by Andy Remic
“We’ll sort something out. Let’s find this Professor Xakus. If he’s still alive.”
“I never thought of that,” rumbled Franco.
“And if he’s not mutated.”
“Ahh. Bugger.”
“Exactly. Let’s move.”
They worked their way down through the library, past shelves of books, digital tomes, organo-glass reading cubes and plasti-sheets. Shelves upon shelves upon shelves, millions of tomes containing billions of words, knowledge, entertainment, the history of a hundred alien species; all contained under one transparent semi-living roof and huddled amidst stone walls which harked to a distant age, long gone from the reality of physical memory.
Keenan led the way now, Knuckles and Franco following, Olga to the rear and strangely silent. Down organo-glass stairs and ramps they moved, not trusting the lift system due to flickering lights and other strange electrical occurrences. Keenan carried his Techrim 11mm, preferring its discreet bulk and short-distance killing power to the over-heavy Kekra. Franco carried both Kekra quad-barrels; they were his weapons of choice. Knuckles had his rusted machete, whereas Olga simply had her fists.
Down they moved, through silence punctuated by distant roars of the besieging foe. Occasionally, The Great Malkovitch Library shook. And, despite organo-glass ceilings, it got darker as they descended, gloomier, as if moving warily into an undersea tomb.
The first man they met, old and crooked with a shock of bright white hair above circular spectacles, simply screamed and charged away, bent back and walking stick forgotten in his eagerness to escape the perceived enemy.
“Did I say something?” said Franco.
“I think it’s more the way you look.”
“Cheers.”
They followed the stampeding octogenarian, guns still drawn, until they emerged from a broad sloping ramp onto thick red carpets and the central entrance hall. There, gathered with a variety of bristling weapons, was a group of men, not one under the age of seventy. As Combat K and their companions appeared, weapons levelled with a rattle of machine-gun alloy.
One gun slammed, and a bullet whined over Keenan’s head to embed in organo-glass with a soft plop. A large man at the centre of the group slapped another man’s weapon down, scowling. “Sorry, ND.” He poked the responsible OAP in the chest. “We only shoot the zombies, Henry, you hear me?”
“Shoot the what?”
“The zombies. TURN YOUR HEARING AID UP! YOU UNDERSTAND?” The large man mimed his instruction, but the OAP with the H&K P5 semi-automatic wasn’t listening, instead, taking a few tottering steps towards Olga... or more precisely, the huge woman’s huge breasts.
“I’m looking for Professor Xakus,” said Keenan, stepping to the fore.
“Well, you found him,” said the large man, who despite his age still had a bearing of power, of innate strength. Keenan studied him; Xakus was a touch over six feet tall, with jet-black skin and a bush of white, frizzy hair atop a cubic skull. His face was square-jawed, wrinkled with age despite the latest anti-ageing drugs flooding the market, and deep-set brown eyes studied Keenan with a glittering, bright intelligence. Keenan immediately liked the professor; he felt comfortable in the man’s presence.
“We are on a two-fold mission,” said Keenan.
“You military?”
Keenan considered lying, but dismissed the thought instantly. “Combat K. Well, me and the little ginger one, Franco. The lad is Knuckles, a local gang-lad; don’t leave your wallet lying around. And the woman is, ahh, Olga. A lady friend of Franco’s we seem to have picked up on the way.”
“I didn’t invite her,” muttered Franco.
“That’s the way it looked to me,” snapped Keenan.
Professor Xakus gestured to the group, numbering perhaps thirty and sporting the largest variety of home-knitted cardigans City-side of Quad-Gal. “Meet The Professors. We were here for a simple frag-sesh when the whole zombie fiasco escalated. As professionals, we are often entrusted with the keys to the library; all the staff had left for The Quantum Carnival. We were celebrating in our own way.”
“What’s a frag-sesh?” asked Franco.
“Gaming. Networked computers. You all connect to a game, and run around trying to kill one another in a digital representation of whatever battlefield you choose.” He smiled. “You get to blow the shit out of those you love without actually resorting to caving their head in with a crowbar. You see him over there?” Xakus pointed to a bent and crooked man, who must have been a hundred years old to the day. He sported shaved white hair, a short white goatee beard, and piercing blue eyes. He was clasping a D4 shotgun in gnarled hands the texture of old tan leather. “That’s Rembo. He’s the reigning champion on Quake Fortress, Age of Vampires and Battlefield Quad-Gal. This library had become our digital battlefield until the zombies invaded!”
“Well, it’s for real, now,” said Keenan, voice soft.
“Yes. Unfortunately. It’s one thing fighting in a digital representation; in reality, the experience is a lot more sobering.”
From outside, there came a mammoth boom. The huge, towering doors shook, along with the walls. Behind the group, books—proper, old, leather-bound paper books—rattled from shelves and clattered across the floor. Xakus clutched his hair, his frustration obvious. “They’re priceless!” he whispered.
“They’re trying to burn their way in,” said Keenan, rubbing at weary eyes. “You seem to have attracted a fair horde out there. Have you any idea what they want?”
