The new beastie was impressively fast, I’ll give the Urban Gorgon designers that. Not every pedestrian was quick enough to get out of the way. People panicked. There was a big surge along the road, which turned to a stampede. Some tripped. If one of those massive claw hoofs stomped down on top of them, there weren’t pieces to pick up afterwards, just a gooey puddle for the coroner to pour into a body bag.
Had anyone thought to ask me, I could have told them Simon really wasn’t the man for the job. He got excitable and way too angry in the arena, and with that much simulation and carnage pumping into his brain, the turmoil got to him. He missed the truck with its open ramp. The crime family had some fabulously complex shell game variant planned to spirit the detachable storage pouch away in the middle of all the chaos. But now Simon found himself headbutting the side of the truck, ripping the rear apart before careering past with no plan B. He kept on going.
In the end, the casualty count from his getaway run was so high the police commander gave the order to open fire anyway. Two and a half tons of bitek travelling at that speed doesn’t stop as soon as it’s dead, there was still a crapload of inertia to contend with. The mother didn’t make it; seriously good paramedics managed to save the kid.
Beastie baiting ended that night. The cops shut down every arena, and started hunting down the teams.
THE GUARDS SLAPPED a pair of rigid metalloceramic manacles round my wrists, and jerked me up to my feet. A brief pause while they consulted whoever was in charge through their secure comms.
“Subject is restrained, sir.”
—
“Er, there is nothing to search, she’s naked.”
—
“Yes, sir, naked.”
—
“I don’t know. She just came out of the lift.”
—
“Yes, sir.”
One of them deigned to glare at me. “This way. You even smell bad and I shoot you. Understand?”
“Sure,” I told him.
“How the fuck did you get in?”
“You’re security, you tell me.”
A fist punched me between my shoulder blades, and I stumbled forward, almost falling. “Bitch. We’ll get it out of you. Without your big friend, you ain’t so tough now.”
I managed to restrain myself. Just. I was cold turkey. Had been for twenty-one months since Arsehole Simon and the Moron Gorgons blew it for everyone. Temptation is my daemon. I was more alive in the arena than at any other time in my life. You’re never really cured of an addiction so strong it gives you a reason for living. My grandfather told me about the old chemo treatments for cancer, they didn’t actually cure the disease, you just go into remission. If you’re lucky, remission lasts for the rest of your life. I had the determination to stay cold turkey. Hello, my name is Sonnie, and I haven’t attacked anyone for twenty months. Cue applause and envious sympathy from the other baiters who lost our world.
But without baiting, I was nothing. Being a beastie fighter qualifies you for exactly shit in the real world; and anyway, by then my body was in seriously bad shape. I was dying. Again. Second time, for fuck’s sake.
First time was an accident. I was wasted when I was driving our van, and got busted up so bad in the crash Jacob and Karran had to plumb me into the haematology pillars and nutrient filters we used to sustain our beastie. Even that was touch and go, my spine was all screwed up, along with major damage to my lungs and kidneys, so they took extreme measures and transplanted my brain into Khanivore—the ultimate intensive care module. That’s when we figured it: the edge. Fighters are committed, sure, they want to win, but they have no real stake in a baiting bout. But put me into a beastie and every time I am literally fighting for my life. We came up with a cover story to divert people from how come I was so fucking good—that I’d been snatched by an estate gang, which also explained all the scars left over from when Jacob and Karran slowly patched me up. People believed it, because they saw a beat-up girl who unleashed her psychotic anger in the arena. It played into every deep prejudice in their sweet little bigot brains. They wanted to believe that I was traumatised and full of hate, because that made their world view the right one.
But greed stalks every promoted contest. Probably started when the first gladiator stepped out onto the floor of Rome’s Colosseum. Some little prick called Dicko who ran an arena in Battersea wanted me to take a dive in the bout against the Urban Gorgons, offered me a fortune for it. But of course I couldn’t. I lose, I die. Refusing pissed him off no end, so much he sent an enforcer to deal with me after the bout. She was called Jennifer, a sweet-looking thing with a really convincing fallen angel sob story. I was dumb and horny—yeah, okay, hands up, I fell for it. Her assassin talon implants stabbed me through the jaw, cutting through my jugular as they went up into where my brain was supposed to be. That was when she found out the hard way I truly was Khanivore. I had to take out Dicko himself after that, just to cover our tracks. That’s when the rumours started.
