-26-

Sitting inside the stolen delivery van that idled in the many-acred parking lot of the Power of Pleasure sex club, Carlos put on shatterproof goggles, donned a neck brace, and strapped it on securely with three velcro straps. While wearing it, he couldn't turn his head, but that didn't pose any problems that he could foresee because the only direction Carlos intended to go was straight.

He waited for a particularly gaudy limousine covered with shifting plaid to drop off its passengers and clear the street in front of the club's main entrance ramp. He needed the ramp to be clear.

While he waited, Carlos watched the spotlights and lasers spin around through the clear dome that housed the city's most fashionable place to fuck. A hundred foot-tall projection of a lesser PornoPop star danced in the middle of the dome. Carlos was embarrassed that he remembered her name. It was CandiQ. As she danced and strutted, her figure remained roughly in the center of the dome. He watched her, thinking how much Hi-5 was going to enjoy stealing the main stage from the competition.

“Hey Carlos,” Fritz asked through the loudspeakers on the outside of his helmet, “are we gonna do this or what?” The ramp was clear, so Carlos answered with his foot, and Fritz and Irving swayed as he accelerated the van. Carlos watched the analog needle of the vintage delivery van's speedometer. The last time Carlos looked at it, the vintage dial read fifty-three miles per hour. Fast enough. He lifted his gaze and locked his eyes on his goal.

There were ten bouncers outside the POP club's main entrance, and somehow they all managed to clear out of the van's path as it sped by the long line of waiting clubbers and hit the base of the ramp. The van bottomed out, scraping against the concrete, throwing bright blue and green sparks left, right, and behind it.

The couple who had almost reached the doors at the top of the ramp only turned around because they believed the van's honking horn had something to do with them looking tremendously hot and they wanted to wave at their admirer. It was a common hallucination for people on the amphetamine derived, Beyondo Brand derms with which they had chosen to start the evening. That hallucination saved their lives as they would have likely ignored any honking perceived as a warning since the Beyondo Brand derms they'd slapped on tended to make people think that rules and warnings didn't apply to them because they were so hot. The two rubber-clad clubbers hurled themselves, along with their enormous, surgically enhanced breasts and asses, off the edge of the ramp. It was a remarkable display of Beyondo-enhanced reflexes in which both of them abandoned pretension for the first time in several years.

The van missed crushing them against the door by only a tenth of a second.

As Carlos's van made impact with the first set of reinforced doors, it knocked them off their hinges, and they flew into the interior doors, only five yards away on the other side of the mantrap. For the one-fifth of a second that the van was actually inside the mantrap, between the exterior and interior doors, it was scanned for weapons and explosives like any other visitor to the Power Of Pleasure. The club's weapon scanning system had just enough time to project the words, 'ENTRY DENIED' in floating, red holographics in front of the van, and Carlos only had a tiny fraction of a second to smirk at that before the van made impact with the second set of doors.

They were considerably more reinforced, but they were meant to withstand small weapons fire not speeding vehicles. The interior doors gave way, bursting open off the front of the van's snub-nosed front end, admitting Carlos, Fritz, and Irving to the POP club.

The van bled a lot of speed blowing through the doors, but the twelve hundred pounds of men, armor, and weapons in the van's rear made it difficult to stop on the smooth floor. Carlos pumped the brakes since the van was actually old enough to have no anti-lock systems. It didn't make a difference because they hit a carelessly spilled puddle of lube, and the van slid into a long, twisting, vine-like jungle gym that grew from the floor and twisted over on itself many times over. The sex-toy jungle gym was made of thick silicone rubber over an aluminum core, and hundreds of twelve-inch, multi-colored rubber phalli protruded from up and down its length like long cactus spines. It was bolted to the floor, and it was the perfect structure to decelerate a heavy vehicle except for the way it burst through the windshield, showering Carlos with bits of safety glass and thrusting its rubber dildo cactus spines disrespectfully towards his face.

When they came to a full stop, Carlos was uninjured but several of the dildoes growing off the vine wagged together in front of his eyes in a disturbing and demeaning spectacle. Staring at the closest of the bouncing, multi-colored, rubber phalli with crossed eyes, Carlos removed his safety goggles and told Fritz and Irving what they undoubtedly already knew, “We're here!”