Xakus shook his head. “I have no idea, Mr Keenan. But they’ll never burn through those doors; this library could withstand a serious blast. Its cargo is precious indeed.”
“Yet it’s not designed for war,” said Keenan.
“You are, of course, correct. I expect it’s merely a matter of time.” Xakus sighed, rubbing at his chin. His face was set in deep thought. “Quickly now, tell me who sent you, and why you seek my help. I think, soon, we will be heading for the back door. MICHELLE is waiting.”
“Steinhauer sent us. My home-world of Galhari has been overrun by a race known as junks—the organic, germ-ridden toxic shite of Quad-Gal. I retrieved one of their SinScripts; Steinhauer seems to think you can decode the information therein. Can you do this?”
“Yes. Given time, and the right equipment. I need a CryptorBox. And I cannot do it here; CryptorBox decryption requires large reserves of power. So, the junks are on the move, are they? So many researchers thought them extinct. Were there many?”
“Millions,” said Keenan, quietly.
“Ha! So it is true. Leviathan lives.”
“Leviathan?” Keenan felt his heart turn cold. Ice rippled through his veins. His soul crumbled into ash.
“The World Eater,” said Xakus, eyes distant. “The junks are his slaves. They do his bidding. The SinScript is formed in an ancient digital language, long forgotten by most of the so-called sentient beings in the Quad-Gal. Leviathan, the junks—they do not originate from this life arm. They come from somewhere else; somewhere far distant we could never imagine.”
“This is your area of study?” asked Keenan.
“What? No, no; it came as a by-product. I worked NanoTek as a biomod engineer. I worked on some of the original blueprints for the biomods in current circulation; we studied hundreds of different organic races in the initial blueprint stages of biomod design. The junks became a little bit of an obsession for me. This is why Steinhauer sent you. Why he thinks I can help.”
Keenan nodded. “This leads us to our second problem. Franco here, his wife-to-be, Mel, has been seriously affected by a biomod; it’s turned her into an eight-foot mutation.”
“Like the creatures out there?” said Xakus, eyes glittering.
“No. Different. Bigger. More dangerous. You were an engineer, yes? Can you help change her back?”
“I would need Level 1 equipment. I no longer have that kind of authority.”
Out of the corner of his eyes, Keenan saw Franco deflate.
“But if we could get you to this Level 1 equipment, you could change Melanie back?”
“Yes, theoretically. Anything is possible. But look outside, around you, Keenan. The nanobots have gone haywire; the biomods have deviated a population. It is horror made real. An abomination of science.”
“So it’s true, then?” blurted Franco. “The biomods have changed everyone into zombies?”
“On a basic level, yes,” said Xakus. His face was filled with thunder. “I warned Dr Oz. The algorithms were too loose; there was too much scope for evolution. And then the pirates, the crackers, the hackers—they stuck their fingers into the pie and turned what could have been a saviour of so many organic races into a living, breathing nightmare. Boy, Dr Oz will be pissed.”
“For causing so much death and destruction?” asked Franco.
“You’re kidding, lad, right?” Xakus boomed laughter, and slapped Franco on the back. “No, because of the bad PR it’ll cause. Think what this little incident will do to global Quad-Gal biomod sales. Would you buy one after you’d seen a zombie army rampage across an entire planet?”
“I suppose not,” muttered Franco, feeling like a naive little boy.
“Could you stop this large-scale mutation?” asked Keenan, head tilted to one side, eyes fixed on Xakus. Suddenly, a crazy plan started to form in his whirling brain—a plan which would no doubt be incredibly, awesomely, frighteningly dangerous... but which could, if it worked, put a stop to this insanity. Once and for all. “After all, you helped design the biomods.”
“Not these incarnations,” said Xakus. “But... yes, technically, I know how to shut them down.”
“You mean you can switch them off?” blurted Franco.
The professor smiled. “Nanobots are machines, Francis. Like any other machine, they can be powered down.”
“But it’s not easy, right? Or NanoTek would have pulled the plug.”
Xakus nodded. “Or maybe NanoTek have been shut down by the biomods—the zombies—themselves? Maybe the machines became self-aware; maybe the monster turned on its maker?”
“More and more questions seem to lead to NanoTek. I assume they have a HQ?”
Xakus nodded, as another boom rattled the building. Franco’s nostrils twitched as he recognised the scent of explosive; Knuckles turned, heading off to get a look at the situation outside.
“Yes. The Black Rose Citadel. A fortress island. Impregnable. Anti-aircraft. Anti-nuke. The NanoTek HQ descends beneath the island, and beneath the ocean for two or three kilometres.”
“You think the zombies have taken control?”
“A possibility,” said Xakus, licking his lips. “It is the logical source from which this flood of deviancy poured. It is there NanoTek have the GreenSource Mainframe. Without that, so I believe, the biomods would not function. NanoTek would have pulled the plug by now if they could. And the zombies outside... well, they just wouldn’t work without GreenSource.”
Keenan rubbed his temples, then turned to Franco. “Listen mate, if we can get Mel and Xakus to the NanoTek HQ, there’s a chance we can do something—not just for Melanie, but for all those poor bastards out there. Otherwise...” He shrugged. “We sit here and twiddle our thumbs.”
