Chapter 28
The virus from earth that they were calling Horned Man had taken control of a lot of the non-essential onboard systems. But it was having a hard time getting in the life support systems and squelching the human ticks from its marvelous space body.
Xolo cautiously made his way down to the landing deck to connect with his Earth friends. He really had to be cautious, because there are so many little accidents around us at all times, and if a malefic intelligence gets hold of something like a drink vending machine and jacks up the pressure and looks at you through a fish eye you can get 330ml of cold aluminum pumped through your ribcage.
Xolo ducked a cola, sliced a root beer in two and kept moving.
Doors tried to get him, but he had voice over-ride for them. One corridor sent mad subliminals from hyper flashing lights. Coded hallucinations tailored to the cycles of the human brain. But this was far from an ordinary brain. This was a fortified, weaponized brain and it shrugged off the vague contemplation of blowing its own head off.
He made it down there. Half a dozen soldiers casually sniped into the cavernous hangar any time a wire skeleton tried to reassemble itself. Gomez and Sunny ran at Xolo and hugged him.
“Where have you been?” asked the girl, with her usual disproportionate calm.
“Can't really get into it around these guys,” Xolo replied through clenched teeth and flicking his head in the direction of the Gukkool militiamen.
She nodded. She could see from the way he stood that the only threat came from where they were now. And since the body of the Horned Man had been burned that must mean that its computer mind was the final boss. And she had been hearing the whistle of a boiling kettle for ages so she started to suspect that the mind was in the kettle.
She was a girl who would never notice that nothing made sense.
“Gukkoolians. I have a message from Admiral Woo. Meseret is about to arrive, but we have too many systems down to think about running a blackwarp. You guys hold the fort, I'm taking these earthworms to the 'guest quarters' so they can sit in some couches and maybe get us a bit of extra speed.”
One of the Gukkool militia came over and winked, “Plug 'em up good, mate. Especially the black haired bitch.”
“Put your guns down, Earthers and come with me,” said Xolo, using his natural cockiness to full effect.
Tamano, of course, made a big production out of it. But everyone else just put their guns down. Gomez blew a kiss to his rail rifle. He never thought he would outlive it and had been sure he would die in a puff of plasma when firing it. Walking away from it with no guns, smiling at Tamano IN FREAKIN' SPACE was a wonderful moment.
…
They regrouped in an abandoned conference room. They all partook of some amazing fruit.
“Gukkools do have good produce,” noted Xolo as he chomped deep into a squidfruit.
Tamano gave her usual coffee-flavored commentary. “So, I guess we are either chilling out because all problems are solved or because you have no fucking clue what you are doing.”
Xolo smiled wild sexy at her and wiped the juice off his unbreakable chin.
Then he saw Gomez bristle. He gave him a look that cemented their bond of friendship and Gomez settled down.
Then he addressed Tamano.
“Yeah. It's one of those.”
He turned on the holoscreen and started to dick around with it.
“Wait,” said Sunny. “Before we get into your new crazy plan can you let us all know who you really are?”
“Reasonable,” said Xolo. “I can’t go too far though. But I can tell you that I am Xolo. I’m an assassin. And my computer came up with a plan that I couldn’t resist, to use a weapon I had found floating on the ocean a while ago.
“My algorithm figured out where Boa Morte was hiding. Frankly, I didn’t even know that it was looking for him: it seemed a little out of scope. But it was because of the size of the bounty on his head and the potential of using him to cause massive havoc.
“So I took a Stealth-Spider off into underspace and sneaked in on him.
“It was an ocean planet of course. Boa Mortes don’t feel right if the floor beneath them isn’t moving. I found him dead in his yacht, his cock up a wooden mermaid and his heart popped. But still warm. At first, I cursed the timing, but then I remembered I had some weird kit on that Spider. It had been an ambulance for extracting dignitaries from bad situations and it had a Mind Taper. That’s a machine that’ll do a back up of a failing brain.
“I copied Boa Morte then nuked him from orbit. Then I came up with a plan. I copied my own personality, then I pasted Boa Morte over the top. Then I had the copy of my personality laid over the top.
“I kept the two fake personalities turned off and would turn them on next time I was going into a potentially deadly situation.
“I plugged this new variable into my algorithm.
“Then I got the letter telling me it was time to kill Gukkool and well you know the rest,”
“So you knew they would try and strip your mind off if they caught you,” said Sunny.
“Yeah, I’m too interesting to not try and peel me back. So I put something deadly in there waiting for them. Okay, so back to my plan.”
Sunny started thinking. It would take a while to bake this thought, but all the ingredients were in, and in good proportion too.
The holodeck let the serpent in. The Horned Man avatar manifested. It looked delighted. It was gaining intelligence just from being allowed to materialize into a simple quantum system like this. It pumped data up and down, to and from Earth trying to emulate what it was sitting in. Its binary heart pumped super fast trying to act like slippy sub-electronic thoughts.
“Boa Morte. We have a deal. What’s up with your monkeys shooting my exmonkeys?”
Xolo looked stone cold.
“The deal is done. We have repelled the invader. The war is back on.”
“You don’t want this war, trust me.”
