Slide On The Run

Episode Eleven Pirates of the Lower Quadrant

The entire pirate fleet swung majestically into the field of the gaseous display; three distinct formations, and two dozen or more small ships. Slide knew from millennial experience that Pirates of The Lower Quadrant had never been able to maintain a single, overall coordination, but they had at least all managed to arrive in the same place at the same time. He could only imagine that recent pickings had been slim, and the Eloi biocraft was viewed as necessity rather than a prize. Although not exactly acting as one, the sheer size and variety of pirate fleet was epic; discs, deltas, and asymmetrics, Treen telezeros, Adamski saucers, ancient, tri-robot fighters left over from the Cylon wars, and Pleiadean beamships, attack-customized with strap-on Steely Dans. When the alarms had sounded, Slide had expected maybe a half dozen marauders, but what he saw was closer to two hundred ships, that ranged in size from hulking, rust-stained, former Imperial Sardakar battle-barges, to tiny predator pods of the metal-eaters that were more cell structures than machines. In the middle of the attackers, Slide spotted the dark bulk of the cruiser Starhawk, which was more than enough to crystalize his immediate flight or fight response, and it was wholly the latter.

"Out of here?"

He turned to Lupo, expecting to be met with a similar negative reaction to his own, a desire to get off and away from the Eloi ship by any means necessary, but Lupo was staring at the buccaneer armada with rapt attention. He was totally absorbed and, behind the plexiglass of his bubble helmet, his eyes blazed with a chill and momentary nosferatu glee. "So the ballet begins."

For a vampire created during the Italian Renaissance, Lupo seemed to accept a space battle with pleasurable anticipation. He was the closest that Slide had ever seen him to excited.

Slide, Lupo, Queen Mina, and Mrs. Rosa Coote, still in full space armor, helmets locked down, and with the semi-human Sternwood leading way on his rolling mechanized chair, hurried to what was known as the cortex. On any ship of steel, polymer, ceramic and electricity, the cortex would have been would have been called the bridge, but on an Eloi ship, where almost every component - from gunport to bulkhead - was more or less living cell-structure, things were done a little differently.

The centrepiece of the cortex was a misshapen ovoid, a thick, multi-vesseled,

dermal sheath containing a slopping liquid interior of sweating, and - Slide suspected - sentient ooze. The monstrous and less that appealing growth stood over thirty meters tall and maybe three times that in circumference, and it was surrounded by a complex, tree-like gantry, on the branches of which selected Eloi monkey-moved - serving/aiding, maybe controlling the huge soft-ovoid's function - although Slide doubted that the nebulous Eloi, too dumb even to prevent themselves being eaten by the orchids, were capable of any such thing, and that nothing controlled either the cortex or the biocraft, except the cortex or the biocraft itself. The primary function of the Eloi on the various gantry levels seemed to be that of entering or modifying data by massaging, kneading, and prodding designated sections of outer skin, much in the style of those old monks in the Damaged World who'd had a big bio-computer they'd called the Living Meditation, or the Vreen'agth who had called their all controlling bio-brain the Mind-Sac. Slide knew that he was in some crucial confluence of the biocraft's primary nervous system, and he didn't like it. Growths of giant orchids lined the walls of the chamber, but seemed to play no visible role in its operation, except, every now and again, one would reel and unreel a predatory tendril as though stretching.

"I feel like a parasite."

He had not addressed the remark to anyone in particular, and no one answered. This lack of response was mainly because the pirate fleet had chosen the very same moment to open fire, not with any degree of coordination, but, when one group decided to blaze away with everything it had, the rest obviously felt it was incumbent upon them to do the same. The first thing this barrage revealed was that the biocraft had sturdy and effective screens, extending well into the mid-distance, that manifested themselves with a purple, zapper flash each time a photon torpedo, a plasma blast, nova boom, or the burn from a PBA, attempted to penetrate it.

Slide, Lupo, Queen Mina, and Rosa Coote were able to view the battle on a highly detailed repro-vision that appeared before and even around them, and provided a panoramic, if somewhat ghostly 180 degree view of the space immediately in front of the Eloi biocraft. The appearance of the display was the one acknowledgment of their arrival in the cortex. The biocraft didn't appear to have any captain, commander, first mate, or even a master at arms to greet them, brief them, or otherwise tell them what they were supposed to be doing there. This part really didn't bother anyone except Slide, and since no one else in the group from Mars seemed to share his instinct to flee - and he wasn't in the mood to discorporate out on his own - he contented himself, for the time being, with standing beside Lupo, and watching the miniaturization of the conflict unfold. The pirates were maintaining their intense bombardment, but the biocraft was so far successfully taking on the shields.

