Server Extant

In the great council chamber of the Block, the steering committee was in session. They heard the rumble through the walls as the city’s defenses began to fire.

‘Gentlemen, ladies, and whatever you are, Bing, the invasion has begun,’ said D00mcaster, with solemn gravity. ‘Those of you who counseled peace are now, demonstrably, on the wrong side of history. On behalf of the War Party, I accept your apology.’

‘We’ll fight them to the death’ replied Bing, complacently, ‘We’ll fight them on the beaches, we’ll fight them on the firewall, we’ll fight them in the strangely large number of shacks along the concourse that seem to dedicated to some form of fetishistic pornography.’

‘Steadfast sentiments,’ said The Fat controller, uneasily.

There was a strange vibe in the chamber. The council, normally a body of individuals that reacted with panic and outrage to the slightest adversity, was weirdly placid. Some of them even seemed to be smirking. The Fat Controller thought that it was clearly time for a stirring series of remarks aimed at reassuring his colleagues and bringing a sense of unity in the face of the coming challenges. He began.

‘Let me just say-’

’No, let me just say!’ interrupted One Party Pat, from the back.

‘The floor does not recognize the Party Of One delegate’ replied the Fat Controller, startled and annoyed by this uncharacteristically assertive interjection by 1PP. ’However, I do have some remarks and, seeing as I am the-’

‘Cram your remarks up your bum-hole, you fat exhibitionist!’ One Party Pat rejoined, walking down the aisle to the front. ’And the rest of you cock-suckers too! You can all listen to me for once! Don’t worry, I’ll be brief!’

He leapt into the rail along the well of the council and produced a black sphere, with a red button on it, holding it up for the council members to see. The crowd shifted and muttered in consternation, half-rising.

‘Know what this is, you rancid fucks?’ taunted Pat. ’No? Yes? Well, I’ll tell you! It’s a tele-icon that links to a super-compressed mass, which will decoalesce on arrival. Enough energy to blast all you bastards to hell! And I-’

’P-Fed gave you a fucking bomb?′ demanded D00mcaster, outraged.

‘I never said it was P-Fed-’ replied Pat, disconcerted.

‘But they gave me one too!’ yelled Efficient Kerning, a peace party delegate, from somewhere in the back. He stood and produced a black sphere of his own.

‘Me too’ said Bing, showing his.

One Party Pat looked around the ranks of Kys’s political elite, a slow horror dawning on him. Almost all of them, except for the Fat Controller (who looked bewildered) had produced a similar-looking device, some cursing, some embarrassed.

‘What I- I mean- what- what is going on?’ stuttered The Fat Controller.

’P-Fed promised to pay me to kill you all!’ said Pat, in despair. He turned to his colleagues. ’They approached you all too? What the fuck?’

‘I say’ remarked AnkhBiter, ‘this is a rather sticky wicket, what?’

The Fat Controller rose to his feet.

‘I am so dispirited in the lack of unity we’ve seen here today,’ he said, surveying the room full of his colleagues, sheepishly fingering their explosive devices. ‘I’ve never felt quite as unvalidated as I do at this moment. Also,’ he added looking around at the chamber, ’no-one offered me a bomb.’

‘Of course they didn’t you prolapsed anus!’ yelled Pat, ’No one would trust a fat fuck like you to blow up the government! Well I don’t care! I’m doing it anyway!’

‘No!’ yelled the FC as the congregated council member gasped, flinching involuntarily. Pat hit the button.

Nothing happened.

‘It a dud?’ asked AnkhBiter.

‘No,’ said D00mcaster, clicking his, ‘mine doesn’t work either.’

They stood around clicking their detonators. Pat flung his into the well of the council chamber, and it rolled away with a clang.

‘Fuck fuck fuck fuck FUCK!’ he shrieked.

‘It seems Motor has rather pulled a fast one on us’ said AnkhBiter. ‘Although, now that I think about it, a tele couldn’t get through the Block’s shielding anyway-’

‘Shut up you shitrag!’ yelled Pat, turning on him, ’I’ve always hated you and your Monty Python bullshit! I hope you die in a fucking cancer ward, shitting your asshole out! Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you!’

‘Calm down Pat!’ said Bing.

‘Not gonner calm down!’ yelled Pat. ’I hate you bastards and I always have! This place is a poisonous hell! I was gonna burn my rig! I was going to go out in the sun! Get my life back! Get my sanity back! But I needed that money first! I needed that fucking money!’

