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Sir Pentious threw an umbrella like a javelin through his airship's main display screen, piercing its face between the neon red eyes and neon cyan fangs. Unnaturally-colored lightning arced and buzzed like a Tesla coil from the shattered screen.
Sir Pentious twisted away from it and flared his hood to shield his face, bellowing at his Egg Bois, "Kill the power!"
"On which system?" one yelled.
"All of them! Now!"
Several hopped to action. A few hesitated. One said, "But, boss—we're way up in the air! We'll crash if we—"
Sir Pentious smashed the disobedient egg's shell with one crack of his tail tip. "Did I ssstutter?" He pointed at the shattered screen. "He's going to bring us down anyway! I want it happening under my power, not his! Kill the power! To everything!"
This time, the stragglers hurried to obey.
As the lights started flickering off and the hum and thrum of distant systems died clatteringly Sir Pentious wrapped himself around the pedestal holding the airship's wheel and seized the wheel with both hands—not that it would have any power to steer once the power was out, but it was reassuring to feel it under his hands as he braced himself for a crash landing. Without any sunlight coming through the airhship's rain-streaked glass front wall, his Egg Bois worked in shadows. Visible blurrily through the glass, the shadow of a skyscraper passed by that, just a moment ago, they had been flying high above. The ship shuddered as one side brushed against the building. Sir Pentious's stomach lurched. He hissed and spat a string of swears at that screen-faced bastard as the ship dropped ever lower.
As the Egg Bois each finished turning off the equipment at their various stations, they hurried out of the bridge as fast as they could totter, frantic to reach higher ground before the nose of the ship hit the ground. Sir Pentious was sure it wouldn't make a difference for most of them. The jolt of landing was likely to shatter a majority of his minions, no matter where on the ship they were. He hoped some of them would manage to rub two runny brain cells together and find some cushions to sit on.
The ground was rushing up to meet the airship.
Sir Pentious pulled his hat low, squeezed his eyes shut, and braced himself for the crash.
###
The air stank of rain-soaked rubbish, oily fires, and raw yolk.
Sir Pentious sat at the edge of his airship's shattered front wall, the end of his battered and bruised tail dragging in the dirt below, waiting for his all-over aches to abate a little.
Damn Vox twice over. Strategically speaking, he'd blinded Sir Pentious.
Once upon a time, nearly every electrical machine in Hell had carried Sir Pentious's brand. Cars, clocks, street lights, you name it—Sir Pentious had been raising Hell toward the twentieth century since the end of the nineteenth. All those machines, marked as his inventions through his personal crest, through snakeskin upholstery, through glowing eye-shaped lights...
Hell was covered in eyes—some of them the grotesque remains of souls that had been long-ago shredded, some of them decorations meant to help disguise these revolting real eyes among the false. Sir Pentious's eye-lights has fit in with other artificial eyes perfectly.
Except that his worked. Every eye in every machine he so generously manufactured and shared with Hell was a camera, broadcasting signals on frequencies only he had the technology to detect and decode. Until the Radio Demon.
Even half-shielded as Sir Pentious was from the rain, he could still feel his clothes getting damp. He dragged his tail up into the ship, leaned back and braced his hands on the floor, and rolled the entire length of his spine in an extended stretch. his vertebrae cracked like a whole string of firecrackers going off. Then he slowly rose to his full height and headed for the door to the rest of the airship.
Alastor had crushed Sir Pentious's entire fleet of airships a few years ago. When Sir Pentious had started rebuilding, he'd left out the complex array of wireless communication devices that he'd previously enjoyed for ship-to-ship communication and to receive broadcasts from his thousands upon thousands of mechanical eyes. He'd wasted he-didn't-know-how-much time finding a way to break into Pentagram City's infrastructure to manually refit up the many street lights he'd sponsored to allow for manual data collection; and how much time repeating the process for each individual clock tower and skyscraper that still used his eyes? The cars were a total loss—he'd only had any chance of getting intel out of them as long as what the eyes saw could be broadcasted out by piggybacking on the cars' radios.
