Perdition

The following is a collab with Cornwind Evil. He devised the main story framework, I took care of the writing. Enjoy!

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Sometimes, you think you know a person. You think you know their likes, their dislikes and their odd quirks that make them the unique individual they are. You hug them when they cry, you laugh when they tell you embarrassing stories of high school. You congratulate and scold them when the the comes to do so, you are there when they need you and not there when they don't. And then comes the moment when, out of the blue, they say or do something that completely changes your perspective on them and forces you to re-draw your mental picture of them, like opening packet of Digestives to find every third one is a Jaffa Cake.

Carol had her second moment when she saw the six-shooter Sine kept in a locked box.

She knew it was cursed the moment her "partner" opened it up. The hissing voices had hit her like a shot of whiskey hits the stomach, with the exact amount of unpleasant churning. The urge to simply reach out and grab it sat like a fat toad in the back of her mind, yet the rest of it was screaming in silent terror loud enough to prevent that from happening. What the technopath found the most unnerving, however, was the fact that, despite everything her head was screaming at her, the thing in front of her looked like a prop from a Lone Ranger set - almost innocuous, despite being... well, a gun.

Blinking, she looked up at Sine, and saw the grim seriousness on her face. Oh, dear. It was going to be one of those things.

"Carol... Do you remember what happened a week ago?"

Carol gulped, ignoring the metaphorical snakes in her gullet. "Yeah... That didn't go so well, did it?"

That had been the first moment.

 ------- 

It should have been simple. Spice farmers on Rygol VII needed some aid to make money for themselves, and offering coupons to buy the latest farming equipment seemed the best way to do it. Looking to demonstrate to Carol just how the less-dangerous part of her work was done, Sine had allowed the technopath to accompany her down to the planet, also perhaps hoping she would be of use in picking the best tools  for the farmers. It had been a chance for Carol to sample alien cultures and ways, and for a while things had gone well as they bartered and bargained their way around the planet.

However, their antics had brought about the attention of the local mafia, the Don Vire group, who didn't appreciate their attempts to wrest control of the lucrative spice market away from their grubby pincers. Things went bad very quickly - just how the coupons got switched with paper fakes nobody knew, but it wasn't long before angry farmers were waving their pitchforks at them and demanding refunds. And like most things that go wrong, the situation had spiraled out of their control as the police force of Rygol - no doubt on the payroll of the Vire - had arrived to "restore order" to the scene.

Most things that go wrong, however, don't usually result in mad, hover-bike-based getaways like this one.

"TO THE LEFT!"

Carol could barely hear Sine over the roar of the hover-bike, not to mention the whines of their pursuers. But she still heard, and immediately wrenched the handlebars to turn the bike into the narrow canyon, the g-force almost shunting the mutant off her seat. By sheer luck, one of the pursuing androids was unable to pull off the same manoeuvre in time, dashing itself against a boulder jutting out from the dirt and exploding in a could of metal, joints and wiring. This did nothing, however, to deter the rest of the robots behind them, who merely weaved around the obstacle and continued their dogged chase, balancing expertly on their vehicle's anti-grav fields.

"WHY AREN'T WE SHOOTING AT THEM?!" Carol found herself screaming. Whichever way she flicked her head there were robots, cruising in steady formation on each side of them and glaring down at them with their single red eyes. The humming and roar of engines did nothing to mute the electronic sounds her technopathy was picking up - a constant, almost clinical language that spoke of no ambition or plan other than to carry out their duty and apprehend the "criminals" in front of her. Not even a longing for a nice cup of tea - it was all a bit frightening for the young mechanic.

"FIRSTLY," Sine howled back, "WE'RE ALREADY IN MAJOR TROUBLE WITH THE POLICE FOR FRAUD, AS INCORRECT AS THAT ACCUSATION IS! WE DON'T WANT TO ADD CARRYING UNLICENSED WEAPONS AND ASSAULTING OFFICERS TO THE LIST!" With another yank of the handlebars, the mutant sent the bike skimming up a natural ramp to the right, hopping over a particularly sharp collection of rocks as she did and putting a precious five meters between them and their pursuers.

