The King is Dead. Long live the Queen?

<snip>It screamed out of the skies, a massive, bulbous shape, in pure white, punctuated with portholes and high-reaching smoke-stacks across its spine.It was vaguely ship-shaped, but before it had dropped out of the atmosphere it had been
significantly more ship-shape. Now bits had melted or completely vapourised in re-entry. Where there used to be ornately decorated passenger viewing areas, there was now motlen rivulets of metal crawling along the deck, swept upwards as the ship roared downwards. Three massive reactor engines behind it were forcing this strange craft down into the eager embrace of gravity, their exhausts forming an orange glow: three minature suns in unison.Its wail was a thousand banshees as it hammered through the air, straight as a dart, for the hovering gunship. A shadow formed on the ground beneath the gunship, swallowing its own shadow, then expanding, casting the hovering be-weaponed craft, then the shore of the island into darkness. Seymour Niples gritted his teeth, clung to the control console beneath him and risked a glance at Lester. He was still standing upright, hunched over the massive ship's wheel, his eyes narrowed, intent on their target. One hand on the throttle control -now fully open. The island filled the view out the bridge's windows, Seymour could see details in the shoreline, the castle, the headlines on a scrap of newspaper.
</snip>
 
The room was at a ninety-degree angle to the world, as the ship plummetted straight down.
Seymour's face was pulled back in a rictus grin, a horrible Joker-esque smile, while to his right
and behind him, Lester Seventeen-Dot-Phelps gripped the massive ship's wheel in both hands, placed
his feet on the podium of the navigation doodad that told them they were going much to fast, and
heaved.
 
The good ship HMS King Harry howled its protest. Savage gashes seared their way unevenly along its
hull as stress points gave way and plating buckled. The windows around the bridge, good for
several thousand light-years, impervious to micro-meteor puncture and cosmic radiation,
disintegrated and poured chips of glass upwards, into the control room. Seymour flung his hand in
front of his face, then covered his head in his arms, nestled into the control panel he was
leaning against and tried to pass out as the noise around him seemed to surpass his ears and
hammer straight into his brain.
 
The HMS King Harry fought hard, its nose rising fractionally, then suddenly, with a noise like a
herd of asthmatic elephants trying to snort sherbert, bilge pumps opened in the hull. Sewage,
which had previously been so much ballast waiting to be recycled, emptied in a flood from the
forward nose of the cruise liner and dumped messily into the sea.
 
Slowly, painfully slowly, the ship heaved upwards, its aft section now heavier than its forward
and, complaining all the way, righted itself into horizontal flight. It tore onwards, engines
screaming in their death, but the now the sound of collapsing hull had ceased.
Seymour risked a look up at the windows. Through the gaping hole the rushing air threatened to
pulverise his eyeballs in their sockets, but through the tears he could just make out the shape of
the ugly black gunship still pounding the Queen's castle. He caught a fraction of a glimpse of the
castle itself, one side an ugly, melted slag and he made a silent prayer for the life of the young
monarch. Monarchess? Seymour wondered. Is it monarch for both? Why am I even thinking this? The
gunship loomed large in the windows and...
 
... missed. The HMS King Harry sailed overhead, technically missing the hovering battle-craft and
slid past it in a matter of moments. But the hard fusion energy of the three over-strained engines
caught the gunship in its wake.
 
The pilot of the gunship had lifted his helmet visor, then strained to hear over the pounding of
the ships guns, a strange, echoing, screaming noise. When it hit them, it was a wall of sound, but
that was nothing to the actual force of the engines as the Cruise Liner passed over them. The
pilot wondered briefly how anything could have sneaked up on them, forgetting in his last moments,
the security blackout field his own ship was generating.
 