When the biocraft finally returned fire, seemingly a result of an almost orgiastic flurry of physical activity on the branch-like gantries around the mind-sac, he observed that the biocraft was by no-means vegetable helpless, and, in fact, could muster two separate levels of weapon technology. One was matter/anti-matter-based, as Slide might have expected. Slow-moving plasma fireballs were dispatched from some invisible transmitter behind his vantage point. The other was more remarkable if less spectacular. Where the fireballs - once locked on - rolled up on their targets and consumed them to a crisp, the other weapon was nothing more than a focused double-eex-zee shimmer in space, and the vessel at it's epicenter simply winked. Slide figured the weapon manipulated its target past the Horowitz barrier, and shifted it in either time, space, or both, and, if the mind-sac, or the supposedly, top-of-the-food-chain orchids were capable of viciousness, it probably re-materialized in the heart of a sun without its occupants having a chance to set the controls.

Just as Slide was starting to come to the conclusion that this Eloi ship was so fucked up no one would ever going to bother to tell him and his companions why they were there, but just leave them alone to observe the battle undisturbed, three Eloi detached themselves from a group of a dozen or more at the base of the mind-sac. In this state of emergency, they still favored their filmy, gauzy, semi-nudity - more suitable for a Dionysian bacchanal than a firefight - and, as two women and one man approached, they still seemed both vague and vacant, but at least managed to look a little worried. They first spoke to Sternwood in their own lisping, trilling, multi-octave castrato-sounding language. The half-human in the cyber-chair was seemingly supposed to play interpreter, and Slide wondered why the ones who had served the champagne in the previous episode had spoken English and these didn't. Was it some obscure matter of protocol, or had the champagne servers been specially trained by Sternwood?

"The Eloi want to know what input you might have regarding the current crisis."

"Our input?"

"They credit you with more experience in these things than they have." Queen Mina's voice was royally contemptuous. "The Eloi, I suppose, need all the help they can get? Having failed to grasp the tactical basics to avoid being eaten by flowers."

Sternwood gestured acquiescently with a prosthetic. "You could say that." Mina was suspicious. "I'd have thought the ship itself would make most of the decisions. It must have been in situations like this before?"

"That would be true, except the ship tends to be reactive. The Eloi hope for some kind of more outgoing suggestions, since, it would appear, they fear the ship might decide to reduce itself an eterna-pod in the face of danger."

"Eterna-pod?"

"A huge space seed, able to grow again after a period of dormancy. If that were to happen, the Eloi - and us - for that matter, would perish very early in the process."

Slide, the Queen, Lupo, and Rosa all received this news thoughtfully, but no one felt inclined to be the first to rely. In the end, Lupo turned to the wheeled half-man and shrugged a slight, uniquely nosferatu shrug. "What can I tell them? I've seen wars and am intimately familiar with death, but I have little or no advice in this context."

Rosa Coote nodded. "None us are exactly military experts, except maybe Slide, although if the tales told are true, he's more of a specialist in diversion and desertion…and maybe street fighting."

Slide was about to defend himself, when Queen Mina interrupted. "Actually I have some grasp of battle tactics. I organized a number of military campaigns against the Slimy Things on Mars before I entered my narcotic phase."

The Eloi again chattered at Sternwood. They seemed impatient. "So what should they do?"

"They should get busy masturbating that great sack of goo to ensure it keeps with the present plan and doesn't turn into a seed on us. Or something equally damaging and ridiculous. All available power to the screens. They can't fight off the pirate fleet, there are far too many of them, so everything depends on how much of a battering the screens can take. If they go down, then we have only one thing in our favor."

"What's that?"

"The enemy's intention is to plunder, not vaporize. The biocraft is a very valuable prize. The profit-taking on the tech alone would be planetary GNP. We might well find ourselves in more danger when the pirates fight over it among themselves. As they inevitably will."

Slide couldn't fault her reasoning. Mina Harker's mind had become far more acute since she had left the drug-soaked fleshpots of Mars. He was also calculating the odds, when the pirates stormed the Eloi ship, of being able quickly to change sides in the confusion since, in all their fancy battle armor, the four of them looked considerably more like pirates than Eloi. He, of course, said nothing in front of the Eloi. It might be necessary to grease a few of them for theatrical effect and authenticity when the moment of realignment came.

The Eloi chattered a third time at Sternwood. Impatience had turned to urgency. "They say that the shields will last…well…roughly translated into your time scale, about another twenty minutes."

Mina arched an eyebrow. "I can only suggest they stand by to repel borders."

Sternwood translated this for the Eloi. This seemed to be enough for them, and they hurried away, apparently issuing twittering instructions as they went, back to the center of the cortex. Slide glanced at Mina. "You think they have any chance of handling this?"

The former Queen of Mars shook her head. "None."

And her estimation of the Eloi Mina's was confirmed all too quickly and all too clearly, when they deployed their defending force, presumably, as Mina had told them, to repel boarders. The ones who came to make their stand in the cortex were in full fantasy, and there was no reason to believe that others in different parts of the ship were not the same. The first to appear were a squad of archers, moving in precise military formation, longbows a high port and light gossamer cloaks flowing. Lupo almost choked. "Archers?"

Rosa Coote more scornful than surprised. "They look like bloody elves."