"SECONDLY," Sine added, "YOUR POMSON IS A TWO-HANDED GUN, AND WE'RE GOING AT OVER A HUNDRED MILES AN HOUR! HOW AM I GOING TO AVOID FALLING OFF?"

This was a very good question indeed. The Rygolian hover-bike, as big and robust as it was, had been designed to take one good-sized crab person, not two humans. As a result, both women were forced to share a U-shaped seat that was more than a little uncomfortable. On top of this, Carol had both handlebars and foot straps - Sine had to lean over to grasp a smaller pair of handles just at the front, underneath Carol's hands.  And at the speed they were going at, taking her hands off those handles to get at the bulky, unwieldy laser gun would probably end up with her or both of them becoming red smears on the rocks.

But how to get rid of their pursuers? That was the major concern. The androids were certainly persistant, and although one or two had made costly blunders in this difficult terrain the majority of them were skilled enough to weave through the rocks and keep pursing them despite the tricks they could pull. To complicate things further, the two were trying to reach a small spaceport that, unaffiliated with the Don Vire, would provide them with a safe way off the planet without getting shot, with a rocket due to take off in a few hours. Two problems - they had no idea where it was, and there was no way they could let their enemies find that location as well.

Fear was prowling at the back of Carol's mind like a tiger hunting deer. Hemmed in on both sides by rock, with relentless biker robots on their tail, and several years of jail time possibly in their near future... What had started off as a harmless exercise in aid-giving and deal-making had escalated into something out of  Star Wars film.

And to think the day had started so well, too!

Then Sine tapped her on the shoulder.

"NOW!" she howled. "TO THE RIGHT, SHARP!"

Carol looked, and was bewildered. "BUT THAT'S SOLID-"

"DO IT!"

Eyes shut tight and teeth gritted, Carol yanked the handlebars as far to the right as she could, wincing as she heard something creak within. The bike veered sharply and, to her amazement, slipped through a narrow gap in the rock that, at first glance, was completely invisible amongst the jagged cliff edges. Startled by the sudden disappearance of their target, the androids automatically pulled up sharply in an attempt to track them, and this resulted in a cacophony of banging and clattering as a pileup worthy of a Wacky Races episode occurred within the canyon. If that didn't delay them...

The jagged stone hissed by Carol's head, hungry for her brains, but she put it at the back of her mind as she sped on. Fortunately for her, the danger didn't last long, and soon the bike roared out of the crevasse and burst out into the sunlight. Feeling it's rays upon her face once again, the mutant couldn't help but give a whoop of joy, pumping one fist into the air just as Daniel had done during their drunken escape from Rutledge.

"YES!" she hollered. "WE DID IT, WE-"

"Hold on."

Carol blinked, and looked around.

They had come out, not on a road as the technopath had thought they would, but on a very vast-looking and featureless desert. Well, not exactly featureless - the occasional mushroom-shaped rock pedestal popped up here and there, and the ground was littered with small, sharp pebbles. But it was certainly vast, for everywhere Carol looked there was just more of it, stretching out as far as the eye could see, and there weren't any signs of civilization to be seen. No signs, no cars... not even a friendly hillbilly sleeping under the sun to point the way.

"This... is bad," said Sine from behind her. "We really ought to have come outon the main road by now."

"Not a problem," responded Carol, as cheerfully as she could muster. "We'll just double back and try to find it."

But the courier shook her head emphatically. "No, keep going straight. I really don't want to hang around here any longer."

Fear saw it's chance, and pounced. Carol tried to fight it off, depressing the accelerator until it creaked and trying to enjoy the feeling of the wind in her hair. But the way Sine had cast her eyes about the place, and the tone of panic in her voice, had raised some alarm bells in her head. Had they really gotten lost, or was it something about the desert itself that was scaring Sine? The technopath wasn't sure which was the right answer, and she wasn't quite sure wherever it was from worry or the rush of their getaway, but she was starting to feel somewhat dizzy about it all.

