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Episode Three
Art's Snooker - Second Floor
As Yancey Slide exited the street door of the walk-up tenement firetrap that had been the domicile of the former Joh
Inside the Hummer, Sharkboy thumbed the Apex to standby and minimized the safety in preparation for locking onto Slide. "Do I take him now?"
Nuygen von Bulow rolled over on the vehicle's teardrop command bed, peered out of the smoked glass window, and shook her head. "He's on his way to Doc Zen. If we wait, we can take both them, or at least have Slide when he knows a bit more. I would imagine, right now, he's close to clueless."
The limo was multi-dimensional and customized Tardis-style, so it was massively more spacious within than the exterior of the stretch Hummer could ever have indicated. Outside the smoke-black glass of the window was twenty-first century Earth, inside was her own world of drencrom conditioned depravity, a fluid and tubular space that undulated like a section of some vast intestine, in crude pseudo-sympathy with the Great Flux, and had irregular asymmetric windows and lozenge-shaped display screens set in the continuous wall. A murmuring mercury cascade made patterns between them, and streamers of blue and purple vapor decorated the air. The Humiliation lay at Nuygen von Bulow's feet, licking and suckling on the long cruel heel of her left boot with rapt concentration, blurring the mirror finish of the patent leather with its breath. Its maleshape was fixed by steel clamps and a locked exoskeleton, while pleasure/pain drip-catheters protruding from the remaining soft-sections.
The Humiliation had been with von Bulow longer than most could remember, and some rumors claimed she had owned the creature for centuries, although the rumors never quite defined by what timescale these centuries were calculated. That Nuygen von Bulow should not dismiss and replace her attendant Humiliations with anything like the rapidity that she changed the rest of her entourage, was, of course, highly understandable. Of those
who attempted the initiation only a tiny percentage ever survived, and even less were ever deemed suitable for servitude. Even the current Humiliation was put away for long periods, stored frozen and dreamless in the null-void while not wanted, as when von Bulow had been in Manchuria with Shiro Ishi for the Unit 7-31 atrocities, or when it had lingered longer still while she had been imprisoned by the High-Soviet Knights of the KGB.
In a black skinsuit of tuck-and-roll, armored latex, and wearing the silver eagle insignia of the Ninth Legion to which he was in no way entitled, Sharkboy crouched over the y-tech, assisted by a Zeech in its personal life-tank. Sharkboy was fairly new to von Bulow's traveling retinue, and, as she saw it, he would be lucky to remain much longer. The combination of his insolence and feral overeagerness to inflict painful and lingering fatalities was begi
Unaware of these thought of his doom, Sharkboy turned from the y-tech displays and the controls of the multi-dimensional vehicle and looked at von Bulow. "I could take Slide easily. Piece of cake."
"I said wait didn't I?" "I have him in the cross-hairs. I could at least lock on to him."
Von Bulow jerked into a sitting position, lacerating the Humiliation's tongue with the heel of her shoe, and all but cracking its beak in the process. "Don't reveal yourself as more of a fool than you have already demonstrated. He's idimmu. He would notice the lock immediately."
"It would be very easy."
"You crave yet another electrical beating?"
The Zeech wetly distanced itself as Sharkboy lowered his head in faux subservience. "No ma'am."
"Then do as you are told and be quiet."
"Yes, ma'am."
The Humiliation made a moist blubbering sound, and von Bulow slapped it sharply across its approximation of a penis with a slim black glove. Sharkboy was silent for slightly more than a local minute, and then glanced back again. "Ma'am?"