11/30/11
5:28 PM
OAKLEY, MARYLAND
The Big Man is sitting at a table, out on the back porch of his massive estate. The tree line is several football fields away, and the distance inbetween houses a massive pool, a hedge maze, and a sculpture garden that looks sublimely grotesque.
Like the estate, itself, the table is flashy and well-appointed. It's chased with so many luxurious substances that it would look horribly tacky in any other setting, but looks well at home, here.
Normally, he'd be taking his afternoon tea in a suit -- dark, of course -- and reading the paper. Today, however, he's decidedly dressed down. A thick, fuzzy bathrobe made from a then-endangered animal that's since gone extinct covers his nakedness. He still wears a hat, but it's an old, battered one.
And slippers, pink and tight, with what might be bunny ears half-attached.
The tea he drinks is unique. Only one place in the world makes it. They make it especially for him, out of things that would make the average person squirm, be sick, and call for the authorities if they knew the list of ingredients.
It costs $400 dollars a cup. He drinks about four a day, normally.
Today he's had ten.
The day's Wall Street Journal is on the table in front of him. He scanned the news sections for things of interest, and found the bare hints of what he knew. Stories of the Flier heading out for a training exercise in the Mid Atlantic. Ships and airplanes being diverted. People being surprised by bright lights and loud noises.
No news as to whether it's on its way back, though.
Normally, he wouldn't have to rely on this piece of !@#$ rag for information. He could make a phone call and get an answer, direct from someone who knew what was going on. But as of the last few days, he's been entirely cut off from that service.
The Director of the CIA won't answer his calls, anymore. And everyone below him in the American intelligence community has brushed him off, too. It's as if the refusal at the top of the chain gave them permission to shun him, too, or else mandated that they follow suit.
That's not all. His other villain contacts are being equally difficult to pin down, and just as reticent to reply. No one claims to know what happened to The Skull, though it's pretty !@#$ obvious it was destroyed. No one has heard from his son, Xerxes, either, but they won't say the words "he's dead" to The Big Man.
Even though it's pretty obvious that's the case.
He doesn't feel terrible about the loss of his son. Xerxes wasn't the only child he'd ever had, over the last century or so. He was just the only one that he'd allowed into his world, however remotely, and encouraged his free movement within. The others have no idea that their father is the Gilbert Biggs, and never will.
No, Xerxes was just an experiment that produced a useful, if unstable, tool. What really bothers The Big Man is the loss of The Skull, itself, and the sudden lack of communication. A lack of respect he could deal with, but the fact that no one will even tell him that he's been blackballed is troubling.
The term "social leper" is coming to mind; he doesn't think he likes it very much.
So what now? Who can say? But this isn't the only setback he's had in his many decades in charge of the Legion, and it won't be his last.
In time there will be another Agency Director -- maybe soon, if SPYGOD takes care of the current one -- and the new one may be willing to deal. In time there will be new villains who need framework, and old blood that wants to step down and retire on the franchise fees. In time there will be another fearsome god-vehicle to strike fear into the hearts of the good, and raise the hopes and dreams of the evil, maladjusted, and usefully insane.
Yes, he will have to rebuild things, now that they've been broken beyond repair. He'll need another Magician. They'll all need another war. They might even need another Hitler, come to think of it, though that idiot in Iran might prove useful without having to doctor his image too much,
But he's a survivor, in all things, and this is just another opportunity to prove that. He cannot be captured. He cannot be killed. He cannot be stopped.
And these problems are just a speed bump on the road to new and better times.
He reaches out to have another sip of the tea, but finds the cup is not within reach. He looks at the saucer and sees that it's empty, and then looks around to see where it might have gone.
It's in someone else's hands. SPYGOD's, to be precise. He's sitting at the same side of the table, maybe two feet away, having a sip of that exclusive, ultra-expensive tea.
"Gilbert," he nods, making a slight face at the tea.
"(REDACTED)" the Big Man replies, trying not to panic, even though he knows SPYGOD's the one in danger, here: "You know that's four franklins a cup?"
"Really? You should get your money back, Gilbert. It tastes like !@#$."
"It is !@#$. That and some rather unethically-harvested things from an otherwise-healthy human body."
"Chinese corpse tea? Well I'll be !@#$."
"You know what it is?"
"Of course! Anthropophagic drinks are something of a hobby with me. You know I drink wine made from the bodies of my enemies, right?"
"Yes, I've heard."
"Well !@#$. I should have brought a bottle."
"Why?"
"Well, we're celebrating, aren't we?"
The Big Man squints his eyes at his unexpected guest: "And what, pray tell, are we supposed to be celebrating? The death of my son? The destruction of The Skull? The failure of that shape-changing idiot to kill you?"
"Well, not exactly," SPYGOD says, draining the tea and then throwing the cup over his shoulder, where it shatters into three large, almost equal pieces: "I was going to say 'your retirement.'"
"My retirement?" The Big Man repeats, smiling: "Whatever gave you the idea I was going to retire?"
"Well, a few things. But primarily? You're !@#$ed."
"I've heard that a few times before-"
"Well you're hearing it from me, now, !@#$face," SPYGOD says, getting up and leaning over his quarry: "So that makes it !@#$ official."
"Oh dear, the gloves are off," The Big Man says, remaining seated. He wonders, idly, where Hargreaves is. He also wonders how long it'll take before security shows up, provided he didn't kill them all, already.
"That's one way to !@#$ put it, my friend," he says, stomping around the table and looking off into the distance: "You no longer have a relationship with the American government, or any of its intelligence agencies. You are no longer welcome in the halls of power. Everyone you had any deals with is either hanging you out to dry or have themselves been hung out to dry. All fall down."
"Well, that's a definite setback--"
"But wait! There's more. Much more, Gilbert. Your former, mind-washed associates have been captured and restored, and have either turned or been burned. By this I mean that some have cooperated, and told us all they know, perhaps as the price of joining The COMPANY, and perhaps as a contributing factor to a lesser, or at least less deprived sentence. And some are just never going to see the light of day again, provided we leave them in any shape to see !@#$ anything ever again.
"And, as we speak, every last operative and assassin on your big list of franchise holders, which we cracked years ago, by the way, is finding themselves on the wrong end of a gun barrel. As with the retirees, some will cooperate, by which I mean come work for us, unless they're too !@#$ed up to let live. And some will not cooperate, making the choice rather easy.
"But all this means one simple thing. That is this, Gilbert: as soon as I get the phone call, I can tell you that the Legion is done. Over. Hallas. Kaput."
There is silence at the table. SPYGOD does not turn around to face The Big Man. Is there something out there, in the far-off treeline? Or does he not want to look him in the eye?
Does he really think that can save him from The Big Man's power?
"Well, you are forgetting about my insurance policies," The Big Man says, deciding not to use that power just yet: "You know the deal, (REDACTED). If I don't make those calls, or do make certain calls, many bad things happen."
"They're dead," SPYGOD says, still not turning around.
"Dead?"
"Dead. Deceased. No longer breathing."
"How...?"
"Poison. Car accidents. Freak accidents. Suicides. You know how it goes."
"No. I mean how did you find them all?"
"Well, that's just going to be my little secret," he grins: "But you can trust me on that, Biggs. Your insurance policy just got canceled so hard that Snoopy took a !@#$ on your front stairs."
"That seems kind of horrible, killing all those people like that."
"You killed how many people the other week, Gilbert? All those old operators, dead by poison fumes and their bodies turned to bones with sludge gas? I don't think you get to talk about horrible, !@#$."
"No, you misunderstand me, (REDACTED). It's not that I don't think it was the right thing to do, under the circumstances. It just seems out of character for you. For a conservative you seem like such a bleeding heart, sometimes. It seems so... harsh."
"Oh yes, it is," SPYGOD finally turns around to look at The Big Man: "Very !@#$ harsh. I don't know how I'm going to live with myself.
"I mean, you only threatened the life of the !@#$ President and his family. You only had two slaves looking after nuclear silos in Montana. You only had a finger in the brain of one of the guards on Plum !@#$ Island with keys to the anthrax and smallpox samples. Ten nuclear plants. The !@#$ NSA, TSA, CIA, FBI. !@#$, you even got someone into the Department of Fish and Wildlife. We're still figuring that one out."
The Big Man shrugs: "I don't even know why I took him, truth be told. I think it's because I thought it would be funny to have a ranger get eaten by a bear."
"Well, he ate a bullet at two this morning, Biggs," SPYGOD hisses: "Be proud of yourself. Be !@#$ proud of your great and mighty works."
There's silence, for a time. The Big Man contemplates telling him to shoot himself in the skull, but upstairs someone cries out and then stops.
"Was that Hargreaves?" The Big Man asks.
"Yeah. One of my Agents is working him over. He really doesn't want to leave here."
"Where are you taking him?"
"!@#$ if I'm telling you. It'll be interesting to see how much of what's rattling around in his skull is him and how much of it's you, though. I'm going to bet he's more you than him, by now."
"No, I think you're wrong there, (REDACTED). His father served me, as did his father before him. His needs are met, any desires he has are his to ask for, so long as he remembers there's a time to work and a time to play. I've never had to discipline him, never had to make him do anything, except maybe leave me alone."
"What happened to his father?"
"I killed him when he got old and stupid. Same with his father's father. Call it mercy."
"You really are one !@#$ up fellow, Biggs."
"'Oh kettle, thou art black,' cried the teapot," The Big Man says: "Speaking of which, I could use some more tea. Come with me to the kitchen."
SPYGOD pulls out his gun and starts shooting. In seconds the chair the Big Man is in has no legs, and the former leader of the Legion is on the ground, stunned.
Why didn't it work? What happened? What the !@#$ just happened?
"I have one question for you, Biggs," he says, putting the gun away: "Your real name isn't Biggs at all, is it?"
"Why would you say that?" he replies, shaky and -- though he hates to admit it -- scared.
"We looked. Your birth records are as fake as !@#$. No one remembers you as a kid. You just sort of appeared, fully formed as they say. Now me, I'm betting you were an immigrant."
"I was, yes," the old man says.
"And your last name was not Biggs, was it?"
"No. Beksinski. Gellon Beksinski."
SPYGOD nods, turning back to the treeline: "I'm guessing Eastern Europe."
"Poland, actually."
"Oh? What part?"
"Warsawa," he replies, allowing the true name of his place of birth to roll off his tongue.
"Is that why you went after Hitler, then? He annexed Poland?"
"Oh, it goes deeper than that, (REDACTED)" The Big Man says, getting up out of the chair and standing up: "My parents came over here because they had money, and wanted their son to live someplace where that money could buy the best things, regardless of your creed.
"The rest of the family stayed behind, but we always hoped they'd join us. But they never wanted to come over here. They preferred it there, in spite of everything. My father was so disappointed, I think he went to his grave a sad man, wondering why they wouldn't give America a chance.
"And then came the Nazis, and the laws, and the Ghetto.
"And then..."
He lets the point hang. Maybe there's a sigh in there.
"I am sorry for your loss," SPYGOD says, turning back around: "I truly am. Is that why you stuck it to Hitler, instead of working for him?"
"No," he says: "The man was never going to amount to anything worthwhile, and I knew that. But after what happened, I considered it a personal incentive. Several birds with one stone."
"What a waste," SPYGOD says: "You know that? This is such a waste. You could have been one of our greatest assets during the War. A man who couldn't be killed? Who could disappear the moment you weren't looking at him? Could get anyone bad to do anything at all?
"You could have !@#$ killed Hitler, you !@#$. You could have been a one-man army. The best hero we ever had.
"And what did you do instead, huh? What did you do instead? You did... this."
"This is pretty nice, though," The Big Man says, pulling up the chair SPYGOD was sitting in and sitting back down.
"It's built with bloody money."
"Yes, and you know what? So is every nation in this world. The truth is that you can't call the land yours unless you own it. And how do you own something? You have to take it. If there's someone already there, and they won't sell, you have to take it. That's just the way it is.
"Every nation. Every country. Every place in this world with a name had another name before it. Every idea needed someone to die for it. Every empire needed soldiers, and every soldier needed an army to fight to call themselves soldiers. That is also just the way it is.
"Who are you to say otherwise? Who are you to judge me? Who are you to condemn?"
SPYGOD turns and looks at him, again. And he smiles.
"I'm the man who has your !@#$ in his hand, Biggs," he says: "That's who I am."
"So you're going to be boring and try to kill me?" The Big Man says: "I expected better."
"Oh no. No," SPYGOD says: "I'm not going to lay a hand on you. I'm going to walk away and leave you here."
The Big Man blinks. Twice. Then he almost sits up, but realizes that won't help things.
"I don't understand?"
"I didn't think you would, Biggs. But here's the deal. I know I can't kill you, because you'd just come back. I know I can't put you in prison, because you'd just vanish as soon as no one was looking at you. That kind of limits my choices, and I don't like that. So I need to get creative."
"Well, many have tried-" The Big Man starts to say, rising up out of the chair, but then doubles over when he feels something enter his gut. The crack of the gun is heard a half second later.
"What?" he says, sitting down and pulling at his robe. Inside his chest is a dart. He pulls it out and looks at it, uncertain.
"Nasty little cocktail," SPYGOD explains: "It'll send you off to sleep, which isn't death, and you can't disappear if you're not awake. We'll just keep you in a medically induced coma, Gilbert. The way we can manipulate them, these days, you don't ever have to wake up."
The Big Man stumbles, trying to find some way to kill himself. There's nothing nearby except the smashed teacup, but before he can get to it SPYGOD shoots the big pieces into tiny, harmless ones.
"You dirty !@#$" the man hisses: "You dirty rotten boy !@#$ drug junkie sodomite !@#$!"
"Hey now," SPYGOD says: "I ain't no chicken hawk. My boys are all legal."
"Well, that'll be the one good thing they remember you for, then," The Big Man says, almost helpless under the creeping paralysis: "Let me tell you something, you !@#$. I think you hate your boss. In fact, I know you do. I know you think the President is worthless and weak. Not a real American. Not a real leader. I've heard everything, I know."
"So what's your point?"
"My point is... you should shoot him," the man says, grinning in spite of the pain: "You should shoot the President of the United States of America, before the next election. And nothing that anyone else says or does should stop you. You should--"
He only gets that far, and then his mouth locks up. But as it does he can't help but laugh, knowing that he's just tagged his last and greatest target. There's no way he can shake that many instructions off. Something had to get through.
Something had to stick.
SPYGOD smiles, and walks over to the old man. He lifts him up and puts him fully in the chair, so he'll be comfortable until the COMPANY medics arrive.
"You know, a little secret, just between you and me?" He says, putting a finger to his lips: "I am completely immune to mind control. I always have been. I don't know if it's the Eye or what, but no one can make me do anything I don't want to do.
"I might make other people think that, from time to time. But it's all fakery. Just something I do to excuse myself from the consequences of my own actions.
"I just figured I'd tell you, now, because you're not going to tell anyone else anything ever again. And that suits me just fine.
He kisses the old man on the cheek, and, checking to see that the paralysis is complete -- and it is -- he walks away from the porch, smiling as he goes.
Halfway across the lawn he looks back. The old man is still there, stuck in his chair. He looks at him for quite some time, and then, taking a leap of faith, turns his back on The Big Man for good.
At last, this hunt is over.
(SPYGOD is listening to The Kiss (The Cure) and drinking everything he can to get the tea out of his mouth)
Wednesday, November 30, 2011
Tuesday, November 29, 2011
11/25-29/11 - Like I'm Living at the Edge of the World
If anyone was ever going to make a galactic dictionary, include the word "loser," and put a photograph by it, they couldn't do much better than to put a picture of a Ybari there.
The Ybari were, at one time, one of the more technologically advanced races in our part of the galaxy. At the time that Jesus Christ was walking the Earth, they had developed the bias drive: an exotic drive that allowed them to zip around their part of space in an extremely swift manner, without having to worry about the effects of relativity, and power the ship as well. And, by the time Ethiopia became Christian, 300 years later, they'd learned how to drop into warp space, allowing them to make large warp carriers full of bias-driven ships, and explore, and conquer, even further into space.
But the Ybari had a serious societal fault: one that saw them nearly cut to pieces by the time of the Byzantine Iconoclasm -- a mere 700 or so years after Christ's death. They were never able to completely reconcile their religious beliefs with their technical superiority, and believed with all their hearts that the latter was inexorably tied up with the former.
For example: their fighter pilots didn't just pray before battle, but they prayed during the entire battle. There was a prayer for every different direction they could take their ships, every weapon, every maneuver, and every in-flight trick and repair.
The prayer had to be said before the action was taken. If they couldn't remember the prayer, they could not take the action. If they couldn't say the prayer correctly, they had to start over.
And if they didn't say it fast enough, they might miss their chance, and have to pick another action they could say the prayer for, which might not have been the best choice for the situation.
At their height, against the technologically inferior forces their early conversion fleets encountered, the Ybari were a sight to behold. Massive church-ships exited the warp in a blare of bright lights and loudly-sung hymns. Hundreds of smaller dreadnoughts filed out their sides, their hulls made to resemble the serene face of The Why, and come forward in massive formations that formed the opening scripts of The Book of The Why. Their beam weapons shut down their enemies' ships, sparing their lives so they could be converted later.
And when the planet was as one with The Why, the sound of their conjoined piety could have shaken the foundations of the universe, itself.
But then, to borrow one Earth saying, the Ybari picked on someone their own size. And the Krong, who had no quaint notions about praying to make their spacecraft work both physically and spiritually correctly, thrashed their would-be conquerors so hard that it took the Ybari almost a five hundred years to pick themselves up, again.
