All That’s Dead

49

A massive metal manta ray broke through the clouds, topped with ringed exhaust ports — glinting in the setting sun. Huge, imposing, and opulent. Its attending school of biplanes circled it like cleaner fish, the sky around them laced with vivid pinks and darkening blues. A caption faded up on the screen: ‘THE ARGONAUT ~ MÒR-CLASS PASSENGER LINER ~ ESTIMATED VALUE 4,000,000,00 °CREDITS’. Stirring music swelled.

Logan helped himself to another Malteser, sooking the chocolate off before crunching the malty interior.

The screening room was probably big enough for forty people, but it wasn’t even half full. Zander, his FX guru Hoshiko, and a handful of her team, took up most of the back row. Steel and Susan had commandeered the middle seats in the middle row, with Rennie sitting on one side of them, and Logan on the other. And, in the front row, all on his own, with a huge tub of popcorn: Tufty.

The wee lad pretty much fizzed with excitement.

The screen took up the entire wall in front of them, glowing with colour as the Argonaut passed, then darkening as the scene switched to the inside of another ship. Its wheelhouse was a strange mix of new-fangled electronics and Heath Robinson levers, cogs, and dials. Moving bits turning other bits. More bits going in and out. The Argonaut clearly visible through the windscreen — below and unsuspecting.

An older woman stalked into the middle of the shot. Handsome and imposing, with a cascade of curling flame-red hair and a clockwork corset. She took off her top hat and tossed it to a stitched-together part-man-part-dinosaur creature, who caught it with a mechanical arm.

A half-naked Conan type lumbered on, complete with loincloth and furry boots. Only instead of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s head at the top, a cat sat inside the stump of Conan’s neck — wearing goggles and a silk scarf — operating levers to make him move.

‘Excuse me.’ Tara appeared at the end of the row, one hand on her swollen belly as she squeezed past Rennie. ‘Sorry. Coming through. Thanks.’ Smiling as Susan, Steel, and Logan stood to let her past. She thumped down into the empty seat next to him and groaned.

Logan took her hand and squeezed it.

She leaned closer, voice dropped to a whisper. ‘Did I miss anything?’

Tufty bounced up and down in his seat. ‘Any minute now!’

The handsome woman in the corset snapped her fingers. ‘Poltron, Scartbreak, release the grappling spears!’

Frankenstein’s Tyrannosaur nodded. ‘Yes, Baroness.’

A jump cut and the picture switched to outside again, sweeping down from the wheelhouse windows, past the ship’s mascot and ‘THE BURNING FOX’, looking up past the ship’s hull to the elliptical balloon it hung from, its propellers a blurred whurrrrrrrr.

Hatches popped open all along the ship’s length and harpoons with grappling heads levered out, before roaring away like guided missiles, trailing ropes and chains behind them.

The screen filled with the Argonaut again as the grappling spears thunked into her hull. One cracked into a biplane on the way in, pinning it to the ship like a lepidopterist’s butterfly.

Tara shifted in her seat. ‘My bladder’s got the attention span of a sodding goldfish these days.’

Tufty turned and scowled, one finger up to his lips. ‘Shhh!’ He gazed up at the screen again. ‘Here it comes!’

The baroness snapped her fingers again. ‘Arachnox!’

Apparently, Arachnox was a human head in a jar full of blue liquid, mounted on a mechanical body that looked like the unholy love child of a silverback gorilla and a tarantula as it unfolded itself from the ceiling and clicked down onto the wheelhouse floor.

The head in the jar looked an awful lot like Tufty’s.

Arachnox’s voice was a grating electronic rasp. Wet and sibilant. ‘Yesssss, Baronessssss?’

‘It’s time for your children to come out and play.’

‘Of courssssssse.’

Doors and levers sprung open all over the solid parts of Arachnox’s body and sharp red eyes glowed in the darkness. ‘Sssssssscurry, my little onessssss. Sssssssscurry and feasssssst!’

A whole heap of mechanical spider-rat-things fell from his body — twisting to land on their metal feet — and scampered out through small holes in the bridge’s skirting boards.

The camera followed the biggest spider-rat as it scuttled through the gloom and out onto one of the chains stretched between The Burning Fox and the Argonaut. Following its brothers and sisters as they swarmed across to the bigger ship, drill-head teeth spinning.

Tufty let out a little squeal of delight, bouncing up and down in his seat.

Yes, he was an idiot and a pain in the hoop, but you had to admit he made a pretty good mechanical-gorilla-spider-sidekick for an evil genius.

Logan turned and smiled at Tara. Leaned in, closed his eyes and kissed her. Her lips tasted of warm cherries and vanilla ice cream.

The kind of taste you’d never get tired of.

The kind of taste you could spend the rest of your life with.

On the screen, people started screaming.