Post by Admin on Sept 12, 2012 12:28:03 GMT -5
Knight and Squire
Issue #2: “The Unfair State, Part Two”
Written by Fantomas
Cover by Fantomas
Edited by Mark Bowers
Issue #2: “The Unfair State, Part Two”
Written by Fantomas
Cover by Fantomas
Edited by Mark Bowers
Eliot Ambler hummed and tutted to himself as he sorted through the great steel cabinets that cluttered the old archival section of the discrete London office complex known affectionately by men in his profession as 'Big School'.
The dusty files and folders that he leafed through – occasionally tucking some under his arm or else just neatly replacing them – were the accumulated intelligence gathered over decades, the product of his division's combined labours all laid out in paper, keypunched computer card and microfilm. He followed the intricate indexing system slowly but diligently, even taking care to make pencilled corrections to mislabelled or misplaced dockets and addendum. It took time, but eventually Eliot had the desired files, and he found himself a quiet corner of the dimly lit basement and laid them out on a table, alongside his sandwiches and a lukewarm mug of coffee.
It was quiet down in Archives, which was how Eliot liked to do his work. He was a man who had pushed over the middle aged mark an indiscriminate length of time ago, and who was tolerated by the driven young things in the busy offices of Big School but who generally felt he had more in common with the dusty library down below. Those Higher Up had been making an endless stream of memos and notifications about getting the Archives digitized, clearing out the contents of the cavernous basement into one thumbnail sized piece of circuitry, but they had never followed through. Perhaps they would get around to it when they finally get around to firing the old codger who eats lunch there, Eliot reflected.
He hummed without contentment and bit into one of his tuna sandwiches, opening up the first of the files.
CLEARANCE LEVEL SIEGE PERILOUS REQUIRED TO READ FURTHER ran across the page headers. DOCUMENT 047 ON THE VIGILANTE KNIGHT, PERCIVAL SHELDRAKE, COMPILED 5th FEBRUARY, 1962 [/size]. Skipping through a series of blown-up photographs that he knew – with some professional pride, as he had been the one who had spent a month holed up in a B&B room in Great Worden for them – were surveillance stills of Worden Castle and of the costumed resident there, Eliot came to a set of pages, fixed in as an addendum, that had not faded with the years as the others had, chiefly because they were no more than a day old. Hiding secret files in the secret archives of a spy agency is exactly Matron's style, he thought, with just a touch of admiration.
Taking the addendum from the file, Eliot finished his sandwiches and coffee, reading through its contents.
This addendum, handwritten 11.09.2012 by FIELD AGENT GEORGE CROSS. Clearance level is highest. Comprising of notes in abstract as to Cyril Sheldrake, Earl of Wordenshire, also known as the para-hero, Knight, and his current personal assets and capabilities. This addendum uses only pen and paper, and any annotations, additions or copies are to be handwritten with like materials ONLY. The Knight's junior agent, Beryl Hutchinson, is a CLASSIFICATION THREE meta-person, compromising any digital or electronic records kept. But you already knew that, didn't you, Eliot? After all, it's only you that gets to read this. Where did Matron hide the file this time? Anyway. Secret dossier and all that.
The Knight caught his cape in hand and swung it in a wide arc about him as he launched himself into the air.
Three razor-edged postcards riffled through the cape's fabric, spinning harmlessly past his armoured body as he pulled his foot up and then kicked, connecting with the masked face of one of the three ninjutsu-trained postmen. There was a crunching, and the Knight pushed backwards, rolling free as the postman crumpled to the road. Blood spurted from his nose.
The other two postmen adopted low crouching stances, letter-knives jumping from hand to hand.
The Knight has proven himself a capable hand-to-hand combatant, relying partly on his military service training and experience for endurance and brute strength, and partly on his skill for hybrid boxing styles, wrestling holds and grapples. While he only just stops short of being an Olympic level athlete, the Knight's use of acrobatics tends more towards the direct and practical rather than being prone to flair or the overly elaborate.