‘Jesus’ said D00mcaster.

‘What, we don’t get paid?’ said SkotaBee, sounding panicked. ‘But I pushed my button! It’s not my fault we didn’t blow up! We still get paid, right?’

‘Of course we don’t, you-’ yelled Pat, ‘-or do we?’ His shrill voice amended to a suddenly-wondering tone.

There was a moment of silence in the council hall, as each council member germinated, by some intuitive telepathy, the same concept.

‘Gentlemen...’ said The Fat Controller, in a nervous, warning tone.

D00mcaster drew a kinetic weapon, that he wasn’t supposed to have (in the supposedly weapons-free council sanctum) and fired it into Palomach’s face, splattering it like an omelet dropped off a hotel balcony. KKKarl, a Peace Party member in good standing, whipped out a chainsword (that he also most definitely wasn’t supposed to have), and began laying onto the members around him, in a vicious, blood-splattering figure-eight.

An instant later the entire council was fighting, with wild, animistic savagery, the kind of violence that comes from the insufferable itch of petty hatreds deeply cherished and long denied. The leaders of Kys-1 fought, like starving dogs over a half-eaten hotdog, behind the burned-out shell of the last Seven Eleven on Earth.

* * *

A Kysairon war machine, spider-like thing with a black, spherical body and numerous ling, stalk-like legs, was firing glimmering beams of green light from its multiple, jewel-like eyes at the figures of P-Fed soldiers, which flitted in the windows and alleys, hitting it with a constant crossfire of bullets and missiles. As PRod and Morghain watched, one of the limbs broke off, crashing into the street, and another leg buckled. The body swayed, circular escape hatches popped open in its sides and several Kysairons, three roaches and a citizen, spilled out. As the P-Fedders leapt up to blast the escaping figures, Morghain popped from cover too, opening up on them. Several were cut down and the rest ducked back. An instant later, the machine was hit by something heavy, there was a boom from down the street, probably an AST, and the glare of a bright heat/energy beam. As it faded, the robot became visible, still standing upright on its sagging legs, but now burning brightly.

A white flash blew open the sides of the curving street in a rolling cloud of dust. Through the gap clambered a P-Fed tank, like a massive beetle, on its unfolded limbs. A second came after it and they paused, facing their alternative turrets up and down the street, covering the approach. More gunfire came from inside the gap, striking the street’s far wall, collapsing it in a cloud of dust and jumbled shop-wreckage. More ASTs rolled and clambered through, into the next street.

Not wanting to be caught, the Kysairons slipped into the hole in the wall and escaped through a dim honeycomb of inner structures.

‘They’re burrowing through the strip’ Said Morghain.

‘I guess they figured out the shortest way through a labyrinth was a straight line’ replied PRod, ‘but it’s going to take them hours, at that rate.’

‘Come on,’ said Morghain, and they began to work their way forward.

A bewildering trick of the acoustics created the sound of fighting everywhere, but the street canyons seemed deserted. To get east, it was pointless turning to the left, since they’d just run back into the burrowing line of P-Fed soldiers and their sentinel tanks. They had to go right then enough north, to get over the advancing column. They pressed on.

* * *

The council members went at each other, hacking with weapon secretly modded into their builds, chainsaw limbs and energy beams blasted from eyes and mouths. Occasionally one would attempt to break free of the melee, only to be grabbed and dragged back, by common consent, to be beaten and ribboned to death, before the mob rounded back on itself. By some weird psychological alchemy, a murderous and mutual will, they had contracted to to deathmatch rules; We end when it ends, no one walks away.

The Fat Controller, declining that consensus, had wedged himself into a crack in the wall made by some explosive force. The once elegant, spiraling chamber was wrecked, fissured, a vortex of weapon flashes and blinding smoke, full of Dantean figures locked together in death-struggles. He was weeping, trapped, fending blows from his refuge.

The FC knew that he couldn’t die. For a long time, he’d known that the loss of his online identity would send him back to the mental hospital. The terror of that reality, an abyss opening beneath his feet, was paralyzing, although, later, he would have some of explaining to do, to his netcast followers and himself, as to why the multiple cams in his house revealed him, at the time, to have has an enormous erection.

Now the fighting was dying down. The Fat Controller couldn’t see much, the haze of battle was thick. Bodies and parts of bodies lay on the benches, flaccid and obscene, a hellish chaos. But not everyone in the murk was dead. He knew that, and it filled him with terror.

