hey! so! i'm writing a short story series about supervillains and talking animals!
it's called
DOOMHOLD!
and it's available for free on Smashwords and now also here :D
enjoy <3
DOOMHOLD, PART 1: THE PERIL BEGINS!
In the very heart of the Arctic lurked the ancient fortress Doomhold.
Doomhold!
Doomhold!
A quarter mile high! A quarter mile wide! Four hundred thousand tons of metal and arcane machinery! Eighteen million years old! Impregnable! Invincible!
Yet to the average human, it would have looked like no more than a colossal grey cube, trapped in ice and half-buried in snow, to the top half of which clung hundreds upon hundreds of satellite dishes, like an army of mosquitoes attacking a sugar lump.
To the particular human fixing Satellite #156, his caffeine-yellowed teeth clenched against the cold, it looked like the culmination of choices he didn’t regret but did resent being forced to make.
“Come on, you rusting antique,” he grumbled, wiping frost off his face-shield. “I’ve checked the wiring three times. I’ve oiled every spring and tightened every screw. Everything is exactly as it should be. Stop spewing error messages at me and work, damn you.”
Doomhold (Doomhold!) didn’t like that, and responded by turning off the panels beneath her hull that had been generating just enough warmth to keep him from freezing to death.
Yanking out the component that had been troubling him for the last hour, he roared, “Childish! If that’s how you’re going to behave, I’m going back inside!”
It wasn’t much of a protest. He’d needed to return inside to run a systems analysis anyway. Regardless, the headset beneath his helmet released an angry burst of static as he was climbing down to the hatch that distracted him at a pivotal moment and almost made him slip.
Inside, it was barely warmer than outside. It was also dark. They were keeping the lights and the thermostat low to preserve power. The list of day-to-day challenges was long, and insufficient power was right at the top alongside inadequate tools and whatever the hell that mysterious stench was on Deck C.
He removed only his outer gear – his harness, goggles, his helmet, his fire-retardant jacket, and his tool belt – and left on his gloves, his beanie, his fleece, and the three layers he wore beneath it.
(Given how odd Doomhold was, an onlooker might have been surprised by how normal its maintainer looked. Black hair up in a bun, a short black beard, slightly taller than average, and a generally garrulous aura. That was all that could be said. He wasn’t even particularly handsome, although he very much believed he was.)
When everything had been hung on a hook or folded and set on the appropriate shelf, he stalked down a dark corridor, following the whiff of hot food and, on the way, noting a new leak.
“Pipe Three Eight Three, Level Seven, intersection of Corridors G and H, half an inch in diameter,” he muttered, scribbling in his notebook. “Low priority.”
The deeper he went, the more the walls hummed. Doors slid open and quickly closed again as he passed in an attempt to startle him.
He encountered no one. Thousands could have resided within Doomhold, but at the moment, she had only three breathing inhabitants.
“I’ve had a ghastly morning,” he declared as he stalked into Doomhold’s command centre.
It was one of the largest rooms in the whole fortress, a cathedral of steel, screens, and tubes. His voice echoed.
A very fat, bald man in a wheelchair was hunched over a wide work desk, a screwdriver in hand. This was Wimberley. Doomhold liked him more, for which reason every room he occupied was always well-lit and warm, and he wore only slacks and a long-sleeved purple shirt. He had a plate of hash browns, one of the few foods he enjoyed, placed amidst a minefield of tools and gadgets.
“Ziklag, fetch me fresh batteries,” Wimberley ordered, without turning to look at him. His voice was shrill and horrid.
“A thoroughly ghastly morning. Four hours spent outside, in the freezing cold, risking my life to repair this obscene block.”
Wimberley made a vague ‘who cares?’ gesture. “They’re in the drawer over there.”
Ziklag, who knew very well where the batteries were, made no attempt to retrieve them. “Three times I’d have plummeted if not for my safety line. And the sun! So bright! I’d not be surprised if my retinas are permanently damaged. What are you working on?”
He stole a hash brown and bent down to study Wimberley’s latest project, shoving aside empty coffee cups, medications, and immaculately-etched diagrams.
“What does it look like?” retorted Wimberley, frustration pitching his voice even higher than usual.
“It looks like you started repairing the microwave, then became distracted and put missiles on it. Again.”
Wimberley, at last, looked up to glare at him.
He had small eyes overshadowed by generous brows – you had to get up close to notice that his irises were a striking shade of umber. Ziklag glared back, used to these contests (they’d once silently glared at one another for a solid hour before he’d got an itch), and after a moment Wimberley glanced at the piles of scrap metal and trinitrotoluene and acknowledged, with a shrug, that Ziklag might have a point.
“A strategic choice,” Wimberley said, stubbornly.
“In case our enemies penetrate our defences with the aim of stealing our three year stockpile of cheap, awful frozen mac-n-cheese?”
Nibbling off a slice of his left pinkie’s fingernail and adding it to the little pile of fingernails beside his freshest cup of coffee, Wimberley replied, “In case your useless, bubble-headed American henchwoman or that even more useless droid try to make popcorn unsupervised and almost burn down a whole deck. Again.”