As one postman lunged in a gracefully-curved diving motion, the Knight ducked, catching the thrust knife and pulling it up, yanking the postman out of his advance and holding him off balance. The Knight curled his gauntlet into a fist and punched down, hard, into the man's twisted shoulder. There was a crack as the collarbone caved in.
Turning, the Knight just had time to drop the shouting postman as the third sprang at him, landing on his armoured chest and stabbing at his neck.
Physical force aside, the Knight remains a contender thanks to his penchant for invention. An engineer with an eye for firepower, even if sometimes his armaments do seem to have been tacked up by a child with an Airfix kit.
Cyril raised his head, his blank visor reflecting the masked face of his attacker, and gave a low whistle.
From his stylized horse-headed motorcycle's main body raised compartments slid open, unfolding outwards to reveal a miniaturized metal airfield, with a runway that extended into place. There was the sound of tinned rotary blades whirring into life, and then a squadron of tiny robotic Spitfires took off, screaming down the scaled-down runway and soaring in tight formation around towards the Knight.
For a moment, the masked postman simply looked at Cyril, his knife hovering above his neck, before a series of microscopic darts plugged all along his face in looping strafing runs. The automated miniature Spitfires flew past as the postman slid off the Knight, his eyes rolling back into a drugged unconsciousness.
Not that his enemies seem to disappoint when it comes to stocking deadly weaponry in disarmingly absurd imagery, mind.
There was a ticking sound, and the red Royal Hate-Mail van began to rattle.
Cyril shouted, and jabbed a button hidden under a panel on his gauntlet.
He has a whole garage of specialized vehicles underneath that Keep of his, too. The motorcycles are what he's famous for, of course, but people forget that, when he isn't crime-fighting, the Knight runs rescue operations. His machines are built to reflect that. They're hardy, resilient and come equipped with the tools to save lives.
The riderless motorcycles revved their silent engines and zoomed forward, executing a sharp turn and launching three black cable nets out as they turned. The three postmen, two struggling and swearing, were caught up and yanked along as the motorcycles dragged them down the road, away from the rattling, ticking red van.
Cyril shouted again.
If you've gone through the sketches and notes included on what we either speculate or confirm as being the Knight's most up-to-date physical fitness reports, armour, weapon and vehicle schematics, and think that any of that makes up Cyril Sheldrake's success as a para-hero, then you're mistaken.
While the idea of a teenaged accomplice troubles me more than anything, I will confess that the Knight's – and Cyril's – greatest asset is, and always has been, that crazily competent schoolgirl, Squire.
“Duck down, I got it!” Squire called back, swinging herself out of the van window and up onto the roof. “They left a smart phone on the passenger's seat. Big mistake. The big boom coming up is in the back, it's the parcel bomb on a timer. Didn't have time to cut the wire, so I went through all their calls, texts and emails instead. Took...”
She leapt as the Knight crouched, grabbing his arm as she landed neatly on his back. She pointed upwards, launching a grapnel hook around a chimney and rocketing the two crime-fighters onto the rooftops just as the van exploded, showering the sleepy market town with twisted metal shrapnel and the stench of burning rubber.
Blackened letters came down as a thin rain of ash as Beryl grinned at Cyril from underneath her domino mask.
“...a second or two. Easy.”
The Knight returned the smile and looked down at the street, where people were starting to emerge tired and yawning from their houses to find a torched and burning postal van and three postmen trussed up in nets.
There's a set of medical files copied down in pen from when she had her appendix taken out last year. She normally manages to wipe systems immediately if anything juicy is uploaded into them, but we had them keep her sedated long enough for an MRI scan, and for that to be drawn again by some sketch artists. Don't know if the aberrant growths in her frontal lobe mean anything to you, but that's what we think causes her digital comprehension abilities.
As someone who has written a lot of these routine evaluations on Cyril Sheldrake, I still advise against the proposed attempts to recruit him into the JLGB. Whichever Minister is leaning on SI5 to set up this publicity stunt wants Sheldrake because he thinks he's an obedient soldier. He's not. He's an old school, Boy's Own type hero who will call us out on it if things turn dark. Which they will. They always do. I like the man, but I wouldn't want to try and tell him what to do.
