The Meeting

[Enkidu]

“…Dieu damn this man; what is this impertinent rattle he has dragged me into?” Achille’s shivering brain declaimed as he dragged himself from his chair, teeth oscillating too intensely to shoot a retort, legs quivering as springs; a poor suspension that didn’t prevent his entire skeletal structure from vibrating like a sexual implement and the cheese from executing a merry jig around the tabletop.

Beyond the thin, gauze-esque layers of the porthole’s silicates and the invisible trace of the surrounding hardfield that wrapped the station’s fragile frame as a hand to a glove, a streaming, broiling glow of turbulent vapour trails seared the space, jackhammering the ZXBT back and forth in its mooring fixture with a cyclone of blows. Over Sylvania, the dome’s sun guards had locked heavily down, metamorphosing The Jewel of the Taus into an unsightly, angular blot with a singular, convalescing action preventing all of the pundits held within from being stewed by the extreme heat into a fine, crimson paste before a drink could be dropped. Outside, a squadron of ospreys wheeled drunkenly from a hangar, spurred grimly onward towards the interloper as intensely as their thrusters could muster, shields flashing through the spectrums as they cut against the tumult.

“Engine wash.” Achille noted, mouth sealed and thin as he imagined proximity alarms discharging all over the station, and prayed to whatever nonexistential deity happened to be listening at the time that the perpetrator hadn’t clipped anything. “…God, but she must be huge!” He seethed, sprinting trippingly to the far side of the flying bridge, contemplating all the innumerable savageries he would inflict upon Monsieur Orsini if the originator of this transgression bore anything resembling a Maltese Cross.

He stopped, poleaxed by enormity. Beyond the starboard bow and drifting into obscurity behind the Freeport’s central spine, loomed a monster of a stern, a sheer, white cliff-face of a warship that vomited fire as it cruised bullishly past, flashing its mountainous broadsides, slit-windows slicing between the ablated skin of this titan, nozzles spewing exhaust gasses with the same nonchalant expenditure with which a human treats air. But what had fixed his eyes so, was not the craft itself, but the gilded, topaz football pitch of a Fleur-de-lis that adorned its side with a rude disdain.


A kaleidoscopic of fevered pineal contemplations ran through his mind, as the Burgundian deliberated exactly what offence he had committed against the kingdom of the One True Monarch, closed his eyes and counted the seconds. When he opened them again to find himself entirely under-dead, Achille, taking the route of action most traditional to a confused (and more than slightly concussed) leader; wheeled on his subordinate.

“Why??!” He screamed, as the quivering died.

---

THE SYNDIC LEAGUES
(A co-operative of Rheinland's outlawed trade unions, determined to take the underworld for themselves.)

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