“I thought you were here to decode the Sin-Script?”
Keenan shook his head. “It’s all fucked up, Franco. All connected—somehow. I’m just trying to work out the puzzle; but this shit going down here in The City, the biomods, the zombie deviations— they’re linked to the junks and the invasion of Galhari.” He grimaced. “I can feel it in my fucking bones.”
Franco gestured to Keenan, and they moved away from the group. Again, a detonation rocked the Great Malkovitch Library. More books toppled from shelves. Tutting and clucking like mother hens, the aged academics started picking the tomes from the ground as if they were rare and expensive crystal.
“Listen,” said Franco, out the corner of his mouth, “he said that name. The bad one. The one we agreed never to discuss.”
Keenan nodded, eyes locked on Franco’s. “Xakus said the junks are the servants of Leviathan. But we killed it. Didn’t we? We blew the singularity chains—watched it annihilated by the black fire, then sucked into that bastard black hole.”
“We didn’t see shit,” said Franco. “Did we really understand what was going on—on that screwed-up world? Teller’s World—the devourer of millions? It was alien to us, Keenan. Truly alien.”
The two men were discussing their last, and most devastating, adventure. Keenan, tortured by the memories of his murdered wife and children, had taken a mission to locate and steal a fabled artefact called The Fractured Emerald—which could prophesise the future, but also see into the past. Keenan was promised the name of the killer who murdered his family in return. Only The Fractured Emerald turned out not to be a jewel, but instead, a woman— or at least, a female. An alien female named Emerald, from an age-old extinct race—the Kabirrim. Emerald wanted to go home, to be strong again, so that she could finally elect to die—to discover ultimate peace. Keenan, Franco and Pippa had escorted her to the dangerous and prohibited planet of Teller’s World, a barren desolate ball of soul-devouring rock. However, travelling far beneath the world, towards its core, Combat K soon discovered the world was far from conventional, and was in fact a prison-sphere holding an incarcerated being in the cage of a stabilised singularity. The alien being was Leviathan, classified a GODRACE, one of the original Five Great Creators. Only, Leviathan had gone bad, turned sour, become The Eater, The Devourer of Worlds. Unwittingly, Combat K helped Emerald to free him from his chains; only to swiftly put a spanner in the gears of the plan, detonating the prison cage—and Teller’s World in its entirety—and consigning Leviathan to a bleak and final extinction. Or so they had believed.
Now, it would seem, Leviathan’s slaves were expanding, invading, conquering. That could only be a bad thing.
“We saw him crushed in that black hole,” said Keenan.
“No. That’s what we wanted to see. Pippa pulled that illegal K Jump and we got the hell out. To see Leviathan drawn down into that place...” Franco smiled, and it was cold, twisted and angular on his face. “Well, to see that through to its finale, Keenan, we’d have to have joined him.”
“What now?” Keenan took a deep breath. “If Leviathan exists...”
“One step at a time, compadre.” Franco patted him on the back. “We’re not supermen! Well, at least you’re not. First we sort out Mel, and this SinScript. Hopefully it will tell us what we need to know about the junks. Maybe they have nothing to do with Leviathan. Maybe they fancy a bit of conquering all on their own. When we decode the SinScript, then we’ll see what threat lies beyond.”
“Yes.”
Knuckles appeared at the top of the slope leading down from the higher tiers of the library’s unconventional internal structure. “Keenan!” he shouted, voice just a little too high, tinged with panic.
“Yeah lad?”
“You’d better come and see this.”
“Is it important?”
“It’s the zombies. They’ve brought tanks.”
~ * ~
Keenan, Franco, Olga and Xakus ran after Knuckles up the ramp, which sprung softly under pounding boots. They were followed by a straggled line of limping, geriatric academics brandishing a bristling array of weaponry that would make any platoon weep with promise of wargasm.
Knuckles led, and Keenan, sprinting, soon felt the effects of too much booze, too many cigarettes, and a few years of gross physical abuse. He was tired. Exhausted. Filled with pain, and taunted by angst. As Franco would say, this gig was turning into a proper hell mission from hell!
They reached the fourth floor, and Knuckles powered ahead, out under an ornate archway with a thousand intricacies of gothic carving, across fake alloy-stone flags to a curled balcony. Outside, the flames had died down, the zombies presumably having either exhausted their fuel, or readying themselves for another stage of onslaught.
“
There.” Knuckles pointed.
Keenan reached the balcony, with Franco, Olga and Xakus. Heavy smoke filled the air, along with an acidic stench of fire. The balcony stone beneath their hands was hot. Embers glittered in the dark like fireflies. Keenan squinted.
Below, the zombie warhost stood arraigned in eerie silence. Many heads were turned, staring back across the once picturesque plaza. They started to part, shambling aside as deep, booming engines revved and a massive tank came belching from the rear, down a narrow street between towering black skyscrapers. It had a 45-degree sloping glacis leading to a flat hull top. Twin 250mm canons stared with evil, oval eyes.
