by Andy Remic
Like a bad smell, Keenan’s headache returned. A dull nagging, deep in his brain.
He smiled, a grimace of loathing. “Great. Just what I need.”
“Shh.” Xakus held up his hand. The group slowed.
“This is my gig. I’m here for Melanie!” Franco moved to the front, bristling with new weapons from his pack, although thankfully he’d ditched his TRI-SPIES because they kept attempting to strangle him. Carefully, he peered around the corner.
The corridor to Voloshko’s quarters was guarded by two Battle SIMs. Franco glanced up, then around. Did they know he was there? Was it a bluff? He chided himself. Battle SIMs didn’t bluff. They didn’t have the intelligence. Sweat niggled under his collar, a flexing maggot of fluid. Voloshko said don’t bring any weapons. Hmm. But then, what nutcase would go unarmed?
Plan. Need a plan.
Franco rummaged, pulled free a BABE Grenade, slid free the pin, and showed it to Keenan. Keenan gave a nod, patted Xakus on the arm, and they retreated down the corridor a safe distance.
Franco lay on his belly, and eased himself to the corner. The floor beneath felt like human flesh, soft and wriggling and disgustingly erotic. It was so nauseating it made Franco want to puke. Again.
Extracting a tiny digital spy mirror from his inoperative PAD, he peered round the corner. One of the Battle SIMs shifted, heavy armour creaking. Franco rolled the BABE Grenade along the floor, then waited, arms over his head.
The SIMs, too long in domestic servitude, stared sullenly at the BABE as it rolled to a halt by their feet, silent and rocking on the veg flesh floor. They looked at it. Then up. They stared at one another, heads tilted in curiosity.
“I...” began one—as the detonation picked them up and tried to rip them physically and elementally into a million pieces. A deep concussive boom roared through the corridor, and Franco sprinted through the smoke, Kekras in hands, and almost toppled into the ragged hole blasted in the semi-organic floor. He skidded, arms flapping, and was almost swallowed by ragged lips of bomb-charred flesh. He gazed down into distant darkness ringed with blood-dripping ribs. The SIMs were bellowing and punching at one another as they fell, arguing, voices hollow and fading, fists like whirring spades. Bullets whined from combat carbines, panic tracer carving distant lines. Franco grinned to himself... he’d expected to have to finish them off with head shots. He hadn’t anticipated the grenade eating the soft floor. He chided himself, aware he was supposed to be an expert in detonations.
“Do come in. I have been expecting you.”
Franco’s head slammed up, focused on... Voloshko. The man stood, wearing an immaculate crushed-coral suit. It was pink, and shimmered. His hair and beard were neatly trimmed, eyes dark in sunken sockets. Despite his appearance and obvious wealth, he appeared a little... tortured?
“Where’s Melanie?”
“Ah, straight to the point.”
Franco’s Kekra came up, quad barrels trained on Voloshko’s face. Voloshko did not flinch... and that made Franco wary. He edged forward, around the grenade hole, and into Voloshko’s... apartment? Franco shook his head, eyeing the moody interior, the drapes of helk-fur tapestry, the metal weave floor.
Voloshko gestured to a wide black couch. “Would you like to sit? We need to talk.”
“There’s nothing to discuss. You took Melanie. You killed those children. I want Melanie back. Or you will die.”
Voloshko smiled, but it was a movement with his mouth and not his eyes. When he spoke, his voice had changed. It was level, monotone, like a machine. “I don’t think you quite understand your predicament, Franco Haggis.” He moved, and seated himself. He picked up a drink. Ice cubes chimed. “Now let me explain.”
There was a boom, and bullets ate the leather three inches beside Voloshko’s head. Franco strode forward, face a snarl, and he halted gazing down at the Minister for The Hammer Syndicate.