Sir Pentious could have continued using wireless broadcasts to collect camera data—as long as he didn't mind that Alastor casually and passively blocked broadcasts wherever he was in the city—if he could have encrypted the signals. But Alastor didn't just have power over radio signals, but the machines that received and manipulated those signals. Either Alastor would get into the machines Sir Pentious used to decrypt the signals, making the encryption useless—or Sir Pentious would have to rely on his underlings to manually decrypt the signals. His eggs were nowhere near smart enough for that.
The hallway leading deeper into the ship was pitch black but for a couple of streaks of gray rainy light from ajar doors. Sir Pentious blindly felt for the emergency supplies hatch next to the bridge's door, groped around inside for a flashlight, and was relieved when it cast a shaky yellowish light. It was a miracle the batteries still worked. He didn't know when they'd last done a battery check; since his first fleet of airships had been downed, it always seemed like there was so much more in need of doing. He stuck the flashlight in his hat's mouth, pulled out an electric megaphone and was pleased to find it too crackled to life, and slithered down the hall. "All right! Sound off! Is anybody still alive!"
An array of voices with various levels of distance and pain called, "Me!"
"Assemble in the main hold in the stern," Sir Pentious said, gesturing toward the back of the ship. "Open doors as you go, get some light in the hallway. I don't want to trip over you morons." There was a rush of pattering feet and quiet babble as the Egg Bois hurried to obey his orders.
As Sir Pentious passed one of the opening doors, an egg approached him. "Say boss, why don't you just turn the power back on?" he asked. "Now that we're done crash landing and all."
Sir Pentious twisted the egg around and his hat adjusted its bite on the flashlight to let him see the egg's number. "Because, 94—Vox might still be in the system."
"Wow! The TV guy?" 94 plodded after Sir Pentious. "Do you really think so?"
"It's possible." Sir Pentious had heard rumors that Vox could control electricity—but he'd also heard rumors that Vox could travel through electricity. If the latter rumor was true, then there was a chance that by turning everything off, Sir Pentious had trapped Vox in some sort of energy state inside his ship's power generators. Until he knew for sure, he wasn't about to risk unleashing him.
Sir Pentious pushed open the kitchen door and sighed in disappointment at what he found. The refrigerator, bolted to the wall, had stayed exactly where it was supposed to during the crash; but the impact had flung the door open, scattering food across the floor nearly to the opposite wall.
94 toddled into the kitchen, looked down at the carton of a dozen eggs that had smeared across the tile floor, and laughed.
Sir Pentious muttered to himself, "I need to redesign that door with a latch," then raised his voice. "See if the water's still running. Fill a teapot, toss in a tea bag, and bring it to me."
"Yes, sir, Mr. Bossman!"
Sir Pentious wove across the hall to one of his workrooms, grabbed a blowtorch, a pair of work gloves, and goggles, and continued toward the stern of the ship.
After reformatting all of his eye-shaped cameras to get them off the airwaves, Sir Pentious had had to devote much of his time to collecting their data. Airships sailing from building to building, dropping cords and a couple of agents to plug into the network he'd formed between the cameras and upload their footage to his ship. He disguised his data uploads as supply runs, hid the cords used to transmit the data inside the airships' heavy anchor chains. Few people in Hell knew his eyes were cameras and many of those were apathetic to the constant surveillance. Nobody else had any reason to suspect that his supply runs were his means of collecting surveillance material. With wireless transmissions unavailable, it was as perfect a setup as Sir Pentious could hope for.
Until Vox. Vox, who could manipulate electricity. Vox, who apparently was now well-integrated enough into the Pentagram's electric grid to find Sir Pentious's bugs. Vox, who had waited until Sir Pentious had unplugged, weighed anchor, and taken off to turn on the screen and taunt Sir Pentious on his own bridge. Stupid mistake. If Vox had thought Sir Pentious was too much of a coward to crash his own ship just to ensure a flash little upstart wouldn't crash it for him, he certainly knew better now.
The hold was in complete disarray, crates and containers tossed around. Also no surprise. Coming up with a standardized system to strap everything down and holding the Egg Bois to it was another one of the million things on Sir Pentious's to-do list. There were never enough hours in the day to do everything. Never time to build all of the weapons of mass destruction he had blueprints for in his head. Never time for all the little raids and robberies he needed to do in order to fund his airships and machines. Never time to complete the preparations needed to let him pull off his grandest schemes and power plays before those windows of opportunity closed off. Never time for all the tiny upgrades and mundane adjustments that got pushed to the bottom of his to-do list but that now had cost him a storage room full of equipment and another goddamn grocery trip he didn't have time to make. Never time for anything. Every year seemed to get shorter.