Anyway, I have a sewer to investigate (REDACTED old Matron). Stiff upper lip, Eliot. Have a bottle of something ready for drinks in your office when I get back.
Cyril blew the foam from his cocoa before taking a drink. He was sat back, with his feet crossed on the desk.
Beryl was sat beside him, working the super-computer that dominated the Keep's eastern wall, skimming through databases and networks. In the corner of the stone-walled hideout, Worden Castle's Texan butler, Hank Hackenback, sat polishing Cyril's armoured costume, his radio playing tinny music that he tapped his foot and hummed to.
“Here we are, then,” Beryl said, stopping the rapidly-flickering screen on the weathered face of a man in a white coat and with a peaked white cap.
Cyril leant forward. “Milkman, good to see you. How did the rest of the morning's rounds go?”
The Milkman, a veteran costumed hero who kept the peace with early morning patrols along with his Corps of Milkmen astride specially designed Milk Floats in most of the country's major cities, tipped his cap to the Knight.
“Had to overextend the team to cover the countryside but we got results. Hate-Mail vans in the South Downs, Chester and Abergavenny. All carrying parcel-bombs for local MPs, all prevented from reaching their targets. We've followed the leads your Beryl found in their phone and are about to conduct an evening raid on what we think to be some kind of Royal Hate-Mail Sorting House. Should shut them down for a good while. Any idea who they are, or are these new players entirely?”
Cyril rubbed his forehead and thought for a moment. “I think this is a new player, and whoever they are they're playing it big. Something that's been in the works for some time now. Our captive postmen refer to other warped versions of British institutions in the messages on their phones. There's the Royal Hate-Mail, a National Sickness Service, a Ministry of Abattoirs, Institute of Cut-throat Accountants...we think they're all cells for some kind of super-terrorist operation, all with different MOs but with the same aim of disrupting the workings of the country, taking out the government with subversion rather than direct assault.”
“The Milkmen Corps will keep you posted, Knight. We can cover more ground than you and Beryl can, so leave the fire-fighting of these cells to us. You aim for the head.”
“You're a good man, Milton Malone. Knight out.”
“I haven't been able to hack the Hood's comm-system for a while now,” Beryl said, as the Milkman signed off and disappeared. “Something might have happened to him.”
“It usually does,” Cyril agreed. “So, we need a lead. Have the police finished questioning our postmen yet?”
“Not yet,” Beryl shrugged. “Wait...wait, you'll want to see this.”
The screen switched over to what seemed to be a newsroom studio, only severely broken down with deep cobwebbed shadows and a splintered crack across the camera lens. Sat behind the news desk seemed to be a body, slumped face down, in a dark suit.
“What am I looking at?” Cyril frowned.
“BBC, ITV, Channel 4...all the old terrestrial channels are showing this. It's using analogue, so I'm not sure I can backtrack it.”
There was a clattering from the screen, and then the body on the desk was jerked into movement. While the torso and head remained slumped down, the hands and arms jerked about, propped up by thin sticks by some puppeteer beneath the desk. The hands waved enthusiastically for a moment, and then clapped together limply. The voice that spoke next clearly came not from the body, but from someone behind the camera.
“This is the Big Bad Broadcasting Corporation. Nation shall speak war unto Nation.”
Cyril, Beryl and, in the background, Hank watched as the body's hands clumsily flapped around on the desk, as if searching for something, then dipped beneath the desk and swung up violently, now holding, with the help of bleeding staples, a large photograph.
“This is Michael Thompson. He was the MP for a little county in the Midlands that you may have heard of. He is currently staying in a famous London hotel, but it won't be long now until we get him! Run, run, Knight and Squire! Perhaps you'll make it in time! Hurry though, we'll be naming and killing on the hour, every hour, here on the BBBC! Stay tuned for some choice afternoon snuff film viewing!”
Cyril had grabbed his costume from Hank and was pulling it on before the voice finished.
“We take the bullet train to London. Find out who he is and where he's staying on the way. Move!”
As the two drove their motorcycles through thick London congestion traffic, police sirens whined and the sound of helicopters could be heard.