11/25/11
After a somewhat delayed thanksgiving meal consisting of five live animals, twenty different kinds of human !@#$, and some poor fool who rang the door to his villa at the wrong time, Xerxes Biggs gets on the phone and makes a number of calls.
Most of them are to private numbers that are only to be used in absolute emergencies. Some of them are to people who are paid outrageous sums of money to babysit certain phone numbers and inform their clients if they're used. Others are relay calls that trigger alarms, and indicate that something has happened, and someone should really return a call.
In all cases, the results are the same. None of the people he's called want to sign back on for the fight. They've seen what's happening to the Legion, and they know what it will mean for them if they get out of retirement. They're all polite refusals, of course, but they're refusals nonetheless.
Xerxes does not take this news well -- not at all. But once his anger is back under control, he calmly calls the people who are looking after The Skull, and tells them to get the old girl up and running again.
In a few days' time, she'll need all the firepower they can get, because they're either going to attack the Flier, or Washington DC. Which one gets attacked entirely depends on whether the Flier's in front of the city or not.
He knows SPYGOD won't turn that down. He knows the man thinks he can take The Skull, based on the old schematics that he allowed to be leaked to certain people in the Agency.
What he doesn't know is that the old weapons systems have been entirely replaced. They bought some very interesting new toys at the last Outland, before a certain person got upset and blew it up.
And they've been waiting for a good reason to try them out...
The good news was that, in the wake of the Ybari assault on Krong Prime, a new galactic confederation was created. Unlike previous ones, that had sought to rule over many, or merely acknowledge the rights and existences of one's neighbors, The Pact was a vehicle for galactic fellowship, trade, and mutual defense. Specifically, if one member was attacked, all members were pledged to send a selection of their best ships, so as to be adequate to the task ahead.
So when the Ybari came back for a second attempt at conversion, around the same time that Constantinople was sacked in the 4th Crusade (1204), their War Priests didn't just face the might of the Krong, but of twenty other civilizations, big and small. They were fought all the way back to their own space, and told, in no uncertain terms, that they were to remain there until they could learn to cooperate with others.
The days of galactic dominion were over, they were told. Play nice, or don't play at all. And if The Why didn't like it, The Why could come here, Itself, and tell The Pact otherwise.
The Why, obviously, declined their invitation. A perimeter defense was created between the space held by The Pact and what little remained of the empire of the Ybari, and they were left to stew in their own failure and isolation.
When faced with a bad situation caused by the poor choices of their leaders, a civilization can choose to do many things. This could have been the moment that the Ybari chose to reflect, and possibly reform their society into something less backwards and ponderous.
They could have stopped putting to death those "heretics" who claimed that science and technology worked just fine whether you prayed or not. They could have recognized that there were some things science did well, and some things that only spirituality could explain, and the two could exist as equal partners in a well-balanced civilization. They might also have chosen to abandon forced conversion as well, and sought peaceful contact with other races, trusting that the wisdom inherent in The Book of Why would speak for itself.
They did none of these things. They insisted that they were being tested, and had to prove their mettle to The Why, or else they would be found lacking. They went back to work rebuilding their conversion fleets, often working their conquered "allies" until their worlds were smoking pits devoid of any remaining resources.
And they set their sights away from The Pact, looking in the opposite direction, where much less powerful targets laid ripe for conversion. They would bring The Why to these people, instead. And someday, when all these systems were taken, and their resources brought to bear, they would try The Pact again, and be victorious.
One of these intended targets was Earth's Solar System.
11/26/11
5:32 AM
THE B.U.I.L.D.I.N.G.
Phonecall #1: "... and you're sure of that? Right? Okay then. Alright. I !@#$ figured as much. The Big Man wasn't going to go down without some kind of a massive confrontation. You go ahead and let him know I accept his little !@#$ challenge, but that when this is all said and done I'm going to be paying him a visit. And he knows exactly what that means. Oh yes, he !@#$ does. Okay, good. I'll get them up and running, then..."
Phonecall #2: "Hello, Captain. It's time. We have a dogfight in the mid-Atlantic scheduled at some ungodly hour in three days time. Yes, you !@#$ heard me correctly. We're going up against The Skull. Now the good news is that we know its capabilities. The bad news is that the information I got was from the people who actually work with those !@#$ in the Legion, so either it's old intel, or grossly distorted. So we have to be ready for bear, lion, and !@#$ dinosaur. I want the reflex weapons ready to implement. I want the phalanx systems operational. I want those little surprise missiles ready on the interceptors... right, the experimental ones they said would never work. Yep. You got it. And I'll be inspecting in 24 hours, so make sure they hop to it."
Phonecall #3: "Hello, is this the Yokum residence? Yes, this is SPYGOD. Yes, the SPYGOD. I'm calling to give you some good news, actually. It's about your wife, Helen. We have her, and she's okay. Well, it's a long story, sir, and a lot of it's classified out the !@#$, but the bottom line is that she hasn't quite been herself for a few months, now. That's why she was rolled out of the White House, yes. But the good news is that we've had someone who's very good at removing bad ideas with her, and after a few more psychological tests, I think she'll be good to come home. Maybe even go back to work before too long. Yes, sir. You'll be able to see her soon, and the President wanted me to tell you how glad he is she's doing better. Hey, no problems, sir. I like it when I can actually give good news for a change."
Phonecall #4: "Mr. President. Yes. We need to talk. It's about the Legion. Yes. It's pretty !@#$ bad, sir. No two ways about it. You need to take steps to isolate yourself from the Director of the CIA immediately. Don't let him know you're doing it or he'll take counter steps. You also need to look into upping your guard. I wouldn't put anything past him. No. No, I don't think it's a good idea to involve Mr. USA. We're still not sure where his loyalties are, remember? !@#$ if I know. Oh, and one more thing, three days from now, don't be in DC. No, no, nothing to worry about. Just maybe go do a surprise stump speech in, say, Hawaii. Yeah, sure. Have some poi for me."
By the time the Ybari conversion fleet finally got to Earth, it was 1975. Their long-range probes, which had buzzed by the planet in the mid-60's, revealed that the planet's defenses seemed milquetoast at best. They had just gotten their first, fully acknowledged space programs up and running, and hadn't bodily ventured out further than their own orbit. The best they could muster was space probes, and their most powerful weapons were apparently pointed at one another, rather than outside invaders.
The Book of The Why had a number of parables that best described this situation. They all more or less translated to "cake walk."
Unfortunately for them, by the time they got to the Solar System, it was the mid-70's. By that time, certain things had awoken on the Earth, and had been making certain that it would be defended. A great, circular array of defense platforms, called Wonderwall, had been erected in trans-lunar orbit, its tireless robots tasked to protect the planet from the many threats that lurked between the stars.
And it had the power to shatter suns.
Wonderwall's sensors detected the fleet when it exited the warp around Jupiter. By the time it passed the asteroid belt, the robots determined that it was a war fleet, and was approaching with gun ports open. When it was almost at Mars' orbit, they had an attack plan ready to go.
And when the fleet got no further than three miles past it, Wonderwall struck.
It took the Ybari almost 800 years to remake their conversion fleet. It took Wonderwall exactly five minutes to destroy it. Its massive "dark" laser cannons skewered the fleet at the speed of light, and once it was in disarray the slightly slower, but much more powerful particle beams mopped up what little remained.
The robots didn't even let the escape pods live.
This is why, as so many would-be alien conquerors have realized to their detriment, Earth is often called "the graveyard of empire." It had a double meaning for the Ybari, for, after word of their defeat got out, many of the worlds they'd recently converted rebelled. Worse, other, as-yet-unconquered neighbors decided to take parts of the empire for themselves, leaving it a sorry, wrecked remnant of what it once was.
Even the dark days following the judgment of The Pact looked like a golden age, now. It was all the Ybari could do to hold onto their own homeworld, much less fend off aggressors. And there was no parable in The Book of The Why that could give adequate advice as to what to do, now.
11/27/11
8:00 PM
UNDISCLOSED LOCATION
Agent S held the package in his hands. Inside it was something special. Something that would make a necessary action much easier.
The package came with a note. It was from his Director. All it said was "Plan B. Now." But that's all it had to say.
All the time he'd been poking around the Flier, trying to find evidence, had been wasted time. Nothing good had come of it. Nothing at all.
And now they were in big trouble.
The Magician was working for The COMPANY, now, turning retired supervillains into COMPANY assets, and deprogramming The Big Man's insurance agents. It was only a matter of time before they found out how deep the roots between the Legion and the Agency ran.
And then, as they said, the pooch was well and truly !@#$.
The burning of bridges had already begun, but not fast enough. And if there was one thing they couldn't do, it was be fast enough to stop SPYGOD once he caught a whiff of something actionable.
SPYGOD had to die. Soon.
Agent S had to be the one to kill him. Soon.
He might not live through the attempt. He might get caught, before or after. But he had to try, at least.
He owed the Legion that much for getting him out of trouble, back in the 30's. He owed the Agency that much for keeping him on, after the War. And he owed it to his country, which he loved with every beat of his strange heart, to see to it that the monster they'd put in charge of The COMPANY did not have another chance to destroy her.
Agent S didn't care what they said about his powers, or his methods, or what he chose to do with the meat that he borrowed. He was a patriot, first and foremost. A soldier in the war of civilizations. An ant in the farm, guarding the queen.
He could probably live through this. He could probably get away. But even if he didn't, he had to try.
SPYGOD was going to die. Agent S was going to kill him. That was all there was to it.
And he smiled through borrowed lips, relishing how tasty it would be to see the horror on SPYGOD's face as his trusted aid turned him into ash and cinders.
Agent S might be a monster, too, but he was America's monster. And that made all the difference in the world.
Once again, the Ybari had the opportunity to reflect on the weight of their errors, and chose a new path for themselves. Once again, they squandered it, and instead sought to implement a new plan -- one that would take much longer to accomplish than a conversion fleet, but would give the same results, eventually.
They would trade their way to domination.
They would pretend to peace. They would embrace commerce. And they would sell their wares to disreputable types who desired to take power on their worlds, with part of the stipulation for the sale being that, once their customers had conquered, the Ybari would be allowed to set up worship centers upon it. Such a small price to pay for such fine wares!
On some worlds, their offers were harshly rebuked, as no one wanted anything to do with them. On others, the Ybari were cannily welcomed, but then betrayed after the conquering occurred. One planet's revolutionary cadre actually had the gall to ban all religious worship from the planet after the war was over, and had to "apologetically" relegate all churches, including those of their Ybari allies, to a derelict space station called "Heretic Town."
But on yet others, where the name "Ybari" was largely unknown, and their history not fully understood, their deals were taken up in full. On these worlds the Ybari prospered, and their religion was accepted, though not always universally taken up. Still, they had faith: one foot in the door is all that is needed to gain entry to the house, as The Book of The Why does say.
11/28/11
11:27 PM
THE FLIER
It's something of a nervous habit of mine, walking the top deck of the ship before a big battle. !@#$ing over the side isn't so much of a nervous habit as it is a bad one, but in the mood I'm in, right now, I don't think anyone's going to !@#$ with me about it.
Not that I've had too many battles in this ship. Usually the mere sight of The Flier's enough to scare most people into total compliance. Because when you see a flying ship the size of three aircraft carriers floating above your capitol, it's time to rethink your !@#$ demands and want tell the President whatever the !@#$ he wants to hear, even if it's "we surrender."
And if you aren't smart enough to do that, well... !@#$ you, your mom, and your little dog Toto, too. !@#$ just got real.
But I have a bad feeling about this one. I can't help but think I'm gambling with a really bad hand.
The Skull isn't just any supervillain gimmick, like a clown-faced getaway car or a plane that turns into a ghost. This is a full-on WMD on steroids. The !@#$ thing has weapons so far ahead of the curve that its a wonder they aren't in !@#$ outer space, for crying out loud.
And the Flier? Well, it was good !@#$ back in its day. But her day was back in the 80's, really. And while she's been refitted and rebuilt numerous times, since then, at her heart she's still a creaky old bucket that never goes quite as fast as you think she should, or hits really as hard as you need her to.
I have a responsibility to her. I have a responsibility to her crew. My people.
I can't help but wonder if I've bitten off more than I can chew, here. How big of a price I'm going to have to pay for it.
And while I may have an Ace up my sleeve, here, I'm going to have to play through several !@#$ hands to get to it.
It's times like this that I wish I knew some gods that weren't absent, retired, or !@#$ useless. I would be praying to them, right now. For luck. For speed. For the lives of my people.
But the only God I can really count on is the one I look at in the mirror, every morning. And he's a drunken, sex-addicted junkie with delusions of grandeur and a penis that looks stranger with every growing year.
Speaking of which, I think I will !@#$ over the edge. I think we're right above City Hall, right now.
And Hizzonner needs a bath.
So it was that, in the late 80's, well after Wonderwall had become Deep Ten, the Ybari snuck onto the planet that had annihilated both their conversion fleet and their Empire. There, at a special place, they met with various disreputable individuals and organizations intent on conquering the planet for themselves. And they made several deals, and sold several advanced weapons and vehicle systems to many of them, in the hopes that at least one would succeed.
One group in particular walked away with the greatest prize of all. They took a small dreadnought, with most of its weapons systems and cloaking capabilities. The bias drive had been removed, if only to keep the species from taking it apart, realizing they could make them, and eventually rivaling the Ybari. But the buyers were confident they could use the pinnacle of their own world's energy creation technologies to power the craft.
After the sale, one of the purchasers -- from a group calling itself a Legion -- noted to the other "!@#$ if it doesn't look like a big !@#$ skull, too. How perfect is that?"
"Perfect indeed," the other said. But when the Ybari tried to correct them, and explain that this was the face of The Why, Itself, they were interrupted by that other. And after he was done speaking to then, they suddenly had the strange urge to give the man back his money, go out behind the convention, and end their own lives in a violent and messy manner.
And so they did.
11/29/11
4:37 PM
THE FLIER, OVER THE ATLANTIC OCEAN
The Deck is a bustle of activity. Anti-gravity stations float this way and that as the great machine goes forward to war. Gunners in virtual reality pods rotate in endless circles, waiting for the targets they know are going to be enroute.
In the center of it all, SPYGOD strides, a bottle of Jack Daniels in one hand and a massive, purple spliff of uncertain origin in the other. He never takes the Flier into battle unless he's drunk and stoned, just so he can stay focused.
All these lives depend on him, now. He can't !@#$ this up.
By him are his personal assistants, relaying orders and giving him new information as it's available. He probably doesn't need all their chattering voices, as he can hear that they hear before they tell him what they've heard. But it helps him stay anchored to have that information repeated.
"Yeah, okay, ahead full. Raise shields to maximum along the front and undercarriage, because that's where they'll hit. I want reflex weapons on standby, and long range missiles ready to go, and you tell Agent Decker that if the left battery's slow again I'll !@#$ throw his !@#$ at The Skull when it gets within range. And for !@#$ sake, let's have those interceptors ready. The last time we did a full drill it reminded me of a tea party with two kittens and a stuffed bear."
He looks over at Armatrading and tips her a wink. She pretends to chuckle, but something goes hard and lonely in her eyes the moment he turns back and away.
The gun at her hip is not standard issue. It's a Legion-made incinerator. Their scientists figure it'll reduce SPYGOD to his constituent atoms within .003 of a second, provided she can get a good enough bead on him.
And if this battle starts going badly for the Legion, she's going to pull it out and use it.
He leans in closer, admiringly. He breathes on her breasts. His eyes go unfocused, ecstatic.
She breathes into his face, ever so softly. He breathes back, closing his eyes. For a few brief seconds they share the same oxygen, and it's more than he can handle with his eyes wide open.
The ecstasy has him enthralled, and that's all she ever needed. His mind on fire for her.
And fatally unaware of the small details.
SPYGOD winces as the damage reports come in. 50% of the hull is either destroyed or on fire. The long range batteries are empty or trashed. Most of the forward cannons are obliterated or empty.
And that's with the phalanx systems trying to mow down the enemy's missiles and shells as they bombard The Flier in wave after wave. Pretty soon they'll be out of ammo, too. And when that happens...
At least the interceptors are doing their jobs, keeping the numerous drones The Skull launched from coming too close and adding to their misery. At least they still have their halon systems, quickly quenching the fires as they come across them. But this is going to be a !@#$ of a fight.
"Sir, sensors indicate that The Skull's shielding is weakening," someone tells him.
"How much?" He asks, gazing around as he does. There's too much smoke and fire and horror in this room. He has to focus. Stay focused, !@#$ it.
As he waits for the answer, Agent S prepares to make his move. The holster is unclipped. A hand's on the gun. One quick movement and it'll be over.
It's just the matter of finding that one, right moment when he won't know what's about to happen.
This has made it so that the chair's restraints are not holding her down. She could have gotten her arms free any time in the last few days.
She just needed to have someone in the room with her, with the keys to her leg restraints. Someone she could distract long enough to not notice her slipping her sweaty hands out of the restraints, and then aiming her fingers up at his face.
The attack short-circuits his ecstasy. He coughs and gasps, unable to scream as she clamps his mouth shut with one hand and digs a thumb into his eye with the other.
"You will let me out of this chair, right now, or I will take your eyes," she hisses. He stammers and tries to say something but he can't. Blood pools around his lips; she must have made him bite his tongue.
"Right. Now." She emphasizes. He haltingly obeys, maybe hoping someone can get into the room before she's free. But if there's anyone in that observation room, behind the one-way glass, then he or she hasn't noticed yet.