“No, let me fucking explain it to you. This is the way it works. You’re not fucking immortal, and you have no biomods in your blood because if you did then you’d be a deviant mess of organics, like all our friends out there on the streets. So you’re human. And you die as easily as any other sack of flesh shit. You’re acting cool because you think you invited me here, but you expected me to roll up like a good doggie wagging its tail, but no, I came in the, uh, arse way. You weren’t expecting that. That’s why you’ve got Battle SIMs running around like headless chickens. Stop trying to play the cool fucker and tell me what you’ve done with Melanie! Before I really lose my temper and start a little Voloshko Cellar of my own.”
Voloshko licked his lips.
Franco’s Kekra boomed again, and this time blood appeared on Voloshko’s ear. A nick. A warning. A droplet oozed free, and dripped onto the shoulder of the pink coral suit. Ice cubes danced in Voloshko’s glass.
“Next time,” said Franco, “my aim might not be quite so true. I’m a little bit,” he twitched, “tetchy.”
“She’s not here.”
“Where is she?”
“NanoTek took her.”
“What did NanoTek want with her?”
Voloshko smiled. “You’d have to ask them.”
“You’re lying?”
“Why? You’re the Big Man with the gun.”
“You’re a bastard.”
“I never claimed to be anything other.”
Franco roared, and slammed a right hook that sent Voloshko reeling to the couch, blood spraying from smashed lips. Franco lifted his Kekra and fired ten shots off into the ceiling... then froze.
Blood rained down.
“Don’t move,” said Keenan, voice impossibly soft.
Franco licked his lips, and stared down at Voloshko. “What’s your secret weapon, scumbag? You’re way too cool.”
Voloshko glanced up with his eyes, then eased himself back into a sitting position. He produced a white handkerchief and dabbed at his bleeding lips.
“Franco. I repeat, don’t move. Don’t look up. Just don’t damn well move.” Keenan was standing by the entrance to the Floor 698 apartment. Franco could hear, and sense, his tension.
“So,” said Voloshko, and stood. He lifted the Kekra from Franco’s hand and weighed the weapon thoughtfully. “You are, indeed, correct. A man such as I doesn’t simply employ stupid Battle SIMs to charge up and down corridors. Things at The Hammer Syndicate are, shall we say, a little more sophisticated. You may now look up.”
Franco looked up. His heart sank.
The high, dark ceiling—in its entirety—was filled with needle thin elements, spear-long, and glinting with nasty black sparks. As Franco watched, several of them curled back into recesses, and other long needle-thin lengths uncurled and wavered, then became rigid. Franco took a step one way. A hundred of the needles followed him, swaying slightly, as if caught by magnetic attraction... before becoming rigid again.
Voloshko moved in close to Franco. “It’s alive,” he whispered in Franco’s ear. “AI. Sentient. You can forget The Tangled, forget biowire, forget sharp-wire and veinthreads and ticklestrands. Above you lies the evolution of a technologically advanced synthetically living killer; it has intelligence far outweighing humanity, has no empathy or emotion, is loyal only to its master, and has a single one-core function. To kill. We call it a skein, but some of our tech comedians refer to each strand as a Spear of Destiny. Haha. They will have their little jokes. I, however, have absolutely no sense of humour.”
“What do you want?”
“Want? Well, I know you are Combat K, Franco. I knew it when you worked the streets for me, all those long detached weeks ago. I knew it when you took out my men, the retards Keg and Tag. I’ve been watching you for a long time, Franco. Yes. Waiting.” He circled Franco, still dabbing at his lips. “And I admit to being aggrieved when you helped that bastard Slick escape; and I was aggrieved when you evaded capture for so long. But, ultimately, it was a plan that worked out for the best. Didn’t it?” He smiled. His dark eyes shone.
�
�Waiting for what?” said Franco.
“You were the bait, little man.” Voloshko lifted his head. His gleaming eyes fixed on Keenan. “I needed you, and Mel, the whole thing, in order to reel in Mr Z. Keenan here. I feel that me and Keenan have some unfinished business.”
