June 9th, 2013, 11:22 PM
“You have no idea what I just discovered, Princess,” Elgolian announced.
Catherine gave him a surprised look. He didn’t normally run into her room at practically midnight, and she’d been an hour into a really good book, it having been that long since Mercy stopped talking to her about her plans (she and Junia were touring a new display of heraldic art that Junia had apparently wanted to drag her to) and life in general.
“I assume it is important?”
“There was a glorious battle in the third district!” he said excitedly. “Your siblings’ knights clashed, with a resounding victory for your brother. Elizabeth’s men are shattered; I had the word from one who she claimed dishonored himself, and who is now fleeing into exile. Your sister now seeks vengeance.”
Catherine opened her mouth to say “What?!” but decided that was unnecessary.
“The source was reliable?” she asked instead.
“The knight was filled with fury. No man could fake such wrath.”
“Follow me,” she commanded. The book was by her chair; there would be time to read later. “My father needs to know. Tell me everything while we go.”
“A grand quest,” said Elgolian. “May we make it to him alive.”
- 11:28 PM -
Bloody Lizzy strode forwards, wholly deliberately. Behind her were only two knights, but she didn’t need them. She didn’t need anyone.
Her brother wasn’t even willing to face her himself, the coward. Instead it was one of his remote bodies who had met her in the courtyard in front of his palace - a courtyard filling up with more and more robots.
“You are trespassing in land where you have no right,” he said. “Remove yourself or be removed.”
“I am the Grand Duchess and you are sheltering three fugitives. Open the damn door, Julius.”
He shrugged. “Your knights ambushed innocent travellers. I request weregild for the injury.”
“Get out of the way, Julius,” she said. “Two of mine are hospitalized and one dead because you defied my orders! Jacobin was mine!”
“Your knights were fools,” Julius Balog said, through his proxy. “This is my county. They had no right to enter it without my permission, for whatever purpose.” His eyes narrowed. “They certainly had no right to try to murder knights of the Fifth traveling along the main road. And you have no right to stop me from defending myself from a terrorist sowing strife in my own lands.”
“I am elder, and this attempt to kill my men is treason pure and simple.” She drew a coin from a bandolier, flipped it.
“How could I commit treason? I am as much king as you are queen.”
“Then this is regicide,” she said and flipped the coin again, accelerating it with the sudden speed of a railgun shot halfway through the descent straight through the robot’s skull.
- 11:24 PM -
The metaphor that Catherine rather liked for the royal palace was a turnip, because all the important parts were underground and the top was just to catch some sun. Aboveground there was a large and important palace, surrounded by all the statues and museums and gardens necessary to convince passersby that it was, in fact, legitimately palatial, and they themselves were surrounded by government buildings in which those officials whose functions the Titanium Tyrant had not been able to either ignore or subcontract to his Counts worked.
But that was just the turnip’s leaves. Under it were floors and floors of secret fortresses, armories, intelligence databases, laboratories, and, of course, the warehousing for the robot army which was starting to approach the population of Novapest in total size. All of this, naturally, was protected by not only some of those robots, but dozens of lethal chokepoints defended with unholy traps openable only by the Tyrant’s most trusted followers, or, in some cases, the Tyrant’s kin.
And at the bottom of it, below all the passageways that would only open to the highest of ministers and below those that would only open to a member of the royal family, was the Tyrant’s laboratory. It was towards this that Catherine and Elgolian descended.
At one point she’d asked him why, when he was working with highly dangerous substances, he didn’t do it higher up, so if it exploded it’d only blow up a tower instead of collapsing the entire palace.
“Because, dear daughter,” her father had told her, “if I’m experimenting with nuclear weapons or tinker free energy machines, they’d blow up the entire palace even if they were in a tower. Best to keep them underground, where no one else can attempt to detonate it.”
Catherine approached her father’s private elevator, passed the retinal scan, typed the code that meant ‘two riders, no equipment’ into the private keypad and then pushed the button for the… where would he be? Chemical experiments? Tinker weapons? Maybe trying to get the earthquake machine working again.
No, she decided, and pushed the button for the eighty-sixth subbasement. The Durendal armors hadn’t been revamped since she was twelve.
The elevator blinked angrily at her. 86 was off limits. 87? Acceptable. It brought them to the eighty-seventh floor, and, Elgolian’s hand on his sword, the elevator door opened. Quite a large laser was pointed at them.
