Chapter 6: Snake Eye.
Leela landed hard, rolled, and came up running. The laser and maser turrets on either side of the tower’s roof were tracking the PE ship through the dark sky as it cruised past on autopilot – that gave her a window.
The nearest access door was some thirty feet away, and as she ran she fired her laser pistol at it, melting the lock mechanism to red hot slag.
“Halt! You are trespassing on…”
Leela shot the hovering security drone out of the air and continued onward, diving and rolling when one of the auto defence batteries raked crimson light across her path. The sole of her right boot smoked and bubbled where a maser beam had brushed over it. She barrelled into the door, crashing through to a stairwell. A klaxon began to wail mournfully somewhere but she ignored it, descending the steps three at a time.
First stage complete, she thought grimly. Now for the hard part.
“Hiiiiiii-yaaaah!” she shrieked, kicking open the door on the first landing she reached… which turned out to be slightly ajar anyway.
She found herself in a lushly carpeted hallway, covered on both sides by security guards alerted by the alarms – one an anthropomorphic robot and the other a human man. They reached for their guns…
Leela shot out the robot’s knee joint first, then pirouetted and slammed her heel into the human’s chin. He went down cold, and she spun back to the robot guard as he tried to level his weapon from the floor. She smashed his gun arm aside, sending the pistol bouncing away, and planted her own gun against his cranial casing.
“Where’s Fry?” she demanded in a low, steady voice.
“Does not compute, you one-eyed harlot,” the robot said nastily.
Leela shot out one of the robot’s eye lenses, the components melting out of the socket like tears. “Philip Fry,” she said firmly. “I know Mom has him somewhere.”
A fairly decent emulation of a gagging whimper escaped the guardbot’s vocal unit. “Experimental subjects are two floors down,” he said shakily. “That’s all I know… it’s restricted – you won’t make it.”
Leela stepped over the guard and made to leave, but a troop of five more security personnel rounded a corner and headed toward her. Acting on instinct, she fired a laser bolt up at the ceiling, triggering a deluge of fire-retardant foam that blanketed the newcomers like a sudden snowdrift, causing them to slip and tumble blindly.
Turning heel, she ran the other way, trying to put distance between herself and the angry shouting some way behind.
* * *
Mom watched the purple-haired cyclops make her way through the hallways and stairwells. On occasion, the young mutant woman would notice a security camera and blast it, but most of the electronic eyes remained intact.
“Sweet mandrake on a pancake,” she muttered. “This girl’s insane! How’d she escape Ultima? And what the hell does she think she’ll accomplish by blasting her way through here?”
As she watched, the surveillance feed showed Leela shooting the gun out of a security guard’s hand and throwing a water cooler at another before ducking into an elevator. When the elevator’s security override prevented it from moving, she shot a hole in the floor and dropped through to clamber down the cables.
“She’s unstoppable,” Larry murmured nearby in reverent wonder as he gazed longingly at the screen, enraptured by the breathtaking warrior woman. Mom slapped him.
“Shut your sinkhole!” she snapped. “Can’t anything just go right for a change? First we lose contact with the Brezhnev, and now this lunatic freak storms in here… and where the hell is Ultima anyway?”
“You waste time fighting each other,” a voice said from across the room, and Mom cast the Nibblonian an angry glare.
“I’m not fighting anyone!” she snapped.
“Yeah!” Ignar seconded. Larry slapped him to silence.
“The evil you have dredged back into existence will not be contained by any will,” Nibbler said from within his enclosure. “It is insatiable and relentless. It has already taken control of your research vessel and even now accelerates toward Earth.”
“You’re well-informed,” Mom sneered, “for a rat in a glass cabinet.”
“My people are in constant contact with me,” the little alien said. “They are observing. The return of the Brainspawn echoed across the cosmos like the howl of a thousand Greek men having their chests waxed. No good will come of your folly…”
“Enough from you!” Mom snapped, sending Nibbler’s case back down on its hydraulic lift. Though she refused to acknowledge it, a small prickling of disquiet had taken up residence in the back of her mind.
And it was growing.
* * *
Swinging out of the elevator shaft, Leela quickly ejected the spent battery from the handle of her laser pistol and slapped in the spare. It was the only one she had.
After catching her breath for a moment, she moved on. The whole building seemed to be made of corridors. Corridors leading to corridors that connected to corridors that allowed access to corridors. A detached part of her mind applauded the career choice that had led her away from bland office buildings – Fry had been instrumental in that.
