5 in !@#$ AM and I've already got a chapped face as red as a greenhorn's !@#$ after a long night on the tower of power.
That's what I get for abseiling into a firefight without a mask. The better to chug some hooch on the way down, I tell 'em. Either that or I need to really see where I'm going.
Truth is, going face-first off the Flier into a hail of lead, lasers, and god knows what the !@#$ else loses some of its fun if you're not eating bugs all the way down.
Not to worry, son. It'll heal up sometime in the next day or so. It always does.
Which is more than can be said for the three COMPANY Agents we lost on the way, or the 50-something HIVE guardians whose missions we just fulfilled with a !@#$ vengeance. They are most !@#$ definitely NOT getting back up again after all that.
Times like this, a man likes to sit on the bloody, holey, still-smoking corpse of the largest enemy he killed with his bare hands, take his crash helmet off, and contemplate the glory that is life and death, war and peace. Either that or just clean his guns, wonder when his subordinates are going to leave him the !@#$ alone, and have time for a good, quiet think.
Okay, something just exploded underground. That was probably the HIVE's computer core. I hope everyone did what SPYGOD told them to do, and not what SPYGOD didn't, or this whole exercise might have been for nothing.
What was that something, I hear you asking? Well, that's an excellent question, son. Whatever are we doing out here in scenic Jamestown, New York, at the !@#$-crack of dawn, and what have we been spending the last few days getting ready to do here, other than !@#$ !@#$ up at taxpayers' expense?
Well, we've talked about our friend Geri Yersterday, the former nazi et-tech reverse-engineer rocket scientist who's the real brains in the Yesterday clan. And we've talked about her messed up sister Gerde the nazi eyeball thief who's been missing since the War.
Now how does all that come together?
Well, you'll remember me mentioning that Geri has about 3.5 Einsteins rattling around in that petite skull of hers. We never tested Gerde, obviously, but it doesn't take too much in the way of an educated guess to figure that she's about the same. Or maybe a little lower.
Or, god !@#$ help us all, higher.
So it's after the war. We're chasing ABWEHR and shooting werewolves. We're watching the lights go out all over Europe and learning to hate the Soviets. SQUASH is starting to form and we're stumbling towards a debacle in Korea.
I'm not immortal, yet, but, admittedly, enjoying riding the initial wave of love and approval for finding and killing Hitler (by accident, admittedly). And The COMPANY isn't even a gleam in anyone's eye. Yet.
But as we're going about our business, making the free world safe for money and god (in that order), what will soon be the CIA is getting news that a lot of leftover Eugenicists are vanishing all over the world.
Remember Eugenics? That was the idea that, through better breeding, you could improve the gene pool, filter out bad conditions, and effectively elevate humanity up a few steps. Which isn't actually a bad idea, except that, with the generally accepted science of the time, the only way to do that was to keep less than ideal people from breeding.
Needless to say, the Third Reich destroyed anyone's enthusiasm for that concept (much like it tarnished the poor swastika). So there were a whole lot of Eugenicists out of work in postwar Europe, either trying to recast themselves as geneticists (like Dr. V the nazi eye-thieving !@#$ eventually did) or stay really low under the radar.
Well, someone was scooping them up under ours. This went on for years, and, quite frankly, we considered it good riddance as we thought we had bigger fish to fry. Which was, in 20/20 !@#$ hindsight, a mistake.
What we did not know, then, was that Gerde had gone on the lam after Auschwitz was closed down, taking a lot of ill-gotten gains with her. A small fortune in dental gold, namely.
She used that small fortune to get some muscle. Then she used that muscle to steal some well-hidden high tech equipment the Reich had abandoned but the Allies hadn't found. And then she used that high tech equipment to start building a model for a new, improved world.
You see, Gerte may have been a Nazi !@#$, but she was no dummy. There was a reason she didn't hook up with ABWEHR, and that reason was that she understood that the Third Reich's ideas about the master race, and how to get there, were stupid and clumsy.
And she did not have time for things that didn't work, or the people who insisted that they would.
Her idea was a lot more direct. Rather than getting rid of untermenschen and prodding ultra-compatible couples together with all the subtlety of a gun to the !@#$, she was just going to eliminate the middleman of human reproduction altogether. She was going to establish a blueprint for a perfect being and decant it, herself, Brave New World style.
(Kind of like what ABWEHR later wound up doing, oddly enough, only without the shoggoth mommy.)
We first started encountering HONEYCOMB back in the 60's. At the time they seemed like just another science terrorist outfit. Ridiculous high tech clothing and guns from science fiction land, which vehicles that were just a little ahead of their time but not exactly at the dependable stage yet.
They'd show up, hijack important experiments, steal critical components, abduct scientists, and then vamoose with the goods as fast as those weird outfits would let them. It wasn't until the third or fourth time we ran into them that we started realizing the corpses we collected from the fights shared a remarkable similarity.
They all looked like brothers, in other words.
They were also !@#$ smart (maybe .5 of an Einstein) but had a severe kind of psychosis. It was the sort of condition that prevented them from making decisions helped with their long term survival. In short, they didn't really care about themselves too much, so long as they did their jobs. And on the rare occasions we caught some alive, we had to watch them 24/7 to make sure they didn't crunch down on their back molars for a tasty cyanide shake.
Then came the day we busted into a HIVE, just like we're doing now. And we found the decanter, down in the sub-basement, churning out new, fully-formed HONEYCOMB members every time they were needed. Personalities were implanted along with information, knowledge, and skills. And then they just had to be outfitted and sent off on a mission, knowing that their lives did not matter worth a !@#$ as long as they got it done.
In other words, HONEYCOMB invented the spawner about thirty years before Doom.
The only problem is that HIVEs spawn, too. Every time we take one out, the computer core goes blooey, and then somewhere, someplace else in the world, a small facility no one paid much attention to goes live and starts cranking out HONEYCOMB agents. Sometimes they revenge themselves on the ones who did away with the previous HIVE, and sometimes they just carry on their work.
But I have a thumbs-up from the few Agents who are coming up from the smoking ruins of this HIVE. I think that means we achieved our aim of stopping the core from transmitting a go signal to the next HIVE in the chain. Which means we've got one less HONEYCOMB hideout to worry about.
The only problem is that we have no real idea how many there are left. But we've got some takeaway from this mission in the form of an intact computer drive or two, and some other technological muckety-floo that didn't burn up when the thing exploded on us. So I'm calling that a step in the right direction for an overall plan.
What that plan is will have to wait until I've had a few drinks with these brave Agents. Unlike some crazy maniacs with a technology for technology's sake problem, my plans only come a little at a time.
But there will be more blood. You can count on that, son.
(SPYGOD is listening to Brave New World (Toyah Wilcox) and having a Doom Bar Bitter)
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