The Countdown Has Begun
"...And as the earth washed into the seas of the world, the whole of humanity was oblivious and reading from their copies of 'Fool's Sacrifice' by Geronimo Bosch."
So saith pages from 'The Book of Unheeded Omens and Portents.'
The momentous day is almost upon us: T-7 and counting. Monday 24th November sees the release of the first instalment in the Dominion City Blues series. But, wait shall ye not, for there be a further taster below.
It's right here: Enjoy!
She flipped the flyer back onto manual and made with manoeuvres, banking sharply and climbing illegally, racking up yet more code violations. By this time, they had Crazy 8’s in tow, and Thea registered also two other hotrods weaving and rolling in her wake, evidently clued into them and gaining fast. Taking evasives, Thea ploughed them through a lane of oncoming trundlers, causing palpable consternation amongst their ranks and one mighty dumpster to veer off tack, accounting for the nearest pairing of Crazy 8’s, which meant one less thing to worry about, although it also emboldened their pursuers in the absence of the Buzz.
Leaving the freight lanes, they bumped and grazed against some SharkBoys in a spanking new Archangel V10 who, being wannabe hoodlums, spat their indignant fury and bared their pointy teeth, before joining the pursuit of Thea’s sleek but bedevilled Nixter. This proved a fortuitous intervention for their quarry, providing a real, physical buffer between Thea, G-Boy and the bona fide mercenaries on their tail.
It also bought Thea time in which to devise a viable escape route.
In the meantime, the posturing pricks in the rear realised too late that they were the sparkling filling in a skidoo sandwich, rammed from behind by a beaten-up and blacked-out transporter. G-Boy watched as the SharkBoys’ misplaced confidence and unqualified rage became tempered by turns as they approached and passed the limit at which pride dictated the jeopardising of the pilot’s shiny, brand new penis extension. The scarred and sturdy teamster forced alongside the SharkMobile, scraping and squealing down the Archangel’s curvaceous bodywork, in a time-honoured skidjacking manoeuvre that was clearly the prelude to a violent seizure of the all-too-recently gleaming Gazoota.
Meanwhile, Thea brought G-Boy’s attention back to a dashboard monitor indicating the more immediate threat of a hotrod menace cruising directly beneath them.
Thea had them thundering through the Tarkovsky Tessellate: a complex, high-volume MidCity intersect, with routes leading to Za’s Palace and The Vapours, as well as to The EtCeteras. The Vapours marked the rough edges of semi-legitimate enterprise within Dominion and clung to the fringes of the OutCity. Beyond this point, brave and lunatic sightseers ran into the Slum sprawl and shanty towns of The Breeders: including areas such as StenchTown, incorporating the ShitCorps monopolies and the SkankVille Arenas; undesirable environments even to those downtrodden citizens of Dominion who had the misfortune of residing there and not somewhere that G-Boy thought Thea would have marked down as a likely destination. But, between their current location and the scum holes of The Breeders there also laid The EtCeteras: purposefully maze-like, pedestrianised bazaars and urban segways which served to mediate the flow of undesirables from the OutCity into the semi-legitimacy of The Vapours. If life and commerce in The Vapours and The EtCeteras was lawless enough, then what lurked beyond, around the sump pits of The Breeders, marked the very extremities and peripheries of human decency and the City limits of Dominion were to be found here, by the towering, cantilevered tidal sluice-gates and the potentially noxious waters of The Dead Pools, that ebbed and flowed therein.
“Fit to bail?” Thea asked casually, her lip curled like she was enjoying the ride, the thrill of the chase.
G-Boy nodded back at her confidently, making sure to appear calm and assertive in his reply.
This confirmed to him that their intended destination would indeed be somewhere within The EtCeteras; an area he was as familiar with as anybody could be amidst those transitory, labyrinthine and ever-changing pavilions, with their desperate turf traders, meat markets and unhinged purveyors of narcotics, hot goods, reclaimed body parts and other illicit ephemera. It was every man for himself in The EtCeteras, which meant that your tail was as likely as you were to meet with an unsavoury end.