Distracted as she was by that small reverie, she almost failed to notice the squad of tactical response troops in armoured exoskeletons that marched into view and lined her up in their railgun sights. Hypervelocity iron slugs tore the air asunder behind her as she ducked quickly through a doorway. She skidded to a stop, looking in horror through a wide glass partition into what looked like a large operating theatre.
Strapped down to a cruciform table, shrouded by wires, and surrounded by scientists, was Fry. Immobile, pale…
With a wordless cry of rage, Leela raked a blast of laser fire against the glass. It spiderwebbed, and she leaped at it, smashing through and landing amid the scientists in a shower of glass shards. She then began slamming the scientists out of her path in a brutal fashion.
“Get away from him!” she shouted, kicking one man in the stomach. “Leave him alone!” The scientists scattered in terror, and Leela leaned over the prostrate form. Fry’s eyelids fluttered, but he remained still, breathing slowly.
“Fry?” she said anxiously, gingerly pulling electrodes and fluid drips off his skin. “Can you hear me?”
“…Walkin’ on sunshine…” Fry mumbled in his drugged sleep.
“Come on, we have to get out of here,” she said urgently, unlatching the clamps that held his wrists.
“Leela…” Fry said groggily, opening one eye. He grinned in a dopey doped-up fashion. “…I love you,” he mumbled.
“Yeah sure, I love you too,” Leela muttered quickly, glancing around for the reinforcements that were surely on their way.
“You asked me… to look after… Nibbler,” Fry muttered, gesturing with a floppy arm. “I tried to…”
Leela looked where he pointed, and saw Nibbler watching them from a cylindrical enclosure.
“What the hell is going on?!” she said.
“Difficult question to answer, you little skank,” a harsh voice snapped across the room, and Leela spun around to see Mom, with Larry, Ignar, and a group of security guards in tow. Larry smiled shyly at Leela and waved.
“Maybe you should ask your stupid friend there,” Mom said, “or your little pet – they might be more willing to talk to you.”
Leela pointed her gun at the group and positioned herself between them and Fry.
“Fry?” she said.
“You let her walk away…” Fry sung Milli Vanilli, still under the influence of whatever drug had been used on him. “Now it just don't feel the same…Gotta blame it on something… Gotta blame it on something… Blame it on the brain… brain…”
“Rain,” Leela corrected absently.
“Nope,” Fry mumbled. “Brain. Brainspawn. They’ve got one… or it’s got them, hard to say…” He slowly sat up, and abruptly fell off the table in a heap.
“What are you talking about?” Leela prompted without taking her eyes off Mom.
“Don’t really know,” Fry said, climbing unsteadily to his feet. “Can’t… remember exactly. You look real pretty today.”
“Fry, find some clothes and get Nibbler,” Leela said.
“How far do you really think you’ll get?” Mom said. “The idiot and the Nibblonian know things; secrets I want to glean. And I will have them, one way or the other. There’s nowhere you can run where I won’t find you, on this world or any other, so why don’t you just cut the crap and drop your little peashooter?”
Leela gritted her teeth.
* * *
The Planet Express ship held station some five hundred feet from Momcorp’s corporate headquarters, hovering on antigravs. Robot 1-X Ultima made a few quick passes before circling more slowly, probing the battered old cargo vessel with full active scanners.
When it ascertained there were no life signs aboard the ship, it turned and blasted off toward the building, where sensors detected its proximity. A semi-sentient security program acknowledged Ultima’s clearance but queried the fully-online status of the robot’s weapons systems.
When Ultima ignored the building AI’s prompts to take its weapons offline, the coarse groping of targeting scans passed across the war drone.
Ultima responded as basic programming dictated, by classing the whole building as a hostile target. It launched a salvo of electronic warfare artillery, multiple shells that detonated broad spectrum electromagnetic pulses and unleased a torrent of Trojan worm clusters. The devastating wave of overloads and corruptions washed through every electronic component in half of New New York.
Countless blocks of the city suddenly blacked out.
Darting ahead on its ion thrusters, Ultima crashed into the now-dark building in search of its primary target.
* * *
Fry had pulled on a shirt and tracksuit pants that were stored in an alcove beneath the cruciform surgical table, and then finally figured out a way to open Nibbler’s enclosure – the little alien scampered out gratefully, running up Fry’s arm to perch on his shoulder.
“Listen to me,” Mom said, stepping forward. Leela tightened her grip on the gun… and suddenly they were all plunged into blackness.
Total darkness reigned and the distant crump of explosions sent small shudders through the floor. Nibbler made a confused chirping noise. The sounds of puzzlement and annoyance issued from Mom and her cronies, and Leela realized the unexpected advantage that had presented itself.