One leg. Then the other. She leaps up and out of the chair, trailing tubes and electrical leads behind her like some surreal S&M dress.
The agent? Oh, that's right. She's still got his head in her hands.
And, by default, his neck.
One good twist and it's snapped. The effort makes her woozy. The drugs are trying to slide her back down, but she will not let them. She's come too far too fast for this.
Come too !@#$ far and suffered way too !@#$ much.
Oh, that's done it. The person in the observation room's noticed at last, and has hit the alarm. She hears klaxons going off and shouting: the subtle but loud chorus of panic in the face of escape.
"Sit down, you !@#$," a female voice shouts: "You dumb !@#$, sit down! There's no escape from this place. We're all locked in here together. There's three of us out here and there's just one of you. You're not getting out of her alive. You hear me? You are not getting out of her alive!"
"!@#$ you, too, !@#$," Armatrading whispers, reaching down for the dead man's gun: "Alive wasn't in the plan."
The glass is bullet proof, but she fires a shot at it, anyway, just imagine the stupid !@#$ jumping back. She imagines the fear in her eyes, and the thought is delicious. But she knows that if it's there, it's not of the gun.
It's of what's going to happen next.
She thinks of her father, who was in the Army and died overseas. She thinks of his strength and his decency. How much she misses him.
She thinks of her mother, who raised her right as an Army widow. She thinks of her determination and her willpower. How much she will miss her.
She thinks of her little sister, the well meaning idiot. She thinks of her big heart and small brain. She'll miss her, too, !@#$ it.
She thinks of Beatrice, once last time. Wishing she could reach and out say sorry for everything that happened. So many regrets, never enough time. She already misses her more than she can say.
And SPYGOD. Oh, the things she'd like to say to him, now. And maybe she can, somehow...
The door starts opening. They've got tasers, now. Probably under orders to keep her alive.
She has no such order, and puts the dead agent's gun in her mouth.
The Ybari were, at one time, one of the more technologically advanced races in our part of the galaxy. At the time that Jesus Christ was walking the Earth, they had developed the bias drive: an exotic drive that allowed them to zip around their part of space in an extremely swift manner, without having to worry about the effects of relativity, and power the ship as well. And, by the time Ethiopia became Christian, 300 years later, they'd learned how to drop into warp space, allowing them to make large warp carriers full of bias-driven ships, and explore, and conquer, even further into space.
But the Ybari had a serious societal fault: one that saw them nearly cut to pieces by the time of the Byzantine Iconoclasm -- a mere 700 or so years after Christ's death. They were never able to completely reconcile their religious beliefs with their technical superiority, and believed with all their hearts that the latter was inexorably tied up with the former.
For example: their fighter pilots didn't just pray before battle, but they prayed during the entire battle. There was a prayer for every different direction they could take their ships, every weapon, every maneuver, and every in-flight trick and repair.
The prayer had to be said before the action was taken. If they couldn't remember the prayer, they could not take the action. If they couldn't say the prayer correctly, they had to start over.
And if they didn't say it fast enough, they might miss their chance, and have to pick another action they could say the prayer for, which might not have been the best choice for the situation.
At their height, against the technologically inferior forces their early conversion fleets encountered, the Ybari were a sight to behold. Massive church-ships exited the warp in a blare of bright lights and loudly-sung hymns. Hundreds of smaller dreadnoughts filed out their sides, their hulls made to resemble the serene face of The Why, and come forward in massive formations that formed the opening scripts of The Book of The Why. Their beam weapons shut down their enemies' ships, sparing their lives so they could be converted later.
And when the planet was as one with The Why, the sound of their conjoined piety could have shaken the foundations of the universe, itself.
But then, to borrow one Earth saying, the Ybari picked on someone their own size. And the Krong, who had no quaint notions about praying to make their spacecraft work both physically and spiritually correctly, thrashed their would-be conquerors so hard that it took the Ybari almost a five hundred years to pick themselves up, again.
11/25/11
After a somewhat delayed thanksgiving meal consisting of five live animals, twenty different kinds of human !@#$, and some poor fool who rang the door to his villa at the wrong time, Xerxes Biggs gets on the phone and makes a number of calls.
Most of them are to private numbers that are only to be used in absolute emergencies. Some of them are to people who are paid outrageous sums of money to babysit certain phone numbers and inform their clients if they're used. Others are relay calls that trigger alarms, and indicate that something has happened, and someone should really return a call.
In all cases, the results are the same. None of the people he's called want to sign back on for the fight. They've seen what's happening to the Legion, and they know what it will mean for them if they get out of retirement. They're all polite refusals, of course, but they're refusals nonetheless.
Xerxes does not take this news well -- not at all. But once his anger is back under control, he calmly calls the people who are looking after The Skull, and tells them to get the old girl up and running again.
In a few days' time, she'll need all the firepower they can get, because they're either going to attack the Flier, or Washington DC. Which one gets attacked entirely depends on whether the Flier's in front of the city or not.
He knows SPYGOD won't turn that down. He knows the man thinks he can take The Skull, based on the old schematics that he allowed to be leaked to certain people in the Agency.
What he doesn't know is that the old weapons systems have been entirely replaced. They bought some very interesting new toys at the last Outland, before a certain person got upset and blew it up.
And they've been waiting for a good reason to try them out...
The good news was that, in the wake of the Ybari assault on Krong Prime, a new galactic confederation was created. Unlike previous ones, that had sought to rule over many, or merely acknowledge the rights and existences of one's neighbors, The Pact was a vehicle for galactic fellowship, trade, and mutual defense. Specifically, if one member was attacked, all members were pledged to send a selection of their best ships, so as to be adequate to the task ahead.
So when the Ybari came back for a second attempt at conversion, around the same time that Constantinople was sacked in the 4th Crusade (1204), their War Priests didn't just face the might of the Krong, but of twenty other civilizations, big and small. They were fought all the way back to their own space, and told, in no uncertain terms, that they were to remain there until they could learn to cooperate with others.
The days of galactic dominion were over, they were told. Play nice, or don't play at all. And if The Why didn't like it, The Why could come here, Itself, and tell The Pact otherwise.
The Why, obviously, declined their invitation. A perimeter defense was created between the space held by The Pact and what little remained of the empire of the Ybari, and they were left to stew in their own failure and isolation.
When faced with a bad situation caused by the poor choices of their leaders, a civilization can choose to do many things. This could have been the moment that the Ybari chose to reflect, and possibly reform their society into something less backwards and ponderous.
They could have stopped putting to death those "heretics" who claimed that science and technology worked just fine whether you prayed or not. They could have recognized that there were some things science did well, and some things that only spirituality could explain, and the two could exist as equal partners in a well-balanced civilization. They might also have chosen to abandon forced conversion as well, and sought peaceful contact with other races, trusting that the wisdom inherent in The Book of Why would speak for itself.
They did none of these things. They insisted that they were being tested, and had to prove their mettle to The Why, or else they would be found lacking. They went back to work rebuilding their conversion fleets, often working their conquered "allies" until their worlds were smoking pits devoid of any remaining resources.
And they set their sights away from The Pact, looking in the opposite direction, where much less powerful targets laid ripe for conversion. They would bring The Why to these people, instead. And someday, when all these systems were taken, and their resources brought to bear, they would try The Pact again, and be victorious.
One of these intended targets was Earth's Solar System.
11/26/11
5:32 AM
THE B.U.I.L.D.I.N.G.
Phonecall #1: "... and you're sure of that? Right? Okay then. Alright. I !@#$ figured as much. The Big Man wasn't going to go down without some kind of a massive confrontation. You go ahead and let him know I accept his little !@#$ challenge, but that when this is all said and done I'm going to be paying him a visit. And he knows exactly what that means. Oh yes, he !@#$ does. Okay, good. I'll get them up and running, then..."
Phonecall #2: "Hello, Captain. It's time. We have a dogfight in the mid-Atlantic scheduled at some ungodly hour in three days time. Yes, you !@#$ heard me correctly. We're going up against The Skull. Now the good news is that we know its capabilities. The bad news is that the information I got was from the people who actually work with those !@#$ in the Legion, so either it's old intel, or grossly distorted. So we have to be ready for bear, lion, and !@#$ dinosaur. I want the reflex weapons ready to implement. I want the phalanx systems operational. I want those little surprise missiles ready on the interceptors... right, the experimental ones they said would never work. Yep. You got it. And I'll be inspecting in 24 hours, so make sure they hop to it."
Phonecall #3: "Hello, is this the Yokum residence? Yes, this is SPYGOD. Yes, the SPYGOD. I'm calling to give you some good news, actually. It's about your wife, Helen. We have her, and she's okay. Well, it's a long story, sir, and a lot of it's classified out the !@#$, but the bottom line is that she hasn't quite been herself for a few months, now. That's why she was rolled out of the White House, yes. But the good news is that we've had someone who's very good at removing bad ideas with her, and after a few more psychological tests, I think she'll be good to come home. Maybe even go back to work before too long. Yes, sir. You'll be able to see her soon, and the President wanted me to tell you how glad he is she's doing better. Hey, no problems, sir. I like it when I can actually give good news for a change."
Phonecall #4: "Mr. President. Yes. We need to talk. It's about the Legion. Yes. It's pretty !@#$ bad, sir. No two ways about it. You need to take steps to isolate yourself from the Director of the CIA immediately. Don't let him know you're doing it or he'll take counter steps. You also need to look into upping your guard. I wouldn't put anything past him. No. No, I don't think it's a good idea to involve Mr. USA. We're still not sure where his loyalties are, remember? !@#$ if I know. Oh, and one more thing, three days from now, don't be in DC. No, no, nothing to worry about. Just maybe go do a surprise stump speech in, say, Hawaii. Yeah, sure. Have some poi for me."
By the time the Ybari conversion fleet finally got to Earth, it was 1975. Their long-range probes, which had buzzed by the planet in the mid-60's, revealed that the planet's defenses seemed milquetoast at best. They had just gotten their first, fully acknowledged space programs up and running, and hadn't bodily ventured out further than their own orbit. The best they could muster was space probes, and their most powerful weapons were apparently pointed at one another, rather than outside invaders.
The Book of The Why had a number of parables that best described this situation. They all more or less translated to "cake walk."
Unfortunately for them, by the time they got to the Solar System, it was the mid-70's. By that time, certain things had awoken on the Earth, and had been making certain that it would be defended. A great, circular array of defense platforms, called Wonderwall, had been erected in trans-lunar orbit, its tireless robots tasked to protect the planet from the many threats that lurked between the stars.
And it had the power to shatter suns.
Wonderwall's sensors detected the fleet when it exited the warp around Jupiter. By the time it passed the asteroid belt, the robots determined that it was a war fleet, and was approaching with gun ports open. When it was almost at Mars' orbit, they had an attack plan ready to go.
And when the fleet got no further than three miles past it, Wonderwall struck.
It took the Ybari almost 800 years to remake their conversion fleet. It took Wonderwall exactly five minutes to destroy it. Its massive "dark" laser cannons skewered the fleet at the speed of light, and once it was in disarray the slightly slower, but much more powerful particle beams mopped up what little remained.
The robots didn't even let the escape pods live.
This is why, as so many would-be alien conquerors have realized to their detriment, Earth is often called "the graveyard of empire." It had a double meaning for the Ybari, for, after word of their defeat got out, many of the worlds they'd recently converted rebelled. Worse, other, as-yet-unconquered neighbors decided to take parts of the empire for themselves, leaving it a sorry, wrecked remnant of what it once was.
Even the dark days following the judgment of The Pact looked like a golden age, now. It was all the Ybari could do to hold onto their own homeworld, much less fend off aggressors. And there was no parable in The Book of The Why that could give adequate advice as to what to do, now.
11/27/11
8:00 PM
UNDISCLOSED LOCATION
Agent S held the package in his hands. Inside it was something special. Something that would make a necessary action much easier.
The package came with a note. It was from his Director. All it said was "Plan B. Now." But that's all it had to say.
All the time he'd been poking around the Flier, trying to find evidence, had been wasted time. Nothing good had come of it. Nothing at all.
And now they were in big trouble.
The Magician was working for The COMPANY, now, turning retired supervillains into COMPANY assets, and deprogramming The Big Man's insurance agents. It was only a matter of time before they found out how deep the roots between the Legion and the Agency ran.
And then, as they said, the pooch was well and truly !@#$.
The burning of bridges had already begun, but not fast enough. And if there was one thing they couldn't do, it was be fast enough to stop SPYGOD once he caught a whiff of something actionable.
SPYGOD had to die. Soon.
Agent S had to be the one to kill him. Soon.
He might not live through the attempt. He might get caught, before or after. But he had to try, at least.
He owed the Legion that much for getting him out of trouble, back in the 30's. He owed the Agency that much for keeping him on, after the War. And he owed it to his country, which he loved with every beat of his strange heart, to see to it that the monster they'd put in charge of The COMPANY did not have another chance to destroy her.
Agent S didn't care what they said about his powers, or his methods, or what he chose to do with the meat that he borrowed. He was a patriot, first and foremost. A soldier in the war of civilizations. An ant in the farm, guarding the queen.
He could probably live through this. He could probably get away. But even if he didn't, he had to try.
SPYGOD was going to die. Agent S was going to kill him. That was all there was to it.
And he smiled through borrowed lips, relishing how tasty it would be to see the horror on SPYGOD's face as his trusted aid turned him into ash and cinders.
Agent S might be a monster, too, but he was America's monster. And that made all the difference in the world.
Once again, the Ybari had the opportunity to reflect on the weight of their errors, and chose a new path for themselves. Once again, they squandered it, and instead sought to implement a new plan -- one that would take much longer to accomplish than a conversion fleet, but would give the same results, eventually.
They would trade their way to domination.
They would pretend to peace. They would embrace commerce. And they would sell their wares to disreputable types who desired to take power on their worlds, with part of the stipulation for the sale being that, once their customers had conquered, the Ybari would be allowed to set up worship centers upon it. Such a small price to pay for such fine wares!
On some worlds, their offers were harshly rebuked, as no one wanted anything to do with them. On others, the Ybari were cannily welcomed, but then betrayed after the conquering occurred. One planet's revolutionary cadre actually had the gall to ban all religious worship from the planet after the war was over, and had to "apologetically" relegate all churches, including those of their Ybari allies, to a derelict space station called "Heretic Town."
But on yet others, where the name "Ybari" was largely unknown, and their history not fully understood, their deals were taken up in full. On these worlds the Ybari prospered, and their religion was accepted, though not always universally taken up. Still, they had faith: one foot in the door is all that is needed to gain entry to the house, as The Book of The Why does say.
11/28/11
11:27 PM
THE FLIER
It's something of a nervous habit of mine, walking the top deck of the ship before a big battle. !@#$ing over the side isn't so much of a nervous habit as it is a bad one, but in the mood I'm in, right now, I don't think anyone's going to !@#$ with me about it.
Not that I've had too many battles in this ship. Usually the mere sight of The Flier's enough to scare most people into total compliance. Because when you see a flying ship the size of three aircraft carriers floating above your capitol, it's time to rethink your !@#$ demands and want tell the President whatever the !@#$ he wants to hear, even if it's "we surrender."
And if you aren't smart enough to do that, well... !@#$ you, your mom, and your little dog Toto, too. !@#$ just got real.
But I have a bad feeling about this one. I can't help but think I'm gambling with a really bad hand.
The Skull isn't just any supervillain gimmick, like a clown-faced getaway car or a plane that turns into a ghost. This is a full-on WMD on steroids. The !@#$ thing has weapons so far ahead of the curve that its a wonder they aren't in !@#$ outer space, for crying out loud.
And the Flier? Well, it was good !@#$ back in its day. But her day was back in the 80's, really. And while she's been refitted and rebuilt numerous times, since then, at her heart she's still a creaky old bucket that never goes quite as fast as you think she should, or hits really as hard as you need her to.
I have a responsibility to her. I have a responsibility to her crew. My people.
I can't help but wonder if I've bitten off more than I can chew, here. How big of a price I'm going to have to pay for it.
And while I may have an Ace up my sleeve, here, I'm going to have to play through several !@#$ hands to get to it.
It's times like this that I wish I knew some gods that weren't absent, retired, or !@#$ useless. I would be praying to them, right now. For luck. For speed. For the lives of my people.
But the only God I can really count on is the one I look at in the mirror, every morning. And he's a drunken, sex-addicted junkie with delusions of grandeur and a penis that looks stranger with every growing year.
Speaking of which, I think I will !@#$ over the edge. I think we're right above City Hall, right now.
And Hizzonner needs a bath.
So it was that, in the late 80's, well after Wonderwall had become Deep Ten, the Ybari snuck onto the planet that had annihilated both their conversion fleet and their Empire. There, at a special place, they met with various disreputable individuals and organizations intent on conquering the planet for themselves. And they made several deals, and sold several advanced weapons and vehicle systems to many of them, in the hopes that at least one would succeed.
One group in particular walked away with the greatest prize of all. They took a small dreadnought, with most of its weapons systems and cloaking capabilities. The bias drive had been removed, if only to keep the species from taking it apart, realizing they could make them, and eventually rivaling the Ybari. But the buyers were confident they could use the pinnacle of their own world's energy creation technologies to power the craft.
After the sale, one of the purchasers -- from a group calling itself a Legion -- noted to the other "!@#$ if it doesn't look like a big !@#$ skull, too. How perfect is that?"