Needs must, as the saying goes, and G-Boy didn’t need reminding of the fact that theirs were, currently, desperate.
With the sound of an impact to the underside of their wings, Thea warned against an incoming threat. The monitor on the dash showed a swarm of tiny blips beneath them, escaping outward in all directions over the body of the vehicle from within a pod of some description which had been fired to attach on impact with the Nixter from the hotrod cruising below. Within moments, the swarming blips revealed themselves as spidery, fist-sized automata which were clambering and clattering over the bodywork of the speedster in their efforts to reach the human occupants. Likely directive: to stick them with toxins, sedatives, trackers and the like.
G-Boy took to swatting them forcibly from the body of the flyer wherever they appeared over the passenger side rim, sending their gunmetal grey bodies skittering skyward. Thea, for her part, slung the skidoo alongside the nearest available vehicle, skimming and scraping the invasive robotic units from the scratched-up skin of the outer shell to prevent them gaining entry. Those that clung on, without being crushed or deactivated in the process, she either batted away or sent spinning with a shock to the system from her concealed Ruptors.
With the occupants of the Nixter otherwise engaged, a pursuant hotrod drew close enough to their rear end for some hulking goon to clamber aboard. Once impositioned, the brute threw his arms around the pilot’s head, blocking Thea’s vision and wrenching her neck, while simultaneously delivering heavy blows with his boot against the side of G-Boy’s helmet.
As he reeled against the dashboard, G-Boy glimpsed the bloodied handle of the blade sticking out of Thea’s boot holster. She was reaching desperately for it with her left hand. G-Boy withdrew the blade, lunging at Thea’s assailant and began plunging it repeatedly into the side of his ribcage. At that point, shots started pinging off G-Boy’s helmet, fired by the pilot of the flyer on their tail.
With resistance diminishing, G-Boy used the hulking frame of the interloper to shield himself and Thea from the incoming fire and allowed the remaining spidery critters to use his yielding bulk to their satisfaction, as three or four of the diminutive robots took advantage and ran all over him, biting and probing at the shuddering body.
“Too much heat - we gotta hit street.” This was G-Boy’s succinct verdict on proceedings, as he discharged his Ruptors in the direction of the pursuing vehicle.
“Brace yourself,” Thea instructed, grimacing, teeth bared, jaw clenched, worked up now: “I’ll get you a clear shot.” And then, she slammed on the brakes.
Their tail rear-ended them violently, jarring all concerned and throwing the pilot of the hotrod forward against the windscreen. Rebounding from the contact, the goon slumped back in his seat with the visor of his helmet shattered and blood running down his neck. G-Boy stood tall on the rear of the speedster, firing a volley from the Ruptors over the protective screen and into the body of the dazed and bloodied headhunter. He lay jerking with bodily spasms as the zooter dropped from view.
“There’s something real for their Messages.” G-Boy declared pithily, with some satisfaction.
“...Brace.” Thea instructed once more, diving down through a level of traffic, to deal with the threat from below. In the commotion, with the Nixter stopping on a pin, the goon crew beneath had managed, incautiously, to overtake their quarry. Thea wasted no time in using this circumstance to their advantage: she swooped at speed, landing one front corner of the Nix through the roof of the Spankster, crumpling it nicely and causing them both to pirouette away from each other in opposite directions, almost gracefully, as she pulled up at the last. Thea and G-Boy climbed and took off at a lick, arcing dangerously through several spiralling lanes of labrats, notionally free from pursuit, with the Spankettes and their concertinaed spinal columns losing altitude and careering unhappily into bruising entanglements with the unyielding dumpsters and whack wagons of the freight lanes.
The smile was back on Thea’s face: “If you can’t stand the heat...” Her tone was positively jaunty, as though they were just two casual downtime jaybirds.
“...Don’t wake up in hell!” G-Boy added grimly.