In fact, it felt like she had a headache coming. So much so, in fact, that she took a hand off the handlebars to nurse her aching temple. Unfortunately, that meant having to slow the bike down in order to focus on that, and Sine noticed the drop in speed.

"Something wrong, Carol?" she asked.

"Bit woozy, is all," was the response. "I'll be fine, just- Sine?"

Carol had just looked over her shoulder to see her friend, meaning to reassure her, and noticed that she'd turned pale. Oh, dear. That wasn't a good sign.

"Carol," Sine muttered at last. "I'm so sorry, I forgot to tell you."

"What?" Fear was now casually gnawing on Carol's nerves. "What's the-?"

THOOM

Sine's quick reflexes were what saved them, in the end. As searing light and heat streaked towards them, the courier wound her arms about the surprised Carol's torso and kicked off, dragging the mutant out of the seat with her. Without a hand to guide it or hit the brakes, the vehicle careered onwards and straight into the incoming blue-white ball of plasma, detonating into an impressive mushroom of fire and burnt scrap. Both women had no way to appreciate it, however, as they awkwardly hit the ground a second later, tumbling head-over-heels together a few dozen feet before rolling to a stop at the foot of a wind-scarred rock pedestal, a breathless and dust-covered heap.

The knowledge that her friend's armour had spared her from broken bones was of small comfort to Carol, for the world was madly spinning around her and a particularly ominous humming was at the back of her hearing. Consequently, she barely noticed when Sine almost immediately disengaged herself from the tangle and scrambled to her feet to confront the new enemy, merely rolling aside to give her some room. Three thoughts were rattling around in her head at the current moment - anger at herself for choosing the casual clothes over actual protective gear, pain from her limbs being scraped by rocks and, predictably, a sort of dull sadness for the fate of their bike.

"I liked that bike," she murmered to the universe in general as she dragged herself upright. "It was happy. Vroom, vroom, I'm a bike, look at me go..."

Come to think of it, that humming noise was a bit loud, wasn't it?

Carol looked, and immediately wished she hadn't.

The Rygolian hover-crusier was not designed to look pretty. Nothing that resembled a toad sitting in a cowpat could ever claim to hold any prestigious design awards - they'd be laughed out of the showroom. It was designed to get to a problem very quickly, and then get rid of that problem very spectacularly, and in that respect it was perfect. It's near-silent engine and dusty paint job meant that both women hadn't detected it's swift approach at all, and the barrel of the roof-mounted plasma cannon was still smoking as it lowered towards them. One-by-one, the androids they'd so cunningly eluded roared up alongside it, fixing the two women with their unchanging stares as they pulled up in a semicircle around them.

Carol felt the blood draining from her face, and turned to look at Sine. Her expression was unreadable, but her eyes showed a twinge of... guilt? Guilt for what? Carol could understand machines like they were books, but humans were a bit more troublesome - facial and body cues were difficult for her to pin down sometimes. She wondered what could have possibly brought this on, then realized that there was a massive fuck-off gun pointed at her at the moment. Priorities, Carol!

"Criminal scum," boomed the shrimp-like alien at the controls, "this is your last chance. Surrender now-"

"Carol."

Sine's voice was oddly strained, and barely audible over the bombastic tannoy.

"Yes?" asked Carol, wondering where this was going. Apart from having their organs scattered across the nuclear desert, of course.

The response was not what she expected.

"Close your eyes and cover your ears."

Carol blinked. "Wh-?"

And then Sine pulled out the six-shooter from a pocket, and all Carol could remember at that point was a long, drawn-out scream that, only later, would she find out had come from her to block out the legion of whispering voices in her head. There had been red in her vision, red of blood and fire, and somewhere in the distance someone had shouted the beginnings of a swear word in an inhuman tongue and was suddenly silenced by a crack of thunder. And when it was over, she'd been crouched over the sand and stones, hands over her ears and tears in her eyes and throat red raw.