“We do?” Keenan stepped forward, leaving Xakus in the corridor. Xakus, ashen, backed away; vanished like a ghost.
Keenan glanced up, watching the skeins of toxic wire waver and solidify, waver and solidify, as if in never-ending cycle, like metal hairs in a breeze. Taking a deep breath, he strode to stand before Voloshko, hands resting light on his weapon. “I do not know you.”
“But I know you,” hissed the Minister of The Hammer Syndicate. He reached up to his face, took a hold of the skin, and peeled it up and back with a sudden violent wrench. What stared at the two men now was quite clearly not human. The head was small, circular, a tiny sphere of some black metallic substance... almost robotic, but not quite. It was organic. A synthetic machine built from odd old flesh. Eyes wavered on stalks, clusters containing millions of tiny black globes above a slit for a mouth. The slit smiled, and Keenan saw perfect little cubic teeth.
Keenan allowed a breath to leave his body. His eyes flickered to Franco... and he knew Franco was ready. For the battle that must surely follow...
“Yes,” said Voloshko, voice husky without his ersatz human voicebox, clusters of eyes glistening and altering in size—some shrinking, some enlarging—in a rhythmical pulsation. “I am Seed Hunter. Like my brother, the man you murdered on Teller’s World. The man you knew as Mr Max.”
“I did not murder him.” Keenan’s voice was quiet. His head lowered. His eyes subdued.
“You—” Voloshko’s head snapped right, to Franco, “both of you, you killed Mr Max as surely as putting a gun to his nerve-cluster. And now you will die. A horrible, long, painful death. It will take weeks. The skeins have been programmed, and we’ve been waiting for you.”
He stepped back, a sudden movement. From the ceiling flashed a hundred skeins, needle thin wires which pierced Keenan and Franco, entering their flesh in a hundred separate places and worming under skin, into muscle, into faces and arms and legs and torsos...
Both men dropped to their knees, screaming, clawing at their faces, the air around them hazy with fluttering organic wire like strands of silk, synthetic killing skeins. Franco howled as wires wormed into and under his cheeks and stood out against skin like thick black veins, a web-mask on his flesh as the skeins burrowed inwards, sank deep towards his brain...
Franco toppled over, rolled to his side, vibrating in a spastic fit, caught in the throes of a slow and agonising death.
Keenan gritted his teeth, forced his head up, black wire writhing under his skin, in his cheeks, his nose, inside his eyes, wriggling stark against his cornea like microscopic worms. He glared at Voloshko, teeth entwined with black skeins, his tongue riddled with the poisonous killing wire and he spat at the Seed Hunter—
“Go—to—hell,” he snarled, growling, hands clasping at the agony in his skull.
Voloshko smiled with his tiny mouth. “On the contrary. That’s your religious belief, not mine. Enjoy the experience, Mr Keenan. And Mr Haggis? I have to say, it’s been a pleasure.”
Voloshko turned, and strode from the room.
~ * ~
CHAPTER 13
WIRED & WEIRD
The City had once been a normal planet. It had equator, oceans, desert, arctic regions; and a gravity near-similar to Old Earth. 1.1 OEG. However, over millennia a thousand different species had built a billion different buildings, towers and skyscrapers and cubeblocks, all vying for life and light and towering over every and any expanse of the world which would take foundation. Then, a planetary engineer had the bright idea of utilising those areas not traditionally utilised; first to be decimated by the hand of the architect were the deserts—kilometre-deep foundations forced beneath the sand, huge areas fused into glass by controlled thermonuclear direction, sand dunes skimmed and buildings speedily erected. The seas fell next, pontoon support struts housing floating fifty lane freeways above roaring surf, with floating rig-decks acting as huge cubic boots for towering concrete and alloy and emerald structures. Finally, it had been the arctic which succumbed to planetary usurpation. Ice and snow were tamed. Icebergs used as flotation chambers. Skyscraper domes erected against freezing hailstorms.
