Cyber Circus

“Get up, you gimps! Drive these shitters out,” he roared at his pitch crew.

“Easy, freak. Else I’ll dust your boy here,” shouted the two-tone while the exterminator kid yelped, “He got me, boss! He got me!”

Pig Heart wouldn’t be held to ransom. He shunted the Sirinese in-between him and the sniper, with the vague idea of rescuing the kid once he’d disentangled himself. It was an idea which melted the instant he heard the zip of knife passed through flesh. The kid gurgled and fell.

It was distraction enough; Pig Heart felt a crush of pain and the world flooded black. He stumbled, blood draining from his split nose, the same cherry red smearing the butting plate at the Sirinese’s forehead. The man’s victory was cut short. Pig Heart crushed the butt of his rifle into the Sirinese’s windpipe, heard him wheeze like a pair of bellows. The whip of a pocketknife near his jowl told him the two-tone was on him. A slug from the sniper punctured the ground where he’d stood a second earlier.

Convinced his crew had deserted him, Pig Heart cursed them as yellow-bellies. But then the two-tone started to shake violently as if suffering from a malady. It took a second glance for Pig Heart to see the splay of blood at the man’s chest and the protruding curve of a scimitar. He didn’t stop to thank his backup but charged at the painted sand hill.

Shoot me up, chump! Just you shoot me up, he dared the sniper. There was a whistling noise and a rock took a second chunk out of his already bleeding ear. Pig Heart tossed his head from side to side while snorting, and powered his muscular limbs.

A red figure streaked by – the Jeridian he’d encountered earlier on the lift rig – and she was phenomenally fast. Inside seconds, she made an arrow of her body and leapt over the flat, twisting into a revolving bullet as she travelled and so avoiding the two rock slugs the sniper peeled off.

D’Angelus’s man knocked down the sand hill flat and started to run. The Jeridian landed in a roll of muscle, ripped the scimitar from the sheath at her back and flicked it clean through the sniper’s neck. Pig Heart watched the head fall.

* * *

Earl didn’t like being close to hoppers. He pressed back against the thick canvas wall as one of the two nymphs landed on a nearby tent pole, claws scraping the dark metal, wings folding with a rough clack-clack. The nymph was the size of a small burrowing machine – in fact, as Earl noted, its taupe and black exoskeleton had a lot in common with the panel work of those machines abandoned by the government at the country’s inactive mines. That the creature was alive did little to detract from its stiff easing out of segmented femur and tibia, or the clockwork bob of its head. Resembling large black pustules either side the skull, the eyes appeared all seeing while the bright green cornsilk poking from between the forewings betrayed the creature’s botanical DNA. The same plant feed which had turned Humock’s farmland to dust was responsible for the crossbreeding of the original hand-sized greenkicks with a strain of air plant. To a man like Earl, the idea was as ludicrous as it was terrifying.

“Nothing natural about you,” he whispered, pawing the canvas at his back as if to scale its height. The hopper twitched its head in his direction. Earl could’ve sworn it absorbed him with those huge swimming eyes.

With a brittle rub of motion, the hopper took to the air and joined its twin in circling the tent.

Forcing himself to move, Earl mauled the leaf lump in his mouth and eased around the edge of the circus tent to the backstage curtain. Having forced Nim to drain his juice, he’d thought it good for morale to let his boys poke the whore; they’d never afford D’Angelus’s rates otherwise. “Swift as virgins getting their first tug-off,” he’d warned, and slipped back out front to keep an eye on the boss.

But the minutes were dragging and the men were taking their sweet time. D’Angelus and the heavies he’d kept back were eating up the hoppers’ act, but Herb reckoned the ringmaster would be rounding things up soon.

Finding the edge of the curtain, he pulled it gently aside. He needn’t have bothered with subtleties. Jaxx, the Sirinese, came tearing through the curtain, followed closely by the swine man, sweaty and mad-eyed. Earl slunk back into the shadows as the pitchman leapt onto Jaxx’s back, the two men careering into the ring.