The gun was gone. But so was the hover-cruiser. There was only a doughnut-shaped ring of crumpled metal where it had been, with the faintest traces of red on the inside, and no sign of the androids could be found anywhere. And Sine was standing in front of it, putting the gun back into it's box-pouch and looking particularly grim-faced, like Judge Dredd after he'd one-shotted some gloating crime boss and was admiring the new wallpaper shade of Hint of Brain.

That had been the first time Carol had felt... scared of her.

And then the Sifter had, quite helpfully, gone "bing" to remind everyone it was fully charged now. And then they'd gone home, and Sine had explained that the Rygolians had a big nuclear war once, and the desert they'd driven through had been bombed quite a bit when it was still a jungle and there was still trace amounts of radiation in it. So she made Carol take some pills and lie in bed for a few days to clear up the sickness that followed soon after, and whenever the mutant was sick, she was there to rub her back and be encouraging about it.

And more than once, lying in bed, the mutant had heard Sine yelling over the phone at someone, so she assumed something was being done about those coupons, even if she never really bought it up in conversation afterwards. Lawyers got mentioned once or twice, so it was probably going well. Daniel had come to check up on her when he heard about it, and he was oddly silent as he sat by her bed and held her hand - which was even stranger, because normally he hated even being poked. Robbie even bought flowers and a card, and that made her feel a lot better about the whole thing.

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"Carol..."

Carol snapped out of her flashback, blinked once or twice, and turned back to her friend.

"I don't like fighting," Sine was saying. "I really don't. But as the saying goes, sometimes you can get further with a kind word and a gun than with a kind word alone. And nothing is worse then when someone decides they want to be your enemy after they've stacked the deck in their favor, so..." The redhead sighed heavily, running one hand through her hair as she directed her gaze at the gun lying in it's case. She looked upon it as though it was a scorpion plotting to leap up at her and sting her face.

"Maybe this is a bad idea..." she muttered. "Maybe I'm too damn mad..."

"Oh, don't say that!" Carol felt a sort of indignant despair come over her - no way was she going to let Sine put herself down like that. "You're no more mad than I am, and... well, it was kind of my fault I didn't prepare for the whole radiation thing!"

"But we shouldn't have had to!" retorted Sine, throwing her hands in the air. "All we wanted to do was a simple job! And then a bunch of assholes... God, I hope Santos made it hurt!"

Carol nodded eagerly, recalling how they'd kept in touch with the marines long after the ruckus on Orvance. More than likely that had been one of the people Sine had spoken to on the phone - if there was anyone the two trusted to take care of crooked mafias, it was a Ghost with people problems and camouflage technology. Then she heard the whispering again, and looked down at the gun, recalling just what they were here to talk about. Yep, still like whiskey to the stomach.

She hated whiskey.

"Ignore it," was Sine's reply, casually closing the box as if it were nothing. "Echoes of past vile ghosts. The equivilant of graffiti." Then, with yet another heavy sigh, she slumped into the nearby armchair, one that she'd pilfered from a yard sale on a planet filled with cheerful, bipedal cow-things, and brought one hand to her forehead.

"Carol," she continued, "you and I... we're at a bit of disadvantage. We're not Adept Astartes, we're not robots, we're not even magicians who can repair their own wounds or shield themselves. Which also limits what kind of weapons we can use."

Carol nodded, but said nothing more. The point was all too clear.

"You've read my personal files," Sine went on. "So you know I've stumbled into some dark things. This is one of them - Perdition. I got involved in some business, years ago, involving these... weapons. Don't know where they came from, don't know who made them....but there were six of them. They changed shape over the years, though for some reason ever since the 1800's they've remained in this shape.".

"Six?" Carol swallowed, nervously. "And is this...?"

Sine shook her head emphatically. "No, it's not the same one I used. But it's similar. It never runs out of ammo, because it's fueled by hatred, and its bullets explode into the fires of hell themselves. The one I used, Devastation, shoots bullets that hit with the same force as shots from a rail cannon. Sounds awesome, but then again, cursed weapons always do." She leaned back into the chair, and for a moment the room was silent as the two women pondered their situation.

