"The Beckham Bridge."
Slide shrugged. He didn't understand the reference.
Lupo led Slide quickly along corridors and down flights of curved, Turquoise Tower steps, with what appeared to be an unerring sense of direction. Slide could only wonder how the nosferatu, who claimed to have been on Mars only slightly longer than Slide, could know his way around the labyrinthine layout of the place. He certainly proved that he did when they quickly arrived at the brass and steel gates of a multi-shaft, high-speed pneumatic elevator. Lupo dialed for an down-designated car, and one arrived in a matter of second. This was in no way too soon for Slide, who could feel the very structure of the tower trembling from what could only be the Slimy Things' assault on the city. They stepped into the car, and, no sooner had the lift gates hissed and clanged closed, it dropped like a stone, obviously descending to the deep bowels beneath Queen Mina's tower. As the elevator's free fall mitigated, and the two regained the floor under their feet, Lupo handed Slide the radium revolver that he had taken from him during the carriage ride to the tower. "You may find a need for this."
"Do you have a weapon?"
Lupo glanced at Slide with a noticeable disdain. "I am nosferatu, Yancey Slide. Among humans, I have no need of weapons."
The elevator's stop was abrupt enough to cause Slide to bend at the knees, although Lupo didn't waver. The gates of the car slid back to reveal that had descended to a vault of energy. The air smelled of ozone, positrons, and charged dark matter, and a high pitched hum rose and fell but never dropped out of the dogs-only audio range. Lupo hadn't exaggerated when he'd said that the place was deep under the tower. Slide felt as though they could not be that far from the Martian planetary core, and at least a part of the cavernous interior was only a faux-reality, kept in place by a stasis generator. Slide didn't like to be anywhere near a stasis generator. He's seen too may of them in his time with Billy Oblivion, and he didn't like the way their center never held.
Lupo again seemed to be reading Slide's reactions. "Let's just concentrate on the Carter machine, shall we?"
Slide put aside his dislike of stasis generators, and turned and looked the thing up and down. "That is one big motherfucker."
And indeed it was. No simple chair, lever, and revolving power canopy like the one he'd ridden from Doc Zen's place what now seemed like an age ago. A towering Faraday cage, awaited them, topped by multiple spinning blades; a huge brass and steel construction that was a undeniable peak in the massive Victorian super-technology of time machines. For a moment, Slide stood and stared with undisguised admiration. Who had put Queen Mina up to all of this? She was so tenuously connected with even her own reality, he found it hard to believe she had devised all this on her own, and the set-up was way past the capabilities of Sir Richard Barton or any of the other self-important courtiers. Dracula? He doubted it. The cavern had nothing of the Tepes stamp to it. When Slide had last seen the Count, he hadn't even liked steam trains. Of course, there was no accounting for radical change in this cosmos, but he still wondered who the hell had Her Majesty been hanging with?
"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!