Ziklag considered this. “You’ll need at least five missiles. And a forcefield, if we’re being pragmatic.”
A series of high-pitched, ear-piercing clicks and whistles echoed throughout the room.
“Why aren’t you fixing that instead?” Ziklag complained, flicking a switch to turn it off. “That’s the twelfth false alarm this week.”
“You are certain they’re false alarms?” Wimberley muttered, scanning a nearby screen for any indication that a squad of heavily-armed commandos was about to descend on them.
“Wimberley, you keep asking me that. Every single time I’ve checked, it’s been some dumb animal snooping around where it shouldn’t. I have better things to do than monitor the movements of penguins.”
Wimberley tilted his head. “Is it normal, to find penguins this far inland?”
Ziklag shrugged. “How would I know? I’m not a biologist. I don’t run an aquarium, for all that it often seems to me that my co-workers have the attention spans and intuition of fucking goldfish.”
“Mmm. Only I ran diagnostics yesterday and all our external security features are functioning perfectly well.”
“Clearly you missed something! Wimberley, I know it distresses you that there simply isn’t room to fit more missiles onto Doomhold’s defences. I know you find all ventures that don’t allow for the possibility of additional missiles tedious. But if I have to hear that infernal noise one more time, I shall set up a tent outside and live there, and then you’ll have to wait far longer for someone to bring you your batteries. Fix it, I say!”
***
Half a mile west of Doomhold (DOOMHOLD!) stood Snow and her friends.
Or rather, Snow stood; her friends lurked. The wind was brisk, she was more than thrice as large as any of them, and they’d learned how useful it was to be able to huddle in the shelter her broad, furry body provided.
“Okay, guys,” said Snow. “This is it.”
Snow was a polar bear.
Three months ago, she’d had life figured out. She’d survived childhood. She’d caught her first seal. She could swim, and run, and her teeth were sharp and her coat thick, and that was all she needed.
Then things had… changed.
Snow didn’t know why.
The concept of ‘why’ was, in itself, new to her. In her previous life, ‘why’ had rarely mattered. You did what your body told you to do, and if you did it well, you lived. Who cared why seals were tasty and Mother was warm?
But now her head was crammed full of why at every hour of the day.
Why was she here?
Why were any of them here?
Why did she think this was any of her business?
Most importantly, why was there a huge evil grey block squatting in the middle of the landscape and why was she convinced its occupants were up to no good?
“Our first mission as a team!” squawked Waddles, flapping his fins in excitement. “We should do something cool first! Like, um… a vow of eternal loyalty! Or a suicide pact! If they try to take us alive, we bite each other’s throats out! We go down swinging! Oh, oh! We should have a team motto!”
Waddles was a penguin not yet free of his baby fluff.
Snow had met him only a week ago. Just like her, he’d been alone, wandering toward the grey block for no explicable reason, and for a moment she’d considered eating him. She’d eaten penguins before and enjoyed it very much, and the first lesson Mother had taught her was that you never, ever turned down food.
Why had she decided not to eat him? Why, why, why? She was hungry. It had been two months since her last meal and while she could go longer, there was no reason to, no reason at all beyond this bizarre conviction that she Shouldn’t. That it would be Wrong.
Sky, an albatross and the oldest of them at twenty-one, gave Waddle’s plump backside a stern peck. “Calm down. This is serious business. Snow, just to run through the plan one more time: We activate the perimeter alarm again. Ziklag will come out to check for enemies. When he does, I distract him while you sneak into Doomhold. I’ll follow you afterwards, if I can. Once inside, we’ll set about sabotaging their nefarious plans.”
“Uh-huh,” said Twitch, sceptically, scurrying in anxious circles. “Just the four of us. With no weapons or backup. In a huge building filled with things that snap, shoot, slice, and explode.”
Twitch was a rat, and the only one of them to have actually been in Doomhold before. His family had dwelled in its dusty basement for generations, until the fateful day Ziklag had found them and set down traps. He was a cynical soul, but he was also usually right. Snow rather wished they’d made him the leader instead.
“The danger is what makes it heroic, Twitch,” Waddles explained. “And being heroic is cool!”
“‘Cool’ is irrelevant. As the only ones in a position to intervene, we have a moral responsibility,” said Sky, gravely.
Sky’s ‘why’s were all like that, big, complicated concepts like ‘morality’ and ‘pragmatism’ and ‘the greater good’. She’d also have been fine leader.
For her part, Snow was still motivated by gut feeling, and her gut had told her from the very start that Doomhold was bad, bad news, that it had no place here and needed to be made to leave.
“I’ll look after you,” she assured Twitch, pressing her big black nose to his tiny grey head. “I know we haven’t done anything like this before, I know it’s scary – but look at me! I’m twice as big as Ziklag!”
“Ziklag isn’t the only problem,” Twitch reminded her. “Wimberley’s in there too, with all his weapons. Then there’s their henchmen, and the robots, and the cat.”