"I had three of them," the courier explained. "I threw Devastation into the Bleed, the second gun  - Forsaken - into a black hole and kept Perdition, burying it as best I could. And since nothing happened, I sort of forgot about it all. Until now.  I wouldn't bring it up, but..." Here, she swallowed, impulsively massaging the fabric of the armchair with both hands, and looked up at Carol.

"You ever feel mocked by fate, Carol?"

"Sometimes," was the reply. "Like when the blender-toaster I made exploded. God rest his fuses."

"You remember that rift cleanup I did a week ago? That you didn't want to help with because Robbie had the flu? It was a rift to the Bleed. And guess what it spat out."

Carol needed no other prompting. "Devastation," she answered, with a voice like lead.

Sine nodded. "It could have ended up in endless places. Instead... it came back to me. Knowing what I know, this means we may be called upon to gather all Six Guns. Which could be bad, if just because bad people might be seeking them. Like that Calico freak, for instance. Heaven help us if he got wind of these."

For a moment, Carol was at a loss for words. This was a lot to take in - a bunch of guns with weird powers, that were also cursed and whispered nasty things in your head? And people actively sought those things out, trying to claim their power for whatever mad reason? This was starting to sound like that television show Robbie watched on Saturdays, where everyone wanted these glowy balls that summoned a big wish-granting dragon. Except worse because... well, cursed guns. There was a long, prolonged silence as she tried to think of something to say, or do, that would help in some way.

Then she jumped as she felt something being pressed into one of her hands. A quick look discovered it to be the case where the gun was contained, the polished wood cold and almost metallic against her skin. It had another hand upon it, a familiar hand, which was attached to an arm, and following the arm lead up to Sine. The woman had an odd sort of sad smile on her face, one that bewildered Carol for a moment as she looked upon it.

Then she spoke.

"It was my fault. I put your neck in a noose without even knowing it, and I'm not going to have that happen again. And besides," she added as she took her hand away from the case and left it sitting in Carol's palm, "if I'm going to get myself mixed up with these things again, I may as well put them into the hands of people I trust."

Carol blinked, not quite understanding at first. Then the realization swep over her - she was being entrusted with this potentially dangerous, demonic firearm that could burn the flesh off people's bones and was powered by hatred. It was a very big weight on her shoulders, she knew, but for the moment that was eclipsed by the sudden awesomeness of guarding such a powerful weapon in the first place - at least, in the technopath's mind. Determination swept over her, and she placed the case upon her lap as she sat upright, restraining the urge to salute military-style.

"I won't let you down," she announced, in a very decided voice. "I promise."

"Excellent," Sine smiled back. "Oh, and before I forget, you'll need these." And she reached over the table and took something else off it - an earpiece, which she handed to Carol. "I know you're strong-willed, but the gun will be constantly whispering, imploring you to find it's brothers. Many others have gone mad from it, so it's best not to take chances."

Carol nodded in emphatic agreement. "Of course not!" she exclaimed as she examined the device with a keen interest. "I mean, cursed guns are always a tricky proposition to begin with - can't have them whispering evil things in your ears! And if somebody tried to take it from me-"

"They can't," Sine butted in. "Not until you die - well, that's the theory, at any rate. Oh, and Carol," she added as she stood up from her chair. "The guns themselves aren't evil - remember that. They've got their reputation because many evil men used them, and let themselves be twisted by the voices. They can't change you by themselves, it's not in their power. But they can damn well try to encourage you to change."

Carol looked up at Sine, and grinned her trademark grin that would put the Cheshire Cat to shame.

"Let them try."

The moment had passed

-------

Two hours later, Daniel mysteriously burnt his hand trying to take the gun from under Carol's mattress. He spent the next half an hour soothing himself under the cold water tap, swearing like a drunken ironmonger.

So that was one theory confirmed.