What we didn’t have was a building schematic.
Coming in blind wasn’t ideal. Actually, it was a long way from ideal.
“Where are we going?”
“Up,” Fate said. “The lab we’re after is above the cryogenics section. The place is divided into three sections, mind, body and—”
“Soul,” I interrupted. He didn’t laugh.
“—machine. A lot of the stuff they’re working on here is A.I. related, implementing what they discover in the mind labs up on the machine floors, looking for the perfect hybrid.”
“So, this chip we’re after is up on the mind floors somewhere?”
“There, or if we’re unlucky, it’s already in the vaults.” Fate said.
“This really hasn’t been thought through, has it?”
“Let’s just get moving, we can argue about everything later.”
We backed out of the control room. As I crossed the threshold an alarm tripped, a red warning light strobing gave the air an iron-like quality. At first, I thought I’d set the alarm off somehow, but then Swann punched a couple of buttons on the keypad, and it stopped. “Our friend was late venting one of the regulators. One of the compressors overheated. Everything’s fine now.”
“Apart from the fact he won’t be able to vent them later, either,” I said.
“We’ll be long gone by then,” Fate assured me.
I didn’t share his confidence.
Swann took the security pass from the dead techie’s white coat and used it to open the blast doors. We followed him through, Fate being the last one out. Our running footsteps echoed loudly through the complex. We were confronted by a series of rising ramps that doubled back on themselves in an angular spiral, and on each platform, another set of blast doors promised access to the secrets of Akachi Corp and the Dark Continent. Some of the walls had bio scanners recessed into them, others optical ones. “We’re not going to get through any of these doors without the right kind of security clearance,” I said.
“I’ve got it covered,” Fate promised, but I’d seen nothing to suggest he had.
I looked up the wide spiral of steel ramps. There was a glass ceiling dome at the top, maybe two hundred feet above my head. There were probably twenty or thirty more floors between where we were and where we almost certainly needed to be, and it didn’t take a genius to realize that the security measures were going to tighten the higher we climbed.
I saw a couple of white coats walk across one of the platforms a couple of stories above.
They didn’t see us, but it served as a reminder that we weren’t alone in here, and we stuck out like a sore thumb. Anyone seeing us would know immediately we weren’t meant to be there and would trip the alarm.
“You know what to do,” Fate said to Swann. They’d obviously planned this. Swann clambered up onto the guardrail and sprung, the exospine propelling him up to the platform where the white coats were in the process of using the retina scanner to open the blast doors to the labs. He rushed up behind them, bringing the arc burner to bear, one savage thrust into the base of the spine and twist, severing the vertebrae and leaving the poor bastard gagging for a breath he couldn’t take. The second white coat started to scream, but the scorching blade took out his vocal cords on the back-hand.
It never ceased to amaze me what the exospine was capable of—it transformed a cripple into one of the most prodigious killing machines I’d ever encountered.
I hadn’t expected what happened next.
Swann crouched over the two men, and using the blade opened their skulls beneath the eye socket to fish the orbs out.
He waited for us to catch up.
“Now we’ve got clearance,” Fate said, taking the eyes off his man.
I don’t exactly have a sensitive stomach, but I wanted to throw up.
We continued up to the mind labs.
When he reached the blast doors, Fate held first one eye then the other up to the optical scanners and waited. The display panel went from red to green, and the doors opened.
“Party time,” he said.
It was supposed to be in and out. The in, which should have been the tough part, proved to be surprisingly easy. That should have been a clue. It should have set all sorts of alarm bells ringing. The only reason it didn’t was that I was so angry at Fate. Akachi had opened themselves up to us. It was as if they’d known we were coming.
Which of course they did.
That was why we didn’t see more techs wandering about as we climbed up through the floors of the facility, and why we’d not triggered any of their defenses on the way in. I should have known that the whole cloaking puck trick was dumb and couldn’t have worked. I’m sure they’d had eyes on us from the moment we bailed out of the Anaconda, and certainly when we were on the ground. They owned this place lock, stock, and stinky shanty. There’s no way they’d just let us get this far if they hadn’t got a plan to make sure we didn’t walk out of there with that chip they’d no doubt invested billions in developing. I’m not stupid, sometimes I’m just a little slow.
I don’t know what I’d been expecting from the lab, stacks of Petri dishes and burners maybe, but this wasn’t it. The room was filled with robot arms turning and twisting as they went about the mechanized tasks of experimentation, opposable thumbs grasping the precious components as they lifted, rotated, and repositioned themselves. I couldn’t see how they were being controlled, or where from, but they didn’t stop what they were doing as we entered. There were a dozen stations, each of them mechanized, each assembling some separate component that would come together in a single whole.
They weren’t what drew my eye. Along the wall was a dozen heavily armored men standing motionless.