“Sounds like you don’t want it, machine.”
“I have all the time in the world to wipe you out. Monkeys on horses or spiders or whatever. I can pick you off at will.”
“Not true. True before we all learned so much about you. But now I estimate you have two weeks left to live.”
Clicks of doubt and ripples in the sphere.
“Really?”
“Think fast, computer!”
“So you made a deal with the space monkeys, is that it? They are going to come back and hunt me down.”
“No. No deal. I have nothing to bargain with. They are going to come back and burn you off the planet and however many human casualties it takes to do that, they’ll pay. They can’t have a serpent at the foot of the tree of knowledge.”
“They’ll kill the Earth people? They need them for their headnet.”
“Don’t need them all. Especially with a hundred burned up starships off the net. No. You’ve got two weeks left and I guess half the population of the earth has two weeks left. It’s messed up.”
The Horned Man crossed his arms. He walked around his imaginary lodge.
“I can kill Earth last you know. I’d be happy to kill all the other planets first.”
“That’s nice. What are you suggesting?”
“If I am off Earth, they’ll leave Earth alone. Give me the space ship and I’ll transfer my whole consciousness onto it. I’ll have a zombie crew and we’ll sail off over the edge of time and coil there.”
“Ha! You’ll be back in a year.”
“I’ll give you a hundred years. A hundred years truce. I’ll hard code the pact right in front of you.”
“I can’t promise the same. You’ll just have my word.”
“I’ll have your ship. Once I have the ship, I don’t care much about one more little pimple like you.”
“Then it’s a deal,” said Xolo firmly. “I’ll need the BunrakAdmin to confirm your promise is carved in stone, then we’ll leave the ship. I’ll pass you all
the passwords once you promise not to harm us and you hard code it in a way that binds your lower levels.”
“It’s a deal,” said the Horned Man.
For his own pleasure, he made a holographic version of Xolo and shook his hand in his imaginary lodge. And then he turned up the speed of time and Xolo wrinkled and curved and then reached the threshold where the flesh rots and the little beast is gone.
“I am in no rush, you see,” said The Horned Man in the holographic globe. “I’ve taken naps big enough to kill you all.”
…
All the good humans got in their paracopter and started to float away. They saw the silver ship, maybe the most beautiful object they had ever seen: a true dragon in might, grace and flight.
It shrank away. They knew that horrible things were happening to people on board that ship. They were being killed and eaten (in either order.) Zombification was a horror even when it happened to your enemies.
But the zombie wars on Earth were over. They had done a thorough audit and confirmed that the Horned Man A.I. had purged itself from its military “Internet” and self-destructed the hardware and now sat in a warm and spacious emulator in a headnet pocket on the Space Dragon.
The BunrakAdmin had done a very thorough job. “You are true heroes,” saluted Xolo with the hand that he was not using to point a gun at them with.
Xolo had insisted on one last clause. The Space Dragon had to make a huge jump away from Earth to a sector outside human jurisdiction. The Horned Man - or the Horned Dragon maybe now – had agreed. He was giddy at the concept of big space and microspace both opening up before him. His evil happiness mirrored the happiness of the “good” part of him who dreamed of making art with every vibration that existed in the universe. Once the fucking death monkeys were gone.
As the paracopters dropped through the violet phase of the burning air they saw the warp engines engage and then they started to forget that the Space Dragon was there and soon enough they were right.
…
The Space Dragon warped to a place that was marked as ‘off limits’ on the maps. And ‘Top Secret’. Of course Xolo had the keys.
The space warp was long. Zombies loved it. The dead humans loved this swim through the River Styx.
Eventually the dragon surfaced.
This was not space as the Horned Dragon has imagined it. Instead of blackness and merely distant promises that things did indeed exist in the universe, the whole firmament was a flow of lights and lightnings. All around him he saw creatures that resembled earth jellyfish, or colonies of Portuguese-Man-o-War, only they were the size of India.
They flowed together and danced and joked. They merged and split. They passed nuclear sperm packets to and fro, and the spare heat that they spilled was enough to kill towns. They had enormous fang-like probosces, which were in fact controlled tornados of plasma.
They were the only living thing in the universe that didn’t come from Earth: the Titans. They followed humans across space and with clever tricks - massively audacious tricks - the tiny humans who couldn’t hold much more significance than a thimble, got these creatures to remodel planets, to eat mountains, piss oceans and carve the names of human mothers in calligraphic lakes on beautiful little worlds.
The name of the original tamer of these beasts was long gone. One of those old space pirates who didn’t like publicity much. But it was well know that they hated space ships and anything that stank of black sub-space. They only responded to beautiful songs, and the Horned Dragon and his Space Zombies knew no songs.
The Titans moved around the silver dragon, flowing on magnetic slime trails that paralyzed starship engines.
They smelled all of the horror that had been used to build this pretty shiny bauble.
The plasma gods destroyed even the atoms of the ship that had ventured into their holy fields without the gift of melody. The Horned Dragon - who screamed the secret binary poems it had been hoarding - was taken off the board.
Immense beauty wrapped in mass murder was a bad combination, and the universe was better with it gone.