Sonnie’s Predators got out of Battersea fast, but this time my body had bled out before Jacob and Karran could start plugging it into life support. They resuscitated me anyway, and patched up the damage as best they could. But by then my organs were in a bad way, and heading for total shutdown. Wes put a new womb tank together, so my body and Khanivore lay there side by side in our truck, nursed by machines as we travelled to our next few bouts. They only took both of us out for the fights themselves, my body on show as much as Khanivore was.
That lasted for another four bouts. Then Covent Garden happened.
I was fucked.
“We’ll pool all our money,” Wes said earnestly. “Get you into a top-rated clinic, they can clone replacement organs.”
I was watching them through a camera networked to a bioprocessor, in turn affinity-bonded to my brain. Everything about me was cobbled together now, extreme measures and makeshift systems made compatible only by the genius and flair of my friends. I’d resigned myself to the inevitable by then. They’d made a grand effort, and I’d do the same for them if I had any talent other than fighting. We’d had a good run.
Karran couldn’t meet his gaze. She shook her head slowly. I felt more sorry for Wes than I did for me; he and I had a thing going... before.
“But—”
“The damage is too much,” Jacob said. “It’s only the support machines that are keeping her body alive now, all the major organs are failing.”
“Then we replace them. For Christ’s sake, we build beasties. A human should be easy.”
“Come on, Wes. You know beasties don’t have internal organs. They’re just bitek muscle hung over a carbon skeleton, and the tank’s ancillary haematology modules provide their blood. They can’t survive for more than a couple of hours on their own. Cloning human organs is specialist and expensive, and she’s going to need a lot. Even if we could afford it, I’ve not heard of a complete rebuild case.”
“There must be something you can do? Design some smaller haematology modules, mobile ones. I’ll build them!”
“Oxygenated blood can sustain the brain, but the human body is fantastically complex, our organs function in synergy,” Karran explained gently. “We still don’t know much about autonomic regulation. And nerve grafts are crude at best. That’s why affinity was such a gift for controlling bitek limb prosthetics—” she stopped abruptly, and gave Jacob a curious look.
Like I said. They were the smart ones of the team. With their ability and brainpower, they could easily have gone the corporate research route with unlimited funds. Instead, they were lured away by the dark excitement of the arena. Big part of the reason I joined up with them, that fuck-the-world exhilaration of being free to do what you want to do.
Ivriana and Wes did the most honourable thing. I don’t know if my worthless zombie body could cry in the tank, but I’m pretty sure it did. They handed over their money and left.
Ivriana landed fine; as it has been through history, hospitals were desperate f
or licenced nurses, and the agency she signed up to quietly overlooked the employment gap on her CV. Same went for Wes, with his knowledge and experience of systems engineering he joined the Jovian Sky Power Company, and went offworld. Last I heard he was living the dream out at Jupiter, mining helium3 from its atmosphere to power Earth’s fusion generators.
Jacob and Karran formed a start-up called Orgenesis. We rented an industrial unit out in Acton, just under the rim of the central north dome. There were two floors; the basement storage hall, where they installed the tanks for Khanivore and my necrotic body; the first floor was the clean lab, along with a couple of offices where they put a mattress on the floor, and used a microwave to cook their meals.
The best replacement organs are cloned using the patient’s own stem cells. They worked well, but the process was expensive and took time. Second best was bitek, which was still in the early stages, and even more expensive.
Karran’s idea was to use existing organisms and modify them—simpler, quicker, and cheaper than sequencing bitek from scratch. You just needed the right organism. At a fundamental biomechanical level, what’s the difference between an intestine and a snake? Both are living tubes that ingest food at one end and extract nutrients from it as it passes through. A snake has more muscle and a brain and teeth—so get rid of them and the difference becomes even smaller. The most efficient lungs on the planet? A dolphin’s. It’s a mammal, it has to breathe in and pull extraordinary amounts of oxygen from the air so it can swim underwater without needing to take a breath for another ten minutes. Now those are lungs worth having.