Not men, I realized. They were the husks of biomechs, cyborgs if you like, androids if you’re lazy. They were powered down. That didn’t matter. Their presence was enough to have my heart in my throat, like it was trying to escape from inside. The biomechs were huge. They were easily seven, eight feet tall. Some sort of idealized überman. I never trusted machines. Ever. I walked across to the nearest and prodded it in the chest, hard. It didn’t react.
“I thought this was supposed to be the mind lab?”
“You saw the signs,” Fate said, but he sounded a little less certain.
“Signs can be changed,” I said, looking around the rest of the room.
It wasn’t right. This looked more like an armory than a laboratory.
Martagan didn’t seem any happier than I was. She was staring at one of the robotic arms as it swiveled and pivoted and slammed two pieces of biomech tech together, fusing them. “They’re building transhumans in here,” she said.
I was about to contradict her and say androids when I saw the bank of glass cabinets at the far side of the room. I approached them, drawn by what was inside. Maybe this was the mind lab, but not in any way I’d expected. Inside bubbling vats of preservative were an array of brains severed from their stems, waiting to be transplanted into the artificial bodies being fashioned for them.
I rested my hand against the glass.
The others started rifling the room in search of the chip. I had no idea how it would work, some sort of interface in the base of the skull, maybe, so people could plug in, tune in and drop out.
Behind them, the robot arms carried on building, servos, valves, transistors, resistors and synthetic skin to wrap them in. Lisl Martagan was right: the machines were building a man, I realized, watching him come together in the reflection of the glass case.
It was a faster process than I could ever have imagined.
I turned away from the display case.
“It’s a trap,” I told Fate.
He shook his head. “No one knows we are here. Don’t get your knickers in a twist.”
“They were expecting us,” I argued, stubbornly.
He looked up to see the final pieces slot and lock together and hear the huge electrical surge that was the machine’s way of declarin
g let there be life. The biomech’s eyes lit, and its jaw came up, jutting out aggressively. It towered over each of us. Around the room the other sentries woke one by one, lifting their right hands as if to make a vow, the joints pivoting and swiveling as the biomechs tested their fingers, running through some sort of start-up routine. We needed to move fast, before all of their systems came online.
The doors closed behind us, locking us in the lab with the biomech warriors.
“This can’t be good,” Martagan said, ever one for the understatement.
She wasn’t wrong.
I’m all for getting stuck into a fair fight. I even enjoy an unfair one most of the time. But being locked in a small room with thirteen biomech warriors coming online at the same time didn’t seem like a lot of fun. At least not for us. The biomechs were no doubt going to have the time of their lives.
Swann went for it, hurling himself across the room to hit the last one of them—the one blocking our way out—head on. The biomech didn’t flinch, wobble, stagger or betray any sort of human weakness as it back-handed him away. The sound of metal on bone was sickening. His head went back. I saw the light inside his eyes go out as the incredible force of the blow lifted Swann five feet into the air and hurled him bodily into the glass display cases. The glass shattered on impact, raining bloody shards down on the fallen man. He lay there for a moment, unmoving, then slowly brought his head up, dazed, and struggled to rise. From where I was, I could see that several of the centipede legs of his exospine had been dislodged in the fall.
Swann couldn’t control his legs.
It was time for us to start doing what we did best: bleed.
Martagan was the first to react.
She whipped her hand back and under-armed a knife, sending it end over end through the air to lodge in one of the biomech’s optical sensors. It was a good thought; the thing had a real brain back there. The blade sank deep into metal-plated skull but didn’t slow the cyborg down for a second.
It came toward us.
“What the hell have you got us into?” I yelled at Fate, but he was already engaged, fighting for his life with two of the biomechs that had closed in on him.
Thirteen seemingly indestructible warriors against the four of us.
Perfect.
Martagan ran toward one of the dangling robotic arms and launched herself up to gain height as she grabbed it. Her momentum swung it back, bringing her closer to the wall. She was running even as she hit it, her feet taking three quick steps along the wall before she pushed off and let go of the spinning arm. She hit the biomech full on.
The machine rocked back under the impact but didn’t fall.
She had never intended on knocking it over.
It was all about getting close before it got its defenses online.
She slapped a magnetic proximity mine in the middle of the cyborg’s chest and triggered it with a shove onto the pressure plate as it attached.
We had five seconds until it blew.
An eternity and no time at all.
We scrambled for cover as an arc of fierce blue energy rippled out from the center of the proximity mine, arcing toward the glass cabinets. The way these things work is you slam them down on the ground and the beam arcs up to the ceiling—if a droid breaks the beam, curtains. Martagan was about ten steps ahead of us, thought-wise. I saw what she intended, and went in low for the biomech’s legs, spinning it. I hit that thing with all the power of a truck, using my momentum and its weight to turn it. The arc beam sliced through the trunk of the first biomech, sheering through the cyborg’s trunk and lighting its innards up like the New Year sky. The stench of burning metal and fused synth-skin was vile. It took all of my strength to keep the biomech turning, using the proximity mine’s beam to slice through each of the thirteen warriors as the sizzling pulse of raw lethal energy slowly faded.