Fritz and Irving exited out the rear door of the van. The clubbers around them were nearly naked, and rather than panicking, most of them thought it was all part of the show, all part of the POP club experience. A few ran off screaming into the crowds of copulating partiers, but everyone in the POP club was too wasted, too focused on a sex act, or was too self-involved to notice or care.

Transparent glowing red cherries twice the size of basketballs hovered and danced and spun above their heads as Fritz and Irving ignored the crowds and lumbered like great ponderous armored knights towards the nearest stairwell. The first floor crowd wasn't their problem. The first floor belonged to Hi-5, and she was arriving in the next van.

Casper felt the van bottom out on the ramp, but other than that, the entrance to the POP club wasn't too rough. The second van had a sliding side door, and when it opened to reveal the bodies in the dim light and the flashing strobes, the spotlights, and projected holographic cherries that danced like sugarplums, Casper was impressed. The first thing he noticed was the smell. The club was filled with an all-pervasive scent of human congress.

Now this, he thought, is some first-class, decadent shit.

It was hot, and he began to sweat under his clothes and kevlar. The first floor went on forever. There were islands of orgies and strange, functionally designed furniture and people fucking above his head. Figures appeared to be screwing in mid-air above the dancing, drugging, and fucking crowd that numbered in the thousands. The mid-air copulators were actually hanging from thin, almost invisible, elastic cords, connected to harnesses, that allowed them to embrace and engage while suspended. They reminded Casper of insects he'd seen doing it over a pond in the park when he was a kid.

There was dancing and there were catwalks for overhead viewing. There were open showers and a lube-filled swimming pool set in the floor that immediately gave him the willies. Everywhere he looked there were people doing it, people fucking everywhere and anywhere under the smoky-pink-tinted, transparent XinClair dome high above.

The smell reminded Bonnie of fun she hadn't had in a while, and she bit the side of her cheek thinking about it while she scanned the POP club for threats. Nothing but clubbers. She turned to look at her own team, standing out like armored thumbs in the mostly naked crowd. Casper looked entertained.

Catherine was standing next to Casper, and as she stared up through the transparent dome at the city-lit clouds above, he heard her say something through the pounding music about how under the see-through dome they were all fucking in front of God. Casper thought, out of the corner of his eye, that she looked excited.

He looked over at Bonnie, and she didn't seem the least bit phased. She seemed like she thought she was above all this, somehow. The only response it drew from her was chambering a massive round in the Sagami hand cannon that Hi-5 had let her keep. Casper wanted to ask Bonnie what she thought about all this, but when she saw him looking at her, she said, “Don't get any ideas, Ms. Aziz.” He didn't bother trying to explain himself because the music was too loud and he was focused on a million other things, mostly the infinite variety of boobs on parade.

Bonnie thought there were spotlights shining in her eyes Then she realized they were headlights. It was Shelby in the third van. She parked inside the mantrap over the scanners that didn't like her gun or her bomb and again flashed a message in mid-air, denying entry to the club. Bonnie watched her hop out the door and jog forward to meet them. She was grinning.

Hi-5 and Carlos stepped forward a couple of paces. Bonnie couldn't hear anything but 180bpm dance music, but she saw Carlos smile and make a gesture towards the stage, and then it looked like he shouted something to Hi-5. Something like, “You're on.”

Hi-5 wore a full-length AniLux trench coat in the van, covered with spinning firecrackers and their eternally burning fuses that always dropped sparks towards the ground. Bonnie knew she had plans to go on stage and was hiding a more flamboyant outfit underneath.

Hi-5 was armed with an eighteen round grenade launcher, built like a gigantic revolver, and in her left hand she held a pistol with an extended clip three times the length of the barrel. Singh and Cheese moved to either side of her, and she handed them her weapons, shrugged off the AniLux trench coat, and revealed her stage outfit for the evening.