She raised her hands slowly and carefully. “Voice scan. This is Catherine Balog, the Tyrant’s daughter.”
“Accepted,” it said in a mechanical voice, and pointed at Elgolian. “Identify ysrfjsoeiajognssszzz.”
One of his silver swords was embedded in it.
“I find that most mad artisans only possess one line of defense,” Elgolian said happily, as from the walls there unfolded dozens more cannons. “Once you cut through it, all your problems are done.”
Catherine sighed. “This is Catherine Balog! Do not shoot! At anyone! Disable!” She glared at him. “My father is sane.”
The cannons, seemingly reluctantly, did not fry Elgolian, giving Catherine a chance to look around her father’s workshop.
All the ‘do not disturb’ signs were on the outside. Inside her father’s lab were workbenches and cupboards and shelves filled with all sorts of odd-looking things - canisters filled with strange bubbly liquid, half-grown things in jars, and another giant laser cannon pointed at an opaque, human-sized canister.
Catherine felt the impossible temptation; to go and page through all her father’s notes, drink the horible toxic liquids, turn on the machines to do what they did. There was no sense behind it, no reason, just the whisper in her ear that said, go, jump off the cliff, maybe you can fly. There was no sense behind it, no reason behind it except what Patience had said. (Getting shot will just give me superpowers.) Or at least she’d know if she could get superpowers. Jump off the cliff. Either way you’ll know.
Leaving the bait, she went up the stairs, followed by Elgolian who had now retrieved his sword.
Her father was flipping eagerly through incomprehensible-looking notebooks on a workbench cluttered with gadgets. Next to him a crystalline spindle spun in a tiny glass box, apparently independent of any power.
“A Pemmer box?” she asked, fascinated for a moment. “You haven’t taken that out of the Durendal, have you?”
He sent her a quick look. “A replica. It doesn’t work,” he said, snapping a notebook closed. “Minerva’s ionic couplings and Temperance’s antigrav plus Jackson’s ‘frictionless bearings’ let it spin forever with no power but what it generates, but it only gains a joule a month or so.”
“Dad, we have a problem.”
“Catherine, if my children run to me whenever there’s a problem, you won’t know how to solve problems on your own.”
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“Dad, they’re killing each other.”
“Who are?” he said in the tone of voice of someone who is deliberately Not Interested.
“Elizabeth and Julius! There’s an actual battle going on!”
And the Tyrant turned, slowly but surely, and it looked to her like stone cracking as the old man’s face hardened. “What?”
And now his eyes were looking at her and through her; the expression that he held when he was studying the entire world as a unit with everyone else in it as children or as ants. “We’re going to the armory, Catherine. Explain how that happened on the way. Elgolian?” He pulled a ring off his finger and tossed it to Elgolian. Elgolian caught it and saluted. “Your majesty!”
“Run to the Captain Palatine and tell him that I want everyone ready immediately. We’re going to restore order.”
She staggered after him, breaking into a run after a moment to catch up to him. “You believe me?”
“My daughters cannot lie to me,” he said. “Catherine, what happened?”
“So, it started when - a revolutionary? Killed Pyre and attacked the royal palace.”
“I see my children are handling some problems on their own,” he murmured.
“I passed a stack of unread memos on the way in.” She was breathing hard by this point.
“... Continue.”
“They decided that Lizzy should be the one in charge of catching him,” Catherine continued.
“Your source?” asked the Tyrant.
“I got this from Elgolian who got it from one of Lizzy’s knights. He said he said she said they decided.”
“Continue,” he said, striding forwards.
“Anyway, Steelmind sent his own team after him anyway. The two groups of hunters got into a fight and now Lizzy’s headed for the third palace with an army.”
“God-damn,” said the Tyrant. “They’re acting like children.” His focus turned to Catherine. “Who commanded Steelmind’s group? Junia? I would have thought even she would have had the sense to avoid that type of entanglement.”
“I don’t know,” said Catherine.
The Tyrant took the stairs, taking the steps two at a time, glowering his way past all the security barriers he’d installed, slapped his palm onto the scanner, and watched the doors open to the Royal Armory.
“This is a formal-dress occasion, Catherine,” he rumbled. “Get dressed.”