‘Come on out, piggy!’ now sang a sing-song voice, from the depths, ‘Come on o-out!’

It sounded like D00mcaster.

’We’ve got something for you, piggy,’ insinuated another, the voice of KKKarl.

‘Damnit Karl, I told you we didn’t want this to get sexual’ snapped the voice of D00mcaster.

‘I don’t recall agreeing to that’ said KKKarl.

‘Just come on out, Devin’ said a weary, fourth voice, much closer. Bing Giant. ‘Come on. We’re not mad at you. It’s best you just come out.’

Cringing, shrinking into himself like a salted snail, the Fat Controller emerged from of his crevice. Four council members, the last survivors of the massacre, appeared and stood, in grim semicircle, back-lit by fire. D00mcaster, KKKarl, Bing Giant and, surprisingly, One Party Pat, looking quelled and subdued, his fury burned away.

The chamber was painted with glowing blood, which lay in moonlit pools and runnels across the tumbled benches and walls.

‘W-what do you want?’ trembled the Fat Controller.

‘You can’t sit this out,’ said Bing. ‘You can fight with the rest of us, or fight us all at once.’

‘Deathmatch rules’ said D00mcaster. ‘What’ll it be?’

‘Come on fellers!’ chattered the FC, ‘This is crazy. You don’t need me here. Just let me go.’

Incredibly, they saw, he was shaking. Physically shaking, enough that his mocap suit was picking up the echo of it.

Watching his fat ass tremble like an animal was disgusting to D00mcaster.

‘Let’s just kill him!’ he gritted, unable to stand it.

‘No no, please!’ squawked the FC, ‘I-I-I’ll do anything!’

‘Switch to nude mod’ ordered KKKarl.

‘What?’

‘Or we will do you right now. Come on. Nude mod. Now.’

‘But I- I don’t have a-’

‘Too bad! Then you, die!’ yelled KKKarl, raising his chainsword..

‘No! No, I have one!’ fumbling in panic, the FC switched builds.

D00mcaster flinched. He hated nude mods. What some of these freaks looked like ‘naked’ would keep you awake at night. How they could consider it sexual was incomprehensible to him. The human race is sick and evil, he thought. He wondered if he should look around on the deepnet for a gene reprogrammer. Mix up a deadly virus or two and let them go in a shopping mall. Finally put that bio-chemistry degree to use. But the Fat Controller did not too look too bad, a pale corpulence, the porcine effect enhanced by the way his thick legs tapered to hooves. The physical dynamics of the body, the rolls of blubber, the luminous pallor of the skin that spoke of some prop-expensive sub-surface shader, were all top notch. However, to the onlooker’s disappointment, relief and surprise, respectively, the FGC’s corpulent body was featureless.

KKKarl had hoped he’ d have at least one sexual orifice. But no matter. It wouldn’t take long to cut some.

‘Get on all fours!’ Ordered KKKarl, turned on by the emotional immediacy of the situation. The Fat Controller would apparently do anything to ‘survive’, crying real, actual tears the whole time. That was something you didn’t get to enjoy every day in this land of the undying; an emotional connection with your victim. KKKarl decided he’d decapitate the FC just as he climaxed.

Unfortunately, however, he didn’t dare turn his back on his comrades long enough to rape this blob properly.

‘What are you doing?’ Asked Bing with trepidation, as he saw his council-mate heft the chain sword.

‘I’m going to chainsaw him up the ass’ said KKKarl. It’ll be hilarious!’

He raised his weapon, as if to make a start, but cut suddenly right, zipping through the skull of One Party Pat and sending his brains spinning entertainingly out the top of his head. How are we going to break the tie if we don’t have a quorum on a procedural vote? thought the Fat Controller in numbed horror, as the blood-spurting body tumbled across his own. D00mcaster leapt at KKKarl, grabbing him in a lock and Bing fired indiscriminately, stippling both of the struggling figures with bullets.

‘That money’s mine!’ yelled Bing.

‘Fuck you!’ panted D00mcaster.

The Fat Controller heaved off Pat’s corpse and ran.

Come back here you shit-rabbit!’ yelled D00mcaster holding down KKKarl and trying to bend his chain sword back far enough to cut through his torso, while KKKarl stabbed him in the stomach. Bing, his projectile weapon expended, was using it as a club.

