Zatoichi - SCP Foundation

Previously: Visions of Bodies Being Burned

Nearly a century ago…

The Albatross was a living, breathing thing. And, like all such things, it was fated to one day die.

Death arrived sooner than expected. Carnecki’s electric pentacle provided the door; the summoned MI666 agents carried out the rest. Only minutes after the pentacle’s activation, the full force of Britain’s imperial might filled the ship’s halls with screams and fire.

Arsène Lupin gritted his teeth and rushed forward.

Every surface — from the floors, to the walls, to the very ceilings overhead — was shaped from wood. The vessel looked as if it had been grown rather than crafted. Ahead, gnarled knots yielded to an immense panel of tinted glass, exposing the exterior world. The Frenchman stopped to stare in silent awe.

In the stillness of space, a lonely planet shimmered like a glass blue marble wreathed in silver.

“«Beautiful, is it not?»”

Lupin spun. With the mere flick of a wrist, he withdrew a small derringer from its hidden compartment. The man who spoke was old; ancient by any estimation. His body was ruddy and dark, and possessed a wiry strength — with eyes that flashed like tarnished doubloons at the bottom of a sunken chest. His beard was as white as snow, and fell softly to the center of his torso.

At his feet lay the crumpled remains of a mechanical ‘Automan’ — a machine loaned to Britain by the Wizard of Menlo Park. The old man had removed its head, examining the array of cunningly arranged cogs and gears within.

“«Neptune, I mean.»” The man gestured to the window. “«Roman God of the sea.»” His face split into a crooked grin, as if suddenly struck by a great irony.

“«Your French is immaculate,»” Lupin replied, holding his pistol steady. The old man made no show of concern. “«Am I to presume, then, that you are—»”

“«Yes.»” A distant explosion vibrated through the Albatross’s hull. The Captain turned to examine Neptune, his hands clasped behind his back. “«And you must be that gentleman thief I’ve heard so much about.»”

This took Lupin by surprise. “«You’ve… heard of me?»”

The Captain turned again, but only his head. “«I make it a point to know of Britain’s enemies. Particularly the clever ones. Which makes your alliance with them all the more distressing.»”

Lupin sighed, pistol aimed at the Captain’s heart. “«It could not be helped. They have my grandson…»”

“«I suspected as much.»”

“«You did…?»”

Another explosion; this one was closer. The ship shuddered — like a brief, violent spasm of pain.

The Captain leaned forward, bringing his hands to grip the twisting tendrils of wood that cradled the window. “«I knew the crown would not permit me to leave. Not with my miracles. They would have them, or they would have me dead. It is the way of empires. Even yours.»”

“«France has its own enemies, Captain. We never had need to make one of you.»”

“«Nevertheless, you are here to kill me.»”

Another explosion; more gunfire. Closer, now. Lupin scowled. “«Much as it pains me, yes.»”

“«Before I began my slumber onboard, I… prepared a contingency. A weapon; a proxy for my vengeance, my wrath. A means to strike at my hated foe one final time… from beyond the grave.»”

Eager to delay the deed, Lupin gestured for him to continue.

The Captain looked to him, smiling grimly. “«You know they will not permit you to live. You are as good as dead. We all are. The Albatross is dying, and it will take us all with it. But before it does, I… need your help.»”

“«To do what?»”

“«To correct a mistake,»” he told him. “«To defy Fate itself.»”

Now:

The flashbang was fair play. The endless tides of robot soldiers were not.

It’s a nightmare in the lobby—every few seconds another identical, oddly-chalky copy of Nemo stumbles out of the doorways like the world’s shittiest game of Whack-a-Mole. The clones aren’t even shooting at them with real bullets; just dinky little fishing-grade spear guns with all the sharpness of a plastic spork.

They’re not a threat. But they are an infuriatingly persistent wall between them and the man who might or might not be destroying Britain while they speak.

Just out of sheer numbers, they’ve got Adam, Barry and Chess pushed back to an impromptu pillbox they’ve set up from a loose array of stray furniture. A chandelier’s been knocked off the ceiling in all the fracas and it’s crushed one of the attendants flat. The others haven’t gotten off the floor since the diver scorched their retinas with enough lumens to fry an ant from the other side of the Earth.

Chess has been gunning down clockworks for the past ten minutes, and it’s getting harder and harder not to leave the blinders down for good. She knows she can’t sleep on the job—knows she’s in control of Lefty and Righty, not the other way around. But this is the definition of a target-rich environment, and every instinct she has is telling her: hit the autopilot, let her hands clean house, damn the consequences. She’s shooting a gyrojet, for God’s sake. When is she ever going to do this again?

She just needs to hold out a little longer, she tells herself. Just til they figure out what to do from here.

“Barry,” she barks. Eighty feet, nine-thirty, the thing at the back of her brain says, and Lefty snaps round for Righty to drill a perfect three-bullet burst through the skull of another automaton. “We’re on a clock here. Do you have anything yet?”