For fifty years, the Titanium Tyrant had been accumulating weapons and weaponizable technology, and the most advanced of these were scattered across the walls. Apex Systems’ Immovable Object dangled from one wall, the Clonelord’s molecular destabilizer from another, Greymalk’s old metacannon and Underthief’s Atlantean warhammer. It was enough to arm seven or eight full teams of superheroes, even leaving aside the crates marked RADIOACTIVE and LETHAL POISON and SERUM 24, DO NOT TOUCH UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES WHATSOEVER.
At the end of the armory by the racks where the Tyrant’s polearms rested was a hangar, banks ready to accept five full suits of armor. Four of the five slots had careful labels above them; the Tyrant and Queen’s Durendal and Joyeuse were both present in their slots - identical except for the colors of the royal devices on the chests of the armor; the Durendal was silver and blue and crowned with gold, while the Joyeuse was painted the color of the shield, gold and purple, and bearing an identical crown - but Lizzy’s Girardoni and Steelmind’s Mons Meg were both missing. The fifth was dusty, unlabeled, unpainted but for the royal arms, and a simple metallic grey.
And it was beautiful for all that. Six and a half feet of titanium and carbon fiber alloys. Tall; strong, fast, maneuverable. Perfect. Catherine had practiced with the sims, she’d worn the training suits, but never before had she put on the Durendal armor that had been finished on her thirteenth birthday.
Catherine went through the checks slowly. The hangar did all the work of putting it onto you, but machines aren’t always good at telling when something’s gone wrong with machines. Her power supply was good; both the direct battery and, an extra check, the pemmer box that refueled it. Arms were operating at a hundred, legs -
“Are you ready?” her father asked curtly. He was faster, of course, always was.
“I think so,” she said and stepped out. Legs at a hundred percent. She was still trying to scan the systems... Her armor was equipped with lasers, AP blades, a railgun in one hand and a fourfold blaster in the other, a velocity-redirection field to catch bullets and shrapnel, energy shields… she hadn’t finished trying to make sure everything was working properly when they made it into the cargo elevator.
- - -
“Well,” corrected Lizzy as she dusted off her hands, “not regicide, but a damn good start. I assess damages on you for getting in my way as equal to…”
She smirked as her knights fled, or at least as they withdrew to a defensible position. It was hard to tell the difference.
“Your palace and however many robots are within bullet-range of me.”
Steelmind’s entire army opened fire, and Bloody Lizzy laughed and shot and laughed and shot, spinning from one target to another as she danced a dance of destruction. She didn’t bother with the coins, now; her Durendal had the same weaponry any others did and her power could accelerate a railgun shot into something whose sonic boom was a weapon in itself. The fate of any of the robots that got close to her would be much worse; as long as it was coming towards her she could slap a -6000 momentum multiplier on it and then it would burst from the acceleralation, and even her brother’s juggernauts would take only a flick of the finger to destroy.
She dodged their shots as best she could anyway, though, just for the fun of it. Enough heat or energy could overload the Girardoni’s absorbers, but the odds that Steelmind could bring that to bear would be negligible. It would need nuclear weapons or an A-for-atomic blaster, and (she grinned) right now there were two of them in Novapest and Solaris wouldn’t draw on her to protect Steelmind.
This was fun. The joy of battle was the joy of destruction, and this alone of the pleasures of childhood had never dulled with age. Her fist smashing through the chestplate of a machine was the undoing of all the work that had gone into it. Someone, somewhere, had manufactured tools, someone else had used them to dig up iron from the ground, that raw iron had been shipped - by someone - a great many miles to a steel mill, where it had been worked and worked into the highest quality, and then it had been shipped hundreds more miles to Novapest, where the finest of machines ever built had turned it into a simulacrum of a man and sent it forth. It had known years - decades, perhaps - of sentinel duty and battles and joy, it had grown dented and the paint chipped and it had been made into an individual work of art, and then her fist had crushed it into nothing.
The pleasure of breaking was gone in an instant with a levy. Powered armor would be better - that was normally handmade; smashing armor was stealing years of men’s lives, and it was nothing to the pleasure of killing a man or woman, and so bringing their individual story to a permanent finish. A few months’ labors were destroyed in a Levy, but killing a soldier was the crushing delight of consuming twenty years of work and fifty years of potential, all drawn into her in an instant of joy.