Predictably, this planetary molestation caused havoc with the natural ecology. Species were rendered extinct in months. Natural resources could not fulfil the building quota, the geological shopping list, and so trillions of tonnes of raw materials were dragged low-grav down-side on MeshCables by orbiting freighters, and pummel-dropped into anti-grav clusters surface-side. This, combined with a realigning of the planet’s natural ecology, in short, screwed up The City’s weather.
Floods, heat waves, snowstorms, hurricanes, tornadoes, tsunamis, earthquakes, volcanoes... all accelerated in event and violence, which caused untold damage and, more importantly, loss of revenue. A reduction in the credit column. And so, over the next twelve years a system of climate control was gradually and experimentally dragged into place. Two hundred and fifty huge, orbiting WCS blocks monitored the planet’s ecosystems, and were capable via skystreams of injected aeromatter of altering any advancing weather patterns that cost-programmed hardwired AI controllers could predict. Which meant, overnight, threats to The City’s stable economy and accelerating growth were killed dead. Like a miracle, like a god, The City controlled its own climate.
Which is a great state of affairs when sensible machines rule the roost. However, currently, twenty-five AI controllers lay crumpled, broken and dead, on the WCS Control Centre’s nicely panelled marble floor.
And sitting at the controls, pus and drool spooling from green necrotic lips, eyes shining with a strange and curious intelligence, the zombies had taken their place. They had rotting, flapping boots on the desk. And were eating brains on toast.
~ * ~
Thick black snow fell on the city. It was getting thicker as the climate grew colder, and colder, and colder. Ice settled on mammoth buildings, icicles lining high summits like evil, glistening teeth. Globally, liquids froze, and the colder it got, the more functional the zombies became. As if whatever controlled them needed the cold.
High up in the atmosphere, there came a hiss as something slammed north.
There came another... another... then thousands more as tiny black PopBots smashed through the snow in a neat, flowing formation which undulated around buildings and aircraft, weaved through the atmosphere, and targeted a very specific single location:
#proximity series15OOO
#speed 275 altitude 2370 beginning descent
#updated instructions received
#integrated/ received/ understood co-ordinates loading............
#uploaded all data structures OK
#attack sequence initiated
With a silent, flowing hiss, six thousand detonation PopBots dropped like ice from the sky, and locked unerringly to their target.
~ * ~
With shaking, wire-squirming hands Keenan lifted his Techrim, sighted, and as Voloshko exited the chamber, turning right, so Keenan started firing, the gun booming in his hands as he tracked across the organic vegetable wall. On bursts of fire, bullets howled across the chamber, punching fist-sized holes through the interior. With wire squirming in his face, Keenan kept on firing, shot after shot after shot, and he staggered to his feet as Voloshko reappeared, his fake human flesh ragged and scorched and holed and his tiny Seed Hunter’s head lowered, globe-eyes fixed on Keenan with... annoyance.
“Why can’t you just die in peace?” Voloshko growled... and charged—as a detonation rocked the tower. The walls shook, flapping like quivering, impacted slabs of flesh. From somewhere, cold air flooded the chamber in a downdraught dump. It smelt of ice.
Voloshko skidded to a halt as Keenan toppled over, foetal, his Techrim thumping across the
floor. His eyes were closed, breathing laboured as the wires closed on his heart and started to squeeze tight in a fist of AI metal...
Voloshko’s head lifted, turned, eye-clusters fluctuating as his senses screamed warnings... and understanding flooded him as the detonation PopBots began to slam the tower. Explosions howled like machine gun fire. Huge ragged tears appeared in the walls. The quivering organotower seemed to pause... in suspended shock... then scream in a silent wail of tortured despair.
“No!” snarled Voloshko. He sprinted to the gaping, ragged maw, stopping at the edge and gazing out and down over six hundred and ninety-eight floors. Thick snow fell. He blinked away ice from his cluster-globes. And saw them, more detonation drones, undulating towards him in a vast, awe-inspiring wave—