The HMS King Harry was now dead and showing its extreme displeasure, it flung itself at the
castle, clipping the last of its tall turrets in an artificial avalanche of ancient mortar.
Bricks, painstakingly transported from Earth were reduced to dust and antiques spilled
unceremoniously from their places of display in a now gutted state room. The King Harry kept
going, the engines cut out and it plunged deep into the ocean the other side of the island.
A mushroom cloud of salt-water steam rose from the surface. It could be seen from the mainland, as
it rolled and spread upwards signalling doom and death to passing tourists, most of whom shrugged.
An hour later, on the coast nearest the island, a struggling restauranteur was briefly surprised
by a short, sharp shower of broiled fish, splatting down around his place of business. He grabbed
the head waiter and they spent an industrious twenty minutes collecting these perfectly cooked
delights. A year later, though he never re-created the delicacy that brought him to name, the
entrepreneur owned a chain of restaurants called "Fins from Heaven".
 
Meanwhile, the King Harry was slowly sinking. The bilges, emptied of their sewage had fused open
and were now filling with salt-water. The bridge was a smoking ruin. The steam cloud had largely
unaffected them, passing by, but the heat had vapourised the water in the room, leaving it dry and
unbreathable. Seymour struggled up from the deck, which was now listing in a completely new and
unlovely direction and attempted, with shaking hands, to adjust his tie.
"L-l-l-l," Seymour swallowed in dry mouth, attempting to dislodge his tongue. "Lester?"
"H-here," came a quivering voice, "M-my hand... Wh-where's SNIDE?"
"I don't know," Seymour inched through the smoke towards Lester, following his voice. "What's
wrong with your hand?"
 
"I-it's s-stuck."
 
As the smoke cleared, Seymour made out the sagging shape of Lester, clinging like a resolute
Captain to the ship's wheel. Seymour squinted and saw that his metal hand had somehow sealed to
the brass fittings of the wheel. "It's welded on," he told Lester. "Can you get yourself free?"
 
"D-don't think so. H-he might have, b-but n-not me."
 
"Who?"
 
"The other me."
 
"Ah." It seemed all there was to say. They stood in silence thinking for a while, then Seymour's
eyes lit up with an idea. He limped over to the intercom and after some fiddling, punched the code
for the engine room, indicated on a laminated bit of card stuck to the wall beside it.
 
"Hello, engine room?" Seymour called, "Dai, are you there?" He waited, listening to the deafening
silence, "hello, Dai? Please don't be dead." He waited again, then a voice from far off, in a
voice that sounded a thousand years old:
 
"What kind of a landing do you call that then? Lucky for you Dai's around, isn't it? Vented the
sewage ballast in the nose didn't I? Soon as I saw you lot trying to get the ship up again. What's
all the nonsense you've been up to, that's what I'd like to know?"
 
"Dai, brilliant, you didn't die!" Seymour was almost sobbing with relief. "I need your help, my...
er..." Seymour tried some words out in his head "friend?" Not yet. "Acquaintance?" Too formal. He
settled for: "My employee is trapped up here. Can you help?"
 
"Righto boy, I'll be up there in a bit, won't I? 'Course the lifts won't work will they..." his
grumbling faded into the distance and Seymour flicked off the intercom.
 
"It's all right," he told Lester, "Dai's on his way up."
 
"Oh." Lester looked blank, "good?"
 
"So where is the other one?" Seymour asked, filling in the time.
 
"He s-sort of g-goes... inside. It's like he sleeps," Lester tried to explain. Watching him
Seymour could see that he was different. Admittedly he was stuck to a big ship's wheel but he held
himself differently, more awkwardly. Previously, even when talking to himself, he'd radiated
confidence, now he oozed paranoia and nervousness. "He's good to have in a c-crisis," Lester went
on, "b-but if it g-gets too stressful, he s-sort of retreats."
 
"Fat lot of good he is to you then," Seymour snorted.
 
"N-no, i-it's real stress. L-like when he d-died," Lester told him.
 
"Died?"
 
"Y-yes. N-neck snapped, b-but I p-put us back together again," Lester told him.
 
Seymour greeted this last comment with silence, watching Lester with the same expression that an
audience member reserves for the magician who has just belted his watch with a hammer. "Who are
you? Really?"
 
"Really? I s-suppose I'm h-his jailer," Lester sighed, "h-he did something, it might be connected
w-with..."
 
"with?" Seymour prompted.
 
"With B-better Th-than L-life," Lester said quietly.
 