He looked around the hold wearily, wondering how much had been damaged in the crash. The guns and ammo would probably be fine. His stores of sheet metal might be bent but there was plenty he could do with bent metal. He'd have to check for chemical spills as soon as possible. Another thing he didn't have time for.
Huddled among and atop the crates was a ragtag bunch of eggs, some waving around flashlights, all blinking dumbly in the sweep of Sir Pentious's flashlight. "All right, headcount," he said. "How many survivors do we have."
The eggs twisted around to look at their brothers in surprise. Many of them began to noisily count each other. One raised his hand and yelled, "Were we supposed to keep count?"
Sir Pentious rolled his many eyes, lifted his megaphone, and yelled, "Everyone get where I can see you and then stop moving!" He crosses his arms and waited for majority of the eggs' movements to stop, then started counting.
Sir Pentious had tallied up forty-odd survivors—more than he'd expected—when 94 came into the room, announcing, "Here's your tea, sir! But I couldn't heat it—" 94 was immediately yelled at by several other eggs for moving after the boss had instructed them not to. He shrunk down and yelled back, "Sorry!"
"I didn't expect you to heat it. Hold this." Sir Pentious handed the megaphone to 94. He strapped on the goggles, pulled the work gloves on over his usual pair, picked up the tea pot and blowtorch, and heated it from the bottom. Several of the Egg Bois cooed in wonder at the flame. Sir Pentious had thought he'd weeded out the pyromaniacs.
He braced himself for the burn, tilted his head back, poured a long stream of scalding hot tea straight down his throat, and coughed out steam. "This tastes vile," he croaked. "You didn't grab one of the tea bags with an X on it, did you?" When Sir Pentious had been developing an extra-caffeinated tea variety, he'd had to go through a lot of mixes before he found a recipe that wasn't intolerably bitter from the caffeine powder. He thought he'd trained all the eggs to leave alone the failed bags unless it was an emergency.
"Oh, no, boss, I would never!" 94 said. "It's just a regular tea bag and rain water."
"Rain water."
"Yeah! From a puddle outside!"
Sir Pentious gave 94 a disgusted look. Then poured half of the scalding tea over the top of his shell.
94 smiled dumbly up at Sir Pentious.
Sir Pentious turned to the rest of the eggs. "Lissten up!" he snapped. "Sssalvage operation, starting now. All of you know what to do." One of the few drills Sir Pentious had never let slip by the wayside. "Volatile substances first, then work your way from bow to stern. Which one of you is most useless at salvage ops?!"
"Ooh!" An egg standing on a couple of crates waved so enthusiastically he almost fell off. "Me! It's me!"
"You, to me. The rest of you, get to work!"
Sir Pentious waited until the room had cleared out except for his volunteer and a couple who had stayed behind to check for spilled chemicals. He closed the distance as his volunteer—number 53—slowly and laboriously climbed down his stack of boxes.
"You know where safe house 7 is?" Sir Pentious asked.
"Yeah! It's just a couple of bus stops away. Across the street from the sody pop shop."
"Precisssely," Sir Pentious said. "I need you to go there and retrieve some of my airship blueprints. The ones from 1889 and 1913 and all the ones from '67 and later."
"Okie-dokie!" 53 saluted. "Those are pretty old designs, boss! How come you wanna look at them?"
Sir Pentious said, with a mix of grim resignation and subdued excitement, "We're going back on steam power."
Even in Hell, every rainy cloud had a silver lining. In fact, if anything, Hell's silver linings shone brighter and hotter. Every airship lost set Sir Pentious's plans back years, yes, as he had to turn all his resources and manufacturing capacity toward replacing it—even in a case like this, where if he was lucky the structure of the ship was intact enough that he could gut the ship and rebuild around its skeleton, it would be well over a year before it was back in the air. But at the same time, Sir Pentious was at his best, his most brilliant, his most alive, when he was designing a new airship.
