Slide On The Run

Episode Four Life On Mars?

The weapon-weight of the Desert Eagle he had taken from the Blimp was hard and metallic against Slide's back, but no way could he put a hand to the gun. Inside Art's Snooker, on the second floor, Nuygen von Bulow and her Sharkboy

sidekick totally had the drop on him. The exact nature of Nuygen von Bulow had always been a mystery to Slide. She was perhaps a succubus with ambition, or a mutant demon of a kind he had never previously encountered. On their first meeting, long parsecs in the past, aboard the ancient Moche airship, he had known she wasn't human, that was for sure, and later, in the perfumed confines of her private state room, she hadn't smelled demon either, but then the bomb planted by Good-time Charlie Christmas and his Sky Pirates had detonated, the airship had been blown clean in half, and he had been deprived of any further chance to investigate. In the present, the needle gun in Nuygen von Bulow's right hand, the breathy Hanoi street-edge in her voice, and the Mossberg toted by her boy companion told him that, whatever she might really be, he should move with extreme circumspection.

"I suggest that you and your people step away from Slide, and make no let or hindrance while we take him, and claim the completely outrageous price on his suddenly very valuable head."

Slide moved just slightly. "Perhaps, before we go any further, someone would like to explain to me why my head has quite so high a fucking price on it."

Nuygen von Bulow looked Slide up and down. "I would have taken you without any financial incentive, Yancey Slide. You've fucked with me too many times for me to feel anything but an extreme and unpleasant delight in watching you suffer all the way to your limits, and well beyond. I haven't forgotten what you did to me at the Kremlin."

Slide shrugged and raised his hands. "I know you and I have a somewhat problematic history, Nuygen, but I really would like to know why I've suddenly become so damned valuable."

Sharkboy hefted the shotgun and looked eagerly at von Bulow. Slide knew the kid wanted to blow someone apart so bad he could taste it. "He's just stalling, ma'am. Doc Zen gotta have filled him in already."

Despite the predicament, Slide was not only able to look Sharkboy directly in the eye, but also raise an amused eyebrow. "That shows how little you know of Doc Zen, kid."

Von Bulow glanced at Slide. "I think we know enough about Doc Zen to assume he's not going to get in the way when we take you out of here. Isn't that right, Doc?."

Zen moved further away from Slide, closer to the pool table. "I'm sorry, Yance, but you're just too damned hot to have around."

Slide's lip curled. "Thanks Doc. With friends like you, what the fuck do I need with parasites?"

Von Bulow gestured with the needle gun. "Are you going to come quietly?"

Before Slide could answer, the door to the stairs swung violently open, and two cops, in blue uniforms, and with drawn guns, squinting in the comparative darkness of the pool hall, were suddenly a new factor in the equation of showdown. "Everyone stand right where they are and don't move as much as a muscle."

In the first fraction of a second, all the players in the room froze as instructed, and the officers moved forward. "Put your hands on the back of your head, Yuma. Fingers laced."

As far as Slide could tell, Sharkboy was the first to break the deadlock brought about by this new Johnny Yuma problem. He turned with the clear intent of blowing away the intruding policemen. Slide was the second to join the play. The Desert Eagle was in his hand, and, without conscious thought, he fired the big .50 caliber automatic with a deafening report in the enclosed space. It was alleged that a bullet from a Desert Eagle could crack the engine block of a Mac truck. Sharkboy staggered forward with a massive wound in his back where the hollow point had torn into it. The cops, being mere humans, were no problem in terms of response. Compared with an idimmu at full stretch, they were infinitely slow. Nuygen was another matter. She had the needle gun pointed straight at him. Although she couldn't kill him, she could have maimed him with a blast of razor-sharp steel micro-shards to the point that his immediate future would be exceedingly uncomfortable, complicated and immobile. Her hesitation stemmed from her not wanting him maimed. She wished him alive and walking, and ready to suffer at her hands, and in that small but crucial moment, as she was divided between desire for sweet revenge and practicality, Slide saw his chance.

He tossed her an illusion. Slide and Nuygen were suddenly somewhere else.