Panting with animal terror, the Fat Controller made it to the great portal. He put his master key in it and they began to open, with fatal slowness. They were massively dense. Behind him the shouts had stopped. Silence fell, but for the hum of the doors. Then, a scraping could be heard from around the bend. A slapping sound. A body, mutilated to the point of destruction, struggled and flopped its way around the corner, leaving a trail of glowing blood. It’s arms and legs were gone, save for a stump at the right knee, and an elbows-length of the left arm. The crippled thing was struggling to drag itself towards him. The FC saw its head look up and saw the hate-filled face of D00mcaster.

‘I want- that- money!’ he hissed, though the injury-impairment ‘Come here- you- fuck!’

The Fat Controller squeezed though the gap and fled. Outside, the city seemed to be in an uproar. He looked up, and was shocked to see the sky full of new stars, the rims of light of the hulls of CPCs. Why isn’t the block shooting? he thought then remembered the order had to come from himself and his fellow council members. He ran out into the darkness. For ten minutes he dodged beams of light, probing the rubble he crawled through. The sound of vast battle was all around, diffused to a dull roar, like surf. At last he came to a mark chalked in glowing letters on the blank face of a dead-end alley. The Fat Controller pressed three, almost invisible, studs in the wall. Silently, there opened a black hole, the entrance of an Outstanding Functionary’s Underground Corridor, or OFUC, more commonly referred to as a rat-line. Hurrying along the pitch-black passage for a hellish, interminable period, he emerged in dimness of the wasteland, outside the declining parapets and last outwalls of the Strip. A bright flash threw his shadow along the broken floor of the plateau, and he turned to see the heavy bombardments of the P-Fed ships striking the city. He was weeping, his vision becoming a river of light and color, by the feeling of warm liquid pooling in his floor pedals, he realized he must have pissed himself at some point, but didn’t care. He was simply, deliriously, happy to be alive.

* * *

Morghain!’ said PRod, ‘The council! Apparently it’s gone.’

‘Dissolved?’

‘Sort of. StaggImatic just DMed me with a video feed one of the council members posted. I haven’t seen it, but according to him, they are murdering and raping each other.’

’What?’

‘That’s what Staggy said. ’Killing each other and fucking each other in the ass’.’

Morghain was shocked but had to acknowledge that this was exactly what the council would do, under these circumstances.

‘So we’re on our own?’ she said. Despite her realistic opinion of the server’s governing body, she felt the news like a bereavement.

Suddenly, a towering voice broke out from unseen sources, all over the city. It was the voice of D00mcaster who had activated the all-address public notification channel, which had not been used since the time it had almost caused the overthrow of the government by enraged citizens.

’All fighters and citizens put down your weapons and surrender. The Players Federation forces will be merciful. We have just signed a treaty of surrender. Further resistance is pointless, your Id’s will not be destroyed and you Kys-One will continue to be a free city in alliance with P-Fed. There is no point in further fighting. Surrender. I am D00mcaster I represent the council in this, which is unanimous in our decision.’

‘What!’ yelled Morghain, ‘No, no, no, no!’

* * *

In the heart of the block, D00mcaster’s mutilated Id had wiggled and flopped its horrible, amputee way to the core. Here a massive block of energy sinks provided the power for the fortress’ defenses. He touched a panel in the wall and it opened, showing a grid of a hundred buttons, in ten-by-ten rows and columns. Knet didn’t allow things like passwords or punch codes to be modded into objects, security measures had to be rigged up with existing mechanics. In this one, a correct pattern of switches in the on-off positions needed to be active. Each withdrew or inserted a locking rod, somewhere deep in the fortress, that restrained a heavier rod from falling on a single button. That button would active a small explosive in the core of the power bank. The energy stored there would do the rest.

The self-destruct had been considered an aid to collaboration. It needed fifty percent of the central Council to vote to unlock it. The reasoning for its existence was that, since half of the governing body could could kill them all at any given time, an incentive to tamp down the factionalism was created. It was a wacky idea, but the council was full of them. To unlock the trigger, an activation pattern needed to be acquired from an off-Knet program that kept track of the extant logons of the council members. It would issue a DM to the listed members and collate them with active Ids. Almost all of those logons were now dark, their owners dead. Only The Fat Controller and D00mcaster remained, thus D00mcaster, by himself, now constituted fifty percent of the council. He sent the activate request, got the approval request, hit ‘yes’, and received the pattern, in the form of a black and white png image. Then it was just a matter of clicking the right switches on the grid to ‘on’, to correspond with the pattern.

