to the Orchids."

"The Orchids?"

"The Orchids are."

Slide suspected that whatever intelligence controlled the voice was not much smarter than a talking clock. A simpleminded verbal transfer.

"The Orchids are all round us."

"Where?"

"The Orchids are all round us."

Slide looked up. What he'd though of a jungle style tree canopy was in fact a complexity of huge petals that rose, dipped, and shivered, inflated and deflated with what Slide read as a languid vegetable ecstacy. Insects and humming birds danced constant attention and, at regular, perhaps even timed intervals, puffs of heavy vapor gasped into the upper air and then drifted down as a localized drizzle.

"Remove your helmet, Yancey Slide." The voice sounded as though it had come back to where it had started. "You will find the air quite breathable."

Slide hesitated. He knew to remove the helmet made sense. The air in this part of the bio-craft looked maybe high in carbon dioxide, but by no means harmful, and if he continued to be stubborn he would only deplete his own reserves.

"I won't argue."

His hands went to the ring fastening, and as he was twisting the helmet lock he heard another voice. "You can take off the helmet, but I'd keep the suit on." "What?"

The new voice came from a distance, but was certainly not disembodied. Something was moving in the mist beyond the moss. At first Slide couldn't distinguish it as anything but a hunched form. Only when the thing was a matter of fifteen or twenty yards away did it cease to be a thing, and was revealed as a man in the most complicated mechanical wheelchair that Slide, as far as he could remember, had ever seen.

"I said you can take off the helmet, but keep the suit on. That's if you don't want to end up like me."

Slide unlocked the helmet and lifted it over his head. He took an experimental breath and found that the atmosphere in this part of the bio-craft was heavy with humidity and stank of cloying perfume and chronic plant decay, but was, at the same time, perfectly breathable. "And who are you?"

"I am Sternwood."

To say that the figure in the wheelchair was a man might have been considered by some as an exaggeration. In fact, this creature who called himself Sternwood was barely half a man. His right arm, right leg, most of the right side of his body, and the lower right side of his face had seemingly been dissolved away, as though by a powerful acid. Slide could see that this Sternwood was human, but how he could have survived such a devastating chemical attack was a total mystery. The motorized chair with its feeder tubes, gleaming chrome, and hardwired circuitry clearly kept him alive, to the point that he and the chair were practically integrated as one.

"I am Slide."

"I already know that."

"Then you have the advantage of me."

The half face attempted a grotesque smile. "I would hardly say that."

Slide looked the creature in the chair up and down. "You might be right."

"At least you're honest. Many try not to look at me."

Slide placed the helmet under his arm. "Maybe I value honesty over delicacy."

"You're doubtless wondering what happened to me?"

"Obviously."

"It was the Orchids."

Slide looked up at the canopy of fleshy petals. "The Orchids?"

"I was half digested before I could convince the Orchids that I'd be of use to them, and they spat me out again."

"I'm not sure I completely understand."

"Never been on an Eloi ship before?"

Slide shook his head. "No, not me."

"You want a drink?"

Slide shrugged. "Why not, now I'm here."

Sternwood slapped a control on the chair with his remaining hand. "I can't drink myself, but I like to watch a man who can."

"I'm not a man. I'm Idimmu."

"I know that, but you'll pass."

Three figures emerged from the mist. Two girls and a boy, if that was the right term for the ever-young species. All three wore lipstick, sultry eyeshadow, alien jewelry of plant-like inter twining gold curves, and filmy capes of sheer gauze that left them functionally naked. Slide's body took notice of the near-nudity, as they responded to Sternwood in near-chorus

"Master Sternwood?"

"Master Sternwood?"

"Master Sternwood?"

"Give Master Slide a drink, my children."

Slide frowned. "These are your children?"

Sternwood approximately shook his head. "No, but I treat them as such. You can really do what you like with them."

The male Eloi stepped forward and whipped a silk wrap from what turned out to be a chilled bottle of Dom Perignon '52. "Does this please new Master Slide?"

How the hell a bottle of Dom Perignon '52 came to be aboard an Eloi biocraft presented something of a puzzle, but Slide was in no mood to ponder details when there was so much else to consider. "Sure, and totally unexpected."

The Eloi male popped the cork, with an accustomed skill that, in itself posed another how-the-hell question, and handed Slide the bottle along with a long spun silver drinking straw. Slide declined the straw. Apparently the Eloi didn't know everything about serving vintage champagne. He look a swig straight from the bottle, and, only then, realized that he had been extremely thirsty ever since he had materialized in deep space.

The three Eloi spoke in chorus again.

"Any one, two, or all of us would be most happy to engage in sexual congress with you, new Master Slide."

"Any one, two, or all of us would be most happy to engage in sexual congress with you, new Master Slide."

"Any one, two, or all of us would be most happy to engage in sexual congress with you, new Master Slide."

The body became extremely enthusiastic at the prospect, but Slide brought its hormones to heel, and glanced at Sternwood. "But that would involve removing my armor?"

Again the half-face smile. "The Orchids have taken quite a few that way."

"I'm not sure I get this. These Orchids feed on humans and Eloi?"

"They feed on anything mammalian that moves."

"How does that work?"

A set of servos lifted Sternwood's head so he was looking up. A sudden flurry of movement had started up in the canopy. "I think you're about to get a practical demonstration."

A huge fleshy petal, purple at the edges, but soft pink in the center, extended downwards, reaching to enfold one of the female Eloi. As it closed around her, she neither struggled, resisted, or cried out. Her companions looked but also registered no protest, or attempted to save her. Once totally enshrouded by the petal, the Eloi form could be seem for a few seconds and then it slowly shrunk away as though absorbed by the flower, or, as Sternwood had put it, disgested by it. After maybe a minute, the petal unfurled slightly and a few fragments of bone dropped from it to the carpet of moss, that swiftly moved to cover and conceal them. Slide looked sharply at the remaining Eloi. "You don't have a problem with that?"

The boy and girl shrugged. "It is the way if the Mulch. There can be no question."

Sternwood sniffed. "What can you do? It's how they fuel their ship. What you need to concentrate on is not getting caught."

Another, very familiar voice from behind him took Slide totally by surprise. "Having to wear these damned suits all the time gets really tired when you've been here as long as we have."

Slide spun round, reaching unconsciously for his blaster, and found himself facing Lupo, Queen Mina, and Mrs. Rosa Coote. All four were wearing space armor similar to Slide's. Lupo raised a hand. "Hold with the weapon, demon. We've been wondering when you would arrive."

Queen Mina nodded. "For some reason, you were left behind on the Gridley ride." "Does someone want to tell me what's going on?"

Rosa Coote was terse. "There's no time for explanations, except that it would appear we've all been brought here for a purpose."

Queen Mina lips pursed. "And you can imagine how I hate being brought anywhere with a purpose. Unless, of course it's my own."

"So what is this purpose?"

"It seems that this vessel, despite its size is about to come under attack by space pirates and we are expected to feature in its defense."

"What?"

Lupo, who was very plainly unhappy, came close to snarling. "You heard what she said."

"Space pirate?"

"That's what we've been told."

"Not the pirates of the Lower Quadrant?"

"How did you know?

"Just something that came to me I was still in the Gantenbrink."

Story so far: Yancey Slide, Idimmu Demon of the Tenth Continuum, now lost in space in the company of Mina Harker, Rosa Coote, and Lupo the nosferatu, following his abrupt and less then orthodox exit from Mars, finds himself thinking of fat and fires as he arrives aboard an Eloi biocraft just in time for an attack by extra-planetary buccaneers