"Get thee behind me, Coote."
Maybe a century or more earlier, Slide might have gone into full demon rut and given even the Saphs a run for their money in debauchery, but too much happenstance had been battering on him for full twelve episodes and more. Inclination to debauch was at low ebb, drained by cumulative circumstance. Also he had more than a passing concern with what might happen next. The Pirates of the Lower Quadrant were going at their riot of rapine as though there was no tomorrow. But tomorrow never knows, and Slide was interested in having a tale to tell beyond the moment, plus some guarantee of a future in which to tell it. He was far from certain how long the biocraft would stand up to this kind of treatment. The big Eloi ship was, after all, a living entity, self-aware, and if the now-missing Sternwood was to be believed, sensitive, maybe to the point of petulance. In a more conventional metal and electron vessel, the cortex would be the bridge, the nerve center of all ship-board operations. It the command center had fallen to the pirates with such ease, he could easily image that orgies of carnage that were going on in other, less crucial areas of the ship.
A one-eyed simian chud, with hideous dueling scars, came at Slide, with a keg o'grog under one arm and a brandishing a cutlass and pike in its second and third hands, clearly intending mischief. Suspecting a crude, blind-tiger morph, Slide shot the thing, and then spun his blaster back into its holster with deft nonchalance. Rosa Coote looked around and frowned. "How long do you think the craft, and whatever passes for it's nervous system, is going to tolerate all this looting, burning, and fornicating inside its essential mind?"
Clearly demons, no matter how diverse their origins, thought alike. Slide shrugged, but not without unease. "I have no idea, but I can imagine a bunch of really nasty scenarios should the ship get multilaterally pissed off."
Rosa gestured to the huge misshapen dermal ovoid that was centrepiece of the cortex. "If that's the ship's brain, there's serious neural-damage going on right now."
Rosa didn't exaggerate. Thirty meters above them, the tree-like gantry that surrounded the ovoid was on fire. Where selected Eloi had previously serviced the soft-ovoid's function, the primary fun was now recreational hanging. Except the hangings would clearly be a temporary recreation. A gang that called themselves the Pyros of the Caribbean hadn't been able to resist the dramatic temptation of an extensive but flimsy structure that proved to be highly flammable. They had zippoed the catwalks and fire licked along struts and spars, and up stairs and ladders. The Roy Bean Society of Erotic Asphyxiators were forced by the flames to take their ropes and go elsewhere in search of a high beam, a long drop, and some suitable sacrifices to dance orgasmic on the empty air. The outer sheath of the biocraft's "brain" that held the essential sentient ooze was blistered and scorched already, and, in a couple of places, burned away, exposing an inner and more sensitive membrane.
"If that thing's got any capacity for pain, that's gotta hurt."
"I could be enjoying the experience."
"You wanna bet your continuance on that?
Slide shook his head. "Not me, lady."
As if in confirmation of Rosa's first observation, the banks of Eloi-eating orchids along the outer walls of the cortex were waving nervously, except for a few, clearly sterner flora, who grabbed all the digestible attackers they could reach. Slide grimaced. "For all we know, it could go into eterna-pod in the next minute."
A small cropulid flattened itself wetly on the contour-curved chest plate of Rosa's armor with a slight thwack and immediately probed with pseudo-pods. She ripped the single-cell loose and crushed it in the palm of a servo-assisted gauntlet. It squealed happily as its nucleus died.
"I think they only do that to make you kill them." She dropped the crushed cropulid and wiped her hands. "What happened to the queen and the vampire?
Slide made a noncommital gesture. "I kinda lost track of them when the pirates broke in. Last time I saw Lupo he had his helmet off and his fangs in the neck of some Barbary princess."
"I thought vampires only fed on humans."
Slide nodded. "That's what I heard."
"Do Barbary princesses qualify as human?"
"Seemingly they are close enough for Lupo."
Rosa Coote spotted the ex-Queen Mina. "She seems to have struck up a friendship with the Saphs of Nardaz."
Slide grimaced. "Is she aware of what she's getting into?"
"Knowing Queen Mina as I do, the more appropriate question might be 'are the Nardaz are aware of what they're getting into?'"
In their commandeered ventricle, the Corsairs of H'nad who liked their force-fucking ecclesiastical, now had four Eloi up on the 3D X-cross, simultaneously running squirm current through them and flaying flesh with a plasma scourge, but even the Corsairs paused in their highly liturgical persecutions when the first massive and botanical groan of pain and anger shook the ship.
Slide looked askance. "Uh-oh."
Rosa agreed. "That's not good."
The sudden and grinding burst of telepathic fury that followed the groan made Slide glad his own mind-reading capacities were fairly limited. Those better tuned to the thoughts of plants clutched at their brain cases, and some even dropped to their knees, or an approximation thereof.