Balanced, legs braced like surfers, they were each on a flying disc about five feet in diameter, she was a buxom blonde in a bikini and boots, and he was a somewhat epicene young man, stripped to the waist, with a wide and studded Spartacus belt. The two of them were going at each other with long, snaking electric whips, and swords hung from their belts, that would supposedly come into play if they moved closer to each other. Slide had no idea where or when they were, but a vast and roaring crowd way below then indicated that they were the current attraction at some ultra-extreme, stadium sporting event. He knew he had never been in any situation or place like it before, and he could only assume the context of the vision had come from her memory rather than his. He still had the edge, however, having instigated the distracting phantasm. His whip shot sparks and coiled around von Bulow's knees and thighs, pulling her off balance. For a moment, she screamed and teetered, and then began to plummet to the stadium below.

Slide cut the illusion as fast as he had started it and, back in Art's Snooker, his hand was around Nuygen's thin right wrist. He twisted, she cried out, and the needle gun went flying. The fifty caliber was up beside her head. Slide fired again, but she was not the target. Again the busting of the cap was a hazard to eardrums, but it was worse for the first native cop who went flying backwards, effectively headless, with blood, brains, and skull fragments sprayed over an elliptical area being him. Slide fired again, and the second cop replicated his companion's arc of final flight. Only then did he step back and place the muzzle of the huge automatic hard against Nuygen's left temple.

"So, my dear, what were you saying about taking my head?"

Slide could not recall ever seeing Nuygen von Bulow looking apprehensive before, and even then it only lasted for a split second. Her previous combination of loathing and contempt returned almost immediately. "I can't be killed."

Slide smiled unpleasantly. "I know that, but one of these hollow points could fuck you up royally for a while. You'd be living without a head."

Doc Zen moved towards the two of them. "Let her go Yancey."

"I don't know about that."

Doc ignored Slide. "Just get out of here, Nuygen. Walk out of here, back to you limo and your Humiliation, and don't say a word. Slide isn't going to shoot you."

"I'm not?"

Zen returned Slide's glance with a look of one who knows he will be calling the shots for there on in. "No, you're not. You have more than enough troubles already."

With a shrug, Slide withdrew the pistol and slid it into the back of his pants. "Whatever you say, Doc."

As Nuygen von Bulow walked stiffly to the door, the body of Sharkboy slowly dematerialized, fading to nothing and leaving no trace. When she was gone, with the double doors slapping behind her, Doc Zen whistled. "Man, she really had that kid in the full thrall. Even dead, he doesn't even exist without her."

The blonde who had been playing nine ball with Zen looked round the pool room with an expression of distaste. "This joint is really messed up."

Zen snapped his fingers. "Ernst, get a bucket and mop."

One of the synthetics scowled. "Why do I always have to do the grue-wipe?"

"You're a synthetic aren't you? Why else would I have acquired you."

"You don't have to rub it in.

The blonde sighed. "We've still got two dead cops here."

Doc Zen failed to catch the drift of her argument. "It's their own fault for walking in here when they did."

"Whoever might or might not be at fault, the bodies still have to be disposed of."

Now it was Zen's turn to shrug. "So someone will drive them out to the storm sewers and feed them to the CHUDs."

"CHUDs?"

"Cannibalistic Humanoid Underground Dwellers."

Slide blinked. "I didn't know you had CHUDs in this C21."

"How do you think we keep the Mole People at bay?"

Zen busied himself setting his team to work at cleaning up all evidence of the mayhem in the pool hall. Then, when everything in motion to his satisfaction, he slipped on his frock coat and turned his attention to Slide. "I guess you see by now that you can't possibly stay here. I'm not being inhospitable, but what just happened could become a constant condition of life if you stick around."

"I seem to be attracting more than my fair share of attention."

"What I mean is, old friend, that you have to get the fuck out of here like now. This minute."

Slide sighed. "I'm hardly in any shape to be leaping from one fucking dimension to the next with bounty hunters all around me. I'm telling you, Doc. I need a hole-in-the-wall for a spell of recuperation. If I have to lam out the hard way, it's only going to be a matter of time before one or more of them catches up to me. Then I'm for the Negative Zone or even the Edge of Entropy. If that's all I have to look forward to, I might as well make my last stand right here and save myself a whole mess of hard traveling."