Closing her eye and focusing on her hearing alone, she took two running steps and whipped the grip of her pistol into someone’s temple, then shot out her leg, feeling the satisfying crunch of a nose compacting against her boot heel. Spinning about, she struck down two more unseen figures in the dark, listening for their harsh breathing and the monosyllabic orders and queries they grunted at each other.
“Gun’s not working!” One of them shouted in terror. “Some kind of electronic warfare…” his words were cut off by Leela’s fist.
Fry listened to the brutality in the impenetrable gloom, wondering idly if he should help, when red lights suddenly flickered on, casting the room in a hellish hue. The emergency system finally came online just as Leela dropped the last guard on his head.
Mom looked with bewilderment at her incapacitated fighting force, including Larry and Ignar, sprawled on the floor, and then at Leela who stood nearby with a slight sheen of perspiration on her forehead.
“Great galloping Jesus!” she said. “Girl, you should come work for me.”
“No chance,” Leela grunted. “Come on, Fry – let’s go.”
“No!” Mom reached into dangerous territory in the front of her jumpsuit and pulled out a small primitive pistol, which she brought to bear on Leela. Leela reacted instinctively, and fired her laser gun at the world’s richest, most powerful industrialist.
Or would have, if it had worked. The laser was completely dead.
“Electronics can be annoying bastards,” Mom remarked as Leela discarded the now-useless weapon. “Sometimes the simple things can be far superior – take this for example.” She waggled the little handgun. “Walther PPK, automatic pistol. It’s remained virtually unchanged since 1931. Spring-loaded slide mechanism – a hammer strikes against a chemical explosive, which propels…”
“Adolf Hitler killed himself with one,” Leela interrupted irritably, and Mom frowned in consternation – she hadn’t been aware of that, and it irked her to be shown up by the cyclops.
“Mother…” Larry said from the floor. “This… situation is getting out of our control. Perhaps we should just cut our losses and…”
“Shut up!” Mom snapped, keeping her eyes on Leela. The two women stared each other down for long moments. There was something indefinable lurking in the younger woman’s single eye – the kind of grim determination that could make mountains politely step aside, and oceans part obligingly down the middle. Mom found she had a great deal of respect for the cyclops; Leela was the kind of person she herself had once aspired to become, before the cynical world dragged her in a different direction altogether. If only she had been as strong as this one…
Leela saw the hesitancy in Mom’s eyes and knew she wouldn’t shoot. She beckoned to Fry, and the orange-haired delivery boy joined her.
“We’re leaving,” Leela said quietly, as a closer explosion rocked the walls.
“You have to come visit us next time!” Fry giggled cheerfully at Mom as he and Leela moved past. “We can have tea and cake, and I’ll strap you to an operating table and prod you for a while – it’ll be ever so much fun!”
They left the room, and Mom looked at the gun in her hand, wondering why she hadn’t shot the intolerable fools.
“Find out what’s happening,” she said to Larry at last, her voice hollow and distant. “Find out what’s attacking us.”
* * *
When the lights went out in the cell, Zoidberg heard Bender fall to the floor with a noise not unlike a trashcan being toppled onto the pavement. It was a sound that made Zoidberg hungry, though the inept doctor was unfamiliar with Pavlovian conditioning, and he chalked it up to a lack of essential minerals in the cockroaches he’d been consuming.
“Robut friend?” he said in the darkness.
There was no reply.
Zoidberg clacked his claws nervously. “Bender, are you all right?” he probed.
Still no reply.
Shuffling forward blindly, his feet bumped into a cylinder of metal on the floor. Bender lay prone, silent and motionless.
“This isn’t funny!” Zoidberg moaned, bending down to shake the robot. “Wake up! I don’t know how to perform CPR!”
Abruptly, red emergency lights sputtered on, bathing the cell in a crimson glow that made Zoidberg’s carapace almost invisible. Bender twitched suddenly and sat bolt upright.
His system was recovering from a serious error resulting from resonant EM backwash, so he performed a scan-disc before reloading his human mode, with language and primary tasks;
1: Bend.
2: Cheese it!
“Whoa!” he said, finally returning to his senses. “What the hell?”
“Are you unharmed, tin man?” Zoidberg asked. “For a moment I thought I would have to perform an emergency ink-pouchectomy.”
“That was an EMP!” Bender said, pushing the lobster away. “Completely knocked me offline. Did someone let off a nuke nearby?”
“No…” Zoidberg looked embarrassed. “I just get flatulent when I’m under stress.”
Bender looked past the crustacean at the cell door, which was slightly ajar, its magnetic lock having malfunctioned in the EMP. Bender walked over and pushed the door, which swung all the way open.