Hi-5 wore a combination of bustier and one-piece bathing suit. It was AniLux too, and it was animated to appear as if she was full of stars. They swirled across her in a spiral galactic vortex set against a blackness punctuated, not only by twinkling stars that swam in the void, but also by explosions that Bonnie correctly guessed were meant to represent supernovae. They exploded about once a second in great multichromatic bursts that left clouds of nebulous color floating over her.

The one-piece suit had half-cups that presented her exposed showbiz-sized breasts, and as she touched a control mechanism set between them, the entire garment began to pulse and chroma shift. The black began to slide through a million colors, and the stars changed with them, maintaining a consistent complementary hue in relation to the background. It was already a seizure inducing garment, but when the pace of the blinding supernovae picked up to match the bass rhythm, the effect was a mesmerizing optical assault.

She wore a thick, hip slung belt that glowed a simple cerulean, and puffy clouds floated across its width. The belt was there to support twin, holstered, pearl handled, long-barrel revolvers and the most unexpected element of her outfit – the codpiece. It was absurdly huge and protruded nearly a foot in front of her, competing with her breasts. It appeared to be jewel studded, but the jewels that covered it were lenses to direct tiny lasers, producing a sunburst effect that constantly lit up the surrounding area with glorious laser beams from her codpiece. There was a very small nozzle at the outermost point of the codpiece's extreme convexity that served a function she wouldn't reveal until the right dramatic moment.

Hi-5 took back her weapons from Cheese and Singh and began to strut towards the main stage. Carlos had told her it was her job to keep the first floor's massive crowd distracted, and he'd asked the right girl. It's time, Hi-5 thought, to steal a show.

Cheese had little difficulty commandeering the DJ booth. It was guarded by two large, stern, turgid-muscled men with stun batons. He put a couple of NarCocktail laced flechettes in them with a tiny pre-charged pneumatic dart pistol, and they wandered off into the crowd, wearing wide smiles and tearing at their clothes, which they suddenly regarded as binding and unnatural.

When the music stopped, the crowd saw confused CandiQ, the second tier PornoPop diva that had been performing, look towards the DJ booth with her hands on her hips and fury in her eyes. Hi-5 approached her from the rear, swept her legs out from under her, and ripped off the tracker she wore that told the holographic imaging scanners what to follow. CandiQ scrambled backwards like a crab from Hi-5's grinning bitch-glory towering above her. She ran off into the crowd. Everybody knew, and she did too, that Hi-5 would fuck a bitch up, during a main stage stick-up.

Her Hi-ness hung the holo-tracker on her belt, and as the imaging scanners locked on the Queen of PornoPop, her image was projected, defiant, glamorous, and one hundred feet high, immediately behind her on stage. A thousand fans looked up expectantly at her Hi-ness, her 5-ness, Hi-5. Her Beats began. Locked inter-coitus, without breaking off, they cheered and changed the rhythm of their meaty motions to move in-time and in sync with her majesty's mighty Beats. Hi-5 began to sing:

“Y'all are Good with the Wood, I see,

So ride 'em cowboys and cowgirls.

Glory be - you hoes should try me!

Churlish hoes step up 'n take a whirl.

Hi-5 is whirl-wind like a rhymin' sit n spin,

To E-Ter-Nity and back again!

Baby! (damn, bitch)

Bitch! Do it, Baby! (damn, bitch)

Bitch! Screw it, Baby! (damn, bitch)

Stay in key 'cause this Bitch got perfect pitch!

Ya do it do ya?

Imagine takin' it to her!

I know yer hard pressed to imagine,

Hi-5 is the bitch that pees standin'.

And if she's got an itch she'll be handin',

Yer twitchy ass to you on a platter,

All wet and spattered with her liquid anti-matter!

Baby! (damn, bitch)

Bitches doin it Baby! (damn, bitch)

Bitches screwin it Baby! (damn, bitch)

Hi-5 is the Bitch if ya got an itch to scritch!”

Hi-5 struck a pose and fired a happy-gas grenade into the crowd with the rotary launcher on the first and third '(damn, bitch)' of the chorus. They loved it. They loved her. Hi-5 loved them back.