Zen looked sideways at Slide. "You're threatening me? You're threatening me with deliberately staying and having a showdown right on my turf?"

Slide shook his head. "No, man, I'm just tired, and it's the only card I have left to play…"

Doc Zen thought for a while. "Mars might be a good place to hole up."

"Mars? What the fuck are you talking about. There's nothing on Mars but rocks."

"Stop thinking so temporally, my boy. Eight million years ago Mars was fucking humming."

Slide frowned. Eight million years ago on a clearly defined Other Planet was a

stretch by any standard of reality-jump. He groped for what he recalled about Mars eight million years in the past. He was relieved when Doc Zen helped him out. "It was when The Slimy Things were tossing their time-cylinders full of fighting machines at Earth and Venus, and the Jedwars and warlords were fighting among themselves. The neo-Victorians are there already. They have themselves a nice little Raj going."

"I'm not sure it's what I'm looking for."

"You're not choosing a vacation, Yancey old son. You're looking for a place to hide. It would seem to be a point on the Martian timeline when they went about their own business without too much truck with Imperial entanglements. And besides, I heard that Miss Mina Murray is up there."

Slide's eyes narrowed. "Mina Murray that…"

"Mina Harker that was."

"She who mind melded with Count Dracula?"

Zen nodded with an express of inscrutable amusement. "The very same."

"No bullshit?"

"No bullshit."

"So they've got vampires up on Mars?"

"They're Victorians aren't they?"

They both knew how Slide felt about vampires. They both knew that Slide was intrigued, but form dictated he should raise one more objection. "How the fuck am I supposed to get to Mars in the shape I'm in? Not to mention the almighty goddamned timeleap."

Doc Zen trumped the problem "We have a Carter Machine out back."

"A Carter Machine?"

"Right."

Now Slide was really impressed. "Where the fuck did you get a Carter Machine?"

"I bought it from a traveling Gnostic who was a Dealer in Devices.

"You're kidding me?"

"How do you think I got Ernst and the other Hormad synthetics?"

Slide and Zen exited by a rear door and descended into a sub-basement by means of a freight elevator. Doc Zen's domicile was also larger on the inside than the out, and the basement was like that of a major museum, with irregular lines and groupings of large and dusty, drop-cloth shrouded objects, and long ranks of warehouse style selves on which the smaller items were stacked in piles. Doc Zen had a reputation for hoarding all manner of stuff and especially devices of arcane obscurity, and usually of little or no relevance to the time period in which he was residing. For a minute or more he stood frowning, as though unable to recollect where the hell he had put the damned thing. Then memory seemed to reassert itself. He walked with increasing confidence among the remarkable and extensive collection of junk, finally halting in front of something looked like a sheeted-up hotdog stand with its parasol still open. With a collector's pride, he whipped away the cover, revealing the umbrella canopy of a Gridley Wave generator above a comfortable 19th century style, padded leather armchair with a hinged set of brass and crystal controls that could be swung in front of the seated operator/passenger.

Slide stared at it a slightly bemused expression even for a demon who had seen most things. "That is definitely a Carter Machine."

"I just have to find the power source."

Doc Zen rummaged and eventually located a light absorbing cube that appeared uncomfortable in the relative space it occupied. Slide took a step back. "Is that what I think it is?"

"A simple little matter/anti-matter unit."

"You're messing round with matter/anti-matter in the middle of a highly populated city?

Doc Zen didn't seem at all concerned. "Fuck 'em if they can't take a cosmic joke. And anyway, I'm careful."

Slide seated himself in the chair of the Carter Machine, trying it for size, but, at the same time, he couldn't help remembering that, as far as his information went, the Carter Machine didn't have an exactly unblemished safety record. He had heard tales of how people had checked out under the spinning canopy but then never checked in again. "I'm still not sure I can do this without tetradetoxin, Doc."

Doc Zen's voice took on a tone of provoked impatience. "Fuck, Yancey, don't you ever stop creating problems? You seriously think Doc Zen is without tetradetoxin?