Sky squawked in exasperation. “Twitch, as you yourself have said, Doomhold is immense. Absurdly huge. There’s a decent chance we won’t run into our enemies at all, if we’re quick and careful. You know the layout, you know which sections to target to cripple its machinery. My sense of smell and superb eyesight will warn us of peril well in advance. Now, pull yourself together, rodent.”
“I still think we should have a team motto,” said Waddles, stubbornly.
“We’ll come up with a great one as soon as we’ve completed our first mission,” Snow promised him.
***
“Sir! Boss!”
Wimberley rolled his eyes and Ziklag straightened up as a robot entered the command centre on six bulky wheels, one of which creaked and squeaked because it was covered in unicorn stickers and couldn’t be properly cleaned and maintained without pealing all of them off.
“What is it, Click-9?” Ziklag asked, tersely.
“Wimberley sent me to get batteries and I finally found some!” Click-9 announced, holding them up in one of their four long, extendable arms.
Wimberley’s wheelchair had been designed and built by its user. It was one of the most sophisticated, elegant pieces of machinery Ziklag had ever laid eyes on; so effortlessly manoeuvrable that it conveyed every nuance of Wimberley’s body language as he spun the seat – which could move independent of the wheels – round to bestow the full weight of his scorn upon their minion.
Snatching up a hash brown, Wimberley said, “Five hours ago, Click-9. I asked you for the batteries five hours ago. The batteries that are in that very drawer over there”, before biting into it.
The fan in the middle of Click-9’s torso whirred and their antennae twitched. “They are? No way. No way. Whoa! What’re they doing there?”
“That’s where they’re kept. That’s where they’ve always been kept, you imbecile. That’s where they’ve been every single day for the last-…”
“Click-9, where did you take those from?” Ziklag asked, narrowing his eyes at the objects Click-9 was holding up. “Those aren’t batteries, they’re superconducting magnets. In fact, they look very much like the superconducting magnets that belong in Doomhold’s quantum hepatic catalyser. Which I very much hope you didn’t deactivate, because it plays a not-insignificant role in preventing this entire structure from being flooded with levels of radiation incompatible with life.”
Click-9’s headlights flashed nervously. “Riiight. Yeah. Yeah, that would be a problem.”
“Are you trying to assassinate us, Click-9?”
“No! No, no, no, never!”
“Maybe put them back, then.”
As Click-9 creaked and squeaked out the door at top speed, Wimberley folded his arms. “I ask again why you haven’t fired them.”
“This is your problem, Wimberley. You give up too early.”
“It’s been a decade. They’re as incompetent as they were the day I built them. Turn them off, throw them into storage and be done with it.”
The perimeter alarm rang out again and Ziklag, triumphant, said, “On the subject of incompetence! Glass houses, Wimberley, glasses houses!”
“No, no, no,” Wimberley snapped, waving his hand over a nearby panel and activating a holographic display of their entire security apparatus and an aerial view of the landscape surrounding the fortress. “Look! It’s working perfectly well! Not a penguin in sight, see?”
“So instead of alerting us to things that aren’t threats, it’s now alerting us to… nothing whatsoever,” said Ziklag, studying the footage.
“Look closer, idiot. There. No, there.”
“Is that a polar bear?”
“I suppose it could be an enemy incursion disguised as a polar bear. But that seems unlikely.”
Ziklag frowned. “I’ve never seen one this close to us. What on Earth brought it here?”
“Who cares? I’m going to launch a missile at it.”
“No, no. We’re saving those for actual problems. I’ll deal with it.”
***
“Um – how will we know if they’ve seen you, Snow?” asked Waddles, who didn’t fully grasp the concept of cameras.
Snow’s ears twitched. “Because I can hear the alarm.”
“They’ll be coming out to check what’s happening in a moment,” said Twitch. “Everybody – places! Sky, remember to go for the eyes.”
“Yes, yes. I’m not a child,” Sky replied tetchily, before taking off.
“Be careful!” Snow called after her.
***
The elevator carried Ziklag down to Deck A, ground level, his rifle in hand.
It took a while for Doomhold to melt the snow gathered around her main entrance hatch, during which time he sighed, tapped his feet, and thought about all the more important things he could be doing.
“Cower, you frozen netherworld,” he declared, when at last he strode outside.
The Arctic greeted him with its usual indifference.
He scanned his surroundings. Hmm. How did one set about hunting a polar bear? Should he set a trap? Or-…
Something fast and white and sharp descended from the sky and slammed into his face.
“Aa-aargh! Get off!” he snarled, as a beak latched onto his hat, and then onto his left ear.
As he tried to repel the bird, the snow to his right erupted.
Before the realisation that he’d been ambushed by a bear and was about to be ignominiously eaten could even settle, the bear in question charged right past him and up the metal ramp leading to Doomhold’s main entrance.
“No!” he shouted, raising his weapon, only for the beak to snap shut on his earlobe and all but yank it clean off.
Howling in pain, he tripped over something warm and roundish and fell flat on his face in the snow.
A penguin. That’s a penguin. What is happening?
Then someone shouted, “Yeah! Take that! Go Team Blizzard Chaos Mega-Storm Rangers!”