Already he could feel his mind bubbling over with new ideas: he'd removed wireless communications from his ships after Alastor proved to be a direct threat; and now that Vox was one too, Sir Pentious had to minimize Vox's odds of getting into his electrical systems. The only way to guarantee that would be to stop using electrical systems altogether—but just imagine trying to keep up with modern technology without electricity! It was unthinkable. He could minimize the risk, though. Get as much of his airship as possible on alternative power sources—diesel, coal, steam, fire, labor. Out with the light bulbs, back to gas lamps. That would be miserable, he'd have to see if he could increase their light output without turning up their heat. But probably for the best—he'd gone a little crazy in the forties, putting everything on electricity, and now he had a chance to reevaluate how much of that was really necessary. The electronics that had to run on electricity, Sir Pentious would find a way to isolate from each other as much as possible—what could Vox do if he possessed a TV in the stern of the ship if it ran on its own generator and wasn't connected to any of the equipment at the helm?
Could Sir Pentious create an airship on par with twentieth century overlords' war machines using technology he'd left behind a century ago? The thought of such a challenge thrilled him.
And that wasn't all. As long as he had to gut the ship and completely rethink how it was powered, he could use this as an opportunity to finally build and install, why, maybe up to half a dozen of the doomsday weapons he'd been dying to convert from blueprints to metal. He could redesign the hold to make anchoring all their supplies in place effortless. He could install latches on the fridge. He could build in a fridge. Maybe he'd risk putting back in some wireless communications—the past few years had proven that Alastor was all but unwilling to touch frequencies higher than the AM radio band—it would be effortless to conceal his wireless communication signals amid the TV frequencies, over a thousand times higher than anything Alastor used—TV was Vox's domain but Sir Pentious hadn't seen any evidence that Vox's unique powers worked wirelessly, Vox seemed restricted to only directly manipulating TVs he could access via cable or the city's power grid...
And the power grid—if Sir Pentious wanted any of his cameras to be of any use to him he had to get them off the city's power. As well as all his land-based safe houses, his garages, his bases. Each with an independent power source. Some of his safe houses already had backup generators; they'd all need them now. And rewiring all of his remaining cameras, so soon after the last time he'd overhauled all the ones he could salvage... Maybe the cameras weren't worth the effort. Maybe he should abandon them completely—was the meager intel they offered worth the labor he poured into them? Maybe he should focus on plugging his mechanical eyes into a new invention and marketing that to Hell, it had been a while since he'd been in consumer goods. His reputation in that department had suffered the last few years between his absence from the market and the way his noble airships had been treated like footballs to be kicked around, but that could be fixed. He could start simple, start with the basics, start with guns, you could never go wrong selling guns—
"Can I get an ice cream float at the sody pop shop?" 53 asked eagerly.
Sir Pentious grimaced. "Oh, fine."
53 raised a hand, palm up, expectantly.
Sir Pentious eyed it. "What?"
"Snack money?"
Sir Pentious rolled his eyes, but tucked his blowtorch under an arm and rummaged around in his coat pocket for his coin purse. He muttered, "When you come back, get me one too. I want a purple cow."
"Sure thing, bossman!"
Something knocked heavily on the loading door at the back of the hold. Which was a weird place for someone to be knocking, because the ship had landed, as it were, with its face in the mud and its ass in the air. Sir Pentious hesitated, then gestured to the door. "Go get that."
"Sure!" 53 hurried to the back, punched the button to make the loading door roll up, and watched as it did nothing. "Huh."
Sir Pentious hissed under his breath about the eggs' dismal intelligence, then pulled on the cord to detached the door from its motor and manually dragged it back along its rails until it rolled up.
On the other side of the door, clinging to the rungs of the built-in ladder up the back of the ship, was Vox.
"You!" That answered the question about whether Sir Pentious had trapped him in the ship's generators.
Grumpily, Vox demanded, "Did you fucking crash your own ship? That hurt, you kn—"
Sir Pentious chucked his tea pot in Vox's face.
With a yelp, Vox lost his balance and fell off the ship's ladder.
Sir Pentious lunged out after him, wielding his blowtorch like a flamethrower.