"Perfect indeed," the other said. But when the Ybari tried to correct them, and explain that this was the face of The Why, Itself, they were interrupted by that other. And after he was done speaking to then, they suddenly had the strange urge to give the man back his money, go out behind the convention, and end their own lives in a violent and messy manner.
And so they did.
11/29/11
4:37 PM
THE FLIER, OVER THE ATLANTIC OCEAN
The Deck is a bustle of activity. Anti-gravity stations float this way and that as the great machine goes forward to war. Gunners in virtual reality pods rotate in endless circles, waiting for the targets they know are going to be enroute.
In the center of it all, SPYGOD strides, a bottle of Jack Daniels in one hand and a massive, purple spliff of uncertain origin in the other. He never takes the Flier into battle unless he's drunk and stoned, just so he can stay focused.
All these lives depend on him, now. He can't !@#$ this up.
By him are his personal assistants, relaying orders and giving him new information as it's available. He probably doesn't need all their chattering voices, as he can hear that they hear before they tell him what they've heard. But it helps him stay anchored to have that information repeated.
"Yeah, okay, ahead full. Raise shields to maximum along the front and undercarriage, because that's where they'll hit. I want reflex weapons on standby, and long range missiles ready to go, and you tell Agent Decker that if the left battery's slow again I'll !@#$ throw his !@#$ at The Skull when it gets within range. And for !@#$ sake, let's have those interceptors ready. The last time we did a full drill it reminded me of a tea party with two kittens and a stuffed bear."
He looks over at Armatrading and tips her a wink. She pretends to chuckle, but something goes hard and lonely in her eyes the moment he turns back and away.
The gun at her hip is not standard issue. It's a Legion-made incinerator. Their scientists figure it'll reduce SPYGOD to his constituent atoms within .003 of a second, provided she can get a good enough bead on him.
And if this battle starts going badly for the Legion, she's going to pull it out and use it.
* * *
Many miles away, the real Agent Armatrading is doing her best not to get too anxious.
She knows what the monster's orders are, and what his plan is. She knows what's happening, all those miles away, in the mid-Atlantic. She knows that if she doesn't do something soon, the thing will strike, and he's not likely to miss.
But she also knows that if she thinks about it too much, he'll know something is up. He'll realize that the connection between the two of them is almost equal, now. And he might have her minders do something -- or not do something -- that will make what she has planned fall apart before she can even put it into action.
So she breathes, in and out. She controls her heartbeat. She does her best imitation of being in and out of consciousness, and arches her back just so, knowing that her breasts are going to stick out just so when she does.
She holds this for as long as she can, thinking of nothing. Waiting for the right moment to spring into action.
Waiting for the right man to come along.
* * *
"Sir, we have The Skull on visual," someone shouts.
The main screen turns on at the far end of the deck, and there she is, fresh from her pre-battle decloaking. A massive ship, maybe just as large as The Flier, itself. A beetling brow arches over two great cannons, and numerous, smaller guns slide out of what appears to be a lethal grin.
SPYGOD whirls about, hoists the bottle, and chugs it in one cataclysmic gulp.
"I don't want that thing getting away, today," he says, wiping his chin: "Launch the interceptors. Prepare the chaff. Get the phalanxes ready for incoming."
Everyone runs to obey. At some moment, as they do, the Flier shudders as its long-range missiles suddenly take off in a burst of fiery tendrils, and its forward cannons start firing.
The Reflex weapons have kicked in; The Skull must have armed its weapons systems. That means it's only a matter of seconds before they know who got the drop on whom.
The interceptors fly out to engage whatever the enemy has to throw at them. As they do, The Skull's surface boils with fire and flame, and it slows in its flight path, ever so much.
For a moment SPYGOD allows himself hope, but then the thing speeds up again, and starts to return fire.
"Better grab onto one of the bars, Sue," he says, not looking around: "This could get a little bumpy..."
It does.
* * *
Then he's in the room, right on time. Her man. The one who looks at her like she's a bug.
And even through his padded pants she can tell he's hard as a dog in heat.
He comes in like he's just checking on her, but she knows what he's doing. He's looking at her appreciatively. He's all but drooling.
She leans back just a little more. Breathes like she's in heat. Like she's having some sexy dream that can't be articulated in mere words.
He leans in closer, admiringly. He breathes on her breasts. His eyes go unfocused, ecstatic.
She breathes into his face, ever so softly. He breathes back, closing his eyes. For a few brief seconds they share the same oxygen, and it's more than he can handle with his eyes wide open.
The ecstasy has him enthralled, and that's all she ever needed. His mind on fire for her.
And fatally unaware of the small details.
* * *
In the face of compromised shields and heavily damaged infrastructure, the fires are the worst thing. Fire on a flying ship is outright deadly. The air speed fans the flames and makes them every hungrier, all but giving them permission to eat like pigs at a trough.SPYGOD winces as the damage reports come in. 50% of the hull is either destroyed or on fire. The long range batteries are empty or trashed. Most of the forward cannons are obliterated or empty.
And that's with the phalanx systems trying to mow down the enemy's missiles and shells as they bombard The Flier in wave after wave. Pretty soon they'll be out of ammo, too. And when that happens...
At least the interceptors are doing their jobs, keeping the numerous drones The Skull launched from coming too close and adding to their misery. At least they still have their halon systems, quickly quenching the fires as they come across them. But this is going to be a !@#$ of a fight.
"Sir, sensors indicate that The Skull's shielding is weakening," someone tells him.
"How much?" He asks, gazing around as he does. There's too much smoke and fire and horror in this room. He has to focus. Stay focused, !@#$ it.
As he waits for the answer, Agent S prepares to make his move. The holster is unclipped. A hand's on the gun. One quick movement and it'll be over.
It's just the matter of finding that one, right moment when he won't know what's about to happen.
* * *
The chair's arm restraints go around her wrists. They clamp down from either side, and are made to fit snugly, so as to keep her from being able to wriggle her hands back through. But over the past few days, she's gotten skinner. And she's been flexing the muscles in her wrists just so when they raise her up and out to give her a sponge bath.This has made it so that the chair's restraints are not holding her down. She could have gotten her arms free any time in the last few days.
She just needed to have someone in the room with her, with the keys to her leg restraints. Someone she could distract long enough to not notice her slipping her sweaty hands out of the restraints, and then aiming her fingers up at his face.
The attack short-circuits his ecstasy. He coughs and gasps, unable to scream as she clamps his mouth shut with one hand and digs a thumb into his eye with the other.
"You will let me out of this chair, right now, or I will take your eyes," she hisses. He stammers and tries to say something but he can't. Blood pools around his lips; she must have made him bite his tongue.
"Right. Now." She emphasizes. He haltingly obeys, maybe hoping someone can get into the room before she's free. But if there's anyone in that observation room, behind the one-way glass, then he or she hasn't noticed yet.
One leg. Then the other. She leaps up and out of the chair, trailing tubes and electrical leads behind her like some surreal S&M dress.
The agent? Oh, that's right. She's still got his head in her hands.
And, by default, his neck.
One good twist and it's snapped. The effort makes her woozy. The drugs are trying to slide her back down, but she will not let them. She's come too far too fast for this.
Come too !@#$ far and suffered way too !@#$ much.
* * *
65% destroyed or on fire. Cannons are empty. Missiles are gone.
And the last working phalanx unit just fired its last spent uranium rod.
The interceptors are down to a mere handful, fighting tooth and nail with the nearly-endless supply of drones The Skull has to spit out. Some of them are getting through the corridor and taking pot-shots at the Flier. He sent his troops up to the top deck to have at them with backpack lasers and shoulder rockets, but that's just going to be flea bitings at this point.
SPYGOD wishes he'd planned this better. He wishes he'd committed more personnel to the fight. He wishes he had more dirty tricks to play, here, and not just the one, massive one he's got ready to go once the moment is right.
Getting to that moment is going to be !@#$.
* * *
"Sit down, you !@#$," a female voice shouts: "You dumb !@#$, sit down! There's no escape from this place. We're all locked in here together. There's three of us out here and there's just one of you. You're not getting out of her alive. You hear me? You are not getting out of her alive!"
"!@#$ you, too, !@#$," Armatrading whispers, reaching down for the dead man's gun: "Alive wasn't in the plan."
The glass is bullet proof, but she fires a shot at it, anyway, just imagine the stupid !@#$ jumping back. She imagines the fear in her eyes, and the thought is delicious. But she knows that if it's there, it's not of the gun.
It's of what's going to happen next.
* * *
"Sir, the interceptors are getting through the drones!" Someone else shouts over the fire and smoke: "They're hitting it with the disruptor missiles. I think..."
"You think?" He shouts: "I don't pay you to think, Agent! Gimmie a !@#$ number!"
"Fifty percent shields, sir!" she shouts back: "The Skull is down to fifty percent shields. Now forty-five. Now forty... maybe less..."
SPYGOD's heard enough. He dials a number and takes one last, big hit off of what's left of the spliff.
"Sir?' Agent S asks, but gets shushed. She/he takes a step back, ready to assume the proper firing stance. His/her target stands up straight and tall, like a general ready to send forth the last, great hope of the war.
"All Agents, this is SPYGOD," he says, prepare for Condition White. I repeat, Condition White."
Agent S thinks. What does that mean? S/he's never heard that before, but the memory is there, somewhere. Why can't he access his host's mind right now? Why...
Oh no. No no no. He sees her standing there, in the room, free from her bonds. He feels the gun in her hand.
He knows he has no time left.
"You there, Straffer?" SPYGOD asks as Agent S panics behind him: "Oh, good. I wouldn't want to think you were napping or anything. I'm sending you the coordinates now... oh, you've got them already. Well how !@#$ convenient."
Agent S gets out the gun with all the subtlety of a crack junkie in a cocaine factory. The big screen starts to darken.
All over the Flier, windows polarize and portholes slam shut.
"Yes, let's make this official. I am being attacked by an alien spacecraft. I am formally requesting assistance. Code Triple Black."
Agent S prepares to fire.
* * *
Her name is Sue F. Armatrading, and she is not afraid. But she is a little sad.She thinks of her father, who was in the Army and died overseas. She thinks of his strength and his decency. How much she misses him.
She thinks of her mother, who raised her right as an Army widow. She thinks of her determination and her willpower. How much she will miss her.
She thinks of her little sister, the well meaning idiot. She thinks of her big heart and small brain. She'll miss her, too, !@#$ it.
She thinks of Beatrice, once last time. Wishing she could reach and out say sorry for everything that happened. So many regrets, never enough time. She already misses her more than she can say.
And SPYGOD. Oh, the things she'd like to say to him, now. And maybe she can, somehow...
The door starts opening. They've got tasers, now. Probably under orders to keep her alive.
She has no such order, and puts the dead agent's gun in her mouth.
* * *
A few things happen, just then.
The first thing comes from the sky. A massive beam of light, brighter than the Sun, shoots straight down from high above, and strikes The Skull right on top of its cranium.
The second thing comes from within The Skull, as the beam punches through the craft like it wasn't there and begins to boil the Ocean below it. It doesn't so much explode as gently collapse in on itself, sucked into the vortex of the beam that's skewered it.
The third is the mighty cheer that those on board The Flier give up, just then.
The fourth is a horrible scream that almost goes unheard, there on the suddenly-raucous deck, except by SPYGOD, who hears all.
He turns and sees Agent Armatrading coming apart. There's no other word for it. Her head mushrooms up and away, clearly blown apart, but not by the gun she had in her hand. She drops it and falls to her knees, continuing to scream even though she has no head.
Then her body expands and contracts, turning into a black, twitching mass of arms, legs, and faces. Hundreds of them, washing in and out of existence, and making her seem like a large and grotesque millipede made from people, squirming all over itself as it prepares to die.
Guards have already rushed out to surround the thing, but SPYGOD waves them back. This is his business, somehow. And while he doesn't know exactly what's happened, here, he has a very !@#$ bad feeling about it.
At some point, the twitching subsides a little, and then the form begins to solidify. It begins to look more like Agent Armatrading, again, only with her head poking out somewhere it really doesn't belong.
Her eyes open, bloody and unfocused.
"Sir, are you there?" she asks: "Sir, please tell me you're there. Please tell me you're okay."
He kneels down, gently, and takes her hand: "I'm here, Agent. I'm here."
"I can't see you. I can hear you, though. Oh thank god. Thank god."
"Agent... what's happened?"
"It's the Body Thief, sir. I think they call him Agent S. He snatched me off the street, back in October. They've had me captured ever since. I tried to fight him, but he was too strong, at first. But I got him. I !@#$ got him."
"Yeah, you did," he says, watching the body collapse around the head: "Is there anything...?"
"No. I'm dead already, sir. It was all I could do to force myself over here and use his body like he was using mine. But you have to get to Langley, sir. It's a warehouse, over on Jefferson Street. I think it's building 5, and we're in the sub basement. They're probably already cleaning the place. If you hurry... you might... might..."
SPYGOD looks to his guards. One of them has the good sense to start running to make the call. The other almost !@#$ himself.
"Sir, I... I... I wanted you to know that I... I...I..."
"Shhhh," he says, cradling her head: "Don't talk. Just rest, Agent. You did good. You did real good."
"Yeah, I did, huh?" she says, eyes melting in what remains of the skull: "I did. I did. I did. I did..."
He stands up and watches the head melt into the floor, repeating her last thought over and over until there's no mouth to communicate it with.
The fires are out. Straffer is shouting over the communicator to ask if they're okay. Somewhere, a jet's being prepared to take a strike team to Langley. These things wash over him like rain, and do not concern him for now.
"Her name was Sue F. Armatrading," he announces to someone nearby: "She was an Agent. And she was not afraid."
The rest is dust.
(SPYGOD is listening to Plainsong (The Cure) and laying off everything for a while.)
Monday, November 28, 2011
11/21-24/11 - Going Deeper Underground - pt. 2
Yes, this has been a long, strange trip to get here, fellow Agents. Consider that payback for messing with my slides.
The bottom line, if you'll excuse the phrase, is that we are now in the most interesting place, in terms of our discussion. We can't have a Hollow Earth to play in because physics and geology, darn them to heck, take our fantasies and turn them into smooshed dinosaurs.
But now we're in the Lithosphere. This is where we can play. And this is where things get really weird.
Now we are at the crust. That's between five and twenty-five miles of rock and soil that, while you still have to be concerned about heat, pressure, and the occasional pocket of lava bubbling up, are the chief playgrounds for people like myself. Give me a well-tuned tunneling device, a good map, and a watch, and I can take you places you'd never think could possibly exist.
My predecessor, the original Underman, made a number of maps of his explorations of the Crust before he retired. I should point out that these maps were, in turn, based on the life's work of numerous other Lithonauts, going all the way back to the 19th century. Only they had to rely on finding large cave systems, and digging their way down with as much machinery or manpower as they could throw at the problem.
Underman, and those like him, had technology on their side. The kind of technology that can create a nuclear-powered tank with an extremely large diamond-tipped drill, capable of slowly boring a permanent tunnel, or quickly passing on through and throwing the debris back behind the vehicle so as to not create geological instability.
...
Okay, sorry. Nostalgia. You know how that is.
Though I gotta admit, it'll kill you if you're not careful.
3:26 AM
THE HEPTAGON
They called him Teleman.
Note the "they." He preferred to be called something a lot less descriptive, or at least darkly humorous. But "they" were the ones who wrote his paychecks, so he put up with the decidedly 80's name, and tried not to think of New Wave, parachute jackets, and MTV.
Luckily for him, "they" kept him so busy that he didn't have much time to contemplate his unfortunate, Agency-handed handle. The ability to teleport yourself anywhere in the world, so long as you knew exactly where you were going, made you an extremely valuable entity.
(The only drawback being that he couldn't take anything with him, or take anything back, unless it was completely inside him when he did it. But a nude man can still do a lot of damage, even without the knife in his mouth, or the datastick/camera in a surgically-created pouch in his navel. Some of the martial arts they'd trained him in were so secret they didn't even have names.)
And while "they" might have had him squarely by the !@#$ (youthful indiscretions -- you know how that goes) his check-writers made !@#$ sure he got to handle some of the value his services provided to them. It was their way of ensuring he stayed their valuable asset, and didn't go moonlighting, or changing sides.
So when "they" offered him a cool million for what was, on the surface, a pretty easy-sounding job, Teleman wondered what the catch was. Teleport into a specific cell, kill a prisoner before anyone realized he was there, and then teleport back out again? He'd done that dozens of times, using the Dim Mak (or its modern day, Krav Maga equivalent) to ensure that even the best pathologists would believe that the target had just died from a heart attack.
Then they told him he'd be teleporting into the Heptagon, and killing a target right under SPYGOD's nose.
To his credit, Teleman did not decline the job. But he took an extra half-second to "think it over," which consisted of him thinking the word "!@#$" several times, and wish his youthful indiscretions weren't so !@#$ indiscreet.
They got him everything he needed. A layout of the place, complete with coordinates so he could focus on where he needed to go. A printout of a camera image of the cell, itself, so he could fully materialize himself within it. All physical data on the target, so he could strike him with precision and kill him instantly, rather than having to inspect his body for the right spots to hit him.
(That's the problem with the Dim Mak; there's no "one size fits all" death touch. You have to study your opponent's chi in order to disrupt it that savagely, or else all you're doing is making an energy hiccup in the body. And all those do is trigger the "fight" side of the fight or flight reflex, which makes for an even messier conflict.)
At 3:21 AM, on Monday, November 21st, Teleman declared himself ready. He ran through the plan one more time in his mind, closed his eyes, and then began to concentrate.