She wondered where her knights had run off to, but it didn’t really matter. She didn’t need any help. It was going juuust fine.
- - -
“Wow, they’re really getting chewed up,” said Junia, in a tone of voice both cheerful and worried.
“So it seems,” said Steelmind. The two of them were watching the fight from his security cameras, or rather she was watching on his security cameras and he was watching from hundreds of bodies rapidly undergoing destruction. Fortunately, robots couldn’t feel pain.
“You want me to go out there and take care of her?” she offered bravely.
“I love you, Junia, but you’d die almost as badly,” said Steelmind.
“You can’t just keep doing this. It isn’t working at all.”
“If by that you mean that I’m losing millions of dollars of expensive equipment, that is true,” he said. “An extremely low price for Lizzy under my power.”
“Under your power? She’s smashing your power!”
“I’m presently unloading the palatial barracks, summoning in the factory-fresh troops in Steelstorm’s warehouses, and inviting every robot within a hundred miles not owned by someone politically powerful enough to interfere with me to join the attack.”
“And none of them can do anything to her.”
“No,” he said with a faint smile. “None of them can. She’ll do that herself. My sister, who like any mortal still needs to drink, sleep, and sweat, is engaging in prolonged, violent exercise.”
He carefully adjusted his glasses.
“You won’t have to do anything, and neither will I. The Girardoni provides no real protection against heatstroke and dehydration.”
- - -
Steelmind’s robots had absentmindedly escorted them all to separate guest rooms, then stood guard outside to await the sounds of conflict. Victoria’s looked like a completely generic American motel room, plain carpet on the floor and flowered quilt on each double bed and photographs of nature scenes on the walls that didn’t have a dresser with a TV set on it, which struck her as worse than a jail cell.
She shut off her microphone and listened idly to the conversation on the radio while she scanned for bugs. Spotting them usually improved her mood.
“No-two, here’s a summary, no-three, since you weren’t here. No-five is dead. We’re pinned up in our friend’s mansion. There’s guards on the doors; we could break out, but we have nowhere to run to.”
There was silence from Captain Crush. He’d be emotionally devastated, which might make him vulnerable to being turned by her enemies. Of course, there were quite high odds that none of them would be alive tomorrow. There were five possible political positions for the state to be in tomorrow. In one of them Victoria was dead, in two of them the war was resolved, and in two of them it had begun. Whichever situation it was, it was beyond her control.
She hoped defending herself hadn’t been a mistake, but the die was cast. Victoria sent ‘Cici’ the message to move to 24-hour alert, then stretched out on the bed, still in armor, and closed her eyes to nap.
- - -
Lizzy’s knights watched from a safe distance. The courtyard was beginning to fill up with stacks of wrecked and ruined metal; the Grand Duchess’s lethal dance was still ongoing with no signs of stopping, or even slowing down. Mase and Hatcheteer were taking bets on how many she’d take down, minute to minute.
Then a meteor crashed into the courtyard before exploding in a shower of stone shrapnel. It was followed by sirens blaring the sound of trumpets, which themselves were followed by a crash as three suits of heavy armor landed.
“Oh, shit,” said Hatcheteer as three giants stood.
The first was stone, solid stone covering a massive body from head to toe, gauntlets and breastplate and helm of granite hiding the features of the man inside it. The second armor was a Durendal that no one had ever seen before, not Girardoni or Mons Meg or The Durendal or even Joyeuse but gunmetal grey, unpainted except for the royal snake-and-crown. The pilot made a clumsy landing as if unused to the armor but then the blades flashed out and the armor was in a guard stance.
The third wasn’t a Durendal, it was the Durendal, blue and silver and crowned, the Durendal that had begun its life in a junkyard. After every defeat the next model had been rebuilt stronger, and now it boasted the mightiest integrated weapons system of any suit known to man. When the Titanium Tyrant went into battle, he supplemented his armor’s integrated weapon systems with a single-bladed poleaxe with tinker-integrated weapons every bit as indestructible as his armor (”Can-Opener,” “Brickslayer”, “The Simple Solution”) and he carried it now.
He slammed Brickslayer into the ground, its blade humming with energy.
“Elizabeth! Julius! Remember yourselves!”
Weapons were lowered all across the army as robot after robot knelt. Lizzy spun, glared… the glow in her eyes stopped. Her shoulder cannons retracted. Her hands lowered.
She knelt.