Bonnie, Casper, and the rest of the Dark snatch team watched the beginning of Hi-5's set from the top of the stairs that led down to the first sub-level. That gave Fritz and Irving, who had already descended, a chance to clear out the Morituri gunmen that would undoubtedly rise from the lowest levels of the club and try to stop them from taking back the Buddha.

Bonnie tugged at Casper's arm saying, “C'mon, twitchy bitch, we got some ass to kick.” It wasn't a perfect rhyme, but it surprised the hell out of Casper to hear Bonnie say it. He liked the fact that she'd touched him, too. As Hi-5 continued to hold the first floor, the team cautiously descended below a projected sign that hung in mid-air over the stairs and declared that this was the way to the 'Specialized Orgy Environments'.

The main hallway of POP's first sub-level had open shower stalls every few yards and the floor of the hallway was wet. Blood from three fallen Morituri gunmen mixed with puddles of water, making patches of bright pink on the concrete floor. They quickly oxidized to rust-water from the disinfectant that was everywhere.

Bonnie stepped over a bullet-ridden Morituri gunman at the bottom of the stairs. Nearby, the naked bodies of two clubbers lay on their backs without any visible wounds. Bonnie guessed they'd slipped trying to flee the firefight and concussed themselves on the concrete floor. The hard-on pills they sold here must be pretty powerful, she thought, trying not to stare at the surgically augmented, porno-scaled, elements of the fallen clubbers that pointed defiantly skyward despite their unconsciousness. Shelby extended her leg and poked one with the tip of her AniLux, swirling smoke boot. She giggled as it twitched and throbbed. “Now that,” she said, “is some impressive shit.” As the absurdly large appendage continued to dance, she added, “I gotta get out more.”

Irving waved to the snatch team from down the corridor, and then Irving and Fritz both disappeared down the stairs to the next sub-level.

The Morituri at the base of the stairs was pumped up on a cheap crank variant known as Jitterthug, and instead of camping the bottom of the stairs as he'd been ordered, he decided to creep up and ambush the armored figures as they came down the gently curving staircase. He had just enough time to affix a RemDet grenade low on the wall of the stairwell, where he was pretty sure the walking tanks wouldn't notice it.

As they rounded the gentle curve of the stairs down, Fritz and Irving didn't see the soda-can sized grenade stuck to the wall. When it detonated, none of the anti-personnel fragments or pieces of tiled concrete wall came close to penetrating their assault suits, but the force of the explosion knocked Irving into Fritz, and Fritz into the wall, and they both lost their balance and rolled down the stairs.

They tumbled out of the curving stairwell like boulders and landed in a small ante-chamber with molded, synthetic cave walls and dim, orange-pink lighting. A disinfectant mist filled the air, sprayed from invisible micro nozzles in the ceiling. That was all they had a chance to notice before they felt small caliber, armor piercing rounds trying to burrow into their suits.

Irving was on his back, and when he tried to raise his weapon, he found it was held fast to the floor by five hundred pounds of Fritz and armor. Fritz had landed face down over Irving's right arm and was well-nigh helpless. Three gunmen emptied their thirty-round clips into the downed duo at point blank range.

Inside the suits, Fritz and Irving felt like they were getting worked over with jackhammers. The burrowing bullets would eventually find their way in if the gunmen kept the armored behemoths literally pinned with fire until they could pour enough rounds on one area to weaken it to the point where it gave way.

Halfway through the Morituri's second clips, neither Irving or Fritz could manage to right themselves, but Fritz's hand found the shoulder bag he wore and the grenades inside it. Groping blindly under the non-stop gunfire that hammered him, Fritz gripped a grenade. He had no idea what kind, and it didn't matter. He gave it a sharp tug, and the cotter pin that had been tied to the bag itself came free, arming the grenade and igniting its fuse. As the gunmen standing above them frantically attempted to change their expended clips for fresh ones, Fritz counted to five in his head. Halfway between 'two' and 'three', the gunfire began again, and now it was beginning to hurt. The first layers of their suits were compromised. Fritz lobbed the grenade away from his prone body on 'four', and he didn't see where it went.

