“The iceberg was hauled here to be studied at the rebuilt laboratory. They cleaned it up enough to be able to see a human shape inside … and that it appeared to be alive. Nothing they tried made a dent or scratch on the surface of the iceberg until a woman, Kim Lanseer, attempted to communicate with the human with a simple far-cry charm.
“It worked. There was a reply. No one knows what it was, since the research site imploded and all the structures, and everyone and everything in there, vanished into a large hole, which had quickly filled with that whirlpool we have behind us.”
Lincoln was silent as she collected thoughts. “Have you ever given a short answer to a question? I’m really glad you know stuff, but it’s more than enough for the both of us.”
“That’s a little harsh. You didn’t request a short answer,” I replied quietly, upset at the jab. True, I did talk more than I should when interested in a topic; I sometimes failed to read stop signals from the audience.
Lincoln could be gracious when she wanted to be and smiled amiably. “You’re right and I’m very sorry. From now on, please give short answers, unless I specifically ask for more details.”
I smiled in return and nodded.
“So where are we going?”
“I chose not to mention it earlier, given the situation with Jovial is live and we need to take action tonight. The farm is here, so we can get into it and do what we can.” I provided Lincoln with details of the day.
She mused for a moment. “This could be a corpse action. It has been years by your owm admission since you encountered Jovial for the first time. The plot was speared then, this is just a stray loose end. Just because you saw the woman doesn’t mean the plan is active. The parts could have been in place for a while and they’re simply sunk in their cover. No one has actually activated them.”
“True and I have thought the very same things. There are a couple of other factors at play as well. Brewing fully grown lifeforms is rarely successful, for unknown reasons successfully bottleborn lifeforms need a period of growing time, never as far as I am aware, less than eighteen months. It can be much much longer. Ten years is not unusual for very complex lifeforms. Given that Jovial was extraordinary the timescale could be shortened for sure. There is the lead time to get into place a well. Jovial was not surprised to see Ms Hiba, he was engaged in admiring how effectively his work had turned out to be. Finally, do you want to take the risk?” I asked, hoping that she would yes as the scale and scope of what we were trying to do had started to come home. I had started to cool down and question if I was rushing off to just waste my time and walk into trouble for no good reason. Lincoln cocked her her and looked thoughtful for a second before grinning hugely at me and replying.
“We need to do something to make sure it’s properly cancelled, so what’s your plan?”
“Get into the farm and do something to stop it.”
“I don’t mean to be picky,” said Lincoln, who clearly did mean to be picky, “but that’s hardly the tattered ghost of a plan. Do something to stop it? I had hoped you have something more substantial in mind.”
“I do. I’m sure that these people have a failsafe in place. There are so many things that could go wrong; they must have had a built-in emergency shutdown protocol. We need to set that protocol in motion and to do that we need to be in the farm control centre.”
“Do you have a backup plan if we can’t get into the control center?”
“Not really.”
“Then we have to do something to stop it, don’t we?” she smirked. “Where’s the farm?”
“We’re sitting above it. This was a brilliant choice. Farms need huge quantities of water. It’s one of the major tracking signs the Standing Committee uses. Here they have all the water they need without anyone noticing.”
8
I tapped the code on the fountain wall we were seated alongside. The receptors in the surface read the presence of Jovial Dialland through my skin and responded positively. Below the surface of the water, a large rectangular shape could be seen. It looked as inviting as the entrance to Jalwar Funnel and was equally dangerous.
I swung around and put my feet into the water. Contrary to Lincoln’s often told version, I didn’t scream like a 10-Bay Sucker bed being pulled from its feeding patch, nor did she have to dart me into tranquility and carry me to the farm while I offered my life savings to return to ”the light of freedom above”. I did have a moment, however, when the combined weight of everything happening became palpable and I wanted to run far, far away.
Lincoln read the situation accurately and pushed me into the fountain. I fell headfirst (perhaps I did scream at this point, but purely from surprise and nothing else) through the opening and landed on drop-nets at the bottom. Lincoln landed after me, at which point the entrance closed and we were stuck going forward.
“Where’s the blood lake?” I asked after we’d walked a few paces. Lincoln had brought star-lights so we had enough illumination to move by, without being bright enough to be seen farther away.
“The blood lake?” asked Lincoln, perplexed. “Why?”
Lincoln didn’t have the knowledge of bottle farm operations that every bottle-born lifeform did. Remembering her request for short answers, I tried to pare it down to the essential details. “A blood lake is the disposal system for a bottle farm. Any farm generates a huge quantity of biological waste. More than half the results of Brewing aren’t usable and have to be disposed of. They’re dumped into a blood lake.”
“I thought any surplus was recycled via incinerators into energy to power the farm? That was one of the steps that allowed mass commercial development of the farms.”
Lincoln had clearly absorbed the “almost information” the Standing Committee displayed everywhere to obscure the real purpose of bottle farm operations.