It wasn’t easy with his mangled limbs, but D00mcaster managed, cursing under his breath. Now there was only one button to go, which he’d left waiting while he conducted his armistice announcement.

‘-all praise our great republic!’ he was concluding. ‘Long live a free Kys-One!’

He deactivated the comm and typed out a DM to Ganze, ’jst killed the council and blew up block. u better pay me fag’. On reflection, he edited out the ‘fag’ bit and hit SEND. Then he pushed the final switch. Somewhere, deep in the complex, a final rod was withdrawn, a heavier rod fell onto a button, and a small explosive charge was set off, in the heart of the Bock’s massive energy bank.

* * *

It seemed that no sooner had the last words of the council’s capitulation finished rolling back to PRod and Morghain through the street canyons, than the Block exploded. It was exquisitely beautiful, in the few moments before the shock wave hit them and the sight was lost in a storm of dust.

‘Run!’ yelled Morghain. ‘It’s gonna rain!’

They bolted, looking for any overhang. Great slabs of falling wreckage began to thunder and crash in the smoke-thick gloom. They turned a corner to a wider space. ‘Down!’ yelled Morghain and body slammed PRod to the left and into the lee of a rubble pile. The drilling beam of a heat energy weapon wrote a burning gash across the street wall, and the cracking impacts of kinetic objects snapped above their heads.

‘Stop!’ yelled Morghain, ‘don’t shoot!’

‘Kysairons!’ yelled PRod, ‘Friendlies!’

A tremendous section of wreckage came down, with ponderous lethality, not more than a hundred meters in front of them, the world shook and they were bucked into the air. For a while they all lay in the terrifying bombardment, hugging the ground, waiting to die as the shrapnel of the Block descended on the city. They didn’t.

‘Don’t shoot!’ yelled Morghain again, as the noise subsided.

‘Come ahead slow!’ called a voice from the glowing recesses of the smoke, ‘-ah shit it’s Morghain,’ it added, as she emerged. ‘Come over, hurry!’

‘Don’t listen to that bulletin!’ she shouted to the mob of armed citizens she found, bristling with weaponry, behind a rubble barricade.

‘The Bock blew up!’ One was shouting, in shrill disbelief and panic, ‘The Block blew up!’

‘It said if we surrender, we can keep our Ids’ said another, a geometrically angular biped with no face.

‘It’s a lie’ replied Morghain, ‘Motor bought the block! He’s going to make an example of Extant. Our only chance it to fight, or he’ll exterminate us all!’

‘Why would he do that?’ Demanded an elegantly-modeled Id of a nude, cheetah-spotted cat woman, with six breasts. ‘We’re more use to him alive than dead, aren’t we? You know,’ she added, hopefully, ‘as sex slaves.’

‘He’s a pragmatic man’ agreed another, an industrial-squat dwarf with an angular sword, three times longer than himself.

‘No!’ said Morghain, in despair, ‘If we keep together we can beat them! Look-’

‘The Block just blew up, Morghain!’ said the angular man. ‘It told us to surrender then committed suicide! Our best bet is to take a chance on the truce. If we fight it out- I mean, this is P-Fed we’re talking about.’

‘I don’t want to die’ said the cat woman, sounding plaintive.‘I have allot going on here.’

‘Anyone with a flyer has already escaped’ said the dwarf. ‘We’re trapped on-server. Unless any of you have one?’ He turned, in sudden hope, to his companions.

‘Of course we fucking don’t!’ snapped someone, in the gloom, ‘if we did, do you think we’d be hanging out with you?’

‘Then our best bet is to surrender’ said the angular man, firmly. The general murmuring of the group seemed to agree.

‘We outnumber them ten to one!’ yelled Morghain in despair. She looked about for an agreeing face, but found their eyes evasive or resentful.

’If you fucking clanners hadn’t provoked Motor in the first place we wouldn’t be here,’ said a new voice. A man-shaped figure, like a medieval-techno iron maiden, with its spikes on the outside, stepped out of the gloom. Morghain thought she knew him, but couldn’t place the name. ’This is your fault.’

’Our fault?’ Said Morghain, although she know it was probably true.

‘I saw you, parading along with the other kingpins when you blew up Epsilon server, you were so fucking proud of yourselves weren’t you?’

