“It’s not magic,” he scolded Tesla. “Those who stay will be fine.”
Jake wasn’t happy having half the tribe underfoot for Synthetica but he left by the doorway at the far end of the room, taking Tesla and others with him. He discovered a joining corridor with several more doors. As he walked away he couldn’t see what the android was doing but heard the gasps and muttering from the crowd.
The voxer footsteps led through the fungus to a pair of double-doors. Jake cracked a door and ducked inside. Almost entire room was coated in more of the mold – every surface. It was another ward room, with ten beds down each side. Like a doctor’s examination room, or an emergency ward, with a bare metal tables and a kindof power-washer machine with a clear tank of white liquid and a hose and nozzle apparatus beside each one. The fourth machine down on the left was toppled on its side with the tank broken and empty, revealed the source of the strange growth. It all seemed to stem from there.
“Lord Jacob, see?” Tesla asked.
Where her bare toes touched the mold it was growing. Rapidly, forming a thick circle around her foot. Jake yanked her back, but there didn’t seem to be any damage to her skin and once she’d stepped away from it the patch stopped growing.
The doors at the far end of the room swung open and a half-dozen voxers were there. Vicious-looking brutes with improvised face-masks beaten out of old metal traffic signs, wielding wicked looking spiked chains, axes and in one case an axe as tall as he was. They looked horrifically deadly, and Jake did not want to imagine the damage they would do wading into a fight with the obeyers.
It was probably too close for recommended use, but Jake had used the plasma gun in tighter confines lately, and as the killmen trotted towards him, all the more eerie in their total silence, he fired.
The effect was instantaneous, and unexpected. Aiming for the patch of ground directly in front of the clanking wall of murder-flesh that was rushing forward, the beam exploded a volcano of molten duracrete.
And the entire end of the room was swallowed in a massive growth of mold.
Jake stared in horrified fascination as the heat from the blast activated the substance, and it erupted like expanding shaving cream to swallow the beds, machines and six killmen. The men gave out guttural yells of anger that changed to panic as the mold swallowed them whole.
“Incredible!” Tesla clapped her joy, congratulating him like he’d planned it all along.
There was struggling, and the pile of mold shook for a few moments and slowly went still.
“Stay here, and stay back,” Jake ordered the obeyers. “I have to get the others.”
By the time he and Tesla returned to the others Synthetica was topless and already sporting a new arm and healed torso. The obeyers all had their heads bowed, whispering prayers softly, and the android girl was the only one who saw him enter. He waved her towards him.
“You have to see this,” Jake said.
“Tesla!” one of the obeyers was rushing towards them happily.
It was Venti, the one-handed scout, only now she had two hands. One of them was synthetic. Looks like the android nurse had been busy. Venti babbled to the chieftain’s daughter in her own language and showed off her new cybernetic hand.
Synthetica arrived with Flux in tow, like he was joined to her hip by an invisible tether.
“What is it?”
“Better if I show you.”
When they returned to the room full of mold, the obeyers he’d left behind were crouched, ready, but nothing had changed. Jacob explained what had happened to the android.
“We need through… that…” he gestured. “I think they were a rear guard, to delay us. Yanco could have found a way out of here by now.”
“Heat,” Synthetica decided, running her K-kit scanner over the moldy mound. “It grows faster with heat. That would explain the chill in the air.”
The room was ten degrees cooler than the rest of the place.
“Try the acid gel rounds, that should do it,” she suggested.
Jake aimed for where he thought the far door would be and fired into the wall of wrinkly green substance. The shotgun pellets chewed a three-foot tunnel all the way to the wall. Two more rounds bit two more cone-shaped chunked out of the mold barrier, revealing the door and half a suffocated killman, held upright by the moldy cement.
“That’s good. Before we move on, I need you to take command of the security bot,” Synthetica said professionally.
“No time.”
“It will take a moment,” Synthetica insisted.
Jake gave a wistful look at the waiting path towards Milan. He had to admit, the security bot would be useful.
