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This message Premiere #31: The Long Way Home was posted by Another visit to the Technoverse and beyond, courtesy of... the Hooded Hood on Sunday, September 22, 2002 at 08:43.
Premiere #31: The Long Way Home
Premiere Archive (Previous episodes)
Who's Who in the Technoverse
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Who's Who in the Parodyverse
The Cyborg Elite were based out of some of the Prussian Islands in the broken wastes of the New Aryan Sea. Promulgating a doctrine of perfection through the replacement of weak human limbs by bionic grafts they held a low view of common humanity and less regard for the sanctity of life. The chaos that the Technoworld had been plunged into since the departure of Technopolis offered them a splendid opportunity to annex the broken terrain of the Norwegian peninsula and none of the eccentric gadgetry of the Steampunk Anarchists could resist them.
Starpom Omega jumped from his grav-car at forty thousand feet and dropped on and through the lead weapons crawler. He dragged himself unharmed from the tangle of wrecked biotech and turned his attention to the incoming plasmacannon platforms.
Still in the hovering Sov-Bloc security vehicle Visionary tentatively touched the button he prayed only switched on the external speaker system. “Hey there! Nasty cyborg types! How are you doing?” Then he remembered what he’s been told. “Listen, the provisional world government – that’s my wife, and this pure thought being called Yo, and this really evil lawyer called Lisa – look, you don’t want to go there, believe me. Well, you might want to go there, because lots of guys do, but what I mean is… Look, could you all just surrender please? Otherwise Starpom Omega will dismantle you well past the warranty claims stage, and leave you looking like an NTU-150 repair job.”
The Russian champion snorted and crushed tempered plasteel limbs with his bare hands.
Behind their makeshift barricades of vintage railway stock the Steampunk Anarchists were puzzled to discover a black silk-clad swashbucker laughing as he or she danced through the oncoming cyber-hordes.
“I’m not kidding, guys,” Visionary warned the Cyborg Elite, suddenly deadly serious. “This stops. Now.”
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“We’re getting an intermittent signal from their screamer beacon,” Sub-Commander Doyle of the provisional world government warned. “It’s hard to track because its being jammed. I think we’re got transients incoming.”
“Damn,” hissed Lisa. “We’re stretched too thin. Most of the surviving armament went back home with Premiere and Enty to fight the Red Watchman. What’s left is deployed across the planet trying to pin down a dozen or more trouble hotspots. Can we survive an attack here at Murmansk Base?”
“About 60% of the autodefense systems are back on-line,” Cheryl considered. “But some of the hardware is damaged. We don’t have anything powerful enough to hold back a concerted attack if the JBH are being followed in.”
Forty minutes earlier a battered Jackie Rabbit had radioed a hasty communication from the Florida Badlands reporting that her team had managed to confiscate one of the regeneration machines of the organ-clone supramacists in the face of some determined opposition. Despite the attack of the clones and some nasty bioengineered hunting beasts, the JBH had managed to get airborne and were running for home. However, a rather annoyed hierarchy of organ-pirates were seeking to retrieve their valuable – possibly irreplaceable now – equipment.
“We have visual confirmation from Kovlabek Station,” Doyle warned. “Around a dozen grav platforms, mostly Technopolis surplus, with bolt on armaments. The JBH vessel has taken some hits but is heading straight back for us. Wait…! Yes the attackers have dropped their jamming field and are concentrating all their power on their point-defense systems. The battle computer isn’t giving us good odds on this one.”
“If we lose here we lost everywhere,” Lisa adjudged. “We’re running this planet on the illusion of competence. If we’re seen to fail here we’ll lose them all.”
“Right,” sighed Cheryl, shooing Commander Doyle from the command console. “Incoming fighters, this is Cheryl from the World Government. Stand down now or we’ll have to stand you down.”
The lead organ pirate told Cheryl what he thought of her and the World Government and what she could go do with them.
“Rude,” scowled Lisa. “I summons him.”
While the first lady of the Lair Legion was chastising a very surprised clone slaver Cheryl continued with her warning. “Go home, “ she told the invaders. “Now.”
The three lead ships fired again upon the JBH.
“Right,” hissed Cheryl. She tapped some codes into the secure keypad and broadcast them. “You’re using old Technopolis equipment, yes?” she asked the attackers. “I’ve just entered the Science Council override codes to shut your technology down.”
A dozen blips dropped off the tracking screen as anti-grav engines stopped dead.
“Get somebody out there to help the JBH,” Cheryl told Commander Doyle.
___________________________________
“We can not hold this together for much longer,” Starpom Omega admitted. “Our alliance is based only on the people’s trust – the world’s trust - for Victor Stephanovitch, for Premiere. Once they learn that he has gone, that we have lost all contact with him…”
“There are more problems than we can fit on the threat board,” fretted Visionary. “Giant blindworm plague in Durban. Holoterrorists at Mombassa Prime. IQ Raiders in California. And the Nanoworshippers are rampaging through Cathay again. It’s falling apart.”
“We’d better get contact back pretty damn quick then,” Lisa scowled.