The archers were followed by what Slide would describe later as a "phalanx of operatic fucking hoplites." By this point, Lupo had regained some of his composure, but still couldn't believe what he was seeing. "It has been a long time since I saw anything as fatuous as this."

Slide gestured as fatalistically he could in his heavy armor. "It happened all the time back on the Darogad. They came at each other from out of all manner of historical fantasies. You'd see mounted Mamalukes with lances and scimitars hurling themselves at Nazi-style panzers."

"And did the Mamalukes expect to win?"

"That's been a hotly debated point ever since that particular incident."

"No Mamalukes left to ask?"

"Exactly."

"Are the Eloi stupid enough to think they might win?"

Slide looked bleakly at the Eloi force. The best word was theatrical. The lightweight silver armor, the long slender lances of the infantry, their small circular shields, and the apparent fragility of their fused-glass swords suggested nothing less that a wholly negative and ass-backwards grasp of reality. When an archer was plucked at random by an orchid, apparently as a snack, his companions looked round wondering what to do, Slide could only, slowly and sadly, shake his head. "The bastards really are as dumb as an flower's lunch."

From that point on, there was really very little to do but wait until to see if the shields went down as the Eloi had predicted, and watch the apparently inevitable come to pass on the repro-vision display. Slide knew he should have acted on his original instinct to jump out of there. Now it was totally too late. No way was he going launch himself back to the Gantenbrink through all the flashing, throbbing mess of energy that surrounded the beleaguered biocraft.

A four-pod Treen fighter, that would have been more at home over the silicone flame belts of the planet Venus, suddenly double-eex-zee winked out and was gone. A second-generation Cylon craft, with the trademark, oscillating redeye, was consumed by a plasma fireball. A Steely Dan suddenly blew apart in spectacular explosion for no reason that was immediately apparent to Slide. The pirates were certainly taking a beating, but for each pirate that flared, burned, or merely vanished, a dozen more remained to take his place. The Eloi shields pulsed and shimmered under the constant onslaught of multiple weapons, and were taking on the violet-through-ultra sheen that indicated they were stretched to the limit. Spectacular as the battle might be, Slide kept at least one wary eye on the cruiser Starhawk that simply held its position and poured relentless phaser fire at the biocraft shieldwall. Although, right then, it carried no markings of planet or fealty, he knew that it had, in various timelines served as the grim flagship of Chacedon the Terrible, who's concubine had, more than once, been the equally malevolent Nuygen von Bulow. A part of his mind was kept occupied with an examination of the possibility that one, if not two, entities that really hated him were close at hand, an eventuality at high odds with his total disbelief in coincidence. Maybe it wasn't really the Eloi or even the orchids that had brought him to the biocraft. Could it be that he was really being set up for one, if not two, or his most sworn and vindictive enemies?

Needless to say, he didn't communicate any of this to his companions. They had more than enough on their minds right there and then, and he also was far from sure how they, especially Lupo, would react, if he revealed himself as a potential liability. The situation was plainly turning bad, and Rosa Coote's expression was grim. "It can't be too long now."

Mina concurred. "There does come a time when surrender is the best remaining option."

Lupo glanced at Sternwood. "You want to relay that piece of advice to these creatures?"

Sternwood wheeled his trolley around. "No. I doubt they know how to run up a white flag anyway."

Had the four not been sealed in their armor, they would have noticed the a distinct smell of burning vegetation, but they couldn't miss the wreath of green-tinged smoke that drifted.

"I would say that boded bad."

Slide scowled. "Really bad."

Sternwood revved his chair. "I'm out of here."

Lupo, for whom desertion was a capital offense, reached for his blaster, but Slide stayed his hand. "Let the poor bastard find himself a bolt-hole if he can. I mean, look at him."

Moments after Sternwood had sped away a rip appeared in the outer shield's integrity. The edges of this energy wound sun-flared with such intensity that it momentarily blanked over the repro-vision. The inner shields briefly burned with white fire and died. A Convair saucercraft came through the resulting gap, flowed by a beamship, and then whole slew of assorted pirate vehicles. Although their gunports were wide open and still hot from the bombardment, no fire was directed at the Eloi ship.

"As soon as they get a few of the bigger ships through they'll be looking to board us."

"Soon as the burn through whatever passes for a hull, they'll doubtless send in a scouting part of war ferrets."

Lupo watched the pirates close on the biocraft with a detached, nosferatu interest. "I imagine they'll kill everyone aboard."

Rosa Coote checked the defenders as though assessing numbers. "They will preserve enough, I suspect, to sodomize and otherwise have their piratical way with.

"Does that mean the next episode will be seamless and shameless cross species rape and pillage."

"I would expect so."

Mina Harker agreed. "Vertebrates and invertebrates, all going at it."

Story so far: Yancey Slide, Idimmu Demon of the Tenth Continuum, in the company of Mina Harker, Rosa Coote, and Lupo the nosferatu, finds himself cursing his continuing run of monolithic bad luck as the Pirates of the Lower Quadrant board the Eloi biocraft bent of an surfeit of rape and pillage far in excess of any old fashioned “kill the men and carry off the women.”