Fritz's blind selection had been a concussion grenade and after he lobbed it away from him, it bounced off a wall and detonated five feet behind the crown of his head and a foot off the concrete floor. The Morituri who'd been standing almost on top of Irving and Fritz saw him throw something, but had no chance to react before the grenade exploded, filling the tiny room with blinding light, deafening noise, and a wave of concussive overpressure. The pressure wave didn't make too much difference to men in sealed-helmet, armored assault suits, but was absolutely devastating to the three, comparatively naked, Morituri gunmen.

They brought their hands to their faces instinctively. Two dropped their submachine guns before trying to cover their faces and one didn't. His involuntarily convulsing finger caused his weapon to spray bullets wildly across the room, knocking his two brother Morituri back against the wall, jerking as the armor piercing rounds easily cut through their light vests.

Fritz managed to do a slow, painful push-up to bring himself to his knees, and Irving, lying on his back, found he could now lift his weapon. He couldn't see the remaining gunman but it was a small room, and when he lifted his arm and aimed blindly behind and above where he lay, it was difficult to miss. The modded machine gun sprayed everywhere. Fritz couldn't possibly control it at that angle, and the only aim or direction it had was given by the large caliber weapon's recoil that jerked and spasmed the aim point all over that half of the small ante-chamber.

The remaining Morituri caught rounds all over his body, before slumping to the floor. Gravity won its battle with recoil for the direction in which Fritz aimed, and the gun's muzzle lowered to the floor while Fritz continued to fire. The Morituri's body was blown apart in several pieces, torn by point-blank range, large caliber bullets.

Irving managed to right himself first, and he was able to get Fritz up. They were both shaken, but neither would admit it. After they finished checking each other for weak spots and made sure their gear was functional, they stood staring at the double doors that led out of the ante-chamber, into the larger grotto. “The second we go out those doors,” Irving said, “the rest of 'em are gonna open up.”

“It won't matter.” Fritz said it like he believed it.

Fritz was right.

He and Irving burst through the double doors, side by side and instantly received well-aimed, incoming fire from three points on the other side of the room. In the dim light, the muzzle flashes from the Morituri submachine gunners made it easy to see where they fired from. Fritz and Irving took many more hits, but nothing that scared them. Fritz talked shit through his suit's loudspeaker while being peppered with ballistic impacts “I-i-i-s-s... tha-a-a-at... i-i-t-t?” The Morituri were firing from behind boulders in three separate positions, but the boulders were fake, foam-covered, styrene props. When the Morituri exhausted their clips and ducked behind them to reload, Fritz's loudspeakers boomed, “My turn, bitches!” He and Irving shredded the lightweight, synthetic boulders, sending high-caliber rounds tearing through, right into the gunmen. One by one the Morituri fell in heaps. Their bodies were pushed backwards by the force of the impacting bullets, sliding across the lube-slickened floor into clubber-filled pools of gooey liquid where they floated on the surface.

The Grotto was an alien place with wide walkways that snaked through pools of thick, viscous, liquid. There were fake stalactites hanging from the molded plastic cave ceiling, and they glowed, pulsing orange-pink from within. AniLux cave paintings were everywhere – Lascaux styled, charcoal drawings of animals. Every animal Fritz and Irving could think of was represented there in pairs, and they were all fucking.

Irving bent slightly, looked down and to his right, into one of the shiny pools that reflected the animated animals fucking on the ceiling, and staring back at him, with dinner plate-sized pupils, were six entwined, heavily narco'd clubbers floating unnaturally in the primordial ooze. They were one undulating, freakish, fucking human mass. Irving had heard of this before. The pools were filled with neutral-buoyancy lube, and it was made for two things – floating and fucking.

Irving warned Fritz, “Watch your step...” Pointing down, he added, “Slippery shit.”

Fritz's face screwed up in disgust inside his helmet. “If I fall in,” Fritz said, “Burn me in the suit.”

A small minority pulled themselves out of the pools and padded away in fear. Most of the floating clubbers were so wasted that they thought Fritz, Irving, the dead Morituri, and the whole firefight were unfortunate hallucinations. The ones that didn't flee and didn't take the noisy armored giants for imaginary simply looked away. They preferred to concentrate on what they came here for – the slimy, primal, libidinous action of the Grotto.