by Andy Remic
He turned the ship around with a grind of gears.
Behind him, in the distance, under the magenta and red flashing horizon, the dolphins started screaming.
"Increase the power," said Franco, calmly, a man utterly and completely in control.
Tarly increased the power.
"Increase it some more," said Franco, although his voice had now lost its edge of calmness. There was a crack in the plaster. A beetle in the bath. A snake in his pants... so to speak.
"Increased to full," said Tarly, her own voice wavering a little.
"What? You mean to full full? A hyperdrive should get us bloody starbound, not flounder around in a puddle of piss like a fish with no fins!"
"Yes," hissed Tarly, "but this is a hyperdrive which has been stolen from a crash site and buckled together using zip-ties and spit, then cobbled to an ancient galleon using spit and spunk. It's on full power, mate. That's as fast as she damn well goes!"
Franco stared at his new horizon, which was a perfect reverse tracking shot.
"We're still going backwards," he said, voice level.
"I can see that," snapped Tarly. "What are we going to do about it?"
"Row?" said Franco, hopefully.
"You're all going to drown, squawk!" yelled Polly the Parrot, helpfully.
"We're all going to drown," corrected Franco with a scowl.
"Not me, buster! I can fly!"
"Damn and bloody bollocks," snarled Franco, and ran towards the mast, where he started to climb like a monkey on acid. Below, the hyperdrive engine was whining and rattling as they fought the awesome pull of, well, gee, Franco could see it now and lo and behold if it wasn't just the biggest damn ocean whirlpool he'd ever had the misfortune to lay eyes upon in his entire fucking existence!
He climbed back down, and sidled over to Tarly.
"Er," he said.
"Is it bad?"
"It's bad, mate."
"Are we going to die?"
"Yep. We're gonna die."
"So, no paddling out of this one, then?"
"Nope. Don't think so love."
Faster and faster they went, backwards towards a vast ocean whirlpool more than four kilometres in diameter... and all to the distant, needle-scratching soundtrack of screaming, dying dolphins...
CHAPTER TEN
3CORE
Pippa dropped into a dark corridor and crouched, yukana sword at the ready. For close quarters combat she found the sword more effective than any projectile weapon. Her yukanas were her babies.
Pippa's clone dropped behind her, and they waited in the gloom, tuning in to their surroundings, the feel in the air, the textures, the smell, the aura. Beneath their boots, they could feel distant, mechanical thumps; rhythmical, almost like a heartbeat. As if the Slush Pits were alive.
Pippa stood first, eyes narrowing as she stared off down the long, straight corridor.
"It's based on a grid," said the clone, voice low.
"Any idea where this Pod Vault prick-tease is?"
"At the centre, I think. The core of the facility."
Pippa gave a nod, and moved off slowly, the distant thumping unnerving her. It vibrated through her boots and made her feel a little sick. She reached a set of dark steps and peered down. Everything was lit by pin-prick red lights shedding a bare minimum of illumination, and giving the ubiquitous black metalwork an eerie red glow.
"Feels like the inside of a brothel," murmured Pippa.
"Been in many brothels?"
"You'd be surprised where I've been, sweetie." Pippa smiled. She was really starting to miss Franco, and right now, to have him with her, spade-like hands clasping a pair of Kekra quad-barrel machine pistols, she would have happily let him stick his tongue down her throat.
Pippa ran her hand down the stock of the MPK. It was matt-black, smooth, familiar, like an old friend, an ex-lover for whom she still had feelings. The gun felt totally solid and real in her hands, something she could rely on without doubt. No human was like that. She smiled, a nasty smile. No clone was like that.
Pippa padded down the stairs. She stopped halfway, hand resting against the wall. It felt soft and warm, even though her gloves. Organic, even. Pippa curled her lip in disgust. What sort of place had the gangers built? A living shell to clone other organic shells? The whole damn place was starting to disgust her, creeping up on her like a dark smoke, a mist oozing in off a river of sewage.
She reached the bottom of the stairs, easing herself to the edge and peering into the darkness. As her clone had said, the place was a grid, an ordered network of corridors. The thumping was subtly louder, as if great machines were hard at work.
Across from her, there was a door. She glanced back at her clone, who gave a little shake of her head. Pippa shrugged, and moved forward anyway. Her hand touched the warm metal, which gave a little as she pushed, then opened into a vast chamber. Warm air blew out, smelling of decay, of rotting garbage, old meat, decomposing vegetables, and Pippa stepped in and it was dark, but her eyes adjusted and she could see huge vats. They were low-walled, maybe waist-high on Pippa, and circular, each one fifty metres across. There were thirty of them, stretching off across the chamber.
Behind her, Pippa's clone closed the door and dropped to a crouch.
"What's in them?"
"You're guess is as good as mine."
Pippa moved forward and stood by the rim of one of the vats. It held some kind of green-tinged black chemical soup. Occasionally, a lump would surface, then disappear beneath the gently agitated surface.
"There's... stuff in here," said Pippa.