‘I wasn’t-’

‘And that bullshit Carnivous pulled at Motor’s presser. You kept poking the bear and now the bear’s taking a shit on our heads. Great job, Morghain.’

‘I didn’t have anything to do with that and I tried to stop it!’ yelled Morghain. ’I’ve been trying to get the factions to deal with Motor for the last year and rein in people like Carnivous! I didn’t want this to happen, but it is! We need to deal with it and I’m telling you, our only option is to fight!’

‘Don’t ruin it for the rest of us Morghain,’ sighed the cat woman ‘if you keep resisting, they might rescind the offer.’

‘Yeah, get the fuck away from us for real!’ said the dwarf, apparently gaining enough courage from the crowd to sass a ranker.

‘Plus the Block blew up’ came the first voice form somewhere, still sounding panicky and rattled, ’the fucking Block blew up.’

‘Go play with your clan buddies, Morghain,’ said the iron maiden man heavily, ‘we’re taking the offer.’ He turned his spiked back, tossed his weapon on the street and climbed out of the barricade. The rest made to follow.

‘There is no offer-’ protested Morghain, her voice failing, but PRod stopped her with a hand on her shoulder.

‘Come on’ he said.

He was able to pull a reluctant Morghain with him. They left the barricade. They ran for a while then paused to listen. Was the booming and rattling of battle growing less? The thought settled into Morghain’s chest like the breath of a fatal plague. The city was weakening. But there were still explosions booming out and weapons chattering and beams of light flickered up into the sky.

They went on, going from street to wreckage-filled street, unable to find the fighting they could hear all around. The defensive maze of the city was working against them and, with his lower-powered Id, PRod knew he was holding her back.

‘Morghain!’ yelled a pale woman who looked like an emaciated cadaver with pale blue fire for hair. She was sitting astride a poison-green frog, slightly smaller than a horse, that bounded across the tops of the street and fixed itself to the walls. ‘They’re over this street! They’re holed up in the Museum of Archaic Porn! Come on, we’re gonna mass up for an attack!’

‘Okay, thanks Bodachia!’ waved Morghain. The pale woman spurred her amphibian mount and it went up and over the street wall. ‘Sorry PRod,’ she said, ‘I can’t hang back with you anymore. I’m going up and over. If you want to bail, go find somewhere to hide. Good luck.’

‘Why?’ Asked PRod, helplessly, knowing that this was it. ‘Come away with me! Let’s go. Let’s just leave.’

Morghain smiled. ‘I can’t,’ she said. ‘And I can’t explain why I can’t. Except that, if I walk away from this place, it has no value. And if it doesn’t, neither do I. Neither do the people, or anything I’ve done here. None of it means anything. That’s too hard for me to accept. Maybe I’m living in a delusion, but who isn’t?’ She wondered if she’d heard those words before.

‘Give me some kind of contact, other than your Knet Id’ PRod said.

‘I don’t have one. I don’t really exist. I’m only here. And here isn’t anywhere.’ Morghain looked at the luminous-deep sky, then back to PRod’s face and suddenly laughed. ‘I feel light’ she said, gazing at the twisting street, choked with new rubble and crawling with its writhing, fire-written signs. ‘It’s like despair, but the good kind. Ecstatic. I think I understand why Carnivous made his suit.’

‘Will you find me again?’

Morghain bounded up the side of the street canyon to its lip. ‘Goodbye, Rodney!’ she called down, ‘You were a friend of mine!’

She was gone.

PRod looked left then right. He cursed and ran to the right.

* * *

Carnivous and the other kingpins were approaching a hump-backed building in the outer ring, dark against the glow of the city, when they saw the Block explode. They turned to watch, the ascending wreckage reflected, in miniature, on their dark bodies.

‘Kys is finished’, said Carnivous. They turned away.

Now they came beneath dark walls of the looming building. Shapes stepped silently out from the darkness. No more than a handful, but massive, articulated and dense. Kingpins.

‘We came,’ said Calandarman. Behind him were The Zule, 7P and Horrid Impregnator. With Lopslide, Hammerziet, Cubist, ECG and Carnivous himself, they were nine strong. For a moment, they stood in silence, as the city rumbled and battled, sending swarms into the sky. Carnivous nodded. They entered the wall by a narrow partition and bright light spilled out. Inside the hangar cavity, the charger rested in its cradle, the floodlights glittering off it’s mirror-black sides.

‘Let’s go,’ said Carnivous.