And slowly, as Ziklag watched his attackers charge, shuffle, and fly into Doomhold, it dawned on him that the voice had belonged to the penguin.
***
They’d done it!
They were in!
…Now what?
As they made their way down a long, grey tunnel, Snow confronted the reality that she still didn’t know exactly what she was hoping to achieve.
‘Stop them.’ That had been the plan. That had been the instinct driving her from the moment she’d first laid eyes on Doomhold. Doomhold was bad, the sight of it made her feel bad, and she had to put a stop to whatever was going on inside it. Not knowing what that was hadn’t seemed like such a big deal when she’d been planning the attack.
“Er. This is… mmh. Not pleasant,” said Sky, and Snow realised that her friend had never been inside a den, had never been anywhere except beneath the open sky.
“Chill, Feathers,” said Twitch, riding atop Snow’s back. “There’re wider corridors ahead, and the engine room’s huge.”
Incredibly grateful for the rat’s presence, Snow said, “What’s an engine room, Twitch?”
“It’s like… the heart. We take it out, Doomhold’s finished.”
Snow had eaten hearts before. She’d enjoyed them. “Great. Great. Let’s do it.”
That was enough, wasn’t it? Even if she didn’t know what Doomhold was or what it did, it would be enough to put an end to it. Surely.
They went left, then right, then left, then up a ramp, then down a staircase and left again. It was unlike any terrain Snow had traversed before. The floor didn’t have the crunchy-softness of snow, nor the slippery chill of ice. There was no white, no blue, only grey tiles and darker grey pipes twisting and winding their way along the walls and ceiling. Sometimes there were lights that flashed red, and she wondered if they were, somehow, Doomhold’s blood, because she didn’t know anything else that was red.
“Wait! Wait!” squawked Waddles, who’d fallen behind. “I can’t keep up!”
“Get onto your belly. You’re always much faster when you do that, even if you do look like an idiot,” Twitch advised.
“I tried! It doesn’t work in here! The ground’s not smooth enough!”
With great care, Snow picked him up in her massive jaws and placed him on her back next to Twitch. Lacking paws with claws, he promptly fell off.
“Oh, for goodness’ sake,” muttered Sky. “Let’s just hide him somewhere while we get the job done.”
“But I want to help,” Waddles whimpered, wobbling to his feet.
“You can help by hiding until we’re done.”
This section of tunnel – or ‘corridor’, to use Twitch’s word, which was one of those words Snow had somehow known herself – was undergoing maintenance. There was a bucket half-full of stale, dirty water and a mop resting beside the wall. Snow knocked the bucket over with a paw and said, “Waddles, get in.”
Once he’d done so, she gripped the bucket’s handle between her teeth and lifted it up.
“Not bad, kid,” said Twitch. “Now move your butt. We got company.”
From around the corner rolled dozens of small white objects, roundish and with glowing eyes. These, Snow knew, were Doomhold’s security robots; Twitch had warned of them, but also emphasised that while they were numerous, they were frail. Snow quickly confirmed that he was right. They were easier to crack open than crabs.
(Ooooh, a crab would be fantastic right about now. Mmmm.)
“Hah! Look! I got one!” crowed Sky, and indeed, she’d incapacitated one by flipping it onto its back with her beak.
“Huh. They’re usually not quite that pathetic. Last time I was here, they fired bullets and lasers and they could electrocute you,” Twitch noted.
***
“Click-9?” said Wimberley, as his cat slipped into the command centre and hopped up onto his lap.
“What’s up, Big W?”
Ugh, how that graceless familiarity made his teeth itch. He was in charge of this whole operation and they were not on a first-name basis, much less a nickname basis.
“You have been maintaining the sentry droids we put you in charge of, I’m sure?” Wimberley queried. “Oiling them, making sure their batteries are charged, that they have ammunition, all that?”
The cat made biscuits as the robot beeped and booped nervously and said, “Uhhhh – totally! Absolutely! Of course I have!”
“I merely ask because the alarm hasn’t stopped blaring and Ziklag hasn’t returned. Which suggests that we might have a genuine crisis on our hands. So it would be very, very problematic for us all if you’d failed in your duties.”
Doomhold was a strange old edifice of many moving parts. Clatters, crashes, and crunching noises were commonplace even when everything was working properly, to say nothing of the eternal groaning of the ice in which they were wedged.
That said, the commotion coming from downstairs was audible even over the alarm and suggested that at least one or two irreplaceable items had now been damaged.
Wimberley grabbed his wheelchair’s joystick and moved from his tinkering station to the row of screens that dominated the room’s left side. (The cat, who had long grown accustomed to this, continued making biscuits.)
There, he pressed various buttons, and the screen before him flickered and briefly displayed hundreds of unreadable symbols before resolving into a grainy image of Deck B, where a rampaging white bear was pummelling one of their sentries into a pile of gears and springs.
For a while, Wimberley simply contemplated the image. Then he said: “Where the hell is Ziklag and why is he letting this happen?”
***
Ziklag had twisted his ankle.