"I think these are recyc vats."
"Recyc vats?"
"Recycling."
"Recycling what?"
"You don't want to know."
Pippa saw a hand surface, bob for a moment in all its severed glory, then dip beneath the surface again. There came a thrumming noise and a sound like gnashing swords. The surface vibrated violently, then went curiously still.
"Interesting," murmured Pippa.
Her clone came up beside her. "Yes?" she said, with a narrow smile.
"That was a hand. What the fuck are they recycling?"
"Unused ganger shells," said the clone.
"What, dead people?"
"They're not people. They're blank bodies. They have no minds. They only last so long. You know how it is with meat - how easy it is for it to go... off."
From the far end of the chamber there came a clattering sound and Pippa's MPK snapped up, tracking, and it took every ounce of discipline she had not to slam off an ND. She blinked. Huge doors high up in the wall had opened, and she noticed for the first time the rails criss-crossing the ceiling, a mass of mono-track. Some kind of upside-down wheeled cart clattered into view, and swinging from it, like so many slaughtered beef carcasses, were...
"No," said Pippa.
They were men and women, even children, all naked. Their pale white bodies were unreal, ghost-like, covered with a viscous sheen. They swung gently as the cart clattered along the track, bringing them closer and closer to where Pippa and her clone crouched in hiding. They were clamped in tight steel vices with three prongs each, bloodlessly piercing their skulls. The ganger shells were drained of fluid.
"That's gross," said Pippa, standing, gun in her hands. "Just plain evil. What kind of fucking society do you have down here on Cloneworld?"
"And so it is, the base problem with humanity and all its self-centred pious hypocrisy. You think what we do is so bad? Look at your own history, Pippa, look at your own constant slaughter, your endless fucking examples of genocide! We clone ourselves, we copy ourselves - is that such a crime? Never, ever in our entire history have we rounded up millions of our own kind and exterminated them in ghettos, or camps, or fields, or hangars. And yet throughout your history books and filmys, this has gone on time after time after time. War crimes and slaughter - even whole fucking planets destroyed, billions of lives pulped into waste! So don't try and preach
to me about our society being warped or evil. We're just different. And for humanity, with all its wisdom and technology and superiority, what is different is to be feared."
Pippa breathed deep. She looked into her own eyes, and saw for the first time that, despite their physical similarities, they were worlds apart. The clone was alien. The clone was more alien than anything Pippa had ever experienced - only emphasised by their identical appearance. They looked the same, and were genetically the same - but diametrically opposed in every single way. A living contrast. An existence of opposites. An impossibility.
Pippa gave a short laugh. "Fuck me. A potted history of humanity by a genetic thief. Remind me not to get on your wrong side, hey, love? I wouldn't like to wake up like one of your twitching corpses over there, that's for sure."
"You! You there! Halt!"
Pippa groaned.
It was an angry and officious little voice. It oozed temper. It was the sort of voice Pippa had experienced across the entirety of Quad-Gal, usually from behind bullet-proof glass, and usually whilst demanding some small pedantic payment for some unnecessary service by a bureaucratic government company that should have been dissolved due to lack of any real purpose decades earlier.
A platoon of small men emerged from a nearby doorway. They looked angry. Disturbingly, they carried guns. Big guns. Damn, the guns were nearly bigger than the men!
"We are halted," said Pippa, hoisting her MPK and pointing it across the space. She said, "I think they spotted us," as the squibs formed a line and, without further ado, opened fire.
Bullets roared across the chamber, and Pippa and her clone hit the ground, rolling behind cover and peering out to return fire. The squibs stood proud, faces contorted with anger, firing off round after round, roaring. Tracers streaked through the vast chamber. Pippa peered out, sighted, and fired off a volley. Two of the squibs were caught by her bullets, danced a jig on the spot and crumpled to the ground with little sighs, leaking blood. Obviously, the angry little men died as easily as anybody else, despite their awesome, ganger-supplied firepower.
The conveyor belt of ganger shells, clanking and trundling along high above, was suddenly caught in the cross-fire. Bullets tore into unprotesting, unprotected flesh, and the long line of bodies danced and jigged and jerked spasmodically. Pippa glanced up, and chunks of flesh and globules of thick green fluid rained down on her. She yelped and lowered her head, but the pulped ganger shells coated her. Smoke was filling the chamber. One came apart at the neck where bullets had chewed into its flesh, allowing the stretching skin to tear, no longer able to support the weight. The ganger shell, riddled with holes and leaking anti-rot, slapped onto the floor beside Pippa, making her curse and growl, then scrabble towards the right, through hunks of flesh and strands of pulped spaghetti skin. She shifted around the vat, pulled her MPK to her shoulder, and with a grimace that had more to do with hate than was strictly necessary, unloaded a full one-hundred-and-fifty-shot magazine into the ranks of the squibs, who were wearing big grins and, until that point, seemed to be enjoying themselves...
