"Shall we use the damn thing, or just stand and admire it."
Slide blinked back to the challenge at hand, and waved Lupo ahead of him. "So go aboard, my friend. After you."
Lupo treated Slide to a dour look. "You had better go first, demon. I have no idea how to operate this thing."
"That might be a problem."
Lupo looked concerned. "You can't run the machine either?"
"I can probably figure it out, but the first question is where's the dope?"
Lupo frowned. "The dope? What are you talking about?"
"The dope. The tetradetoxin, the zombie juice. We can't ride the Gridley Wave without it."
"I took no potions when I came here."
Slide suddenly felt trapped. "Yeah, well, that may be your nosferatu metabolism, but I have to be seriously medicated before I can be hurled willy-nilly across space and time. You know what I mean? I don't want to get to where we're going and not have, for instance, a body. I've had enough of those games. I'm through pulling rotting rabbits out of threadbare top hats."
"You have to have this tetradetoxin?"
"Damn fucking right I do."
Lupo seemed to be considering the problem, but before he could proffer an answer, a loud pneumatic hiss, and a sudden gust of very cold air, announced the arrival of a second elevator car. It gates clanged open. Slide and Lupo turned and found themselves facing the Queen, escorted by Sir Richard Barton, Harriot Marwood, Captain Flashman, and three human guards in hussar's uniforms.
Barton immediately barked officiously at them. "Slide, Lupo, step away from the that machine, dammit. The Queen has to be removed from the war zone."
Slide knew he spoke for Lupo. "Fuck the Queen."
Lupo chuckled deep from his Italian roots. "I think you already did."
Barton and Marwood had weapons in their hands, and the hussars were raising their radium rifles, but Slide didn't even have to react. Just like it was 1880, and he was still hanging with the Curly Bill Brocius and the Cowboys. He laid fire from the radium revolver until the power pellet was exhausted, and, by that time, only he, Lupo, and the Queen were left standing. Queen Mina looked down dispassionately down at the dead, and then up at Slide. "Don't you think you perhaps over-reacted?"
Slide shrugged. "I never did like your crew."
The Queen nodded. "So do we get into the machine and leave this place? Or do we wait for the Slimy Things to come to either fry or digest us?"
Slide glanced at Lupo. He didn't have to speak. Should they take her, or was Mina Harker just an unwarranted complication? Lupo spread his hands. "She is a friend of the Count. And she might have the drugs you need."
Slide locked eyes with Mina. "Do you have the dope?"
"It's in the machine."
"I don't believe you."
"Trust me."
Slide turned and stepped inside the Faraday cage of the big Carter machine. "I don't know why I'm doing this."
Lupo and Mina followed. "Take a red pill from the dispenser."
Something akin to a brass and glass, double cylindrical gumball machine was bolted to one of the uprights of the cage. One tube contained red pills, the other green pills.
"A red pill?"
"That's right."
Slide clicked a green pill into a brass cup
at the base of the two tubes. He picked it up, looked at it, and then swallowed it. A blinding impact pain hit the rear of the base of his skull and reality
turned black.
Story so far: Yancey Slide, Idimmu Demon of the Tenth Continuum, attempting to escape the collapse of the neo-Victorian colony on Mars is slammed into unconsciousness by the green pill from the dispenser in the Carter Machine beneath the palace of Queen Mina.
Episode Ten
Lost In Space
White, white, white, white, white, white, white, white, white, white, white, white, white, white, white, white, white, white, white, white, white, white, white, white, white, white, white, white, white, white, white, white, white, white, white, white, white, white, white, white, white, white, white, white, white, white, white, white, white, white, white, white, white, white, pain, white, white, white, white, white, white, white, white, white, pain, white, white, white, white, white, white, white, white, white, white, white, white, white, white, white, white, white, pain, white, white, white, white, white, pain white, white, white, white, white, white, white, white, pain, white, white, white, pain white, white, pain white, white, pain white, white, pain, white, white, white, pain white, white, white, pain white, white, pain, white, pain, white, pain, white, pain, WHITE PAIN!
"Motherfucker!"
Finally Slide could see. He was deep in the Gantenbrink matter, and that could not be described in any three dimensional language if you wanted to keep your sanity. A Dead Cat bounced by, morphing with every bound.
"Hey up there, Slide. Yo bro, wadda know?"
Slide didn't respond. In the Gantenbrink, nothing was real. Except the pain.
"Hey up there, Slide…" The last word reverberated long as the creature bounced away. "Slide-Slide-Slide-Slide-Slide-Slide-Slide-Slide-Slide-Slide."
"White pain on you too, motherfucker."
And then, for an instant, Slide was in a neon-shamrock-and-cigar-smoke Irish tavern-of-unreality among mobsters in double-breasted pinstripes playing cards with Roman soldiers and IRA gunmen, with the high voices of a boys' choir from the cloister singing in the background, but mercifully it didn't last. Slide knew it was a vignette from Hell, or, at the very least, Purgatory and Slide had no truck with Catholicism. All human, afterlife illusions were bad, but that was one of the worst, and the one most wholly at odds with what really happened when the oh-so-fragile fuckers breathed their last.
Fortunately, he quickly found himself free floating. Starfields were all round him and the Gantenbrink was gone. Somewhere, maybe a hundred million miles away, raw energy was spiral-sucked into the time trap of a black hole's infinite maw. The body of Johnny Yuma was faithfully reassembling around him, and more along with. Slide found himself being clothed in what seemed to be an ornate and very elegant suit of space armor, black byzantine plasteel, with the traditional clear Lucite bubble helmet, and the smoothest tuck and roll jointing. As more of the suit assembled from nothing, Slide could see that it was complexly engraved, with the Green-jade Basilisk of the Knights of Galifrey, to which, of course, Slide was actually entitled, emblazoned on the chest plate. A heavy, custom-crafted blaster hung from a strap-down clamshell, low on his right hip. The weapon was so serious, Slide would have considered it to verge on cumbersome had he not been all too well aware of its businesslike overkill. The 75-gig modified Raymond was top-shelf firepower, and clearly fabricated by some very particular, master weapon-smith, probably in the Rhebzad mountain caves of arctic Mongo, if the brass-knuckle, crow-foot grip was any indication. The blaster was off-set on his left side by a Capulet vibrafoil that swung from a breakaway Venezian sling, and tapped against the armor of his left leg as he moved. The outfit was fine by Slide. Slick, stylish, and it kept out the void, and he liked the fact that he was also heavily and elegantly armed, but, after so many immortal eons, he was under no illusion that its materialization was, in any way random. Either the work of an unconscious extension of his own greater demon-self, or an interested outside party, with too much power and definitely too much inside perception?