At 3:23 his employers noticed that he was starting to turn translucent, then transparent. That was a good sign. he was almost there.
At 3:26 he vanished. There was a sound like a marker on glass, and then he was gone. The clock was running, and they expected him back in thirty seconds or less.
(It never took him more than a few seconds' concentration to come back. Getting there was the hard part, but coming back was a literal snap.)
At ten seconds in, they started to worry. At twenty someone actually asked out loud if something had gone wrong. At thirty, they all did.
Forty. Fifty. A full minute went by.
Then two. Then three.
At 3:31 AM, the Agent in charge of the operation called his superior and told him it was a wash. He recommended using the bomb that Teleman didn't know was wrapped around his C3 (put in at the same time as his navel pouch). His superior agreed
The operatives all left Teleman's apartment and locked the door behind them, knowing they'd never come back.
Anyway, the plates. I'm sure you've heard of Plate Tectonics. That is not a progressive rock band...
Um, sorry. Had to try.
Let's try that again. Plate Tectonics has to do with why we have earthquakes and volcanoes in the first place. It's why continents shift over time, and why it looks like South America and Africa could fit into each other like puzzle pieces.
That's because, once upon a time, they did.
The Crust lies atop the Mantle, like we said, and that's the Lithosphere. What I didn't say, yet, because I got all weepy-eyed for days long past, is that the Lithosphere is not a solid object. It's broken up into several different plates, which move, ever so slowly, like conveyor belts or rotating gears. In some places the plates slide past each other, in others they go up and push away from each other, and in others one gets pulled under the other, and new parts get pulled up from the other side of the plate.
It's what happens inside these plates that is so amazingly cool. It's like of like Earth having 15 true continents, all below the surface. And each one having its own unique biosphere and history, depending on whether it's mostly underwater or above it.
Oh yes, that's got your attention, now.
11/22/11
4:00 PM
(LOCATION UNKNOWN)
The Big Man is not in a good mood, today. Not at all.
First, he has it confirmed by an unwitting source inside the Secret Service. They did, indeed, find the Agent he had programmed. They didn't turn her, like SPYGOD claimed. They just tackled her, wrapped her up so she couldn't harm herself, and took her away in a COMPANY car.
No one knew where she was, now, but chances were good SPYGOD was using the N-Machine on her. If he did, he'd find out where Biggs encountered her, and how he contacted her, and how often.
None of these things are good.
Second, he finds out that a number of his retired operatives have vanished off the grid over the last 12 hours. They're disappearing from their homes in the middle of the night, like Soviet dissidents in a bad propaganda movie. Some have actually been snatched off the street like little kids baited by lollipop-wielding strangers.
Then he is told, in no uncertain terms, that the Director of the CIA does not care to answer his calls, anymore. At first he thought the man might just be really busy, what with all the problems he's having right now. But the last time he called, and tried to mention -- however obliquely -- that the Director might really want to communicate with him, the man's secretary actually told him to lose the number.
"Lose the number." Like he was a jilted lover who wasn't getting the point.
And now this: a graphic picture sent to one of his many mail drops. It's of a naked man who's been fused half-in, half-out of a prisoner's restraint chair. His head is gone -- exploded from the neck up, from the looks of things -- and there's a sign around his neck.
The sign reads:
And while The Big Man had no idea that the Agency was going to use Teleman to take care of their mutual problem, the fact that SPYGOD apparently thinks it was Biggs who sent him, rather than the CIA, does not make the loss of this valuable operative any less painful.
Hargreaves is keeping well away from him, today. It's probably for the best. Right now Biggs is so angry he'd probably tell the man to stud his hand with razors, reach around, and fist!@#$ himself to death on the front veranda, just so he could finally think over the white hot anger coursing through his mind.
This is war, then. It's time to stop pretending.
He calls his son in Corsica. Ever the good boy, Xerxes answers on the second ring.
"It's time, my boy," Biggs says: "Get the team together, and activate The Skull. We're going to destroy The Flier with SPYGOD on board."
Xerxes giggles. It's just his way of saying "yes" to his beloved father. Then he hangs up and goes back to whatever fresh new depravity he was exploring today.
"King takes Queen," The Big Man muses, feeling the anger subside. For now.
Let's talk about what's right under our feet... well, under the Flier, anyway. The North American Plate. It's North America, all the way down to Central America, over to Greenland, and the Easternmost part of Russia and the Northernmost islands of Japan, along with the North Pole.
It is home to the race of small but powerful beings we call the Subterraneans. These stooped, hairy people live in underground cities lit by luminescent fungi, connected to one another by well-built tunnels that are much older than they are.
They have no real knowledge as to who or what built those tunnels. But given how large the blocks they're made of are, they must have either been human sized, or else had access to powerful machinery. Maybe both.
The cities are definitely theirs, though. They're concentric streets of simple buildings that look like igloos made of rocks, with the bricks stuck together with that weakly-glowing fungi. They can build larger structures, but prefer not to, mostly because they don't have the time or energy. They're always out looking for food, which is mostly nasty cave spiders and other squirmy things.
Oddly enough, they won't eat the fungi, even if they're starving. It's sacred to them.
Subterraneans are mammalian, but are not descended from the common ancestor that gave rise to humans and apes. We're not sure what they may have come up from. They remind me of what happens when an inbred farmer boy gets in bed with a badger, but that's not what their myth cycles tell us.
Not that we've had a lot of luck getting the information out of them. These guys are about as vicious as badgers in a trap, and don't play well with others. You'll note I didn't use the term "Empire" to talk about their massive complex of cities? That's because the cities are all technically at war with one another, and if it wasn't for the fact that the tunnels run for hundreds of miles between the cities, and food sources are scarce between them, I think they would have wiped each other out ages ago.
Not that you should go buy a gun and point it at your gopher holes out of fear of what might come up them. They stay well underground. On those rare occasions when they get too close to the surface they rarely stray far from the caverns they come up in, and then they only come out at night. They can't handle any light source more powerful than a candle without being blinded, either temporarily or permanently, and they're scared to death of us.
We smell terrible, apparently.
11/23/11
6:02 AM
SOMEWHERE IN LANGLEY, VA
It's shower time for Agent Armatrading.
In this case, "shower" means two of her minders put restraints on her hands and feet, and then pull her up and out of her chair so another one can give her a sponge bath. They're careful not to rip out the IV picks, or disturb the tubes and sensors, but other than that they're not very gentle about it -- especially when they get down lower and have to deal with her on a more intimate level.
(Her period started two days ago, and they didn't think to get tampons when they abducted her. The fact this makes some of them uncomfortable gives her a little twinge of joy when she mentally comes up for air.)
Of course, not all of them are weirded out by the fact that a naked woman strapped to a chair is going to get messy. One of them is just enraptured by her otherwise-embarrassing biology.
It's one of the men. She notes his fresh face and glittering eyes as he holds her up and down. She recognizes that look: it's like he thinks she's a bug, and he wants to put a pin through her stomach and mount her for framing.
Oh yes. He's the one. He's the weak link, here.
And while he doesn't know it, yet, he's going to get her out of this situation...
But she turns that thought off, very quickly. She can feel Agent S rooting around in her brains, again, looking for information that's going to help him plan the next step in trying to take SPYGOD down.
(It's bad enough he used her skills to frame that poor Agent, and then make him think SPYGOD was going to kill him for using his COMPANY card inappropriately. He might have, of course, but not like that.)
As he's in her, she's in him. She can feel the endgame coming. If he can't find anything actionable or nasty that he can use against SPYGOD, he'll probably have to find some way to kill him, and make it look like she did it.
That way he gets rid of him and her in one move.
The thought almost makes her react to the point where she loses control, and gives away some of her thoughts on getting out of this mess. But at the last moment she gets control, again, and finds a way to wrap herself into a pleasant memory loop --
Beatrice kisses her, there by the wharf. Someone laughs at the dykes. They don't care. Beatrice kisses her, there by the wharf. Someone laughs at the dykes. They don't care. Beatrice kisses her, there by the wharf. Someone laughs at the dykes. They don't care.
-- and the monster who's stolen her body just passes on through, apparently uncaring that she's remembering her last girlfriend's last sweet gesture before things went all so !@#$ wrong between them.
Had it really been that bad? Did Sue really have to have said those things? Did they really need to have broken up, talked behind each others' backs, and x-ed off so many friends for taking no side, or the wrong one?
She doesn't know. If none of this had happened, she'd have said yes, and continued to badmouth the dumb !@#$ that did her wrong.
But here and now, looking at what might be the last days of her life, she wishes there was some way she could reach out, across the distance, take Beatrice's hand in hers, and tell her she's sorry.
And thank her for that one day, there by the wharf.
The discovery of the Subterraneans can be credited to one Herbert P. Bloomdale, back in 1927. He's the guy that started digging for gold up in Saskatchewan, and found a series of caverns that spiraled all the way down to just next to one of these massive tunnels. He came back up to the surface missing a leg, and scared to death for obvious reasons, but stories of his find got out.
It's only because the Canadians are capable of keeping certain things very well contained that most of you have never even heard of these folks before. But there was a man named Iben Colson, back in the 30's, who cobbled together a means to get down to the tunnels. He figured he could go down there and wow them with some technology, and get himself his very own empire below the Earth.
It worked, for a while, and most of what we know about the Subterraneans' disjointed history, myth cycles, and way of life is courtesy of Mr. Colson. My predecessor met him on a few occasions, back in the day, when Colson was a stammering wreck of a man who'd been underground so long his eyes had become totally useless, and he was finding his way around by smell.
Where did they come from? Who built the tunnels? What happened to their society? Why did their writing style look almost exactly like cuneiform? He had no idea.
But he did say one thing: "The answers lie below." Apparently that's one of their many pithy sayings.
Another one is "outsiders are food," which is why my predecessor didn't go back for more information after the last time he came into town. It turned out that Colson had since died, and the Subterraneans didn't care to have another "uplander" coming down and telling them stories in exchange for their lives, food, and the occasional sexual experiment, which was all his "empire" really amounted to.
You like that story? I got more. A lot more.
The mysteries below Ayers Rock, and the nasty, black things that live down there. The Lost Kingdoms of India and Arabia. The ancient horror under the Nazca Plate. The crystal palaces of South America...
But, before we go anywhere with those, we have to talk about the Pacific Plate, and what GORGON's disappearance into the Subduction Zone means to us.
11/24/11
5:31 PM
THE B.U.I.L.D.I.N.G.
"... And you're absolutely sure of this?" Director Straffer is asking, his telepresence walking through a table like it isn't there.
"Well, the !@#$ at the Agency were sure of it," SPYGOD says, downing another beer in two gulps: "They traded it for something of vital importance, at the time. Now, of course, it could be a fake. But..."
"But it looks like the real thing," the ghost of a man says, looking at the schematics on the table: "And it makes a lot of sense. I've often wondered about how they could have gotten the capabilities to pull off some of the things they've done with that, over the years."
"And suddenly it makes a lot of sense. They meet up at Outland with a few would-be alien conquerors, make a really good deal, and suddenly they have their very own, genuine, mother!@#$ Ybari dreadnought... minus the bias drive."
"They wouldn't need it if they're just going to drive around the planet with it. But the drive doesn't just handle the motive units. It also handles the power supply."
"Which means that they can't have all systems running at once, which is probably how we beat that !@#$ thing back so many times in the past."
Straffer considers this, and looks at the schematics again.
"So if we took out the nuclear engines, and some of the more terrestrial weaponry and propulsion, I'd say this is more than 75% alien technology."
"What's the cut-off for DAMOCLES?"
"Well below that," the Director says: "Alright, we've got a deal. But I want you to know this isn't going to be a regular thing. The less we have to do things like this, the better. I get enough flak from the budget people as it is."
"I think we won't need something like this again. But thank you. I appreciate it."
"Is that an actual thank you I just heard? My telepresence must be malfunctioning."
SPYGOD smiles: "The real thank you comes next time you're downside. The beer's on me."
"Well, I don't drink," he says, smiling: "But you can get me a table at Per Se."
"What? That place that charges out the !@#$ for little bites of super-gourmet rocket food?"
"That's the one. I've been dying to get in there."
"Okay, then. Table for one?"
"I was hoping you'd join me, actually."
SPYGOD grumbles: "Well, okay. But just for you. And I am not !@#$ dressing up."
"I wouldn't dream of insisting. Speaking of which, it's Thanksgiving. Shouldn't you be breaking bread with the troops?"
"Yeah, well. Business first. But yes, I do have about two dozen turkeys deep-frying on board The Flier that I should probably get back to. Hopefully no one's caught anything on fire, yet."
"Paris is burning, my friend," Straffer tips him a wink and vanishes, and for a weird moment SPYGOD has no idea if he was just hit on, or not.
But yes. It's Thanksgiving, and today he can be thankful for a number of things, and people. It's been a weird year since last May, and as much tragedy and bad times as he's brought down on himself, there's also a lot of wonderful things going on.
And as he straps on his rocket pack, and makes ready to head back up to The Flier, he's grateful for so much. He almost cracks a big smile in spite of it all, and decides he's going to do something really nice for his overworked, overthreatened personal assistants come Christmastime.
Especially Sue. !@#$ is she turning out to be a crack Agent.
You see, the North American plate isn't the only one that has those old tunnels running through them. The African Plate does as well. And so does the Pacific Plate. It's just that, since the crust there is mostly underwater, so are the tunnels, since they run fairly close to the surface in places.
And that's very bad news. When GORGON vanished off our radar, all those months ago, they most likely went into one of those tunnels. That would indicate that they know about them. That would also mean that they may have been exploiting them for quite some time, now, and may have all kinds of bases and facilities built into the tunnels, themselves.
Suddenly we have a much smaller area to look through. But at the same time, we have a more dangerous brief. There's things in those tunnels that have been festering and breeding down there in seclusion for millions of years.
Yes, millions. That's how old those tunnels actually are.
Did I mention that, earlier? No? Oh, sorry. Yeah, something made a network of tunnels in the crust of the Earth millions of years ago, and whatever it was, it was not us. And we have no idea who or what it was.
Except that there may be a story that explains it, sort of.
Has anyone ever heard of Richard Sharpe Shaver? Oh, okay, one of you had excellent taste in reading while growing up. Okay, two of you? Anyone else?
Well, Shaver was a nutcase. He claimed that he was receiving mental transmissions from an underground civilization that was based on rape and torture. High science, low regard for life, you know the type. Once the editor of Amazing Stories got hold of his rambling letters and fictionalized them, they made for great sci-fi tales, at least until the readers decided they'd had enough and made the editor stop carrying them.
But one of the things he spoke about has a certain weight to it.
Some of you may have heard of Deros. The term's a conjunction of "Detrimental Robots." Something like the rape machines from that one early Gary Numan record. They were biological creatures that had become so degenerate that they killed, maimed, and tortured with all the unfeeling efficiency of a robot, hence the name.
Well, the name "Deros" was attached to something else, later on. Some of the older hands here may have heard of the Advanced Supersonic Nazi Hell Creatures from Below the Hollow Earth? No, that's not a progressive rock band, either, and it sure as heck wasn't a Syfy movie, either.
That was the name given to certain foo fighters, back during World War II. There's no real good pictures of them, due to the fact that they moved so freaking fast, and didn't leave a lot of witnesses, but we have a few descriptions. I think the most evocative one was "flying, fire-breathing, dragon train."
These things attacked our planes and ships in the South Pacific. They appeared from nowhere and then vanished just as fast. And whenever they left the scene of an ambush, they were seen to dive into the Ocean, and sometimes even crash-land on islands. But no wreckage was ever found.
The suspicion was that the Japanese had gotten their hands on some sort of advanced technology, and were using it against us. The fact that we didn't have those things being thrown in our faces every day led Military Intelligence to believe that they didn't invent them, themselves, but rather found them, or bought their services, somehow.
But then the war was over, and during the Occupation we found out that the Japanese had absolutely nothing to do with it. They were as astounded by these things as we were, except that they didn't attack them, for some weird reason. So they assumed the Nazis must have been trying out a secret weapon and not telling them about it, much in the same way the Japanese didn't always tell them about theirs.
A little more digging, and it turns out that, amongst some of the islands in the Micronesian chain, Dero is a known entity. It's what the islanders call a long, swift demon of the sea that launches out of the water, attacks anything that trespasses into its domain, and then disappears. They don't show up all that often, but when they do it's never a good thing.
This leads a few Nazi UFO conspiracy theorists to make a loose connection, and before you know it the two stories are conflated. Suddenly we've got Nazis riding these monsters they found below the hollow earth while turning Antarctica into a submarine base. Not completely off base, in some respects, but there's nothing below Antarctica that synchs up with the Dero.
But you can't help but wonder. All those tunnels suggest a home for something long and swift. And
the fact that we haven't come across any giant, metal skeletons on the Ocean floor might suggest that they don't come from our ocean, but maybe something lower down.
Is that what the tunnels were made for? If so, who made them? The Deros, or whatever they served, or served them?
And if they're down there, along with GORGON, we could be looking at quite a wild op.
That's all I've got for you, now. The next time we meet we'll be talking about how we're going to go about dealing with the situation. We've got some ideas, of course, but it's going to be a tough one.
But you know, one thing I've learned in my relatively short time, here at The COMPANY? Tough isn't just part of the job description. It's when we're at our best. I think this toughness is going to make us even tougher, and...
...
Um, okay. Yes sir. I'm shutting up now.
Thank you all for listening. Good night.