“Okay. How do I do that? Break a bottle of champagne on him?”
“You show it the security card, identify yourself and tell it to initiate the authority override protocol.”
Jake felt slightly silly but he followed her instructions and Flux immediately zeroed in on him like no one else existed. Jake had to get scanned for biometrics and even produce a saliva sample, but since swapping bodies seemed so common in the 23rd century the main security protocol seemed to be a password called a ‘voxcode’.
“Choose a phrase which others will be unlikely to guess and will not come up in normal conversation,” Flux said in his hollow baritone.
Jake considered a moment. “Your plastic pal who is fun to be with,” he finally decided.
“Voxcode accepted,” Flux said.
“Do you have a name?” Jake asked.
“Only a serial designation,” the bot said.
“In that case I’m going to call you Flux.”
“Designation accepted. Do you wish to add any secondary authorizations. They will be able to issue commands that do not directly contradict or override your own.”
“Yeah, these two,” Jake gestured to Synthetica and Tesla. “Got that?”
“Accepted. They may now use the same voxcode.”
“Lord Jacob,” Tesla said with a quaver in her voice. “This cannot be!”
“What?”
“No human may command the vox, the vox commands humans! Only the priests may speak to them.”
“Oh, right. Your crazy religion says the machines are gods. Well… think of it this way, I’m special, and I give you special permission.”
“Because I am your wife?” she asked, awestruck.
“Uh, sure, fine.” If he had the choice between another hour-long theological debate with her and just playing the marriage card, he was taking the easy way out.
Synthetica gave him a questioning look and Jake gave her a sheepish shrug that said ‘I’ll explain later’.
“Let’s get the others and keep moving.”
***
Past the mold-filled wardroom was a maze of hallways and doors. They split into two groups and Jake led his group forward at a fast walk, kicking in doors, impatient to find the bastards who had Milan. Nothing.
Growing desperate he started running, forcing the obeyers to try to keep up. Until finally he spotted a pair of killmen run past at a cross corridor and gave chase. Turning the corridor he saw there was only one exit at the end of the corridor. Jake raced to the door and slammed it open with his shoulder.
“Jake, wait!” Synthetica called.
Immediately through the door a volley of arrows thunked into the wall and shattered off the plastec door around him. He dove for cover. Winced as two more arrows shattered off the wall next to him. They were half-size, and had wickedly broad hunting heads. Crossbow bolts. Hoping that meant it would take a while to reload Jake got to his feet and charged into the room. Pistol in each hand.
He found he was in a big open-concept space divided by low cubicle wall with desks that looked like slabs of black glass. There were maybe ten killmen taking cover around the room and at least two of them were fast reloaders or had waited to shoot, because one bolt slammed into his splat armor breastplate and the other sliced the back of his hand from a near miss.
&nb
sp; Jake fired alternate rounds from the slugthrower and the acid revolver, shooting at anything that moved, starting with the two crossbowmen. In the chaos he couldn’t tell if he hit a single target. He dove over the nearest desk when another voxer stood up to fire a crossbow at him, and as he wiped the dust from the surface of the desk with his ass, it lit up with some holographic readouts.
A vertically projected screen of six hexagonal shapes in a pattern around a central circle appeared in midair. As another crossbow bolt flickered through it, narrowly missing him, Jake fired back and ducked. Above him the screen flickered an angry red message.
HOST KOM NEGATIV 500
“Well, good to know ‘500’ errors didn’t go out of style,” Jake let a ghost of a chuckle escape.
The yells of approaching obeyers forced Jake to get on the move again. Drawing enemy fire, he jumped from cover, shooting at any killman that showed his face.
It worked. When the door burst open, emptying a blue mass of pissed-off obeyers, they weren’t cut down by crossbow darts. Instead the voxers rose up and charged to meet them hand-to-hand. Jake was about to lay down covering fire when the entire room went…
…frozen…
Jake felt like he was pushing his limbs through air gone thick as honey. Every combatant in the room did. Obeyers and gorilla-big mutants charging each other in ultra-slow-motion.
