Charlotte takes a deep breath, examines the various controls and electronics
attached to the strange, plastic and metal cocoon in which Aragorn remains in suspended animation.
There is a faint wash of cracked white, frozen vapour across the inside of the transparent parts of the
casing, as if it had been sprayed with a solution of salt that has now dried and crystallised. She has the
undeniable feeling that the wrong press of the wrong button could lead to disaster for the handsome
man within.
She hopes that her engineering background is enough to give her a better grasp of technology than
Kathy has. There are no little goblins making this thing work.
Or maybe there are? If everything they think about what is happening here is in any way even vaguely
accurate, then perhaps the Scientologists, or the ABD, are using little goblins to run their
equipment.
Feeling silly, but unwilling to overlook any possibility, no matter how ludicrous, Charlotte scans the
area for clues. Even goblins have to eat. There would be crumbs.
After a few seconds of searching she shakes her head.
"Stop this, it's silly!" she scolds herself, and returns to the panel of controls by the side of the cocoon.
"One of these has got to be the magic 'unfreeze' button."
There are a lot of buttons, and flashing displays. No sign of a user manual. Then, surrounded by yellow
and black hazard stripes, Charlotte spots a metal cover that reads:
EMERGENCY SHUT
DOWN
WARNING - ACTIVATING EMERGENCY SHUT DOWN RELEASES SUBJECT
WITHOUT
ENGRAM CONTINUITY
"What the hell does that mean?" Charlotte wonders.
Shrugging, she flips up the cover to reveal the lever underneath. Only one way to find out,
really.
As the lever clunks into position there is a massive out-gassing from the chamber. Charlotte takes a
couple of steps backwards, out of the sudden freezing mist. The mechanism starts whining, and she
entertains a moment's thought that perhaps 'engram continuity' means 'not blowing up'.
The front of the pod splits across the middle and the metal arms push the two halves forwards before
moving them out of the way. Charlotte takes a nervous step forwards. It is still cold in there and there is
no sign of life. Maybe emergency shut down does not bring them back alive. Maybe 'engram
continuity' is a bizarre way to stay 'still breathing'.
Maybe she just killed him.
* * *
"Are you mad?! Timothy Dalton?! What sort of freak are you?!"
Mogden.
"Has anyone else noticed that seems to be rather a large number of George Lazenby fans coming out of
the closet?" Kathy.
"Well, he did have Diana Rigg." Sane Man.
"But he wasn't in From Russia With Love or Goldfinger!" Delgado.
"He certainly did 'have' Diana Rigg in OHMSS. Got to be the best one." Withers.
"Diamonds Are Forever might have been good if Lazenby hadn't declined."
Richie1964.
"But Goldfinger had Pussy Galore!" McBain v1.
"Laser beams!" FatBloke yells suddenly.
"Yeah, those too!" McBain v1 agrees. "Nice to see someone else with taste."
"No! Over there! Duck!"
"I can't see any ducks," frowns Brock, and then the breath is knocked out of him as FatBloke barrels
him to the floor in a rugby tackle that would have made Jonah Lomu wince.
Just in time. The zinging red beam of light zaps right through where Brock had been standing. He tries
to express his gratitude for being saved from trepanation, however he is still fighting to take a
breath.
Everyone else is on the ground already, now examining the criss-cross network of deadly light-beams
between them and the opening in the rock face which was where they were heading.
"Some security system," Arellcat mutters. "Could do with FM right about now. He might know how to
turn it off."
"Can't we just crawl underneath, commando stylee?" asks Ridgerider. "I've been practising SWAT
techniques with Gunner."
Arellcat makes a face at him, then looks around. She finds what she is looking for: a small stone. She
throws it underarm along the floor below the laser mesh.
There is a small flash-bang and another laser, previously unseen, fires at the small stone from high up
on the wall.
"I think you'll find they have movement sensors," she says. "You didn't do very well in the SWAT
training, did you?"
"Are we sure we need to get into that cave?" TimC asks unhappily, having a healthy respect for
lasers.
"Aye, lad," Captain Jack says, lounging on one elbow and taking a swig from a bottle of rum he had
secreted somewhere about his person. "This here is the main complex, where they do all the scientific
stuff an' that. But in there is where they keep their loot, see? Has to be in there, because in there is
caves, and our boy likes to think he has a flair for action movies. Besides. Why else would they install
all this? They don't trust their own chavs, that's why."
"So how are we going to get through?" inquires the handsome Mr Pike.
"What do you think, Shandy?" Captain Jack asks his first mate.
"If you stop drinking the rum, Capitaine, and let me have the bottle, then perhaps I can do
something, non? It is a shame we did not bring a cockerel, however. Does anyone have any
sweets?"
"Here," says AndyGates. "I have some jelly babies left over from feeding the traffic light
goblins."
He passes a crumpled and torn Bassett's bag to the French pirate, via PW and Alchemy.
"Superbe. There are some black ones."
Captain Jack hands the bottle of rum, somewhat reluctantly, to Rjevans6, who passes it to Rigby, who
in turn hands it to Shandy.
"I want some of that back, now," Captain Jack says.
"Ah, Capitaine. One should never be meagre when calling on the loa, n'est-çe-
pas?"
He sets to work.