“We have to get home anyway,” Pigeonman of the JBH said. “We were sent for this Technopolitan cellular regenerator. Without it Fin Fang Foom and others may die. And it can’t hold its charge much longer than another day. After that it will be useless.”
“And I think I left the TV on,” added Visionary.
“We have to assume something has gone wrong back home to stop the Hooded Hood using his Portal of Pretentiousness as a transport conduit,” reasoned Cheryl. “We need to find another way back and forth. Yo, perhaps if we go to the Happy Place?”
“Then we come back to here when we are to be coming out,” the pure thought being warned. “Is to be sorry.”
“There must be some way back to Parodiopolis,” worried Kid Produce.
Lisa scowled. “I don’t know if this will work,” the advocatrix admitted. “If it doesn’t then it might sort of… burn me out and kill me. But I think we need to take a longshot given the circumstances. Stand back.”
“What are you to be doing, cute-Lisa?” worried Yo.
“I summons the person who has the means of getting us out of here… whoever that might be!”
___________________________________
“Excuse me, sir,” ALF.R.E.D. the lunar library’s security system avatar muttered deferentially, “I know how much you hate to be disturbed when you are cataloguing the seventeenth century apocalyptic literature, but the scanners have located a bibliographic tag signature which I felt should be drawn to your attention.”
The Librarian looked up from a treatise on the end times attributed to the so-called Count St Germaine and laid it aside gently and with regret. “Very well,” he sighed, rising and moving into the main library rotunda. “What have we got?”
Lynn was already at the mahogany-framed console. Its glittering black glass reflected a series of diagrams and notations which would have meant little to anyone but the secretive sect of Librarians who maintained the record of literature across the sentient worlds. “Believe it or not, it’s an overdue book.”
“Then use the usual protocols. It’s hardly a matter requiring my attention.”
“Look where it is, though,” Lynn urged. “How on Earth did it get all the way there?”
“Principles of Transmorphic Integration, with Some Notes of Ephemeral Transient States and Plasmics,” the Librarian noted. “One of old Dr Phobia’s books, wasn’t it? I liked the plot but the ending was too easy to guess. Taken out about… hmm sixteen and a half years ago. And not it’s…” he decoded the inscriptions on the monitor .”Where?”
“Exactly,” Lynn smirked. “The Technoverse, of all places. That’s how the lender, one Professor Ho Ching Chan, managed to hide it from our bibliographic detectors. It’s been hidden all the way out there inside a standing quantum screen so we couldn’t trace it. Until now.”
“The screen has failed, sir,” ALF.R.E.D. noted. “Would you care for me to eviscerate this Professor Ho?”
“Bring him here,” scowled the Librarian. “Use the book retrieval systems.”
“On it,” Lynn agreed.
There was a shriek of bending reality beside the returns lectern. The missing volume materialized on the stand, returned at last.
Visionary, Cheryl, Yo, the JBH, and a cellular regenerator tumbled down on the carpet around the book.
___________________________________
“So Lisa used her power and this Professor Ho Ching Chan appeared in the command center,” Visionary explained. “Did I mention that Lisa is evil? Anyway, it turns out this Ho is a science villain from the Cathay Protectorates, and amongst his wicked gadgets was this book he was using to get blueprints for his nasty machines.”
“Yo was to be thinking that if it was to be book from one of the cute libraries to be hidden on cute moons in some realities then is to be being called back and to be giving way out of Technoverse,” Yo explained, sipping his/her hot chocolate. “So we are to be turning off the screening field.”
“And we pulled you here,” concluded Lynn. “Clever.”
“And where is Professor Ho?” demanded the Librarian. There was the little matter of an overdue book penalty.
“I believe Starpom Omega smote him,” Visionary admitted. “Several times. He’ll be awake in a few weeks.”
“ALF.R.E.D.?” the Librarian promoted.
“On it, sir,” the homicidal butler program answered.
“You’re all from the Parodyverse, aren’t you?” Lynn noted. “We have…”
“Nothing to do with that place,” interrupted the Librarian quickly. “Except an occasional visit from my old friend Amazing Guy, of course. That’s all. We’d better return you and your… equipment there as soon as possible, and erase your memory of the Library. You definitely don’t have visitor tickets. Yes, we’d best be getting you home.”
A few moments work with the dimensional transplacer was sufficient to send the heroes on their way. But the Librarian stared at the rug where they had been standing for a long time. At last he sighed and looked up.
“Lynn,” he asked, “Get me the printout on the casualty lists in the Technowar, would you? The one that’s going to happen tomorrow.”
___________________________________
NOTE: Usually I put the snazzy Dancer photomanipulations at the top but in this case it might have been a spoiler. So here’s Dancer’s version of the lunar library crew (with apologies to a well-known TV series. Down, Donar!).
This poster posed from 212.159.41.102 when they posted
Message Thread
- Premiere #31: The Long Way Home - Another visit to the Technoverse and beyond, courtesy of... the Hooded Hood - 08:43 on September 22, 2002
- - (nt) - 08:45 on September 22, 2002
- Things wrong. - Librarian - 18:38 on September 23, 2002
- Ingrate. - (nt) spiffy - 22:46 on September 23, 2002
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