The bird that had attacked him had also defected on the ramp leading up to Doomhold’s main entrance, and he’d slipped on it. In the process, he’d dropped his rifle in the snow. Retrieving it and limping back indoors had taken time.
Working out where the intruders had gone had been easy, thanks to the trail of destruction, but pursuing them had chewed further precious minutes. He’d taken out one of the dozens of back-up wheelchairs he’d stashed throughout Doomhold after that time Wimberley’s preferred chair had lost power on Deck G and left him stranded for hours.
Thankfully, he was already familiar with how it worked, and how to make it go fast.
“I’m coming for you, you furry bastards,” he growled, zooming down the corridor at top speed, his rifle resting in his lap.
***
“Twitch, where are we? How much longer until we reach the heart?”
Snow had badly underestimated how much she’d struggle to navigate Doomhold’s close, strange-smelling confines, its dimly-lit, twisting corridors and forty-eight inconsistently-sized floors. The whole of her life she’d relied on her nose to tell her where to go, and it had never once led her astray. In here, nothing smelled right or familiar, and for the first time ever she was lost.
“This is so much fun,” said Waddles happily, nestled in his bucket.
“It’s a nightmare,” snapped Sky. “How are we going to find our way out again?”
“There! There!” Twitch squeaked. “That door, right there!”
Accepting that her one strength as a leader was to be a ready supply of dumb muscle, Snow slammed her whole body against the grey rectangle Twitch had indicated. It gave way instantly, which was gratifying. Hope lasted a whole three seconds before Twitch said, “What? No, this isn’t it. They’ve changed things.”
The enormous room they’d broken into didn’t contain anything that looked like a heart. Instead, there were hundreds upon hundreds of long, dark cylinders, stacked all the way to the ceiling.
The mysterious vocabulary that had slipped into Snow’s unwilling brain supplied a word: ‘Missiles.’
“We’re here! Yay!” Waddles cheered. “Let’s pulverise it!”
“Errrr... no,” said Snow. “We should definitely not touch those. At all.”
Twitch, on the same page, said in hushed, horrified tones, “Why are there so many? What… what are they planning to do with them?”
“We need to leave,” said Sky, and Snow couldn’t help but agree. She’d never been so certain that they were utterly out of their depths.
Waddles squawked in dismay. “You’re joking! Leave without doing anything? What sort of hero behaves like that? We made it all the way here! We have to pulverise something!”
Moving to perch on the rim of his bucket, Sky said severely, “Listen, you foolish child -…”
Sudden, startling pain burst across the left side of Snow’s head, and she roared.
That was a mistake. Her companions had never heard her roar before, and certainly never in a confined space where the echo rendered the sound positively monstrous. Twitch, prone to panic at the best of times, leapt from the safety of her fur and shot off down the corridor.
“Useless rodent!” Sky screeched.
“By the devil – you really can talk,” said a grating gargle of a voice.
Blinking away blood as it dripped into her eye, Snow turned from the entrance to the missile room and beheld Ziklag, positioned at the opposite end of the corridor with his rifle aimed straight at them.
She’d seen him before, stalking around outside Doomhold tending to various inscrutable chores. He had the cruellest face of any human she’d ever encountered, though admittedly the only other candidates were documentarians on boats. But a human was all he was, and she was keenly aware that she could have stomped him flat or bitten his head clean off were it not for his nasty little toy. How unfair.
Ow, ow, ow. Did she still have an ear, or had his bullet torn it off completely?
“Can you understand me, beast?” Ziklag asked.
Standing up on her hind legs so that she could glare down at him, Snow said, “Yes.”
It was gratifying to see Ziklag’s jaw drop, although Snow thought it was less because of her display and more because he hadn’t really expected a reply. Maybe he’d still believed deep down that their voices were just a recording or some other trick.
For the first time since this mission began, Snow felt like she’d accomplished something. No, cruel man, you haven’t met a problem like us before. We’re new.
“Remarkable,” Ziklag murmured, his gaze calculating. “Tell you what – hmm, yes, what if we dial it back? You stop damaging my fortress and we’ll have a civilised conversation. I’m very interested in your, er… talent. I’d love to know more.”
“I’ll bet you would. But I don’t trust you,” said Snow, flatly.
“Yeah!” shouted Waddles, flapping his stubby wings in what he probably thought was an intimidating fashion. “We’re here to kick your butt!”
Ziklag studied Snow with even more intensity than the documentarians with their binoculars. With far more intensity than she’d ever studied him, or anything. It made her feel stupid, which was irritating, so she bared her not inconsiderable teeth and growled.
“You really are an animal, aren’t you?” he said after a long, inscrutable silence. “Not a robot made to look like an animal. Not a human in some kind of hi-tech costume. You’re just a… a bear.”
Then he laughed. “A bear! An actual bear, burglarising Doomhold. Well! You’re the most interesting problem I’ve had to deal with in a while, if nothing else.”
“Right, that’s enough of you,” she said, put down Waddles and his bucket, and charged.
Oh, now he looked scared! That was good. That was great. She was finally doing something right.