Yanco!
Fucker!
Jake’s eyes scanned the room, spotting the orange bastard on a balcony overlooking the open-concept office space. His entire body was glowing green with effort, and the amount of Tox power he was using to trap almost two dozen people in amber must’ve been enormous.
So enormous the mutant couldn’t keep it up for long. Not at that level. Almost immediately Jake felt the grip of the air getting thinner. Instead of honey it was like trying to run in water up to your knees. He drew aim on a killman with tusks decorating the mouthpiece of his home-made stop-sign helmet. Fired a single slug.
The bullet leapt from the gun slow enough to see. About the speed of a housefly. Halfway to the target the tusk-masked killman noticed Jake, saw the bullet and he desperately bent backwards as the bullet zipped past where he’d been standing.
Bastard!
He’d just have to get closer.
Jake joined the molasses-slow charge into the voxer ambush. Everything desperately sluggish.
In every other combat since Jake had woken in the 25th century Jake had been able to rely on the Nevermore clone-body boost to his combat reflexes. Moving faster than thought. Doing things before he even knew he was moving. He’d never had time to consider it. Acted on instinct. A blaze of action, then it was over.
But not this time.
It was the most nerve-wracking fight he’d ever been in. Every step, every dodge, every pull of the trigger, was an eternity. He had ample time to recognise the horrible danger he was in at any moment. As the two forces slowly bounced around the room Jake saw the same dread reflected on all their faces too.
He watched a voxer so determined to hack his obeyer opponent with his axe that he failed to notice the blue-skinned warrior’s spear tip stabbing upwards until it was already breaking the skin. The gorilla-man could only watch in horror as it ever-so-slowly travelled deeper into his guts, punching out the small of his back. He saw an obeyer desperately swimming upstream in an almost comical attempt to outrun a crossbow bolt that lazily travelled at the speed of a paper airplane and slammed through his body and out the front. It felt like minutes passed between every swing of edged metal, every lunge and parry a nerve-wracking eternity as both combatants knew death waited with eternal patience. Even the screams seemed muted, and muffled, like they’d been submerged in water.
And Jake wove his way through the battle like a sorcerer. Getting close enough to a killman that the slow bullets from his guns couldn’t possible be avoided in time, but never close enough to be reached by even the most rage-filled hand-weapon blow. He shot four men as he crossed the room, leaving their bodies to slowly drift to the floor behind him. They weren’t his goal.
His goal was finding the far side of the slowed kinetic field of psychic energy and getting through. Then getting a clean shot at Yanco. But as he slogged his way forward, limbs feeling like they were weighted down with lead bars, Yanco was watching him from outside the effects. Sensing the priest knew the skirmish was lost, Jake drew aim with the last round in his revolver and fired.
Yanco watched the approaching spray of green acid pellets and stepped aside, turning away from the battle and retreating. Jake cursed silently as the gel rounds reached the edge of the slow-field a moment too late, suddenly free of the extra weight they continued at normal speed, exploding in a sizzling hole on the ceiling.
By the time Jake tumbled out the far side of the field, the battle was almost over behind him. With his advantage the obeyers had run through the killmen, and they were all slowly on their way to the floor. Two blue-skinned corpses joined them, hanging like tangled puppets with a dead gaze.
Jake was too angry to wait for them and wasn’t about to turn back, so he pressed forward.
Time to end this.
***
Chapter 13
: Last Train to Outside
A wide set or curving stairs at the back of the room led up to the balcony where he’d spotted Yanco. Jake took them two at a time, running.
He emerged in a cylindrical room, an atrium two stories tall, with a big central pedestal. Unlike the other Nevermore bunker modules, this room was stark and utilitarian, bare walls made from the dull grey concrete-like material. The only concession to form over function was the huge metal sculpture of the Nevermore logo on top of the pedestal. It was a blackbird in midflight with wings outstretched, the size of a jet fighter.