“That was true a long time ago, when energy recovery was important. Since then, far more effective methods have been developed. Farms are powered by biological charms … lifeforms brewed to be part of a charm that provides power in a much more predictable and controllable way. It’s also considerably more cost-effective. The use of incinerators recovers less than 40% of the potential energy while biological charms deliver 87% of the potential energy for less investment. To deal with biological waste, an interim measure was to store it in huge external reservoirs. Very quickly, those reservoirs attracted a range of hungry scavengers, who in turn attracted predators. The predators have a hormone that allows them to fight infection, and is also very useful for humans. The blood lakes became a planned revenue stream for bottle farms, and are secondary farms for blood-lake predators.”
“Thanks for the update, but why are you asking where it is?”
“From what I understand about this farm, we’ve entered the waste-processing section, and there should be a blood lake nearby that it discharges into. But I can’t smell one.”
“And?”
“And a blood lake that’s not continually topped with fresh waste will start to decline. It won’t support the population of scavengers, which will impact the population of predators. When the predators’ supply of scavengers runs out, they don’t die, because they’re tremendously tough, but simply start to hunt further afield. Eventually, the lack of a sustainable food source will eliminate them, and that can take up to two and a half years as they prey on each other … before they finally become extinct. I can’t smell a blood lake, which means that the lake has finished decomposing and dried out. The supply of scavengers is gone and the predators are scouting for new sources of food.” I drew a deep, calming breath. “I have a concern that could be attracting very unwelcome attent—”
Lincoln clutched my arm. She was keenly alert, sensing something I couldn’t. Suddenly, she started to run, pulling me along as she raced down a service tunnel. She let go of my arm so we could run better. I had no idea what was making her move and didn’t care. If she was moving fast, so was I. Then I got the first whiff and I started to run even fa
ster as fear ignited my muscles. I knew that smell from the sewers—a sweet, not-so-subtle smell of a predator.
Predators weren’t fast on land, and not fast in blood lakes either, but they didn’t have to be because food came to them. They simply waited near the farm outlets where waste was pumped out. Scavengers came to get it and the predators got them. A scavenger with a full belly was half asleep, so a predator could easily get within range and clamp onto them before the scavenger was aware of the danger.
We had the marginal advantage of being awake and aware; they had the advantage of expecting us. Lincoln switched tunnels. I began to think they were herding us. When Lincoln and I arrived at an open area with four tunnels leading from it, I could see we’d indeed been herded. The ground was covered with predators. Even if we’d been wearing chainmail waders, it would have been a problem.
Lincoln halted before she stepped into the death pit. “Which tunnel?” she asked in a remarkably calm voice.
I didn’t have the breath to answer and pointed at the one diagonally across. A scraping sound came from behind. There was no going back, only forward.
Every lifeform had a stress indicator, some physical sign of the toll stress was taking. According to a thoroughly unreliable source, mine was a high-pitched snort, emitted at regular intervals like a manic teakettle.
Lincoln glanced at me and nodded tersely. “Follow me.” She started to blast predators to create spaces so she could walk.
I had no idea if I snorted, squealed or squeaked. My entire field of vision had narrowed to the steps in front, rapidly diminishing space Lincoln had cleared. I began to wobble and raised my arms sideward to stay upright. I regained balance and stepped forward less forcefully. I could hear predators filling the space. My heart had decided to cease beating and my lungs were filled with sloshing fluid (I could hear the splashes as I tried to breathe). Suddenly, my heartbeat returned, racing so fast that I thought it might explode, but this, too, suddenly stopped.
I realized I was dead, that I was simply going to topple over into the hungry mouths below … and it would be a relief. I could no longer manage the processes needed to put one foot in front of the other. In fact, I could no longer see in front. I was in complete darkness the only sounds were breaths whistling from my body and the hypnotic shuffling of the predators.
Something heavy landed on my left shoulder, with enough force to make me stagger, a movement that didn’t quite reach my feet, which were stuck in time and space. I’d be welcoming the jaws of death until they bit into me.
Life and sensation returned at gale force as pain poured through my body and I shrieked. My eyes, functional again, saw Lincoln put her hand across her waist and shoot a second weapon without turning around or interrupting her movements. The predator on my shoulder blew up with a loud bang. An appalling stink filled my nostrils and would remain until I was ground to dust.
I stepped on a predator as I moved forward, the movement beneath my foot wriggling to get a grip on my boot; it was enough to release pent-up fear and aggression. I lifted my foot and the predator, persistently hanging on, sailed across the death pit where I kicked it. A feeding frenzy started where it landed. I kicked another and then another, following Lincoln who’d increased her pace. She never stopped blasting, however, and I didn’t stop kicking until we’d cleared the pit. How long the experience lasted, I couldn’t say.
Access stairs were in the tunnel ahead and we raced up them. At the top, I coded a retraction into the control panel and the stairs sank into the wall. Predators couldn’t climb steps, but I was in no mood to be proven wrong. Lincoln eyed me and then knocked me to the floor, stepping over me and removing grabbers from a pocket. She yanked out the jaws still embedded in my shoulder. The pain was intense and I was ready to die when Lincoln opened my jacket and shirt, and slapped hot sauce on the wounds. I was fine.