(SPYGOD is listening to Fascination Street (The Cure) and having an Oskar Blues G'Knight)
The bottom line, if you'll excuse the phrase, is that we are now in the most interesting place, in terms of our discussion. We can't have a Hollow Earth to play in because physics and geology, darn them to heck, take our fantasies and turn them into smooshed dinosaurs.
But now we're in the Lithosphere. This is where we can play. And this is where things get really weird.
Now we are at the crust. That's between five and twenty-five miles of rock and soil that, while you still have to be concerned about heat, pressure, and the occasional pocket of lava bubbling up, are the chief playgrounds for people like myself. Give me a well-tuned tunneling device, a good map, and a watch, and I can take you places you'd never think could possibly exist.
My predecessor, the original Underman, made a number of maps of his explorations of the Crust before he retired. I should point out that these maps were, in turn, based on the life's work of numerous other Lithonauts, going all the way back to the 19th century. Only they had to rely on finding large cave systems, and digging their way down with as much machinery or manpower as they could throw at the problem.
Underman, and those like him, had technology on their side. The kind of technology that can create a nuclear-powered tank with an extremely large diamond-tipped drill, capable of slowly boring a permanent tunnel, or quickly passing on through and throwing the debris back behind the vehicle so as to not create geological instability.
...
Okay, sorry. Nostalgia. You know how that is.
Though I gotta admit, it'll kill you if you're not careful.
* * *
11/21/113:26 AM
THE HEPTAGON
They called him Teleman.
Note the "they." He preferred to be called something a lot less descriptive, or at least darkly humorous. But "they" were the ones who wrote his paychecks, so he put up with the decidedly 80's name, and tried not to think of New Wave, parachute jackets, and MTV.
Luckily for him, "they" kept him so busy that he didn't have much time to contemplate his unfortunate, Agency-handed handle. The ability to teleport yourself anywhere in the world, so long as you knew exactly where you were going, made you an extremely valuable entity.
(The only drawback being that he couldn't take anything with him, or take anything back, unless it was completely inside him when he did it. But a nude man can still do a lot of damage, even without the knife in his mouth, or the datastick/camera in a surgically-created pouch in his navel. Some of the martial arts they'd trained him in were so secret they didn't even have names.)
And while "they" might have had him squarely by the !@#$ (youthful indiscretions -- you know how that goes) his check-writers made !@#$ sure he got to handle some of the value his services provided to them. It was their way of ensuring he stayed their valuable asset, and didn't go moonlighting, or changing sides.
So when "they" offered him a cool million for what was, on the surface, a pretty easy-sounding job, Teleman wondered what the catch was. Teleport into a specific cell, kill a prisoner before anyone realized he was there, and then teleport back out again? He'd done that dozens of times, using the Dim Mak (or its modern day, Krav Maga equivalent) to ensure that even the best pathologists would believe that the target had just died from a heart attack.
Then they told him he'd be teleporting into the Heptagon, and killing a target right under SPYGOD's nose.
To his credit, Teleman did not decline the job. But he took an extra half-second to "think it over," which consisted of him thinking the word "!@#$" several times, and wish his youthful indiscretions weren't so !@#$ indiscreet.
They got him everything he needed. A layout of the place, complete with coordinates so he could focus on where he needed to go. A printout of a camera image of the cell, itself, so he could fully materialize himself within it. All physical data on the target, so he could strike him with precision and kill him instantly, rather than having to inspect his body for the right spots to hit him.
(That's the problem with the Dim Mak; there's no "one size fits all" death touch. You have to study your opponent's chi in order to disrupt it that savagely, or else all you're doing is making an energy hiccup in the body. And all those do is trigger the "fight" side of the fight or flight reflex, which makes for an even messier conflict.)
At 3:21 AM, on Monday, November 21st, Teleman declared himself ready. He ran through the plan one more time in his mind, closed his eyes, and then began to concentrate.
At 3:23 his employers noticed that he was starting to turn translucent, then transparent. That was a good sign. he was almost there.
At 3:26 he vanished. There was a sound like a marker on glass, and then he was gone. The clock was running, and they expected him back in thirty seconds or less.
(It never took him more than a few seconds' concentration to come back. Getting there was the hard part, but coming back was a literal snap.)
At ten seconds in, they started to worry. At twenty someone actually asked out loud if something had gone wrong. At thirty, they all did.
Forty. Fifty. A full minute went by.
Then two. Then three.
At 3:31 AM, the Agent in charge of the operation called his superior and told him it was a wash. He recommended using the bomb that Teleman didn't know was wrapped around his C3 (put in at the same time as his navel pouch). His superior agreed
The operatives all left Teleman's apartment and locked the door behind them, knowing they'd never come back.
* * *
Anyway, the plates. I'm sure you've heard of Plate Tectonics. That is not a progressive rock band...
Um, sorry. Had to try.
Let's try that again. Plate Tectonics has to do with why we have earthquakes and volcanoes in the first place. It's why continents shift over time, and why it looks like South America and Africa could fit into each other like puzzle pieces.
That's because, once upon a time, they did.
The Crust lies atop the Mantle, like we said, and that's the Lithosphere. What I didn't say, yet, because I got all weepy-eyed for days long past, is that the Lithosphere is not a solid object. It's broken up into several different plates, which move, ever so slowly, like conveyor belts or rotating gears. In some places the plates slide past each other, in others they go up and push away from each other, and in others one gets pulled under the other, and new parts get pulled up from the other side of the plate.
It's what happens inside these plates that is so amazingly cool. It's like of like Earth having 15 true continents, all below the surface. And each one having its own unique biosphere and history, depending on whether it's mostly underwater or above it.
Oh yes, that's got your attention, now.
11/22/11
4:00 PM
(LOCATION UNKNOWN)
The Big Man is not in a good mood, today. Not at all.
First, he has it confirmed by an unwitting source inside the Secret Service. They did, indeed, find the Agent he had programmed. They didn't turn her, like SPYGOD claimed. They just tackled her, wrapped her up so she couldn't harm herself, and took her away in a COMPANY car.
No one knew where she was, now, but chances were good SPYGOD was using the N-Machine on her. If he did, he'd find out where Biggs encountered her, and how he contacted her, and how often.
None of these things are good.
Second, he finds out that a number of his retired operatives have vanished off the grid over the last 12 hours. They're disappearing from their homes in the middle of the night, like Soviet dissidents in a bad propaganda movie. Some have actually been snatched off the street like little kids baited by lollipop-wielding strangers.
Then he is told, in no uncertain terms, that the Director of the CIA does not care to answer his calls, anymore. At first he thought the man might just be really busy, what with all the problems he's having right now. But the last time he called, and tried to mention -- however obliquely -- that the Director might really want to communicate with him, the man's secretary actually told him to lose the number.
"Lose the number." Like he was a jilted lover who wasn't getting the point.
And now this: a graphic picture sent to one of his many mail drops. It's of a naked man who's been fused half-in, half-out of a prisoner's restraint chair. His head is gone -- exploded from the neck up, from the looks of things -- and there's a sign around his neck.
The sign reads:
Thought I'd Redecorate the Cell.
Your Move, !@#$face.
- SPYGOD -
And while The Big Man had no idea that the Agency was going to use Teleman to take care of their mutual problem, the fact that SPYGOD apparently thinks it was Biggs who sent him, rather than the CIA, does not make the loss of this valuable operative any less painful.
Hargreaves is keeping well away from him, today. It's probably for the best. Right now Biggs is so angry he'd probably tell the man to stud his hand with razors, reach around, and fist!@#$ himself to death on the front veranda, just so he could finally think over the white hot anger coursing through his mind.
This is war, then. It's time to stop pretending.
He calls his son in Corsica. Ever the good boy, Xerxes answers on the second ring.
"It's time, my boy," Biggs says: "Get the team together, and activate The Skull. We're going to destroy The Flier with SPYGOD on board."
Xerxes giggles. It's just his way of saying "yes" to his beloved father. Then he hangs up and goes back to whatever fresh new depravity he was exploring today.
"King takes Queen," The Big Man muses, feeling the anger subside. For now.
* * *
Let's talk about what's right under our feet... well, under the Flier, anyway. The North American Plate. It's North America, all the way down to Central America, over to Greenland, and the Easternmost part of Russia and the Northernmost islands of Japan, along with the North Pole.
It is home to the race of small but powerful beings we call the Subterraneans. These stooped, hairy people live in underground cities lit by luminescent fungi, connected to one another by well-built tunnels that are much older than they are.
They have no real knowledge as to who or what built those tunnels. But given how large the blocks they're made of are, they must have either been human sized, or else had access to powerful machinery. Maybe both.
The cities are definitely theirs, though. They're concentric streets of simple buildings that look like igloos made of rocks, with the bricks stuck together with that weakly-glowing fungi. They can build larger structures, but prefer not to, mostly because they don't have the time or energy. They're always out looking for food, which is mostly nasty cave spiders and other squirmy things.
Oddly enough, they won't eat the fungi, even if they're starving. It's sacred to them.
Subterraneans are mammalian, but are not descended from the common ancestor that gave rise to humans and apes. We're not sure what they may have come up from. They remind me of what happens when an inbred farmer boy gets in bed with a badger, but that's not what their myth cycles tell us.
Not that we've had a lot of luck getting the information out of them. These guys are about as vicious as badgers in a trap, and don't play well with others. You'll note I didn't use the term "Empire" to talk about their massive complex of cities? That's because the cities are all technically at war with one another, and if it wasn't for the fact that the tunnels run for hundreds of miles between the cities, and food sources are scarce between them, I think they would have wiped each other out ages ago.
Not that you should go buy a gun and point it at your gopher holes out of fear of what might come up them. They stay well underground. On those rare occasions when they get too close to the surface they rarely stray far from the caverns they come up in, and then they only come out at night. They can't handle any light source more powerful than a candle without being blinded, either temporarily or permanently, and they're scared to death of us.
We smell terrible, apparently.
* * *
11/23/11
6:02 AM
SOMEWHERE IN LANGLEY, VA
It's shower time for Agent Armatrading.
In this case, "shower" means two of her minders put restraints on her hands and feet, and then pull her up and out of her chair so another one can give her a sponge bath. They're careful not to rip out the IV picks, or disturb the tubes and sensors, but other than that they're not very gentle about it -- especially when they get down lower and have to deal with her on a more intimate level.
(Her period started two days ago, and they didn't think to get tampons when they abducted her. The fact this makes some of them uncomfortable gives her a little twinge of joy when she mentally comes up for air.)
Of course, not all of them are weirded out by the fact that a naked woman strapped to a chair is going to get messy. One of them is just enraptured by her otherwise-embarrassing biology.
It's one of the men. She notes his fresh face and glittering eyes as he holds her up and down. She recognizes that look: it's like he thinks she's a bug, and he wants to put a pin through her stomach and mount her for framing.
Oh yes. He's the one. He's the weak link, here.
And while he doesn't know it, yet, he's going to get her out of this situation...
But she turns that thought off, very quickly. She can feel Agent S rooting around in her brains, again, looking for information that's going to help him plan the next step in trying to take SPYGOD down.
(It's bad enough he used her skills to frame that poor Agent, and then make him think SPYGOD was going to kill him for using his COMPANY card inappropriately. He might have, of course, but not like that.)
As he's in her, she's in him. She can feel the endgame coming. If he can't find anything actionable or nasty that he can use against SPYGOD, he'll probably have to find some way to kill him, and make it look like she did it.
That way he gets rid of him and her in one move.
The thought almost makes her react to the point where she loses control, and gives away some of her thoughts on getting out of this mess. But at the last moment she gets control, again, and finds a way to wrap herself into a pleasant memory loop --
Beatrice kisses her, there by the wharf. Someone laughs at the dykes. They don't care. Beatrice kisses her, there by the wharf. Someone laughs at the dykes. They don't care. Beatrice kisses her, there by the wharf. Someone laughs at the dykes. They don't care.
-- and the monster who's stolen her body just passes on through, apparently uncaring that she's remembering her last girlfriend's last sweet gesture before things went all so !@#$ wrong between them.
Had it really been that bad? Did Sue really have to have said those things? Did they really need to have broken up, talked behind each others' backs, and x-ed off so many friends for taking no side, or the wrong one?
She doesn't know. If none of this had happened, she'd have said yes, and continued to badmouth the dumb !@#$ that did her wrong.
But here and now, looking at what might be the last days of her life, she wishes there was some way she could reach out, across the distance, take Beatrice's hand in hers, and tell her she's sorry.
And thank her for that one day, there by the wharf.
* * *
The discovery of the Subterraneans can be credited to one Herbert P. Bloomdale, back in 1927. He's the guy that started digging for gold up in Saskatchewan, and found a series of caverns that spiraled all the way down to just next to one of these massive tunnels. He came back up to the surface missing a leg, and scared to death for obvious reasons, but stories of his find got out.
It's only because the Canadians are capable of keeping certain things very well contained that most of you have never even heard of these folks before. But there was a man named Iben Colson, back in the 30's, who cobbled together a means to get down to the tunnels. He figured he could go down there and wow them with some technology, and get himself his very own empire below the Earth.
It worked, for a while, and most of what we know about the Subterraneans' disjointed history, myth cycles, and way of life is courtesy of Mr. Colson. My predecessor met him on a few occasions, back in the day, when Colson was a stammering wreck of a man who'd been underground so long his eyes had become totally useless, and he was finding his way around by smell.
Where did they come from? Who built the tunnels? What happened to their society? Why did their writing style look almost exactly like cuneiform? He had no idea.
But he did say one thing: "The answers lie below." Apparently that's one of their many pithy sayings.
Another one is "outsiders are food," which is why my predecessor didn't go back for more information after the last time he came into town. It turned out that Colson had since died, and the Subterraneans didn't care to have another "uplander" coming down and telling them stories in exchange for their lives, food, and the occasional sexual experiment, which was all his "empire" really amounted to.
You like that story? I got more. A lot more.
The mysteries below Ayers Rock, and the nasty, black things that live down there. The Lost Kingdoms of India and Arabia. The ancient horror under the Nazca Plate. The crystal palaces of South America...
But, before we go anywhere with those, we have to talk about the Pacific Plate, and what GORGON's disappearance into the Subduction Zone means to us.
* * *
11/24/11
5:31 PM
THE B.U.I.L.D.I.N.G.
"... And you're absolutely sure of this?" Director Straffer is asking, his telepresence walking through a table like it isn't there.
"Well, the !@#$ at the Agency were sure of it," SPYGOD says, downing another beer in two gulps: "They traded it for something of vital importance, at the time. Now, of course, it could be a fake. But..."
"But it looks like the real thing," the ghost of a man says, looking at the schematics on the table: "And it makes a lot of sense. I've often wondered about how they could have gotten the capabilities to pull off some of the things they've done with that, over the years."
"And suddenly it makes a lot of sense. They meet up at Outland with a few would-be alien conquerors, make a really good deal, and suddenly they have their very own, genuine, mother!@#$ Ybari dreadnought... minus the bias drive."
"They wouldn't need it if they're just going to drive around the planet with it. But the drive doesn't just handle the motive units. It also handles the power supply."
"Which means that they can't have all systems running at once, which is probably how we beat that !@#$ thing back so many times in the past."
Straffer considers this, and looks at the schematics again.
"So if we took out the nuclear engines, and some of the more terrestrial weaponry and propulsion, I'd say this is more than 75% alien technology."
"What's the cut-off for DAMOCLES?"
"Well below that," the Director says: "Alright, we've got a deal. But I want you to know this isn't going to be a regular thing. The less we have to do things like this, the better. I get enough flak from the budget people as it is."
"I think we won't need something like this again. But thank you. I appreciate it."
"Is that an actual thank you I just heard? My telepresence must be malfunctioning."
SPYGOD smiles: "The real thank you comes next time you're downside. The beer's on me."
"Well, I don't drink," he says, smiling: "But you can get me a table at Per Se."
"What? That place that charges out the !@#$ for little bites of super-gourmet rocket food?"
"That's the one. I've been dying to get in there."
"Okay, then. Table for one?"
"I was hoping you'd join me, actually."
SPYGOD grumbles: "Well, okay. But just for you. And I am not !@#$ dressing up."
"I wouldn't dream of insisting. Speaking of which, it's Thanksgiving. Shouldn't you be breaking bread with the troops?"
"Yeah, well. Business first. But yes, I do have about two dozen turkeys deep-frying on board The Flier that I should probably get back to. Hopefully no one's caught anything on fire, yet."
"Paris is burning, my friend," Straffer tips him a wink and vanishes, and for a weird moment SPYGOD has no idea if he was just hit on, or not.
But yes. It's Thanksgiving, and today he can be thankful for a number of things, and people. It's been a weird year since last May, and as much tragedy and bad times as he's brought down on himself, there's also a lot of wonderful things going on.
And as he straps on his rocket pack, and makes ready to head back up to The Flier, he's grateful for so much. He almost cracks a big smile in spite of it all, and decides he's going to do something really nice for his overworked, overthreatened personal assistants come Christmastime.
Especially Sue. !@#$ is she turning out to be a crack Agent.
* * *
You see, the North American plate isn't the only one that has those old tunnels running through them. The African Plate does as well. And so does the Pacific Plate. It's just that, since the crust there is mostly underwater, so are the tunnels, since they run fairly close to the surface in places.
And that's very bad news. When GORGON vanished off our radar, all those months ago, they most likely went into one of those tunnels. That would indicate that they know about them. That would also mean that they may have been exploiting them for quite some time, now, and may have all kinds of bases and facilities built into the tunnels, themselves.