Barry is sitting under a desk behind Adam and Chess, reading a catalogue stolen from one of the attendants’ bodies and ‘ooh’ing and ‘ahh’ing to himself. When Chess gets his attention, he quickly slams it shut and clears his throat. “Oh! Um. I don’t- I just don’t get it. Where did all of these come from?”

“Could be portalling them in,” Adam suggests. He’s stolen what looks like a thirty-barrelled revolver from one of the display cases; Chess isn’t sure how he’s shooting it without breaking his wrists, but she’s impressed nonetheless. “That’s a classic manoeuvre, keeps in theme with the whole spaceman gimmick.”

“Not a chance. The Museum’s warded against Ways and dimensional wealds from the bottom-up,” Barry says. “And the cost of apporting all this matter- Australia would’ve been turned into a, a, a lemon or something by now.”

Sixty-five feet, three-twenty. “What about the way he came in?” Chess tries.

Before he can respond, Barry lets out a strangled yelp as another spear flies over his head. “N-no, no, no. They spotted him, and he’s just one guy. How would they miss… wait. Wait, that’s it!”

“What’s it?” Adam asks. There are a couple of inert clicks, before he quickly adds, “Chess, I’m dry. How about you?”

Barry frantically rifles through the catalogue, jabbing his finger into the paper. “Look- Thakkar-Jacquard 3-dimensional loom- automatic spear thrower- he didn’t have to bring anything in, the British did it for him!”

“A Trojan horse play, one hundred years in the making. Canny son of a bitch,” Adam mutters.

Chess pulls the blindfold up and forces herself to let her rifle hang by its strap. “One mag. Tops. What do we do about this?”

“He must have a manufacturing setup or something somewhere in the museum,” Barry says. “Probably where all his stuff was stored.”

“And the robots?” Adam asks.

“Leave that to me,” Chess says.

They barrel down the museum’s hallways like an oil tanker that’s been struck by lightning, an unstoppable wreck of flaming metal with one poor soul still trapped inside. Now it’s Barry’s turn to ride the trolley: he’s strapped down while he gets pushed along by Adam and Chess.

As they hurtle towards their destination, Barry’s doing what he does best: burning, and also giving directions. The blood spraying from a tactically-placed stab wound in his hand is hot enough that spears and robots alike disintegrate on contact, and unlike his two companions, Barry’s unlikely to run dry any time this century.

“Getting warm yet?” Chess asks. She’s trying to ignore how the trolley’s heating up, but it’s hard not to notice her gloves starting to singe.

Barry bites back a sharp hiss of pain. “Uh- another three lefts!”

“We just took two in a row!”

“Who has the eidetic memor- ow, jeez, Christ—”

Chess reluctantly concedes the point, puts her head down and swings them to the left. A wastebin gets turned to flaming slag in the process, but it’s a small price to pay.

Their rampage comes to an abrupt halt when Barry shrieks, “Stop, stop, stop!” Just in time, too- as he allows his wound to cauterise itself, the flames sputter out to reveal the remains of their destination.

Adam and Chess have nearly thrown Barry into the ravine that used to be the Havelock Memorial Hold for Salvage in the Indian Arena. All those clones had to come from something, and that ‘something’ was apparently ‘every part of the Museum in a two hundred meter radius’—very little of which was metal.

The scale is dizzying. The original loom—a baroque, wooden thing twice the size of a wardrobe which sits at the center of the new-found caldera—is barely visible, surrounded by copies of itself which churn out copy after copy of the diver. It’s deep enough that the Nemo copies have to hand-over-hand a tower of each others’ bodies to reach the doorways out of the room. As one of the lucky few crests the edge they’re standing on, Chess instinctively boot-punts its head clean off, sending it clattering back into the pit.

It takes a terribly long moment for the sound to reach them.

“So,” Chess says.

“What do you mean, so?” Barry asks. “Couldn’t I just—”

Almost in response, there’s a faint buzzing noise from the direction of the loom, before the entire assembly drops another foot into the earth. All the floor beneath it—and a few of the robots caught in the blast radius—have simply disappeared.

Barry winces. “—oh.”

“It’s growing,” Adam says. He sounds faintly nauseous. “Was that what he was doing? No, no, no, the character’s wrong, I… Christ. I can’t believe it.”

“No more talk. We need a plan.” Chess puts her blinders on and shoulders her rifle, listens intently to Lefty and Righty as they banter back and forth about the shot. “My accuracy’s one thing, penetration’s another. Gyrojets over that distance, with all the fucking clan- clones- in the way? No chance.”

Adam swears under his breath. “You need a faster round.”

“No,” Barry says. “What she needs is better propellant.”

It’s seemingly routine to kill the factory. All Chess has to do is drop to a knee, shoulder her rifle, and fire. As usual, her hands do all the work. It’s like she’s not even here.

But the trick is in the bullet. The official term for Barry’s unwanted guest is a ‘pluripotent pyrophoric parasite,’ an exotic tardigrade offshoot which transmuted his body into a highly-flammable, infinitely regenerative middle finger to the conservation of mass. In practical terms, this means that six months ago, Chess had to light Barry’s severed finger on fire and watch it regrow the rest of the body.