“Michael Thompson. He used to be an MP, was with Labour but they passed him over on a place in the shadow cabinet...bad blood with the guy that got the job or something because their spat in the papers afterwards had him kicked out of the party. Has a chemical company. Beyond that not a very important person at all. Similar to their usual target, but very public execution style this time.”
“We forced their more open cells into play,” Cyril agreed, swinging his bike into a side-street. “We're here, go up and through the window.”
The two crime-fighters twisted a catch on their motorcycle handlebars and the wheels hissed, sharp tacks and an adhesive gel emerging through the specialized tyres. Pulling back, they held their bikes on the back wheel, then pushed forwards, the front wheel sticking to the side of the building they faced.
“Onwards and upwards, Squire,” Cyril said through gritted teeth, as they kicked their engines into gear and tore up the vertical incline.
The windows began to blur past them as they climbed, until suddenly they zipped alongside a window and dove from the bikes through the glass. They landed with a roll in the room, their bikes continuing up and over the roof, putting themselves into parking mode.
“I don't like using the verti-tyres,” Cyril hissed as they took up defensive positions, surveying the darkened hotel room.
“I do, and you got to choose the last gadget,” Beryl whispered back, edging further into the room.
There was a clattering, and then a balding man in a suit came around from a doorway.
“Knight...Squire. What are you doing here?”
“You don't watch much television, do you, Michael Thompson,” the Knight intoned, relaxing his stance.
“Is this about the eight MPs that were killed by explosives? I heard you did something about that this morning.”
“You could say that,” Squire chirped, stepping forward and grabbing him by the arm. “We need to get you out of here.”
Thompson stared bug-eyed for a moment, and then gasped. “Knight, behind you!”
Knight and Squire twisted around, facing the shattered window, and then spasmed. The darts in their backs emptied out their toxin and the duo sank into a dark sleep.
“Hood? Hood, are you there, sport?”
George Cross opened his eyes groggily. They felt heavy. Everything he felt suggested heavy sedation. He forced himself to assess the situation.
He had been taken down in the corridors. Taken down a good many with him, but taken down nonetheless. Drugged and...restrained. But not unmasked. They'd taken away his utility belt and...torn open his jumpsuit.
”Hood, report. We don't have visual feed from you, but we have isolated your location.”
Turning his head as far as he could either way, the Hood and his web of micro-sensors within his mask revealed that he was in some small, square room tiled in a faded-and-cracked turquoise blue. He was on a steel table in the centre of the room, with two other tables to his side, on which an unconscious Knight and Squire also lay, similarly restrained by heavy and rusty-looking bindings.
They looked as if they had just been brought in, and, unlike the Hood, did not have their chests exposed or marked in indelible ink.
The Hood could just make out dotted lines marking out his organs drawn across him.
He hit his head back on the cold metal, sharpening his senses to be alert with the brief cocktail of adrenaline and endorphins the sharp pain triggered.
Three costumed heroes in a death-trap. Surgical theme, obviously. Where the 'surgeons' were he wasn't sure, but he could make out the double doors that they'd have to come in through. He still had his gloves on, so that meant an array of extendible sawing and cutting tools he could choose from, and his boots had medical supplies built in that he could bring Knight and Squire to with...
”Hood, we aren't receiving anything from you so we're using this as an opportunity to test out our 'Birdwatcher' programme. Agent C will be with you momentarily...”
There was a sudden spark of static and a ringing echo as the double doors were swung open.
“Wait, Matron, I'm here!” Hood shouted, wide-eyed. “Agent C is no-go, do not send Agent C!”
Static drowned the response and the Hood exhaled through gritted teeth as a gang of skeletally gaunt surgeons in ragged attire took their places around his table. The Hood continued to mutter angrily to himself as he manoeuvred a small sawing blade from his glove's fingertip, and began sawing away surreptitiously at his restraints while the silent surgeons handed around rusted-metal scalpels and hammers from a nurse's trolley.
“The National Sickness Service will make you unwell again, defenders of the state,” a voice echoed over an intercom somewhere.
