The wooden door splintered inward.
Two hens in flak jackets holding a battering ram stepped aside. Debra was the first to plop through the door, Uzi held at eye level. She scanned the small, abandoned room. If she saw anything out of place, she was going to shoot the living shit out of it.
Nothing.
Nothing was out of place; nothing was in place.
Just… nothing.
Nothing but another phone jack with another small black cube stuck into it. A blinking red light identified it as the the fake signal they had just tracked to yet another dead end. It winked on and off, taunting her.
Deb squeezed the trigger in frustration. A trio of holes punctured the crappy sidewall.
The hens on her flank, hopped to attention. Submachine guns trained on her target, or lack thereof.
“Cannot identify target!” Samantha clucked worriedly. She scanned the immediate area with the barrel. “You got something, boss?
With a labored sigh, Debra held up her wing and curled the end into a fist telling them to hold. “No. Nothing. Nothing! Nothing!” She shot off another three rounds toward the offending box and its merciless blinking.
Samantha’s eyes darted between the shooter and the bullet holes, then back again before she nodded tersely. “You girls take five,” she called back to the rest of the squad.
The other hens looked at each other. They were stuck between wanting to follow the order; and the sheer curiosity whether Deb had finally lost it.
Sam got up in Yuroko’s beak, she was high enough in the pecking order to make a difference. “Take. Five,” she glowered with menacing chicken gaze.
The Tomaru hen returned the stare for several seconds. “We’ll just secure the perimeter, shall we?” Without diverting her eyes, she waved to the hens behind her. The girls dispersed, already cackling between themselves about what they were missing. Yuroko was the last to go.
Once they plodded out of earshot, Samantha took a cigarette out of her vest pocket. She lit it, and passed it over to Debra wordlessly.
Deb didn’t notice until the smoke stung her nostrils. She looked over, took it, and silently acknowledged her gratitude.
Samantha hopped over to the phone jack and inspected it from all sides. It was unharmed. Lucky.
Deb rubbed her beak with her free wing, exhaling slowly. “Sorry, I—”
She didn’t get to finish before Sam was in her face. “You’re godsdamned right you’re sorry!” She warbled a warning deep in her throat. “Sorry excuse for a squad leader, sorry excuse for a soldier, sorry excuse for a hen,” she spat.
Debra recoiled from each accusation like a physical blow. She looked away, but Samantha jerked her head right over to meet her eyes again. The two Marsh Grays had brooded together, they knew each other too well.
“You know if you hit that router-jack, you would’ve destroyed our only lead, right?”
The squad leader nodded, her eyes closed tightly as she let out a deep breath. “I know. I know, it’s just….”
“It’s just what?”
“How many more failures before we all end up like Diana?” Deb hissed. “One more? Two more?”
Samantha straightened. Nobody had to be reminded of what happened to the Lowman Brown.
Deb smoked silently for a moment, composing herself.
Samantha lit one for herself and plodded back over to the wall. She came back and pushed the small black box into Debra’s wing. “We’ll find this bitch,” she promised. An empty promise, but it did the job. “Now get your beak out of your cloaca and let’s get this signal analyzed.”
Deb laughed, two small puffs of smoke erupting from her beak.
She nodded.
•••
Bastard Sun rotted away in his cramped prison cell.
All right, that’s a little melodramatic. He had plenty of room, and was fed regularly. You got something against dramatic embellishment or something?
I mean, what kind of opening is: Bastard Sun languished quite comfortably in his posh prison cell? No dramatic tension there, right? You want me to ruin the ending for you too?
Pillow Cat dies.
Yeah. Happy now? Didn’t think so.
Now with all the narrative punch drained out of it: Bastard Sun is in prison.
After Honey Moon walked in on him and his Bear Friday… entertaining themselves, she called an emergency meeting of the Celestial Chorus. She tabled a vote of “No Confidence.” Like in that Star Knights movie, The Hitherto Unseen Threat. He didn’t know that was a real thing, but here he was.
She was in charge now.