After Slide had been suitably drugged and otherwise prepared for his departure through space and time, and deprived of his weapon because the Gridley Wave would never support even that mass of metal, Doc Zen leaned in and made sure his seat belt was securely fastened, and then stepped back to a safe distance. "The coordinates are all set. You need only to press forward on the main control lever."

Still Slide hesitated. "I don't know, Doc. I don't know about any of this."

"Fuck you, Yancey, get going, or I'll turn you in to the IIA myself."

With his brain now awash in tetradetoxin, Slide could only do as he was told and go. He pressed forward on the main control lever, and then looked up as the

canopy commenced to turn, allowing himself to be hypnotized by its accelerating rotation. Initially the hallucinations were routine, flapping wings leaving rainbow contrails, and stars streaming down the curvature of space-time like a sparkling mercury fountain, then, fleetingly, as the intergalactic dust clouds rushed past, he crossed the space lanes of the Great Ships of the Ancients, the star-hammers and death-asteroids in which the Shining Ones waged their majestic war on The Great Chalcedon, the Destroyer of Worlds, and he was hurried witness to the carnage and conflagration that resulted when the absolute masters of planetary systems, and the lords of vast gas nebulae clashed in a conflict that he knew would drag on for countless millennia. As he sped across a hundred or more million miles and eighty thousand human centuries, riding the impossible Gridley Wave like the course of the Starchild, he also briefly traversed the black vacuum ranges where the squid-like hydrogen feeders, conceived in the fiery afterbirth of the Big Bang, grazed on the void as they probably would all the way to an approximation of infinity, but then, in an instant he had entered quadrants of light and sound that were impossible to describe even for an idimmu, and where ethereal voices whispered galactic conspiracy in a language he had never encountered before in all his long days, but whose tone was precise enough for Slide to recognize an overpowering evil intent.

When it came, his arrival at his destination was in abrupt and in untoward contrast to the strange and awesome magnificence of the transit. Without warning, he was slammed sideways into hard hot red sand with the force of a dead fall of maybe ten or fifteen feet. For an few moments, Yancey Slide lay stunned and winded, unable to accurately recognize so much as up, light headed in the thin atmosphere, and cautious to make his first move in the reduced gravity. He also realized very quickly that the Carter Machine had not landed with him, and neither had the clothes he had been wearing. He was as bare ass naked as a new born human, without so much as a shirt to cover himself, or any of the small and useful items he had secreted in his pockets before his departure from Doc Zen's. It was more that sufficient to cause him to curse out loud.

"Fuck this for unacceptable shit."

"You must have been extremely drunk."

"What?" The perfect incongruity of the shrill squeaky and over-sibilant voice, with it's slightly affected and decidedly campy English lisp, fitted with the rest of Slide's current predicament so exactly that he moved his head enough to observe that the speaker, was small, barely eighteen inches tall, and resembled a Maine lobster on spindly tripod legs.

"This far down the canal and bareass naked."

"What?"

"I said you must have been extremely drunk to get all this way out of town and lose your clothes into the bargain. You sure must have tied one on."

"Did you see how I got here?"

"No memory?"

Slide was getting tried of this crustacean assuming he was a mislaid drunk. "Just answer the question."

The lobster boy made a negatory gesture with a antennae. "No. I didn't see how you got here. You were fully here when I came sashaying by, out cold in your birthday suit."

"I came a long way to be here. All the fucking way from Earth."

"Are you telling me you're John Carter? Because, if you are, I'm flatly not going to believe you."

"I'm not John Carter, and neither am I Ulysses Paxton, but I arrived here by a similar means of transport."

"So welcome to Malecandra, or Barsoom, or Mars if you prefer it."

"Mars will do."

"My name is Mahdjfb.

"I'm pleased to meet you Mahdjfb. My named is Yancey Slide."

The tripod didn't seem to attache any significance to the name. "I'm afraid your only hope is to make it to the city.

"The city?

"The moons will be up soon and the banths and corphals will be out."

"What?"

"We could both end up as chow."

"What city are you talking about?"

"Extrosylvania."

"What?"

"City of Queen Mina."