His rifle sang and five bullets flew, two lodging themselves in her flesh. It didn’t slow her down. She had a lot of flesh.
Just before she reached him, the floor opened up beneath her and down she went, as though she were a cub again falling afoul of a patch of thin ice.
***
Ziklag barely had a moment to shakily inhale before the floor closed up with a heavy ‘thud’ and Wimberley’s voice rang out from the nearest intercom, sharp as a blade: “I do have to do everything around here, don’t I? Honestly – talking to it? You save the talking for the interrogation room, idiot.”
“What about the others?” he grunted, flushing.
“The bear’s contained. It’ll give us the information we need. Shoot the others. I don’t want to have to deal with more than one prisoner.”
He turned his gaze toward the albatross and the penguin. The former could, presumably, have tried to fly off down the neighbouring passageway. It didn’t. It flew down to land in front of the penguin and stood there on its stilt legs, conveying as much defiance as a bird could.
“Impressive,” he said, raising the gun without remorse. He’d killed brave people before.
The penguin giggled, and Ziklag felt the horrible sensation of tiny paws – tiny claws – running over his boot, over his sock (oh no, oh no), and up-…!
He didn’t consider himself a squeamish man, but he’d probably have screamed even if, a second later, rodentine teeth hadn’t sunk into the meat of his thigh.
(“Teamwork!” cheered the penguin.)
Pain and panic launched him from his wheelchair, whereupon he was quickly reminded that his ankle was unfit to bear his weight, and he fell to the ground in a groaning heap, the bitten leg twitching frantically to dislodge its assailant.
“Out, out!” he snarled, breaking a nail in his haste to remove his belt and pull down his pants.
There was blood, and there were bite marks. But the rat was gone.
So too, when he looked up, were the birds.
***
“I can’t pretend I didn’t enjoy that,” Wimberley mused, absently stroking the cat, which had gone to sleep while its parent concentrated on the screen, “but I do suspect an entire percentage point of dignity was just deducted from the human race.”
“Maybe we could let ‘em stay,” beeped Click-9. “It’d be nice to have pets!”
Wimberley pressed a button and switched to the camera in the chamber he’d trapped the bear in.
“Click-9?” he said, drumming his fingers on the edge of the desk. “Remind me: Whose responsibility is it to ensure that the cells on Sublevel A are in working order? That the force fields, when activated, remain on? And that rust hasn’t eaten a giant fucking hole in the floor?”
“Uh… actually, I think it’s yours,” said Click-9, projecting a hologram of their chore list from the panel on their head. “Yep. There. See?”
“…Shit.”
Click-9 sighed. “Oh well. I wouldn’t know how to take care of a polar bear anyway. They probably shed a lot.”
“Still got the others,” Wimberley muttered, pressing another button and switching to another camera. “Won’t take long to get the penguin to squawk, find out who sent them… shit!”
“Oops. Thought Ziklag had fixed that loose panel.”
“Clearly not. Click-9, today has been a lesson in discipline. From now on, there will be more of it around here. By the way, where is Trench? Your idiot friend’s one and only job is helping the security droids expel intruders.”
“She’s been in our room all day with a bad headache.”
Wimberley wheeled away from the screens and towards the elevator. “Splendid. I shall shortly follow her example. First, though, I believe I shall shout at Ziklag for a while.”
***
The bullets hadn’t made it past her blubber, but the tumble had bruised her badly and mangling the robots had blunted her claws.
Still, Snow was young and strong and could have kept going for days if she’d had to. She was also roundly frustrated and sadistically eager to take it out on an inert enemy. She dug, and dug, and dug, and finally she’d tunnelled her way out of the snow beneath Doomhold and stood in the sunlight.
As soon as their exit route was constructed, she made to head right back in to rescue the others.
“Oi! Fathead! Over here!”
“How – how did you get out?” she cried, delighted to see Sky overhead.
(How very strange, to be delighted at the sight of a bird. Only a short while ago, birds had been nothing more than flickers at the corner of her vision and an occasional snack. And – oh – how strange it must be for Sky to greet a thing that might once have been her killer as an ally. What unnatural creatures they’d become. As unnatural as Doomhold itself, really, and wasn’t that a nasty thought? On the other hand, how marvellous that there were now sources of delight other than meat, the hunt, and Mother.)
“Found a window. Well, really a crack in the hull. Hardest part was squeezing Waddles through. Come on, the others are waiting for us.”
***
Ziklag pressed an icepack to his ankle and studied his thigh with utter fury.
He was bleeding.
It had been years since any of his many deadly enemies had successfully drawn his blood and now a rat had done it twice in under a minute.
And his poor fortress! The attack had lasted barely twenty minutes, and in that time the rioting beasts had damaged or destroyed twenty-nine drones, broken three windows and eight light fixtures, chewed through two dozen wires, knocked over a rack full of delicate tools and spare parts, knocked over a vat full of chemicals that were currently eating a hole in the floor, knocked over Ziklag’s own, personal bookshelf, and left clawmarks in his favourite rug.
If that weren’t enough, there were droppings everywhere.