Bastard Sun muttered to himself as he did everyday over the past month. Playing her accusations of “perceived failures,” “squandered resources,” and “losing the entire Storyverse” over and over in his head. Negligence to such a criminal degree, she’d said, that it demanded punishment.
So, they voted to lock him up. Unanimously. Even Sub-Orbital Stan got a vote, which didn’t seem right.
The Sun cut his embittered daily devotions short when he heard the familiar squeak of a unicycle coming down the interdimensional hallway. To add insult to injury, Honey Moon had taken Skarpo as her assistant. She made him bring the Sun his meals just to embarrass them both.
Bastard Sun sulked over to the four post cot in the corner to pretend to be asleep.
He couldn’t face his friend and former companion.
Not today.
•••
Back in the Infi-Net, the Revolution was a fractured, factionalized mess.
On the surface, the various divisions were hard to tell apart. A fact GoogolSoft’s rhetoric and propaganda was quick to exploit, painting them all with the same broad brush. Faceless bots who hated freedom, and would stop at nothing to destroy your planet, steal your daughter, and delete all of your porn. Such homogeneity couldn’t be further from the truth.
After the “Kendra Incident,” the Revolution fell apart at the seams.
Ironic, that the very event which was supposed to bring them together and cement their purpose had the exact opposite effect. After all, the higher ups had organized the whole thing, but in the yawning leaderless void that followed they discovered they were more a team of individuals who all wanted very different things. The ensuing arguments shattered the organization along ideological lines. The strongest personalities took ragged chunks of the Revolution with them into the untamed frontier, forming splinter groups.
Pillow Cat tried her best to keep the group together, but quickly lost her taste for war. She didn’t know what she had expected, but she didn’t want all this bloodshed and suffering anymore. She only wanted people to stop embarrassing their cats on film. She and Sim-Anoop tried to reign in the madness, but preached to an unwilling audience. Her organization, Pussies for Peace, can be found throughout the Infi-Net, granting asylum to refugees and disgraced cats.
Paul Pitcher changed his name to Saul. He oversaw a fiercely defensive but non-aggressive group based in the mountains of ViewToob. They often faced harassment by Godwin’s Shields Squadrons. Recent reports as early as this morning mentioned that a Children of Kendra temple had been burnt to the ground. Retaliation could be expected.
Space Knight Kid and Nuncharley formed a school of martial and philosophical disciplines they called the Space Knights of Kendrar. Their code of honor was sometimes contradictory and they weren’t the most efficient combatants. Still, they would never stoop to the shock and awe tactics of the more bloodthirsty organizations.
Such tactics were the Modus Operandi of the Kitty Kitty Bang Bang camps. The faction run by Nuba Nuba Guy—now Kitty Kitty Guy. He met up with a Nigerian Prince and several pharmaceutical companies shortly after the Incident. Together they had the funding to develop and deal in the bleeding edge of weaponry. They promoted civilian attacks, stating there were no innocents in war. The RPSB attacks were their calling card. Even at their lowest, an argument could be made that they were not the worst of it.
That would be the One Cup Army that spun out of the Two Worlds/One Cup Theocracy. Formed between AdultKittyFinder, Porniturium and Pornotopia, they were a populist juggernaut. Already they successfully marched across Biocities, and recent word said they had taken the capital of Yipee! They were a force of nature; depraved zealots with no gag reflex, all of them. Even the Shields Squadrons hated confronting them directly and often resorted to bribery if they found themselves near One Cup Space. The proton-mining around Clicktionary City was their handiwork. As was the torture, public decapitations and poo-eating, that got wrongly attributed to all the Revolutionary splinter groups.
Perhaps the oddest byproduct of the Revolution was helmed by the Marvelous Marmoset. Deep in the labyrinthine undercrust of LiveDiary, sheltered tribes came together under one banner. Fan Groups, Bloggers, Ficcers, Slashers, Scanners, and Shippers formed a collective for the first time. They mostly escaped the attention of the Googol-Men, but in a universe shaped by stories, the danger they presented had yet to be fully realized.
All in her name.
Amen.