To be honest, being fine disgruntled me. I was glad to be pain-free, but it seemed strange to be beyond being shit-scared after an attack by a predator and then so abruptly feel fine. It was hard to shake off the feeling that I’d somehow been cheated. If the recovery were so quick, did it mean that I’d never been in trouble to begin with? Luckily, Lincoln wasn’t looking for gratitude, because she was too busy surveying the area.
Then she asked the question everyone did. “Where are the bottles?”
“There are none,” I advised. “When the farms first started, there were brewing vats that were called bottles and the name stuck. There are 100 kilometres of high-density glass fallopian tubing underneath our feet, where the brewing is done.”
Lincoln looked over to check if I was being funny. “Fallopian tubing?”
“That’s the actual trade term. The farmers are famous for their rich and generous sense of humour.” Sharing details of the process used in the tubes would have been too blatant a reminder about where I came from.
Lincoln shifted back to business. “Where to from here?”
I took a few seconds to orientate myself. Accessing Jovial’s knowledge was tricky. I could simply have thought his memories, but this also gave Jovial access to me, and I wasn’t confident he was fully powerless. I used osmosis instead and let bits of information seep into my memory. Details became clear and I knew the path to take.
We were standing in the reception area of the farm. There was no direct physical access from this part to another; it was all done through charms. In most locations, they simply returned you to where you started, but here they led somewhere fatal. I knew the walk-through would read Jovial, but I had no idea how to get Lincoln past the charm. I glanced over and realized, again, that this was her area of expertise and I should concentrate on the real problem: me.
She was wearing a skeleton key, a charm that confused identity security charms to allow unrecorded access. The PR service used them all the time and rigorously controlled who had them. It was a guaranteed trip to the Red Halls to be found with, or near, one. A thorough lack of discrimination proved to be effective in limiting production, distribution and possession of these charms. That Lincoln had one didn’t completely surprise me; it was the key itself that caught me off guard, clearly of Empire vintage, and a priceless antique that would be significantly more powerful than a contemporary version. It was likely that Lincoln could pass through the Red Halls with a charm like that.
She regarded me with a furrowed brow.
With a shrug, I waved at the niche and quite needlessly said, “We go through here”. Obviously, there was nowhere else to go, but I was more than a little scattered.
I headed for the niche, which transformed as I drew nearer. It became a transparent glass panel through which I could see the farm operations control room. I felt Jovial stir and stepped inside the room. A push from behind made me move aside and create space for Lincoln.
She looked around with interest. It was a typical set-up for a farm with large conference table and functional chairs in the middle, a large wipe-clean to write on and, most significantly, an L-shaped metallic desk with a single chair before it. On the desk was a complex cube array; each cube had enough information-processing and revival power to run a small farm by itself. Even the biggest super-farm had a three-cube array, which included 100% redundancy and additional capacity. This one had seven cubes and a White Glass Control Display sheet with a separate feed from each cube.
Whoever sat at that desk had an unimaginable level of control over every aspect of the operations within the Fallopian tubes. Jovial stirred again at his workspace; this was where he imposed his will on creation to brew singular, custom lifeforms. I’d known he was extraordinary, but the set-up on the desk suggested I’d grossly underestimated him … and how unprepared I was for what happened next.
“I’m a bit disappointed. I was hoping for something more intense. This is merely a conference room for bankers or lawyers. Where’s the deadly intrigue? Lanken’s Tears, these people have no sense of how to do things. Where are the uniformed minions streaming from hidden locations
to defend their master’s secrets?”
“This is how they work, no matter if the problem is a traffic offence, an expired credit line, or secretly overthrowing the government. It’s nicely discreet and corporate all the way.”
Lincoln nodded and asked the question I’d been trying to avoid. “Now what?”
I took a big breath. “There’s always an exit strategy. But too many things could go wrong before the final act. Never mind removing traces that could lead back, which is imperative. They were caught before they could push the button on the plan, so we’re going to. Somewhere in here is a key to starting the exit process and fleeing the scene. We need to find it, start it, and get out.”
“Can’t fault your logic, so instead I’ll point to the inherent problem … any clues as to where?”
I nodded and took another breath. There’d be no returning once committed. “Jovial was a member of the inner circle and probably the designer of the exit process. He knows exactly what to do, so I’m going to ask him for the information. The problem is that this is Jovial’s home ground, where he’s most powerful. I’m going to wrestle his most guarded and vital secret from him. I have no idea how it will play out, so if I make any move, sudden or otherwise, kill me and leave the way we came in. Jovials’s death will trigger security protocols, which will destroy this site and maybe close down the plan.”
She winced and drew a long breath. “We’re here now, so we better get to it. How do you want to do this?”
Bottle Born Blues Page 10