“I’m going to skin them alive and mount their heads on my wall,” he fumed.
“Even the rat? Its head is hardly large enough to impress guests,” Wimberley pointed out.
“I’ll stuff the rat’s whole body and use it as a paperweight.”
Not that the animals were really to blame. Ziklag knew who was really to blame. But he’d had years to construct far more elaborate, grisly fantasies of what he’d do to her head when he finally cut it off. It was, Wimberley had often told him, unhealthy to direct all one’s rage at one person. It gave them too much power over you. So for now he’d dream of new fur rugs and penguin stew.
“Boss, the bear stepped on my console!” Click-9 whined. “Seventy hours of Rebel Demon Lord, down the tubes! Can you fix it? Please? Please?”
“Fetch the cleaning supplies, you lummox!” Ziklag roared.
“They’re intelligent – but they’re not organised,” observed Wimberley, who was studying the footage again. “They don’t seem to have had any plan beyond breaking anything they could break. Hmm. We got off lightly, I think. It could have been much, much worse. Remember last time?”
Ziklag did. Ziklag sneered. “The witch didn’t even have the courage to appear in person this time. She’s scared, Wimberley. And desperate. Sending her puppets after us – and only four puppets, at that! We’ve got her on the run, at last.”
“Or this was just a warning shot,” Wimberley mused. “Letting us know that she’s found us. We need a fuller picture before deciding our next move.”
Gaze snapping his way, Ziklag said, “You mean – no, that’s not ne-…”
But Wimberley was already rolling away, his mind made up. Cursing, Ziklag went after him.
***
Their HQ was a small cave in the ice that Snow had dug out herself, two miles east of Doomhold.
The joy and relief of reunion had dispersed. Now was the time for bitter recriminations.
“Incompetence all round!” cried Sky, angrily grooming herself.
“I thought it was fun,” said Waddles, stubbornly.
Twitch’s whiskers twitched. “You were the most useless one by a yard, kid. We could have replaced you with a rock. A rock would have been better, actually. At least we could have thrown it at Ziklag’s ugly head. Still – no one died. We didn’t run into the cat. On the whole, it went better than I expected it to.”
“Waddles was a hindrance, but you are not without fault, rodent,” said Sky, icy. “You ran from the fight. Abandoned your post. Deserted!”
“I came back!”
“At the last minute! Don’t you feel the least bit ashamed of your cowardice?”
“Oh, drop dead, Miss High and Mighty. You’ve got wings. You’ve always been able to fly out of trouble. Not all of us are so lucky.”
Snow sighed, a melancholy paw draped over her nose.
They’d achieved nothing. Gained nothing, except a hole in her ear.
And there hadn’t even been any food inside Doomhold. She was still hungry. She wanted to hunt, wanted ice and freedom. She wanted meat.
She’d said so a few times now, and was the tiniest bit annoyed that not one of them even contemplated the possibility that she might eat them. She wouldn’t have, of course. But an ounce of trepidation would have been nice.
Waddles stuck his beak into her fur and sort of… nibbled gently. It took a moment for her to realise he was trying to groom her.
“It really was fun,” he told her. “You were awesome.”
He still smelled like the bucket. She licked him clean, the way Mother used to lick her.
“We need help, don’t we?” she mumbled. “There’s no way we can do this alone.”
“What you need,” came a new voice, from outside the cave, “is a mentor.”
Panic had them bumping against one another and bouncing off the walls as a human – a human! – entered their secret headquarters and greeted them all with a smile and a bucket full to the brim with fish.
***
Gravity didn’t work right in the white, spherical room at Doomhold’s (DOOMHOLD’S!!!) core.
Wimberley only had to wait a moment before his wheelchair began to float, and he floated out of it, his lab coat fanning out behind him like great pale wings.
“Hello, my masters,” said Doomhold in her habitual cool monotone, her voice emanating from the shiny black cube that hovered in the middle of the room. It was the only constant here. Always the same size, the same colour, the same shape. Meanwhile, the room itself was different every time Wimberley and Ziklag visited; last time, it had barely been wide enough for the two of them to occupy without smothering one another. This time, it could have housed a passenger plane.
Far less comfortable in zero gravity than Wimberley, Ziklag clung to the edge of the door through which they’d entered and said, tersely, “Good afternoon, Doomhold. We have a problem.”
“Ziklag! Manners,” Wimberley tutted. Now level with the cube, he gave it an affectionate pat. “Hello, dear. How are you doing?”
“One of my plasma converters has developed a new crack.”
“Oh dear! I’m sorry to hear that. Ziklag will take a look at it, don’t you worry.”
“I’m also low on fuel. Again.”
“We’re working on that, darling. But we need to address a small issue first. You see, today we had guests.”
“Trespassers,” Ziklag clarified, scowling. “And beasts, to boot.”
The black cube rotated slowly, and Doomhold said, “Yes, I saw them.”
“The witch sent them.”
“Yes, I know.”
Ziklag ground his teeth. “Did you know she was planning this? If so, might you not have warned us?”