Twenty months later and Karran had identified the traits they wanted from a menagerie of options. Jacob designed eggs with yokes of stem cells which incubated the modified embryos without all the artificial tanks and ancillary equipment that clones needed.
Phase one was reducing each chosen animal to the basic essential, genetically peeling away every physiological function except the one we wanted. The resulting first batch of organisms were crude, but they worked. Time and a lot more money would see them refined down to something that could be brought to market. But we had a solid concept.
Orgenesis wasn’t just going to resurrect my body, it was going to earn us a fortune. Investment fund managers were discreetly invited to review a prospectus. That microwave in the office was used less and less as Karran and Jacob got taken out to fancy restaurants.
A contract was drawn up. Two days before we were due to sign, they came for us.
I guessed they knew about me and Khanivore. As soon as they cut the power, five armoured figures stormed the basement. I rode Khanivore out of its tank. How my fans would have loved that: the beastie’s last valiant stand. I knew it was hopeless, but fuck did I go for it.
Khanivore was still magnificent. Three metres tall standing on two tyrannosaurus-styled legs, a deviant’s-dream prehensile tail that ended in four serrated bonemetal blades, polished black head narrowing to a shark-snout with added razor fins. That terrible body clad in a segmented exoskeleton, allowing me an amazing degree of agility, and to which, for the last three fights, we’d added pores that sweated oil which made wrestle-grappling me near-impossible.
The intrusion team was armed with carbines. I was faster than they were expecting, though. With bullets blitzing their way through my exoskeleton, I leapt before the tank had finished draining. No time for finesse. I just landed smack on top of the nearest attacker. His armour wasn’t built to withstand an impact from two-thirds of a ton of beastie. My claws punctured his suit, and I clenched them as I felt his rib cage collapse.
The remaining four were firing continuously now, shredding my internal blood bladders and multiple heart pumps. Graphics overloaded my vision with red symbols. But the intrusion team were pumped on adrenaline and fury, and kept walking forward as they blasted away. I switched my leg impulses from Khanivore’s legs to the bioprocessor running its tail, and swung. Fast as a whip, with the mass of a cargo ship’s anchor chain. It hit one of them dead centre. I didn’t bother with trying to spear him with the tip, relying on inertia. He flew in a shallow arc across the room and thudded against the concrete wall. As bullets smashed into my eyes, I saw his suit was already ripped open, a ribbon of guts spilling out as he tumbled to the ground.
I lifted my head to roar, maybe take a swipe at the three remaining dickheads—I still had sonar ranging. A grenade went off in Khanivore’s back. I lost control of the torso’s internal systems. Blinded and crippled, blood gushing out of every wound—the affinity bond failed as the spinal bioprocessor was hit by another barrage of bullets. Even without the bond I could feel my beautiful Khanivore fall, limbs splayed wide, head smacking onto the floor, a final defiant battle cry fading.
The surviving trio of intruders walked up to the corpse nervously. They took a few more shots at its head to finish off my brain. After watching to make sure the beastie and I were truly dead, they closed in on the second tank, the one we’d used to keep my body alive after my encounter with Jennifer. Too late. It was empty.
I waited until the next day before I went upstairs. The lab had been turned over by experts. All Jacob’s clever stemeggs had gone, every datacore stripped of Karran’s research data. Jacob and Karran themselves were lying on the mattress. They’d fallen together, shot in the temple, professional execution style.
THE DOUBLE DOORS to Alastair’s penthouse swung back, and I was shoved inside by my heroic captors. The place was a huge open-plan living area, with big fat leather couches, and amazing fresh-from-the-jungle orchids in pots. Expensive tasteless art on the walls and dumb conceptual sculptures posed on antique Japanese cabinets. Its window wall looked south over the eerily tranquil borough. Beyond that was the huge curving geodesic cliff of the dome. Night and the first swirls of thick cloud battering against it produced the kind of black wall which must border the end of the universe.