"Smegging hell," Seymour gaped, "you were involved with that?"
 
"P-programmer," Seymour sighed, "I m-made it. Or at least h-helped to. I w-was arrested with
everyone else, b-but after th-they had my lawyer sh-shot, th-the defence w-went d-down hill a
bit."
 
"I'd have said it was a good start," Seymour mused out loud.
 
"T-trouble is, I d-don't know how much of wh-what I remember is t-true and h-how much is m-made up
by the false personality."
 
"That's you. Can't you, I don't know, hack into it or something?"
 
Before Lester could answer, the bulkhead door hissed open and there stood the rotund figure of Dai
Evans, his face seared lobster red, his overalls ripped but an enormous grin on his face. "What've
you bloody done to my beautiful ship? That's what I want to know. What's happened here then." Dai
lumbered over and examined Lester's hand carefully. "You've gone and welded yourself on haven't
you? What've you got a metal hand for anyway?"
 
"Programming drone, drudge class," Lester explained bashfully.
 
"Well it'll have to come off. I've got no tools for unwelding, so the whole thing will have to be
cut off."
 
"His hand?" Seymour paled, looking suspiciously like he might faint.
 
"No, daft sod, the handle, have to take that off won't I?" Dai produced a small laser-torch from
his belt of tools and scythed easily through the handle of the wheel. Lester's hand was left in a fist, gripping the brass handle.
"Now we'll have to get off the ship. Sinking, isn't it?" He led the way out of the listing bridge, along a corridor that was
skewed at an alarming angle and led them to the escape pods. "All in," Dai ordered and they
dutifully obeyed, shuffling into the escape pod like school boys into chapel.
Soon the tiny white spherical space-pod was humming speedily over the ocean, back towards the
island. They circled the half-destroyed castle once, but Seymour, ever frantic, could see no signs
of life. They landed on the lawn in front of the castle and stepped out.
 
"We have to find her Majesty," Seymour said, adopting a commanding tone. He was on land again now,
in her Majesty's private grounds and he felt in charge again. "Lester, see if any of the castle's
computer systems are operational. Dai, check the scanners in the pod look for... What are you two
gawping at?" Seymour scowled. The pair of them were standing, slack-jawed, staring at something
on the beach. Seymour turned to see what it was and: "whooop!" He slipped, fell backwards and
hit his head hard on a smooth surface. "Smeg's sake," he sighed and tried to get up, slipping and
falling again. Then he began a long, slow, inexorable slide down a gentle slope to the
accompaniment of a squealing noise. There he stopped, just as gently, his shoes resting on
something transparent.
 
The transparent something was huge and multi-faceted, filtering the light through it in strange
ways. Sunlight gleamed at odd angles, casting a diamond refraction pattern of rainbow colours
around him. Seymour turned and crawled back the way he had come on hands and knees until he felt
grass and earth under his hands again. Then he turned back to see what the smeg was going on.
The hover-craft gun-ship was there, marked out as highlights in the sky. As Seymour's brian
twigged what he was looking at he saw that the entire ship was made of glass. He could see every
deck, every cable and conduit, made out of the finest crystal glass. It was embedded in what
should have the been the beach but what had actually become a sloping ice-rink, also of glass. The
whole thing had the eerie feel of a macabre ice-sculpture. Seymour gawped at the eccentric beauty
of it all.
 
"Fusion drive," Dai said quietly, "hot as the sun, isn't it? Especially when you've got three of
them on the back of the King Harry. Super-heating of atoms, turned the poor beggars to glass,
didn't it?"
 
"Th- that's both the most h-horrible and the m-most beautiful thing I-I've ever seen," Lester
breathed.
 
Seymour blinked away the after-image on his retinas, then rounded on the other two.
 
"What about the Queen?" Sheer horror was etched on Seymour's face.
 
<duhn duhn duuuuuhn. Tag Onion, you're currently left with Seymour (shaken and stirred), Dai Evans
(Welsh, isn't he?) and the geek version of Lester Seventeen-Dot-Phelps. Where is SNIDE? Was it worth waiting for?> Are you a PC? Upload your PC story and show the world