Suddenly we have a much smaller area to look through. But at the same time, we have a more dangerous brief. There's things in those tunnels that have been festering and breeding down there in seclusion for millions of years.
Yes, millions. That's how old those tunnels actually are.
Did I mention that, earlier? No? Oh, sorry. Yeah, something made a network of tunnels in the crust of the Earth millions of years ago, and whatever it was, it was not us. And we have no idea who or what it was.
Except that there may be a story that explains it, sort of.
Has anyone ever heard of Richard Sharpe Shaver? Oh, okay, one of you had excellent taste in reading while growing up. Okay, two of you? Anyone else?
Well, Shaver was a nutcase. He claimed that he was receiving mental transmissions from an underground civilization that was based on rape and torture. High science, low regard for life, you know the type. Once the editor of Amazing Stories got hold of his rambling letters and fictionalized them, they made for great sci-fi tales, at least until the readers decided they'd had enough and made the editor stop carrying them.
But one of the things he spoke about has a certain weight to it.
Some of you may have heard of Deros. The term's a conjunction of "Detrimental Robots." Something like the rape machines from that one early Gary Numan record. They were biological creatures that had become so degenerate that they killed, maimed, and tortured with all the unfeeling efficiency of a robot, hence the name.
Well, the name "Deros" was attached to something else, later on. Some of the older hands here may have heard of the Advanced Supersonic Nazi Hell Creatures from Below the Hollow Earth? No, that's not a progressive rock band, either, and it sure as heck wasn't a Syfy movie, either.
That was the name given to certain foo fighters, back during World War II. There's no real good pictures of them, due to the fact that they moved so freaking fast, and didn't leave a lot of witnesses, but we have a few descriptions. I think the most evocative one was "flying, fire-breathing, dragon train."
These things attacked our planes and ships in the South Pacific. They appeared from nowhere and then vanished just as fast. And whenever they left the scene of an ambush, they were seen to dive into the Ocean, and sometimes even crash-land on islands. But no wreckage was ever found.
The suspicion was that the Japanese had gotten their hands on some sort of advanced technology, and were using it against us. The fact that we didn't have those things being thrown in our faces every day led Military Intelligence to believe that they didn't invent them, themselves, but rather found them, or bought their services, somehow.
But then the war was over, and during the Occupation we found out that the Japanese had absolutely nothing to do with it. They were as astounded by these things as we were, except that they didn't attack them, for some weird reason. So they assumed the Nazis must have been trying out a secret weapon and not telling them about it, much in the same way the Japanese didn't always tell them about theirs.
A little more digging, and it turns out that, amongst some of the islands in the Micronesian chain, Dero is a known entity. It's what the islanders call a long, swift demon of the sea that launches out of the water, attacks anything that trespasses into its domain, and then disappears. They don't show up all that often, but when they do it's never a good thing.
This leads a few Nazi UFO conspiracy theorists to make a loose connection, and before you know it the two stories are conflated. Suddenly we've got Nazis riding these monsters they found below the hollow earth while turning Antarctica into a submarine base. Not completely off base, in some respects, but there's nothing below Antarctica that synchs up with the Dero.
But you can't help but wonder. All those tunnels suggest a home for something long and swift. And
the fact that we haven't come across any giant, metal skeletons on the Ocean floor might suggest that they don't come from our ocean, but maybe something lower down.
Is that what the tunnels were made for? If so, who made them? The Deros, or whatever they served, or served them?
And if they're down there, along with GORGON, we could be looking at quite a wild op.
That's all I've got for you, now. The next time we meet we'll be talking about how we're going to go about dealing with the situation. We've got some ideas, of course, but it's going to be a tough one.
But you know, one thing I've learned in my relatively short time, here at The COMPANY? Tough isn't just part of the job description. It's when we're at our best. I think this toughness is going to make us even tougher, and...
...
Um, okay. Yes sir. I'm shutting up now.
Thank you all for listening. Good night.
(SPYGOD is listening to Fascination Street (The Cure) and having an Oskar Blues G'Knight)
Sunday, November 27, 2011
11/17-20/11 - Going Deeper Underground - pt. 1
Good afternoon. My name is Myron, and I'm a recovering Supervillain.
...
Okay, joke fail. You were all totally supposed to say "Hi, Myron!" No?
No.
Okay, then. Well, like I said, I was Underman. I was Underman for all of about a month or so before I got caught by our mutual employer, and given the choice. Obviously, I made the right one, because I am now a member of The COMPANY, along with all of you. And I am, as of now, your chief residential expert in all matters pertaining to spelunking, subterranean exploration and warfare, and the so-called Hollow Earth.
Which is why, given that GORGON is one of our next targets, according to some theories, you and I need to have a word.
11/17/11
2:34 PM
THE HEPTAGON
(TRANSCRIPT BEGINS)
*Cell door opens*
SPYGOD: Well hello, there, Zachary. How are you doing, today?
MAGICIAN: Who the !@#$ are you? Where am I?
SPYGOD: Funny you should ask. This is Hell. I'm the Devil. Nice to meet you.
MAGICIAN: Oh God, please. Just tell me where I am. I can't move and I can't see. Not since--
SPYGOD: Shhhh. Shhh. It's okay. You're not really dead.
MAGICIAN: I'm... what?
SPYGOD: You are in Hell, though. And you're stuck with me, so it'd be in your best interests to cooperate fully. Otherwise, things could get really bad.
MAGICIAN: Oh, I know... I know who you are, now. You're SPYGOD, aren't you?
SPYGOD: Give that man a prize! What gave me away?
MAGICIAN: You come in here acting like you own the place-
SPYGOD: Technically, the American government owns it. I just run it. What's your point?
MAGICIAN: All full of yourself, just like a cock on a pile of !@#$.
SPYGOD: Yeah, well, that'd be you, buddy. Zachary H. Leighton. 102 years old. Don't look a day over 50, though, and not bad looking at all. What they got you on? X-Tend?
MAGICIAN: Are you kidding me? This is the Legion's health plan, you dumb !@#$. I think they get me the generic.
SPYGOD: *laughs* Now that's a good one. I'll give you that, Zach. But I have to tell you that's the last laugh you're going to have for a while.
MAGICIAN: Oh, are you going to have me beaten up, again? Keep me tied to this chair and blindfolded? Maybe soil myself, one more time?
SPYGOD: That's not a blindfold, Zach.
MAGICIAN: What?
SPYGOD: It's a bandage.
MAGICIAN: ...
SPYGOD: You see, we've had a file on you, and I have to say I am impressed by your power levels. Able to make someone do anything you want them to, no matter how unsavory or self-destructive? Even able to make people forget their entire lives and accept false memories? That's really something, Zach. I don't think I've got anyone on my side who's got that level of mind control. Not without some serious mental drawbacks, anyway.
MAGICIAN: ... please. Look, I'll-
SPYGOD: Shhh. Don't interrupt me, Zach. I was about to say that here you are, with all that power, and who are you working for?
MAGICIAN: ... I'm...
SPYGOD: That's right. The wrong team. The Legion. The Big Man.
MAGICIAN: What do you mean this is a bandage?
SPYGOD: Well here, do me a favor? Your hands are sort of free. Open your left hand, and turn it palms up. Okay?
MAGICIAN: Okay...
SPYGOD: Now, here. There's something for you.
MAGICIAN: What... what is it? It's cold and... wet...
SPYGOD: It's your right eye.
MAGICIAN: *screaming*
SPYGOD: Now, see. Look what you did! You dropped it! And the floor's all sticky with your filth, Zach. We're never going to be able to recover it, now.
MAGICIAN: *more screaming*
SPYGOD: Okay, okay. Well, can't say I didn't try. We'll talk again when you're a little more intelligible. Have a good afternoon, Zach. Be seeing you.
*door closes*
GUARD: Any instructions, sir?
SPYGOD: Can I have my meatball sub back?
GUARD: Oh! Of course, sir. It smells wonderful.
SPYGOD: Well, here. You have the rest, then.
GUARD: Are you sure, sir?
SPYGOD: Yeah. I just needed the one meatball. Do me a favor? Wait fifteen minutes, go in, and say "eww, what's that on the floor?" Then come in a few minutes later and hose him down. Make sure to tell him that thing on the floor went right down the drain.
GUARD: Um, yes. Yes sir.
SPYGOD: Good work, son. Carry on. Enjoy the sub.
So when we talk about a Hollow Earth, what are we talking about? I'm sure some of you may have read Poe or Burroughs and thought about great jungles in caverns lit by an interior sun, and a world that time forgot. Blah blah blah.
The answer is going to be disappointing if you're wanting to ride dinosaurs ten miles below the Earth's crust. But it's also exciting, because there's things that have been going on down below our feet that stagger the imagination.
The truth is that there is no Hollow Earth, at least not like you might think. The truth is that the Inner Earth is not like anything you imagined, or that you read. The truth is that it's a lot more amazing, and sometimes terrifying, than you could have believed.
And it's a truth we've got to get up to speed on. Mostly because GORGON's down there, already, and may have been down there for ages. And if that's true, then we don't have the time to be sitting around chit-chatting about crazy theories and science fiction stories. We have to focus on what's real, or at least what we can prove.
So it's my job to get you all up to speed on the great, largely uncharted wilderness that is the Inner Earth.
(DATE: 11/18/11 - TIME: 7:30 - 8:00)
(PERSONS PRESENT: DIRECTOR CIA, AGENT S)
S: Thank you for coming, sir.
CIA: No problems, (REDACTED). You didn't have any problems slipping away?
S: They think I'm at a bar with a girl, sir. I left strict instructions not to call me. They tend to respect that kind of thing.
CIA: *shudders* That organization is just one giant harassment suit waiting to happen.
S: Well, sometimes. I think they have a good sense of humor about that sort of thing. As near as I can tell their Hell Month program tends to weed out all the whiners. Mostly.
CIA: Well, I didn't send you to join. What's happened?
S: They got Whisper of Liberty, sir.
CIA: You mean the Magician? Zachary Leighton?
S: Yes sir. He's being held in lockdown in the Heptagon. They have him thinking he's had his eyes surgically removed and are leaving him to drown in his own despair.
CIA: Wow. That's... that's pretty effective.
S: It is, yes. He's been screaming that he's willing to make a deal for the last few hours. They haven't taken him up on it, though.
CIA: So what's your concern, other than the obvious one?
S: Well, if he tells all he knows, he'll lead them to the ones he's retired. If they get hold of them, and make them remember, it will lead back to us.
CIA: And knowing SPYGOD, he'll use that as leverage against us.
S: Or worse. You should see him, sir. He's in full on kill mode, right now. He had to sacrifice one of his Agents to get actionable information on the Legion, and he's out for blood.
CIA: Can you eliminate the Magician?
S: I don't think so, sir. My host has no reason to be there, unless she's following him. But I might be able to get the information on the lockdown. It would make it easier for someone else to get in.
CIA: Do it. I can find someone to handle the kill.
S: So we've written him off, sir?
CIA: I'm this close to writing the entire !@#$ Legion off, (REDACTED). We haven't gotten a lot of bang for the buck out of them since the Cold War ended, and the longer we have them up and around the bigger the albatross around our neck.
S: I agree, sir. But I'd suggest we be very careful about that. We have no way of knowing how much insurance the Big Man's taken out. We could be--
CIA: I know, Agent S. I know. But let's at least get it so The Magician can't do us any more damage. You find out what you can and get it back to me as soon as possible.
S: Of course, sir.
CIA: Oh, and how's your host doing?
S: Fine, sir. Just fine. My people have her under control, and her vitals are stable. I think she'll last quite a while.
CIA: Until... the op is over.
S: Yes. Until then.
(TRANSCRIPT ENDS)
Now, for those of you who didn't pay attention in geography class, this is the planet we all live on. And since someone with a very bad sense of humor decided to deep-six the visual aids I spent all week working on, we're going to have to use our imaginations.
Now, I want you to imagine you've got a toad in the hole for breakfast. You've all had one, right?
No? Oh come on, I can't be the only person who ever makes these. Do you all survive on ramen noodles and whatever slop the commissary has out, today? Jesus wept, people.
Okay, a toad in the hole is when you make some toast, and cut a hole in the center of it. Then you throw it in a frying pan and crack an egg into the hole. The egg cooks in the hole, you scoop it up with a spatula, and you've got a cheap and tasty breakfast. Its not exactly Quiche Lorraine, but if you're on a budget, it sure beats pop tarts.
Anyway. The center of the Earth is the yolk. That's the inner core. It's 800 miles in diameter and solid, probably made out of iron and nickel, or possibly other, more valuable elements. That's kind of academic, though, because you're not going down there.
Why is that? Because of the temperature, for one thing. We've estimated that it's about 5505 Celsius, which is as hot as it gets on the surface of the Sun. Steel melts at only 1370 C, and gets soft enough to deform and bend well below that. Even the best ceramics we have can only get you a few hundred degrees past that point.
For another thing, the pressure down there is so immense that you'd be pulped in microseconds. Think of the weight of over three million atmospheres crashing down on you. Then consider that, at the bottom of the Mariana Trench, it's only a thousand atmospheres. And that's enough to turn most submarines into metal confetti.
Some yolk, huh?
...
Okay, tough crowd.
5:35 PM
SOMEWHERE IN LANGLEY, VA
Agent Armatrading's eyes flicker open for just a second. She knows where she is, and when she is. She isn't so sure about the who, anymore.
That's what's so terrible about this situation, other than the obvious issues. The bastard rat !@#$ who's sharing her body has a mind like a wet sponge. It's impossible for it to touch her and not get her wet.
And the slop it's carrying around... Jesus Christ in Heaven she couldn't have imagined.
The older Agents would tell tales about The Body Thief, but she thought they were just stories. Booga-Booga tales to scare new meat, and make them even more mindful of their surroundings.
Now she knew the truth. The Body Thief was real, alright.
And the things he's done over the years? Things that they hinted at, but never fully spelled out? Oh, they were real, too. And then some.
How many bodies has this person racked up, over the decades? How many people who were in the wrong place at the wrong time wound up sharing a body with this !@#$ monster?
Too many.
She knows everything about him. She knows his origins. She knows what he used to be called, once upon a time.
She knows that he's not going to let her live, at the end of this. She'll have known too much, by then.
She'll know how to destroy him.
That's what's keeping her going, now. She knows she can't break free from his spell. She knows she can't overpower him mentally, or do more than offer token resistance so long as she's tied up this chair and unable to move.
But she's an Agent of the COMPANY. The. !@#$. COMPANY.
She knows things. She was taught things. She had to use those things to make it through Hell Month and survive her first week on the job.
She knows how to use what she has available to get into, or out of, just about anything. She knows how to control her brain and her body. She knows how to fake out the experts.
She just has to make a plan -- a plan so quiet and simple he won't see it coming and warn her minders -- and follow through with it before anyone knows what's up.
And then he's going to pay, this Body Thief. She's going to make him !@#$ pay.
You're also not going to have much luck in the Outer Core, either. That's the egg white in our imaginary, edible world that you can't see because someone stole those slides and replaced them with what's either insect porn or someone's attempt to ape the guy who did the special effects in Alien. Maybe both. You know who you are.
The Outer Core is liquid, and extends about 1400 miles out from the Inner Core. Its temperature ranges from 4400 C, where it meets the Mantle, to 6100 C, where it touches the Inner Core. Those of you who are actually paying attention might realize that that's just about 600 degrees hotter than the Inner Core, itself.
The good news is that the Outer Core is what creates our Magnetic Field, which is why we have an atmosphere in the first place. The bad news is that there's still a lot of pressure down there, and by "a lot" I mean "crushed just a little slower."
So if we're going to think of the Inner Earth as a grade school playground, the Inner and Outer Core are the roped-off areas where the 6th Graders have their token, no jungle-gyms or swing sets recess, and us little kids don't get to play in. But why would you want to, when all the cool stuff is in places we can go?
That's the Mantle. Or most of it, anyway. It's still hot and under intense pressure, but there are variances, and a lot of room to maneuver within them,
The Mantle is the toast in that Toad In the Hole that makes up Inner Earth. It's 1800 miles of hot, viscous rock that flows so slowly it hardly seems to be moving at all.
The part that's got a lot of egg white fused with it is the Lower Mantle. The pressure there is almost 1.4 million atmospheres, and the temperature is 4000 C, give or take a little. This is the buffer zone where a very stern teacher stands and tells you to go back and play with kids your own age.
However, once we're at the Upper Mantle, we're in a different ballgame. The temperature there ranges from 500 to 900 Celsius. That's well within the tolerance of steel. And the pressure isn't nearly as bad, which means that a well-buffered environmental capsule could maintain life support for short durations.
You just wouldn't want to get out of the cockpit and walk around, even if you did find something large enough to take a pit stop in. That's because you're just under the crust, and that's where the heat and lack of pressure can combine to turn rocks into, you guessed it, lava.
4:50 PM
THE FLIER
Been a disappointing day. Very !@#$ disappointing.
I knew we had one mole for The Legion. I suspected we had two. Now I've had that suspicion proven correct, but before we could get him locked down to talk about it, he killed himself. Which means I have no !@#$ idea why he did it, or how much information he may have passed on.
I have to hand it to my new personal assistant, though. Agent Armatrading's got her eye on the ball, alright. She was the one who noticed that someone had used my executive passcode to get into the Heptagon systems and root around in the lockdown files, especially those concerning our new top guest.