“Yanco!” Jake screamed.
“It curious thing,” the priest said from somewhere hidden. “Why you try to kill your woman?”
“Better than spending another day with you,” Jake said. He slowly circled the pedestal, holstering the pistols and taking the plasma rifle in both hands.
He had time to study the huge sculpture, done in an almost rough-hewn style, like it had been carved with ice-cream scoops. It was a bizarre sight and as Jake circled it, he took in the full effect of the stylized metal bird, wondering if it had been put here so the newly arrived synthetic army could imprint on it like baby chicks with their mother.
There was a ramp that curved around the outside of the room leading downwards. Standing at the head of it was Yanco and two huge killmen, holding Milan between them.
“Stupid mistake,” Jake said, levelling the gun.
But as he sighted on the struggling Milan, knowing he could take her and Yanco out with a single shot, he paused. It was a shot he would probably survive, even if he was badly burned, so his own danger didn’t bother him. But aiming at Milan he wasn’t sure if he could gun her down.
The entire Nevermore bunker was shutting down. Cool Breeze had vanished. Might be dead. Main power had failed in the lower levels and there was only so long the autonomous system would keep the place alive. Circe would be gone when that happened, along with all the resurrection facilities.
For all he knew, the cloning tanks were offline right now.
That meant it he squeezed the trigger he might be killing Milan for real. That meant this might be her – and his – last life. Like a cat on his ninth.
Yanco’s veins glowed green and Jake prepared for time to slow, or his head to fill with brain shocks, but neither happened. Instead the magazine well of the plasma gun became burning hot under his arm.
Oh.
Shit.
Jake remembered Synthetica’s warning; rupture a cometite battery and it would release the entire gigajoules-strong energy inside all at once. Only then, when Jake wanted to throw the gun and run, did he feel the sluggish amber of the slow field form around him. He was trapped. With an exploding bomb.
Yanco gave a dismissive laugh and retreated down
the ramp with Milan and the two guards.
The overloading battery wouldn’t be slowed by the field, it only affected kinetic force. Inside the slow-field Jake wouldn’t even be able to distance himself in time. But Jake’s accelerated will to survive was baked into his DNA. He tried anyway.
With all his might he pushed against the slow-field. Flung the gun up and away, behind the gigantic metal bird sculpture and was already running through the honey-thick air to put the bird’s outstretched wing between him and the gun about to turn into a bomb.
He was counting seconds in his head. How long? How long until it failed containment on the gigajoules of energy completely. He made four steps. Five. Was starting his seventh in the shadow of the bird’s wing when the world went white.
Heat like he’d been pushed into an oven, a sizzling crackle and groaning of superheated metal. The energy blast was instant, flash-cooking the entire room. Every surface crisping, melting, and baked like the glassy surface of a volcanic lava flow. Molten gobs of bird sculpture spattered the room like water dropped into a hot pan of grease. Punching molten holes in the walls and floor.
Except for a single patch of the wall, where Jake’s shadow remained perfectly pristine.
In a moment the blast was gone. The room crackling and sizzling as the rapidly cooling surfaces shrank. The slow field was gone, and for a moment as Jake staggered to a halt, boot soles tacky as they almost melted to the floor. For a moment he thought the blast had somehow knocked out the psychic field of molasses. But turning he saw the real reason he wasn’t ashes and vapor.
A hail of rapidly cooling molten chunks of metal was suspended in a dome around him. Standing behind him, singed and blackened but otherwise unhurt, was Tesla. A Tesla-shaped pristine shadow on the wall behind her, just like his. Her eyes glowed a hard green, and she slowly relaxed her outflung hands, letting the glow fade. Somehow she’d used her own Tox power to shield both of them.
But it had exhausted her. She wobbled on her feet and Jake had to run to catch her.
“How did you even do that?” Jake asked, cradling the filthy scarecrow to his chest.
The Apocalypse Watch Page 15