Fate hadn’t moved.
He just stood there looking at the devastation, the biomech corpses twisting and twitching, trying to move, to fight on, hopelessly.
Martagan and I high-fived, slapping palms.
“Teamwork,” she said.
“One gigantic clusterfuck,” I said, looking at Fate.
We still hadn’t found the Neurochip when the facility went into lockdown, sirens wailing, those iron-tinged lights strobing, everything so loud and bright I couldn’t think.
I didn’t think it could get any worse.
I was wrong.
The hit squad turned up looking for Fate.
All we could do was batten down the hatches, sit tight, defend our position.
“Tell me you have an exfiltration plan in place,” I demanded.
Fate nodded. “What do you take me for? We’re going to need to get up onto the roof and grab the sky hook when the Anaconda comes back around.”
“How long?”
“Two hours.”
“You have got to be kidding me? Two hours? We’ll be dead by then.”
“Better hope not,” Fate said.
I hunkered down beside Swann. He didn’t look good. I refrained from asking the obvious. “Anything I can do?”
“You a biomech wiz?” he asked through gritted teeth. He was sweating, pale. His legs trembled. I didn’t think that was a good sign.
“I think we both know the answer to that.”
“Then prop me up against the wall, give me a big fucking gun, and let me hold up the rear while you guys get out of here. They’d need more than one crew to get past me. After that, I’ll take my chances.”
“Not happening, bro. You can’t walk. I’m not leaving you behind. Fate, tell him.”
“We’re all going home, or none of us are,” Fate said. It was the old mantra. We all knew it off by heart. It was written on our souls.
“Very noble. Where’s my gun?”
“I’m serious,” I said.
“So am I,” Swann countered.
It didn’t matter which of us was right in the end, none of us were going anywhere.
We were surrounded on all sides. No way in or out of the lab apart from the main blast doors.
I heard something in the air ducts.
Movement.
They were either trying to sneak someone in or looking to try and smoke us out.
That, or they had a bad case of rats.
Giant oversized rats in the air ducts.
I looked around the room, taking stock of what we had. The one thing we had going for us was that the blast doors were thick. No one would be walking through them without some heavy-duty explosives to lead the way.
“We need to assume the worst, one way or another they will come through those doors eventually, so we need to dig in. Set up effective cover. Make it as difficult for them as possible. Then we need to think about how we get from here to the roof. Two hours is going to feel like a lifetime.” I couldn’t argue with Fate. He was on the money for once. It really was going to feel like a lifetime. “But we still haven’t got what we came for. So assuming it’s in here, we’re finding it.”
“They knew we were coming,” I argued. “If this thing’s that valuable, they’ll have moved it to the vaults and have it under lock and key.”
“Or not. Depends how arrogant the people we’re up against are.”
“They’re company men,” Swann said, grimly. “You don’t get more arrogant than that.”
He had a point.
I looked around again. I knew where it was. I knew where it had to be. It was the one place I wouldn’t have even thought of looking a minute ago. But Swann was right, you didn’t get more arrogant than some of these company men. And if you knew that, then you knew exactly where they’d hide the most precious tech in their arsenal.
It was inside the metal skull of the biomech warriors Martagan had just taken out. I was absolutely sure of it. Sure enough to stake my life on it.
“Get those barricades up,” I told the others. “I know where the chip is.”
I was right.
I lov
e when I’m right.
I pulled the biomech’s head away from its shoulders and started rooting around inside with my fingers, not thinking about what, exactly, it was that I was rooting around in. I felt something hard. The interface. The single part where man fused with machine.
That was where the chip was.
That was why these transhumans weren’t insane. The brains inside them had been wiped of memory and personality, creating a barebones warrior capable of independent thought and action but not burdened by any of its life experiences. It was brutally efficient.
They were creating an army of modern-day zombies.
I pulled the interface out.
My fingers came out of the biomech’s neck slick with mucus and blood. I turned the small black device over in my hand, looking for a way to access the chip itself, which had to be inside it.
I could just make out the metal edge of the circuitry. Using my thumbnail, I pressed it in. The spring-loader popped it out into my palm. All of this fuss over such a small thing. I shook my head.
“Got it,” I said.
No one was listening to me.
The wolves were at the door.
They were at both doors, technically.
I heard the hiss of gas being pumped in through the air vents at the same time as I heard the dull metallic clang of the fragmentation bomb being affixed to the blast doors.
Things were about to get messy.
I saw curls of smoke to my right, seeping into the room from on high. I had no way of knowing if it was some sort of nerve agent that would undo us from within or something less insidious but no less lethal given the presence of the frag bomb on the door and the crew outside waiting to make mincemeat of us.
“Get Swannie,” Fate said. I looked at him as he dropped something on the floor and kicked it into the center of the room. “Just do what you’re told for once,” he barked.
One Man's War Page 3