"What?"

"Made herself Queen didn't she? After the assassination of Dejah Thoris by the Gorthans in Aaanthor Plaza. Made the place the capital of the Victorian Raj, and Claims she's last bastion of the vertebrates against The Slimy Things."

"But you're exoskeletal."

"That counts."

"It does?"

"The Victorians need all the help they can get, right now. If you've got a bone of any kind, they'll take you, even with those humorless fucking Treens growing a new Mekon in the their tanks."

Now Slide was really surprised. "You've got Treens here?"

"'Tis but a short hop from Venus. I mean, Mars and Venus really started talking after the attack of the Volan Hives from the Red Moon, and the fall of the 17th. Mekon."

"I'm starting to feel a little dizzy."

"There's no air plants this far out, dearie. You need to get back to the city."

"How do I do that?"

"You follow the Grand Canal for about ten clicks and you're there."

"What?"

"The Grand Canal. It's right beside you, for pity's sake. You really should take a look around at your immediate surroundings. What are you going to do when people ask you for your first impressions? Tell them you don't have any because you lay your back and stared straight up because like Snoopy on his doghouse because you didn't like the situation in which you found yourself?"

Mahdjfb seemed an excellent judge of the situation so Slide made the effort, struggled into a sitting position and looked to his right. And there was the Grand Canal. The Martian Grand Canal, for fuck sake. The legendary construction required a moment of pause, in which all thoughts of Slide's own ongoing predicament were temporarily driven from his mind as he stared in unashamed awe. "Holy shit."

Essentially the canal was a vast trench that ran in a gentle curve to the orange horizon and beyond. It was maybe a half mile across, and lined with gargantuan slabs of raw, red and blue veined marble, each one flawlessly fitted to the others that surrounded it, without the use of cement of filler. No wonder that, millions of years in the future, the Grand Canal would still be visible from space when it was nothing more than a dry and eroded, ruined legacy. Its construction was the kind of public works project that usually followed long and monumentally epic wars. He could personally recall how many a mogul, and all descriptions of despots had redeployed their no longer required soldiers to labor dawn to dusk on some backbreaking wonder of the world in question. Sometimes it would be grandiose calendars or implausible tombs, but the first favorite was always a colossal irrigation project. And thus it had been with Ras Thavas and the Jeddaks of Thark after the Wars on Consolidation and the Time of the Flying Death. The newly arrived visitor might have anticipated bright flowing water in the canal, but that was not the case. Slide already knew the Martian canals held the water they moved from the poles to the equator enclosed in pipes, but no second hand weird tales of the Red Planet had prepared him for what he saw. Each pipe was maybe ten feet across, dark blue, and there were countless thousands of them.

He also would have expected that such a massed multitude of pipework to have been laid according to an orderly and geometric design, but these pipes undulated and intertwined, in and out, and over and under, and each individual one seemed to conform to what would have been the natural flow of the water in motion.

"I looks like the intestinal track of some gargantuan planet sized creature."

Mahdjfb fluttered his antennae. "In some respects it is, but we still drink the water."

Slide could only repeat himself. "Holy shit." He really was on Mars, sometime in the Golden Age, and no matter how jaded he might have become, that was something that could not be easily taken as routine.

Mahdjfb, however, was becoming snippy and impatient. "I know you're impressed with your first sight of the Grand canal, but you really do have to start for the city."

"Could you show me the way?"

"Yes, yes, I'm going that way, but we must hurry."

"The banths and corphals will be out?"

"At least you remember what you're told."

Slide got slowly his feet. "Okay, Mahdjfb. Lead the fucking way.

He reflected, however, as he started following the crustacean that a naked man walking into a Victorian city might receive a very mixed reception.

Story so far: Pursued by bounty hunters after his desertion from the Battle of the Fifteen Armies, and with the backstory already starting to distort around him, Yancey Slide, Idimmu Demon of the Tenth Continuum, escapes in Doc Zen's Carter Machine and arrives on ancient Mars some eight million years in the past. Unfortunately, Slide find himself unceremoniously dumped by the Gridley Wave on the sands of the Red Planet, devoid of clothing and personal effects.