Once we realized that was up, it was just a question of who else had access to those codes. Two are dead, and one had an airtight alibi for the times that the breakins occurred.
And that just left Agent G. Gordon, who used to be an assistant until he !@#$ up one schedule too many, and got busted down to the motor pool. He did his best to backdoor the entries through several redundant systems, but the trail was pretty !@#$ clear, once you knew what to look for.
By the time we got down there, he was halfway across the lower hangar and headed for the open doors. He must have figured out what we were going to do. The look in his eyes was terrible to see.
Pure, white-faced, pants-full-of-!@#$, !@#$ fear.
I told him to !@#$ stop and come back. I told him it was no !@#$ use, and we knew. I also told him there was no way out, though that wasn't exactly true.
I didn't think he'd actually jump out the door, though. His records said he was terrified of heights, which was one of the reasons I assigned him down there. I thought it would be good for him.
(That and it was kind of !@#$ cruel.)
Hizzonner called me up to complain about a dead Agent splattered across the top of a taxicab. I told him to bill me, and send me what was left. He said there wasn't enough solid matter to fill a pizza box. I asked if it was small, medium, or large. He told me to !@#$ off and hung up.
Everyone who worked with the kid said he was quiet and loyal, but still !@#$ at me for busting him down there. So why did he turn on us?
Was it something I said?
Anyway, Agent Armatrading volunteered to handle the new lockdown codes, just to make sure no one can take advantage of what he sold. She looked a little miffed when I told her it wouldn't be necessary. I'm sure we've gotten to it before anyone else could have, judging from the fact that he hadn't left his station the whole time the breakin was occurring. He also didn't have any sign of passing the info on to someone else, using our systems or something of his own.
So, given all that, all I'm going to do is pretend to be in my office, and then sneak out the back to go watch over The Magician, myself. I've got the feeling that, if anything slipped through, they'll try something tonight.
And I'm quite the mood to put my foot up someone's !@#$ for having given me such a !@#$ disappointing day, today. Yes I am.
(SPYGOD is listening to Untitled (The Cure) and enjoying a Schlafly Christmas Ale)
...
Okay, joke fail. You were all totally supposed to say "Hi, Myron!" No?
No.
Okay, then. Well, like I said, I was Underman. I was Underman for all of about a month or so before I got caught by our mutual employer, and given the choice. Obviously, I made the right one, because I am now a member of The COMPANY, along with all of you. And I am, as of now, your chief residential expert in all matters pertaining to spelunking, subterranean exploration and warfare, and the so-called Hollow Earth.
Which is why, given that GORGON is one of our next targets, according to some theories, you and I need to have a word.
* * *
11/17/11
2:34 PM
THE HEPTAGON
(TRANSCRIPT BEGINS)
*Cell door opens*
SPYGOD: Well hello, there, Zachary. How are you doing, today?
MAGICIAN: Who the !@#$ are you? Where am I?
SPYGOD: Funny you should ask. This is Hell. I'm the Devil. Nice to meet you.
MAGICIAN: Oh God, please. Just tell me where I am. I can't move and I can't see. Not since--
SPYGOD: Shhhh. Shhh. It's okay. You're not really dead.
MAGICIAN: I'm... what?
SPYGOD: You are in Hell, though. And you're stuck with me, so it'd be in your best interests to cooperate fully. Otherwise, things could get really bad.
MAGICIAN: Oh, I know... I know who you are, now. You're SPYGOD, aren't you?
SPYGOD: Give that man a prize! What gave me away?
MAGICIAN: You come in here acting like you own the place-
SPYGOD: Technically, the American government owns it. I just run it. What's your point?
MAGICIAN: All full of yourself, just like a cock on a pile of !@#$.
SPYGOD: Yeah, well, that'd be you, buddy. Zachary H. Leighton. 102 years old. Don't look a day over 50, though, and not bad looking at all. What they got you on? X-Tend?
MAGICIAN: Are you kidding me? This is the Legion's health plan, you dumb !@#$. I think they get me the generic.
SPYGOD: *laughs* Now that's a good one. I'll give you that, Zach. But I have to tell you that's the last laugh you're going to have for a while.
MAGICIAN: Oh, are you going to have me beaten up, again? Keep me tied to this chair and blindfolded? Maybe soil myself, one more time?
SPYGOD: That's not a blindfold, Zach.
MAGICIAN: What?
SPYGOD: It's a bandage.
MAGICIAN: ...
SPYGOD: You see, we've had a file on you, and I have to say I am impressed by your power levels. Able to make someone do anything you want them to, no matter how unsavory or self-destructive? Even able to make people forget their entire lives and accept false memories? That's really something, Zach. I don't think I've got anyone on my side who's got that level of mind control. Not without some serious mental drawbacks, anyway.
MAGICIAN: ... please. Look, I'll-
SPYGOD: Shhh. Don't interrupt me, Zach. I was about to say that here you are, with all that power, and who are you working for?
MAGICIAN: ... I'm...
SPYGOD: That's right. The wrong team. The Legion. The Big Man.
MAGICIAN: What do you mean this is a bandage?
SPYGOD: Well here, do me a favor? Your hands are sort of free. Open your left hand, and turn it palms up. Okay?
MAGICIAN: Okay...
SPYGOD: Now, here. There's something for you.
MAGICIAN: What... what is it? It's cold and... wet...
SPYGOD: It's your right eye.
MAGICIAN: *screaming*
SPYGOD: Now, see. Look what you did! You dropped it! And the floor's all sticky with your filth, Zach. We're never going to be able to recover it, now.
MAGICIAN: *more screaming*
SPYGOD: Okay, okay. Well, can't say I didn't try. We'll talk again when you're a little more intelligible. Have a good afternoon, Zach. Be seeing you.
*door closes*
GUARD: Any instructions, sir?
SPYGOD: Can I have my meatball sub back?
GUARD: Oh! Of course, sir. It smells wonderful.
SPYGOD: Well, here. You have the rest, then.
GUARD: Are you sure, sir?
SPYGOD: Yeah. I just needed the one meatball. Do me a favor? Wait fifteen minutes, go in, and say "eww, what's that on the floor?" Then come in a few minutes later and hose him down. Make sure to tell him that thing on the floor went right down the drain.
GUARD: Um, yes. Yes sir.
SPYGOD: Good work, son. Carry on. Enjoy the sub.
* * *
So when we talk about a Hollow Earth, what are we talking about? I'm sure some of you may have read Poe or Burroughs and thought about great jungles in caverns lit by an interior sun, and a world that time forgot. Blah blah blah.
The answer is going to be disappointing if you're wanting to ride dinosaurs ten miles below the Earth's crust. But it's also exciting, because there's things that have been going on down below our feet that stagger the imagination.
The truth is that there is no Hollow Earth, at least not like you might think. The truth is that the Inner Earth is not like anything you imagined, or that you read. The truth is that it's a lot more amazing, and sometimes terrifying, than you could have believed.
And it's a truth we've got to get up to speed on. Mostly because GORGON's down there, already, and may have been down there for ages. And if that's true, then we don't have the time to be sitting around chit-chatting about crazy theories and science fiction stories. We have to focus on what's real, or at least what we can prove.
So it's my job to get you all up to speed on the great, largely uncharted wilderness that is the Inner Earth.
* * *
(OBSERVATION LOG - ZERO CHAMBER, LANGLEY)(DATE: 11/18/11 - TIME: 7:30 - 8:00)
(PERSONS PRESENT: DIRECTOR CIA, AGENT S)
S: Thank you for coming, sir.
CIA: No problems, (REDACTED). You didn't have any problems slipping away?
S: They think I'm at a bar with a girl, sir. I left strict instructions not to call me. They tend to respect that kind of thing.
CIA: *shudders* That organization is just one giant harassment suit waiting to happen.
S: Well, sometimes. I think they have a good sense of humor about that sort of thing. As near as I can tell their Hell Month program tends to weed out all the whiners. Mostly.
CIA: Well, I didn't send you to join. What's happened?
S: They got Whisper of Liberty, sir.
CIA: You mean the Magician? Zachary Leighton?
S: Yes sir. He's being held in lockdown in the Heptagon. They have him thinking he's had his eyes surgically removed and are leaving him to drown in his own despair.
CIA: Wow. That's... that's pretty effective.
S: It is, yes. He's been screaming that he's willing to make a deal for the last few hours. They haven't taken him up on it, though.
CIA: So what's your concern, other than the obvious one?
S: Well, if he tells all he knows, he'll lead them to the ones he's retired. If they get hold of them, and make them remember, it will lead back to us.
CIA: And knowing SPYGOD, he'll use that as leverage against us.
S: Or worse. You should see him, sir. He's in full on kill mode, right now. He had to sacrifice one of his Agents to get actionable information on the Legion, and he's out for blood.
CIA: Can you eliminate the Magician?
S: I don't think so, sir. My host has no reason to be there, unless she's following him. But I might be able to get the information on the lockdown. It would make it easier for someone else to get in.
CIA: Do it. I can find someone to handle the kill.
S: So we've written him off, sir?
CIA: I'm this close to writing the entire !@#$ Legion off, (REDACTED). We haven't gotten a lot of bang for the buck out of them since the Cold War ended, and the longer we have them up and around the bigger the albatross around our neck.
S: I agree, sir. But I'd suggest we be very careful about that. We have no way of knowing how much insurance the Big Man's taken out. We could be--
CIA: I know, Agent S. I know. But let's at least get it so The Magician can't do us any more damage. You find out what you can and get it back to me as soon as possible.
S: Of course, sir.
CIA: Oh, and how's your host doing?
S: Fine, sir. Just fine. My people have her under control, and her vitals are stable. I think she'll last quite a while.
CIA: Until... the op is over.
S: Yes. Until then.
(TRANSCRIPT ENDS)
* * *
Now, for those of you who didn't pay attention in geography class, this is the planet we all live on. And since someone with a very bad sense of humor decided to deep-six the visual aids I spent all week working on, we're going to have to use our imaginations.
Now, I want you to imagine you've got a toad in the hole for breakfast. You've all had one, right?
No? Oh come on, I can't be the only person who ever makes these. Do you all survive on ramen noodles and whatever slop the commissary has out, today? Jesus wept, people.
Okay, a toad in the hole is when you make some toast, and cut a hole in the center of it. Then you throw it in a frying pan and crack an egg into the hole. The egg cooks in the hole, you scoop it up with a spatula, and you've got a cheap and tasty breakfast. Its not exactly Quiche Lorraine, but if you're on a budget, it sure beats pop tarts.
Anyway. The center of the Earth is the yolk. That's the inner core. It's 800 miles in diameter and solid, probably made out of iron and nickel, or possibly other, more valuable elements. That's kind of academic, though, because you're not going down there.
Why is that? Because of the temperature, for one thing. We've estimated that it's about 5505 Celsius, which is as hot as it gets on the surface of the Sun. Steel melts at only 1370 C, and gets soft enough to deform and bend well below that. Even the best ceramics we have can only get you a few hundred degrees past that point.
For another thing, the pressure down there is so immense that you'd be pulped in microseconds. Think of the weight of over three million atmospheres crashing down on you. Then consider that, at the bottom of the Mariana Trench, it's only a thousand atmospheres. And that's enough to turn most submarines into metal confetti.
Some yolk, huh?
...
Okay, tough crowd.
* * *
11/19/115:35 PM
SOMEWHERE IN LANGLEY, VA
Agent Armatrading's eyes flicker open for just a second. She knows where she is, and when she is. She isn't so sure about the who, anymore.
That's what's so terrible about this situation, other than the obvious issues. The bastard rat !@#$ who's sharing her body has a mind like a wet sponge. It's impossible for it to touch her and not get her wet.
And the slop it's carrying around... Jesus Christ in Heaven she couldn't have imagined.
The older Agents would tell tales about The Body Thief, but she thought they were just stories. Booga-Booga tales to scare new meat, and make them even more mindful of their surroundings.
Now she knew the truth. The Body Thief was real, alright.
And the things he's done over the years? Things that they hinted at, but never fully spelled out? Oh, they were real, too. And then some.
How many bodies has this person racked up, over the decades? How many people who were in the wrong place at the wrong time wound up sharing a body with this !@#$ monster?
Too many.
She knows everything about him. She knows his origins. She knows what he used to be called, once upon a time.
She knows that he's not going to let her live, at the end of this. She'll have known too much, by then.
She'll know how to destroy him.
That's what's keeping her going, now. She knows she can't break free from his spell. She knows she can't overpower him mentally, or do more than offer token resistance so long as she's tied up this chair and unable to move.
But she's an Agent of the COMPANY. The. !@#$. COMPANY.
She knows things. She was taught things. She had to use those things to make it through Hell Month and survive her first week on the job.
She knows how to use what she has available to get into, or out of, just about anything. She knows how to control her brain and her body. She knows how to fake out the experts.
She just has to make a plan -- a plan so quiet and simple he won't see it coming and warn her minders -- and follow through with it before anyone knows what's up.
And then he's going to pay, this Body Thief. She's going to make him !@#$ pay.
* * *
You're also not going to have much luck in the Outer Core, either. That's the egg white in our imaginary, edible world that you can't see because someone stole those slides and replaced them with what's either insect porn or someone's attempt to ape the guy who did the special effects in Alien. Maybe both. You know who you are.
The Outer Core is liquid, and extends about 1400 miles out from the Inner Core. Its temperature ranges from 4400 C, where it meets the Mantle, to 6100 C, where it touches the Inner Core. Those of you who are actually paying attention might realize that that's just about 600 degrees hotter than the Inner Core, itself.
The good news is that the Outer Core is what creates our Magnetic Field, which is why we have an atmosphere in the first place. The bad news is that there's still a lot of pressure down there, and by "a lot" I mean "crushed just a little slower."
So if we're going to think of the Inner Earth as a grade school playground, the Inner and Outer Core are the roped-off areas where the 6th Graders have their token, no jungle-gyms or swing sets recess, and us little kids don't get to play in. But why would you want to, when all the cool stuff is in places we can go?
That's the Mantle. Or most of it, anyway. It's still hot and under intense pressure, but there are variances, and a lot of room to maneuver within them,
The Mantle is the toast in that Toad In the Hole that makes up Inner Earth. It's 1800 miles of hot, viscous rock that flows so slowly it hardly seems to be moving at all.
The part that's got a lot of egg white fused with it is the Lower Mantle. The pressure there is almost 1.4 million atmospheres, and the temperature is 4000 C, give or take a little. This is the buffer zone where a very stern teacher stands and tells you to go back and play with kids your own age.
However, once we're at the Upper Mantle, we're in a different ballgame. The temperature there ranges from 500 to 900 Celsius. That's well within the tolerance of steel. And the pressure isn't nearly as bad, which means that a well-buffered environmental capsule could maintain life support for short durations.
You just wouldn't want to get out of the cockpit and walk around, even if you did find something large enough to take a pit stop in. That's because you're just under the crust, and that's where the heat and lack of pressure can combine to turn rocks into, you guessed it, lava.
* * *
11/20/114:50 PM
THE FLIER
Been a disappointing day. Very !@#$ disappointing.
I knew we had one mole for The Legion. I suspected we had two. Now I've had that suspicion proven correct, but before we could get him locked down to talk about it, he killed himself. Which means I have no !@#$ idea why he did it, or how much information he may have passed on.
I have to hand it to my new personal assistant, though. Agent Armatrading's got her eye on the ball, alright. She was the one who noticed that someone had used my executive passcode to get into the Heptagon systems and root around in the lockdown files, especially those concerning our new top guest.
Once we realized that was up, it was just a question of who else had access to those codes. Two are dead, and one had an airtight alibi for the times that the breakins occurred.
And that just left Agent G. Gordon, who used to be an assistant until he !@#$ up one schedule too many, and got busted down to the motor pool. He did his best to backdoor the entries through several redundant systems, but the trail was pretty !@#$ clear, once you knew what to look for.
By the time we got down there, he was halfway across the lower hangar and headed for the open doors. He must have figured out what we were going to do. The look in his eyes was terrible to see.
Pure, white-faced, pants-full-of-!@#$, !@#$ fear.
I told him to !@#$ stop and come back. I told him it was no !@#$ use, and we knew. I also told him there was no way out, though that wasn't exactly true.
I didn't think he'd actually jump out the door, though. His records said he was terrified of heights, which was one of the reasons I assigned him down there. I thought it would be good for him.
(That and it was kind of !@#$ cruel.)
Hizzonner called me up to complain about a dead Agent splattered across the top of a taxicab. I told him to bill me, and send me what was left. He said there wasn't enough solid matter to fill a pizza box. I asked if it was small, medium, or large. He told me to !@#$ off and hung up.
Everyone who worked with the kid said he was quiet and loyal, but still !@#$ at me for busting him down there. So why did he turn on us?
Was it something I said?
Anyway, Agent Armatrading volunteered to handle the new lockdown codes, just to make sure no one can take advantage of what he sold. She looked a little miffed when I told her it wouldn't be necessary. I'm sure we've gotten to it before anyone else could have, judging from the fact that he hadn't left his station the whole time the breakin was occurring. He also didn't have any sign of passing the info on to someone else, using our systems or something of his own.
So, given all that, all I'm going to do is pretend to be in my office, and then sneak out the back to go watch over The Magician, myself. I've got the feeling that, if anything slipped through, they'll try something tonight.
And I'm quite the mood to put my foot up someone's !@#$ for having given me such a !@#$ disappointing day, today. Yes I am.
(SPYGOD is listening to Untitled (The Cure) and enjoying a Schlafly Christmas Ale)
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