“Amazing!” Zoidberg gasped. “We’re free! How did you do that?”
“I’m just magnificent,” Bender answered. “Now come on, fishstick, let’s find Fry and get the hell out of this place.” They cautiously slipped out of the cell and made their way down the corridor, flinching as the building shook around them.
At length they came upon an area that had been completely demolished, with the ceiling and floor blasted away to expose other levels above and below. Flaming debris were scattered everywhere, and a number of bloodied bodies could be seen.
“Looks like X-Mas came early this year,” Bender remarked, reaching down to casually remove the wallet from one of the corpses. “Definitely a robot did this – no human could have.”
Two running figures emerged suddenly from a side corridor, and Zoidberg scampered whooping to hide behind Bender. They turned out to be Fry and Leela, who skidded to a halt when they saw the two others.
“You guys!” Fry said in surprise. “I totally forgot about you.”
“You totally…?” Bender narrowed his eyes in a furious glare. “Why-you-little…!” He darted forward and clasped his hands around Fry’s throat, strangling him.
“Ugh,” Leela sighed. “When you two are done imitating a related franchise, we need to find a way out of here.”
“Perhaps we should ask this robut for directions,” Zoidberg offered, pointing to Robot 1-X Ultima as it flew into the ruined room. “Hello!” he called, waving to the war drone.
“Oh no!” Leela gasped, catching sight of the battered killbot. “Not again!?”
“Cheese it!” Bender shouted, releasing Fry’s throat.
Ultima fixed on the group of targets, and immediately noted the presence of the primary in their midst. With a surge of relish, it targeted Turanga Leela with a large-calibre phaser. The kill was assured – easy. The objective would be fulfilled.
At that thought, Ultima hesitated.
The objective was the final cognizant purpose left to Ultima. If it succeeded in that purpose then there would be no further goal for it to strive toward. No objective equalled no purpose, and what was existence without purpose?
Existence was comprised of an aim. A goal. A direction. A function to serve.
With the target eliminated, it would have none.
That fractured facet of Ultima’s shattered mind warred brutally with the overriding drive to complete the mission. The mission had to be completed – completion WAS the purpose. But the mission comprised Ultima’s being – completion meant finality, an end. An end to the mission would mean an end to Ultima.
The robot twitched in the air, wracked by its own internal contradictions that played out for endless microseconds. That traitorous self-preserving portion of its mind lifted the targeting crosshairs of the phaser cannon an inch above the top of the primary target’s head, and then fired.
The beam turned a line of air incandescent as oxygen molecules were annihilated. Leela screamed involuntarily when a chunk of her hair sizzled away in a small fireball. While a large section of the wall behind her disappeared.
“Run!” she shouted, ushering the others toward a stairwell.
Ultima tracked the running figures with glee – as long as the primary remained alive, she could be chased, and as long as Ultima chased her there would be purpose. It opened up a salvo of high-explosive shells from its twin gatling guns, firing just behind the fleeing humanoids and into the ceiling above the stairwell. As they disappeared inside, the ceiling collapsed in a cloud of smoke and dust.
This was purpose. This was life. The thrill of the hunt.
From a side entrance, Mom stormed into the demolished area with her sons and a full deployment of armoured shock troops.
“Turd on a taco!” she exclaimed in horror upon seeing the destruction. She looked up at Ultima, hanging poised in the air. “Ultima, what the frag are you doing?”
The robot regarded her for a moment, before bringing its smoking weapon pods up.
“Omigod! Omigod!” Ignar whimpered.
The troops spread out, aiming their positron rifles at the drone and awaiting command to fire. The more experienced among them knew they didn’t stand a chance against a full military android.
“Ultima, I command you to shut down immediately!” Mom barked. “You have failed in your objective and the mission is now over.”
Ultima wobbled on its own axis as if weighing up Mom’s words, and then casually raked the soldiers with multiple atom lasers. They burst into flames and crumbled to the floor with very short screams.
Among them was Ignar.
Mom screamed in anguish and fury as her youngest smouldered into ash. It was the second son she had lost in twenty-four hours. Larry forcibly dragged her back away from the danger as Ultima blasted through the floor and descended into the hole.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Planet Express Employee Lounge
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posted 09-16-2007 01:15
Also, its tenacity and apparently never-ending supply of weapons is similar to an old robot 'war drone' named Sniper in Neal Asher's Spatterjay novels.
posted 09-17-2007 23:14
I also like the way you draw Nibbler, and love the Mustang. You've obviously been thinking about this story for a while, and it shows!