He’s a walking, talking, infinite supply of fuel for any fire—which includes the propulsion of a gyrojet round. A couple of well-placed drops of Barry’s blood at the back of the bullet and its internal rocketry now has a bottomless fuel tank.

So instead of accelerating over a measly sixty feet, the round screams down the full length of its trajectory, drilling straight into the core of the factory’s loom with a speed that would make most micrometeorites jealous. The extra dimensions stuffed inside the loom’s interior pucker and warp before exploding in a violent collision of cancelled terms and cross products that blasts the caldera to a perfect, atomically-smooth polish.

All that’s left of the factory are a pair of severed index and middle fingers still clinging to the edge of the cliff.

As the sound stops ringing in Chess’ ears, she comes to the realisation that she’s been laughing and she can’t stop. Even Adam looks impressed- or, well, she hopes he is. Hard to tell, for obvious reasons.

“A BEAUTIFUL DISPLAY OF MARKMANSHIP,” says the man they’ve been hunting.

The entire team whips round to face him. Chess levels her gun at his eye level; there’s a shock of heat as Barry flares up; after an awkward delay, Adam reluctantly raises his fists.

“THERE’S- THERE’S NO NEED FOR FURTHER HOSTILITIES,” Nemo says. “I’VE DONE ALL I INTENDED TO. DO WHAT YOU MUST.”

“You’re fading,” Chess snarls. “Change your batteries lately?”

There’s a hoarse crackle from the inside of the helmet. “PROJECTED I’D LAND WITHIN THE CENTURY. SO- MANY OBSTACLES. SO MUCH WATER.”

“Agent,” Adam says, placing a hand on her shoulder. “Let him talk. Did you just come here for some petty vandalism, Nemo?”

“NOTHING SO CRUDE AS THAT. A MUCH- BIGGER. DISPLAY.”

Before anyone can say another word, Nemo takes another step towards them and collapses, leg bending at the wrong angle. There’s another, wet gurgle that might be a last, defiant one-liner, and then the suit falls silent for good.

A few seconds pass, before the quiet is broken by a low buzzing.

Chess and Barry sped a few seconds patting themselves down before Adam clears his throat. “It’s mine,” he says.

Fishing his phone from his pocket, he puts it to the earless side of his mannequin head. “Birds on a quiet road, long tail of a bilious worm. Hello, yes- uhuh. Target’s out for good, we think you can safely declare him KIA- no, we were a little preoccupied to be monitoring radi- I understand…”

Lifting her bandanna, Chess approaches Nemo’s prone body with tentative caution. The first thing she notices is his fist, still clamped tightly shut around… something.

It takes some effort to prise the old rusted joints loose, but eventually Chess manages to unveil the contents of his hand—a tiny device like a TV remote in miniature, with an elaborate, fractalline loop antenna at its end.

“A transmitter,” Chess whispers.

“Excuse me?”

Guiltily, Chess stuffs the transmitter into her pocket before she realises the fury in Adam’s voice is directed at the other end of the call.

“Repeat that for me,” Adam says. “What just entered the Solar System?”

Nearly a century ago…

At the center of the Albatross was its heart. It was here that Nemo brought Lupin—even as MI666’s agents followed close behind.

The heart was a sphere-shaped core, no larger than the height of a man, punctured upon all sides by pipes and hoses. The core’s polished brass housing was molded into a hideous visage: a wide, grinning woman’s head, her mouth gaping, her tongue lulling, her teeth like serrated daggers. The core’s heat provided her hollow eyes and mouth with a crimson glow. The hoses provided her hair, and clouds of freezing coolant shrouded her in a mysterious fog—heightening the core’s terrifying mien.

“It is a source of boundless energy,” Nemo told him, speaking in plain English. “The Crown thought it would make a splendid weapon.”

“Would it not?” Lupin had not lowered his gun for a moment. He was still not certain that this wasn’t a cunning trick.

“It could. But… I opted to make it this vessel’s power-source, instead.” Nemo had brought the remains of Edison’s Automan with him. It was a remarkable thing — a suit of armor that acted as an automated soldier. Nemo dragged it behind him as if it was but a toy. Now, he lifted it up and propped it against the wall, continuing to adjust the finely-tuned levers and gears within.

Another explosion. Lupin’s eyes darted to the door behind them. Nemo made the final few adjustments; the Automan hummed to life.

“MI666 is nearly here, mon capitaine. I’m sure they have orders to kill you, then likely me—to spare them the trouble.”

“Yes. We will need to buy the machine time, to do its work.” Nemo’s eyes drifted to the center of the room. “Help me open the core.”

“Is that… safe?”

“No. It will kill us both,” Nemo replied, his tone darkly amused. “But it will kill them, as well.”

Lupin scowled. The door behind them shuddered from the force of the next explosion. With a grim determination, the thief lowered his pistol and stepped forward to help.

Next: SCP-6190: Through an Arbor, Darkly