Alastair stood in front of it, silhouetted by the vivid aurora crown of the empty street grid. I’d seen him a few times at baiting fights, always in the private galleries where promoters and their flash guests drank their expensive drinks and watched the gore fly. He’s the connection in this town, the point where the dark money and the legit merge. A man in late middle age, with a rounded face and gold-framed glasses whose lenses were full of market data. He wore an immaculately cut purple silk suit, and carried a small gun in his right hand.
“Sonnie,” he said. “Nice of you to visit.”
His voice had a soothing Welsh lilt that really didn’t belong to an outright bastard like that.
“I assume it is actually you?” he carried on. “That you’re not affinity-riding that body? After all, you don’t have Khanivore to hide in any more, do you?”
“You know about that?”
“Yes. Dicko was small time, but still not someone you cross. Yet he vanished along with his enforcer right after you turned down his offer to lose the fight. We started to ask questions then. Once we had enough answers, it wasn’t hard to figure out what was happening, how you came by your edge.”
“Smart. Yeah, this is me. For real.”
“And how did you get up here? This tower is highly secure. Someone on my team must have helped you.”
“Nah, did it meself; crawled along the air duct, just like all them spies and secret agents do in streaming shows.”
“No, you didn’t, the ducts are too small precisely to stop that kind of foolishness.” He smiled as if genuinely amused, then shot me. The bullet struck me at the bottom of my right tit. It wasn’t a big calibre. Didn’t punch through, or explode or anything. Just knocked me off my feet to sprawl on my arse. Blood began to trickle out. I tried to slap my hand over the wound, but those handcuffs made it difficult.
Alastair waved the guards away and walked over. He stared down at me like I was something unpleasant he’d just trodden on. “Alpha-five.” Right. Big surprise he’d have some of that. It was a neurotoxin that was gaining popularity in the nastier parts of the underworld th
ese days.
I gasped, wincing. Blood from the bullet hole was trickling over my fingers now. I tightened my grip.
“I can see you know of it. Alpha-five infects the synapses and slowly turns every nerve impulses into raw pain. Light, temperature, touch, even sound. All are amplified. There is no cure, there is no end. Soon even the sound of your own voice will be agony. And the things I can do with a feather will break your mind. But I won’t be using a feather, now will I? We both know that. The only thing that will end your torment now is death. And as those restraints won’t allow you to kill yourself, I’m the one who will deliver that mercy. I will be happy to do so, just as soon as you tell me what I want to know.”
“Go fuck yourself.”
“Yes yes. So, did you come here to kill me?”
“I can’t do anything else.”
“You could. You could have walked away.”
“No, you don’t understand. Jacob and Karran were the only friends I had left.”
“And you want vengeance? I do understand.”
“No, you don’t. This is what I am.”
“An assassin?”
“No. Seriously fucked up, that’s me. More than you’ll ever know.”
The smallest frown creased his forehead.
“I can explain,” I said. “My grandad told me a story once. I didn’t get it when I was a kid, but I do now.”
“I hope for your sake it’s a short story. Because there are several questions you are going to have to answer tonight.”
“He fought in one of the Gulf Wars, whatever they were.”
“I know about the Gulf Wars,” Alastair sighed. “Some of us had an education.”
“Yeah? Well, his side won. They beat some mad dictator, and grandad was assigned to guard this psycho’s palace in the capital. Turns out there was a pit in the basement. There were lions in it.”
“Lions? The animals?”
“Yeah. Grandpa and his squad didn’t know what to do about that. His captain didn’t know, either. So it got bumped up the chain of command fast. Top brass flew in a big cat expert to take a look. They were thinking the army could take the lions back to Africa and release them into the wild, or maybe just give them to a zoo where they’d be cared for. Either way it would be good PR. Anyway, this expert arrives and takes a look at the lions. When he comes out, he tells grandpa straight up to shoot them.”
Made to Order Page 17