Knight and Squire began to stir to his left. The Hood rolled his eyes. They would wake up just as...
“Beginning the operation,” one of the surgical figures cackled, dipping a scalpel down and slicing a long line along the Hood's side.
”Agent C should be arriving now, Hood.”
The Hood swore.
What happened next was a blur. There was a rushing sound and then the bouncing of metal on the tiled floor. Smoke filled the room and a small shape with straw-coloured hair, and a whirling rounded cape to match it, sprang seemingly from nowhere, cartwheeling over one surgeon and disarming him of his scalpel as he did so. The scalpel flew from the figure's hand as he continued diving through the air, running through another surgeon's arm and pinning him into the tiled wall with a thud. A snap kick from the whirling figure brought another surgeon head over heels backwards, while a thin grapnel line shot out entangling two more. The Hood swore to himself, and kept sawing away at his restraints.
There was a crashing as the last of the surgeons were thrown out of the room by the whirling figure, who came neatly to a halt and stood, his head only just looking over the table top, his cape thrown over his shoulder.
Knight and Squire sat up, their restraints torn open by perfectly-placed throwing stars in the brief and sudden mêlée. They clapped, politely.
The child in the yellow cape and slate-grey jumpsuit ran a gloved hand through his hair, combing it back in one smooth gesture. He stepped forward and reached out a hand to the Squire.
“The name's Smiley. Jack Smiley. I'm a secret agent working for SI5, and I'm here to rescue you.”
“Part of an attempt to train spy-kids,” the Hood said, angrily, finally freeing himself from his restraints. “They wanted him to be my sidekick.”
The boy gave him a wry smile and flashed a quick wink at Beryl. “I heard it the other way around. You can call me Chaffinch if I can call you.”
Beryl hesitated. “If you can call me...”
“He did a good job, Hood,” the Knight said, blankly, checking over his armour. “A very good job.”
Chaffinch adjusted his collar and drew out a small silver case. Opening it, he flicked out a cigarette and fitted it to his lips. Folding it away again he took out a bespoke lighter.
“This isn't real,” Beryl insisted.
“If you meant it isn't really just a lighter, you'd be right,” Chaffinch agreed, gesturing up. They looked up to see a ring of plastic explosives taped to the ceiling.
“This is a really enclosed space, Jack,” the Hood scowled.
“I'll open a window,” Chaffinch smiled, pressing a button at the base of his lighter.
There was an explosion, a deafening crash of sound and light, and the room seemed to cave inwards with masonry and debris shattering and rupturing all around.
And then the sound of a spinning helicopter rotor, and rising up from the jagged hole that had been blown from the underground operating theatre to the London suburb above came the four of them, hanging from a heavy cable.
The Knight and Hood began to climb up the cable as it was slowly towed in upwards towards the waiting SI5 agents, while the Chaffinch held himself in a leaning posture, holding the Squire in his free arm. Cigarette smoke blew lazily from his mouth as he surveyed the cold London night.
“He didn't have to grab Beryl like that,” the Hood grumbled. “I mean, he's eight. It's all just posturing.”
“I think I might know what's going on now,” the Knight said, dimly. “but it's only going to get worse before it gets better.”
“Well, you can put your theory to the test soon,” the Hood replied. “Matron says they think they have a lead on this scheme's architect. Apparently the BBBC has been sending the police after targets all over the country – ordinary people, no connections. Could be a cover for their big play. There's a lot of activity in Oxford...the suspicious kind of activity. Rumours of something underground there, too. That's where I'm headed next.”
“My ride just arrived. I'll need to pay someone a visit with Beryl... I'll be in contact. Call us if you need us.”
A silvery grey jet, its front fuselage shaped and etched into a horse's raised head, slipped out of the night's gloom beside the hovering government helicopter and launched out zip-lines to the hanging figures. The Knight and Squire clipped catches to their costumes and fell away into the night, pulled up on automatic winches into the grey jet as it tore off through the sky.
The Hood and Chaffinch watched for a while on their line to the helicopter, and then continued climbing.
“Matron warned you about smoking. You aren't coming with me to Oxford.”
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