* * *
Logan scents the air, sniffing, feeling the berserker rage
broiling and bubbling far too close to the surface for his liking. Striker's scent is stirring up painful
snippets from the fragmented, tortured mess that is his memory. His body is responding to the fear, and
he does not, can not remember what was the cause of that fear. He knows what they did to him, but all
he remembers of it is the pain and the fear.
He does not want to let that berserker rage loose. It took too long to get it under control. The animal
inside him is quiet for now, but prowling. Truth be told, he welcomes this opportunity to get away from
the others. He does not want them to see him should the beast get out.
Especially that Van Helsing character.
He sneaks up to a corner, back pressed flat against the wall, the scent of a security goon strong in his
nostrils, along with the scent of the gun oil and cordite from the weapon the goon is carrying.
The chump was dead the moment he woke up that morning: now it catches up with him. Six
adamantium razors spit him through as neatly as a human kebab, and he drops to the ground. His body
does not even have time to bleed; with the heart stopped the wounds can only ooze wetly.
The tang of blood shadows the Wolverine as he follows Striker's trail onwards.
* * *
They seem to have been searching for hours. Aeroflash and Nutty are getting tired
of the gruesome sights that every so often spring out at them from behind locked doors. Van Helsing
had been right: the ABD had a regular demonic spare part plant operating, and, being demonic, the
creatures had not all been killed by the dismemberment.
Or — and this was a worse thought — it was not the demonic nature of the creatures that
was keeping their separated pieces aware and alive, but some terrible process that they were perfecting
for use on the Humungous. Rebuild him with parts from some of the foulest, violent, powerful
creatures imaginable and then subject him to a process that would keep him alive even if he were torn
into pieces? Traffic calming and cyclepaths would be the least of their worries then.
"Here!" Westley's abrupt, urgent call has them hurrying to catch up with him. "She is here." His voice
is flat, the emotion squeezed from it as if he cannot allow himself to feel until the task at hand is
complete. Until he has Buttercup safely away, the job is not finished.
Inside the room is a suspended animation tube, much like the one that Charlotte had stayed behind to
open. Within it is a glint of golden hair and a face graced with perfect skin.
"The door is locked," Westley adds, his eyes showing the same, flat, emotionless expression.
"Not for long," says Aeroflash. Being insubstantial certainly does have its uses, not least of which is an
enhanced facility for manipulating matter that is not entirely of the real world.
He passes his hand through the electronic panel at the side of the door and it fizzes for a few seconds.
The door slides open.
It is cold in the room. Inside her frosted cabinet Buttercup appears, to all intents and purposes, to be
dead. The display on the side of the pod, however, says differently, and so does the instinct in
Westley's gut.
"So now we open it?" Nutty asks, espying a label saying 'EMERGENCY SHUT DOWN'.
"No! Stay your hand!" Westley exclaims. "Look what it says underneath. If we shut it down like this,
we could cause untold damage. It could wipe her mind! We must find out how to do it
properly."
"I hope Charlotte figured that out," says Aeroflash.
* * *
Finally they have started running into security. This causes Flying Monkey a
certain amount of relief, as he had been well beyond the 'this is too easy' stage. It does not explain why
there is not more security, but some is better than none. They are just goons so far, all human.
Closetleftie had talked the first one into giving himself up, and then Gunner had hit him over the head
with a Topeak Master Blaster and they had left him behind a storage cupboard door.
"This is no time to be taking prisoners," Van Helsing had said.
It did not stop Closetleftie from trying, however.
Unfortunately, as they draw closer to the heart of the complex the guards become more alert, less open
to persuasion, and more willing to press the big red alarm button. After one guard gets far too close to
hitting that button for comfort, Closetleftie is handed to the Pinniped Preservation Society.
"Keep him quiet," Macleach tells them with a wink and a grin.
They make it through the next checkpoint, Redshift turning ninja and taking out both guards before
they know there is anything amiss. From somewhere comes the faint sound of inhuman
screaming.
"We must be getting close now, lads," Gunner tells them.
Ravenbait suddenly stops dead.
"You know how you were worried about the lack of security, FM?" she says, and there is something in
her expression that the others do not like. "Well you'll be seeing a lot more of it any minute now. Jack
Shandy just called up a loa. Normally this wouldn't be a problem, but the ABD have more than
chavs and WVMs down here."
Van Helsing looks searchingly into her face.
"What are you saying, madam?"
"I am saying," she says grimly, taking two steps backwards and then reaching up with lightning speed
and dragging something off the wall that squirms and struggles in her grip, "that the ABD have been
doing more than using A-Time creatures for spare parts. They've been turning them into
slaves."
The creature in her hands looks like a traffic light goblin. It is small and rotund and its chameleon-like
camouflage ability is making its skin kaleidoscope as it fights to get free. The High Priestess holds it
firmly but is trying not to hurt it.
"And if I can sense that Shandy has called a loa, then they can too."
She holds the creature so that it is forced to stare into her bottomless black gaze. After a few moments
it stops wriggling and goes limp. She puts it on the floor, where it sits looking dazed. A few seconds
later it shakes itself and looks around, obviously confused, as if it has just woken up and has no idea
where it is.
"He's coming with us," Ravenbait declares. No one argues. "You can call him Ivan."
Things are about to get rather more exciting than they have been so far.
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