“I merely knew she was in the area, and I assumed you did too. Protecting me is your job, isn’t it?”
“Now, now,” Wimberley intervened, clasping his hands behind his back coquettishly, “let’s not quarrel. Dearest, we were hoping to obtain an idea of where our enemy is, what forces she currently commands, and what she might be planning next.”
“Quite a lot of information,” Doomhold said. “It’ll be expensive.”
“Yes, I know.”
“And I can’t guarantee accuracy.”
“Yes, I understand. It’s fine. Even when your answers haven’t been strictly accurate, they’ve always been useful.”
The walls hummed, and the light emanating from them turned red. “The price is two months.”
Ziklag winced. Wimberley merely smiled and said, “Fair and reasonable.”
A bright red beam shot from the cube and engulfed him. His breath stopped and his body bent, fingers twitching spasmodically.
Just as Ziklag was about to lunge up and pull him away, it was over.
“Satisfactory, ma’am?” Wimberley gasped, droplets floating away from his nostrils.
“Yes. Here’s what I know.”
She spoke for ten minutes, after which Wimberley said, “Thank you, sweetness. We will attend to the problem in short order.”
“See that you do. I don’t enjoy having strangers inside me.”
Firmly, Ziklag took hold of Wimberley and his wheelchair, and pulled them both back down to the platform protruding from the room’s only entrance.
Gravity reasserted itself as they left, and Wimberley, boneless and grey, groaned, his head dropping back.
“Moron,” Ziklag grumbled as he wheeled him out of Doomhold’s core and into the mercifully less weird confines of the corridor.
“Worth it,” Wimberley croaked. His umber eyes were bloodshot. His nose had yet to stop bleeding. “Now we know what we’re dealing with. Now we can make a plan.”
They took the elevator up to Level Eight, where Wimberley’s private quarters offered a stunning view of the North Pole and a day that would last for another three months. Ziklag adjusted the thermostat and made coffee while Wimberley lay back on his bed-office and tried to get comfortable.
“How are the repairs coming along?” he asked.
With a passive-aggressive nose rub, Ziklag said, “Shouldn’t you have asked her?”
“You know she can be… unreliable when it comes to her own health.”
“Tch. ‘Unreliable’. She’s a relentless liar. Which, one might argue, should dissuade you from trading pieces of your soul for her insight.”
“Don’t be melodramatic. She took my fourth birthday, my favourite toy when I was five, and the first time I cried. Most people don’t remember things that far back anyway. It’s no loss. And she won’t lie about our enemies. You know that. We’re all in the same boat.”
“Water flooding a punctured submarine and the men it’s about to drown are also, technically, in the same boat. That does not mean their goals align.”
The coffee was set on the fold-out table attached to Wimberley’s bed, next to the fold-out laptop, the fold-out pill dispenser, the fold-out reading light, and the fold-out missile launcher. He sipped it as Ziklag listed the parts of Doomhold he’d got round to fixing before the beasts’ short-lived siege.
“You need to pick up the pace,” he grumbled.
Ziklag scoffed. “I do? What about your half of the work? You’d be finished by now if you didn’t keep being distracted by microwaves and all your pet projects!”
“I’m not in the mood to argue with you, Ziklag.”
Huffing, Ziklag stalked back to the elevator and descended to Level Three, where his personal armoury was located.
On the way, he stopped by Trench and Click-9’s quarters and banged on the door. “Trench! For God’s sake, where’ve you been? We needed you today!”
The door opened a crack. A horrible stench poured out.
“Sorry, sir,” she rasped.
He grimaced. “Again? Really? Tsk. Pull yourself together. There’s work to be done.”
“Sorry.”
Nothing to be gained there, and he had better things to do with his time than listen to apologies and excuses. He moved on.
It had been weeks since he’d last visited his collection of weapons, his days preoccupied with repairs and maintenance. It was evident, upon entry, that Click-9 had disregarded his strict orders not to trespass and not to touch anything, for there were bullets and throwing stars scattered all over the floor. He grunted in annoyance and gathered them up, putting them all back on their shelf before proceeding past the wall of swords, the wall of guns, and the wall of exotic traditional weapons that he’d learned how to use primarily out of boredom.
(Wimberley often defended his missile fetish by saying Ziklag was just as enamoured of his collection. He really wasn’t. Before he’d met Wimberley, before Doomhold, he’d been competent with a handgun and had a hobbyist’s interest in various martial arts; that was all. It was Wimberley, and Doomhold, and his official role as the protector of both, that had turbocharged his desire to be as deadly as a single human could hope to be.)
Beyond the swords, the guns, the bows and arrows, the wind-and-fire wheels, the battle-axe and the boomerang, there was a small space at the very back of the armoury. In that space was a single object, a weapon – his greatest – with a shelf all to itself.
With steady hands and a steely gaze, Ziklag took it down. Looked at it. Opened it. Counted.
Thirty. A month’s worth.
I can wrap this up in a month.
“You want a fight, witch? You and your flea-bitten grunts?” he said, swallowing two amphetamines. “Alright. I’ll give you a fight.”
THE END
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