There was a moment of hush as the crowd seemed to presume it all part of the act. Then a statuesque Jeridian woman strode out from backstage and raised her arm, the hair of a severed head intertwined with her fingers.

“Ahoj na vas, vrazedne Bolest Earth svine!” she cried in her native tongue, and the still of the crowd transformed into violent alarm.

Earl’s eyes were tight bobbing beads; they scooted to the far side of the tent, settling on D’Angelus and his reserve of men. D’Angelus showed none of the courtesy he’d shown earlier, slamming the Saint Sister aside as she tottered out of her seat and tried to force an exit. His men crushed around him, marking out a path through the crowd with their fists.

Earl dribbled his wad of leaf onto the back of a hand and slopped it aside. Devil in Hell! Where were the men he’d sent in? And what now? What as the Jeridian threw the severed head into the dirt and took on the first of D’Angelus’s men to reach her? What as the swine who’d pocketed D’Angelus’s dollars a short time earlier took the full thrust of Jaxx’s butting plate against his forehead and reeled, only to power back inside the second?

All around the ring, the townsfolk stampeded in a bid for freedom. The noise of panic was bloodcurdling. Having escaped to the calliope balcony, the ringmaster, that squat plug of fat, was hopping and gesticulating. Because the hoppers were still loose. Which meant the exit was stitched shut, Earl realised, his insides curdling.

He stared at the spot-lit heavens where the hoppers dashed against the side of the tent, motes of chitinous material dusting down. It was his job to fight alongside D’Angelus, Earl thought vaguely. But he remembered the hopper clinging to the tent pole earlier, and he felt the weight of its oiled black eyes, how it had seemed to stretch its sight inside him and leave some shred of itself tethered there.

There was an urgency to move; he felt it as acutely as a rush of leaf bitters to his bloodstream. One of the hoppers was skydiving. Twisting and tumbling, it swept around the circumference of the tent, slinking in and out the tent poles like a beast of legend. Earl watched, entranced and horrified by the whir of wings, and how, with each revolution, the creature dropped in height but increased its velocity. Nailed to the spot, he was vaguely aware of a blur of battle cries, the shift of bodies, and the tide of air against his face as the hopper swept closer.

* * *

“Saints alive, buddy!”

Herb’s round face puckered. He shook a hand out as if freeing his fingers of the gore which splashed one half of the stage curtain. The hopper swooped up to a perch in the rafters and was swiftly lassoed by its handler, the man having installed himself at the edge of the zoo platform for the purpose. Herb felt a sense of relief, an emotion which strengthened when one of the pitch crew called up, “S’okay Herb. Hopper just took out one of the brawlers.”

Whatta way to go though! From the safety of the calliope balcony, Herb cursed his vantage point. Seeing the pimp’s man sliced from hip to rib was another stain on his memory. But wasn’t that the price of the ringmaster’s life? Cyber Circus was a difficult beast to control and it took every last bit of effort to keep its savagery in check. Occasionally it spilt over.

Herb gripped the gilded railing, leaning into it. There was only one option – leave. But before they rolled on out, it made sense to know what, or who, had caused the ruckus in the first place.

He turned his attention to the crowd. The marks were tightly herded at the edges of the tent, the canvas straining with the pressure of so many bodies fighting to get out.

Herb tapped the rail under his fingers and said softly, “Hang in there, old gal. Just a minute more.” It was better to keep the marks circulating. Less chance of the troublemakers actually achieving anything.

In the ring, the Jeridian circled her scimitar above her head, other arm crooked out for balance. She faced three opponents – dust handlers from the looks of them. They had that ‘stooped against the wind’ stance. Pig Heart had it worse. His snout had been smashed. Blood soaked the pitchman’s chin, neck and shirt bib. He was up against a Sirian – ex-cage fighter judging by the brow bolt plate and the slug of the man’s fists. Pig Heart took it though and kept on standing.

Herb’s eye was distracted by the pimp’s black leather trekker’s hat. Ahead of him, heavies cut a path through the marks. They appeared to be heading in the direction of backstage.

Whatta they wanna do that for? Herb hummed a slow sad song, the sort Jeridians