Two, three, four of the creatures were punched off their feet, flailing backwards, blood ejecting and mixing in a crimson spray. Pippa stood, still firing, moving right, keep on moving, keep on shifting, and her clone was firing in parallel, an onslaught from two different trajectories catching the squibs at the centre.
The squibs were ranting, anger-fuelled and foaming at the mouth. They charged, and Pippa and her clone mowed them down. They were punched from their feet, and Pippa coolly changed mags as bullets whistled about her face and head, and above her the empty ganger shells still danced as if in time to some bizarre, charnel-house rhythm. And suddenly -
Silence reigned.
Smoke filled the chamber. Smoke, and the stench of death. The squibs were caught in acts of grotesque impossibility, limbs twisted, bodies holed. Pippa moved forward a little, boots squelching in ganger shell anti-rot preservative.
She breathed deep, and glanced over at her clone. She looked like she'd been rolling in a butcher's bin of off-cuts. Pippa looked down at herself and cursed, lips curling into a snarl. She was soaked in... whatever it was. Covered with shreds of white flesh, and splinters of bone.
The trolley above clanked forlornly to a halt, only half its payload still attached. The angry little squibs had taken their tantrums out on the easiest available targets. Some fucking soldiers, thought Pippa savagely. I've never met anybody so suitable as cannon fodder!
"If they're the trained soldiers, I'd hate to see the new recruits," said Pippa's clone. She reloaded her weapon with a clack and looked around, nostrils twitching. "We've certainly announced our presence, then."
"They already knew," said Pippa, gently. She glanced up at the swinging shells. With a click, the bodies tumbled into the vat, splashing and bobbing, dead skin slick, shifting together just under the surface like so many submerged maggots in a stew. "I get the feeling this is some kind of test. Like those squibs were sent to test us. To gauge our abilities."
"Why would they do that?" said Pippa's clone, frowning.
"I don't know. And I don't like the implication. What I do know is that I need to retrieve this artefact - this 3Core. And all I can hope is it's worth all the damn fucking effort."
Pippa strode forward, away from the vat, which was creeping her out more than she could have believed. I mean, I've been through some shit. I've suffered at the hands of machine gods, medical mutations, government-fed super-soldier super zombies, and a cleaner with her organs on the bloody outside and her heart on a chain around her neck! I've been stabbed, shot, nuked and had implants put in my spine so if I turn on my fellow Combat K operatives, my head will detach neatly from my shoulders! And for what? All for what? To get to some shitty little outworld outpost run by a collection of genetic clones whose idea of a prick-tease is to change shape and copy their best friends. I wish Franco was here. Wish he was here, with his sly humour and wisecracks. And I wish... I wish Keenan was here. With his steady voice, his order, his unflappability. Law in the midst of chaos. A calm centre at the heart of the storm.
"Damn it. Come on."
"What's next?"
"I don't give a shit. Whatever it is, I'll break its fucking nose." Pippa stalked ahead, stepping through the massacred squibs, boots squealing in their genetically modified blood.
Silently, her clone followed.
The interior of the Slush Pits was timeless. The temperature was constant, and the light - its tint and intensity - were even. Pippa felt like she'd stepped into a stasis field.
The clanking noises grew subtly louder.
Down more corridors they moved, one boot at a time, taking their time, checking every space for enemies. They saw the occasional squib, scowling at them from the gloom before running off and disappearing into the narrow spaces between the pipes and walls. Pippa's first impulse was to shoot them in the back, and she did blast a few, hitting them between the shoulder blades, watched them crawl along the floor before giving them a double-tap to the back of the skull. But in the end, she didn't have the heart, and simply let them run off on whatever errands they had in mind.
"You shouldn't let them go," said her clone, glassy eyes emotionless, hands steady on her MPK. "They'll report our position."
"But it's like shooting fucking oompa loompas!" complained Pippa. "If Franco was here, he'd be having a blue frothing rage at the sheer brutality of it! He believes in a fair fight. He was always a sympathetic little sap like that."
"A fair fight? I take it you do not," said her clone, calmly.
"No." Pippa frowned. "I believe in doing the job, and getting the job done. As a very old friend once said - get in, and out, and the motherfuck away. That's the only way you survive in this job. If, indeed, survive we do."
They continued through the near-subterranean gloom. They passed several more huge chambers containing vats of body parts, ready for a fresh recycling. Each time Pippa saw the vats, she shivered. It didn't matter
to her that these were supposedly emotionless, brainless, mindless shells. It was one thing to shoot an enemy soldier in the back of the head, but quite another to watch streams of endless, helpless bodies churned into slush. And she realised: Slush Pits. The place where the dead went for organic recycling. Nice.
After journeying for what felt like hours, with the temperature rising to that uncomfortable level where sweat beads the upper lip and crawls like spiders down the spine, Pippa halted. The mechanical thumping had grown louder now, as they drew near.
The corridor ended in a door. There seemed no other path.
"We should double back," said Pippa's clone. "I don't like the sound of that."
"It's a machine, nothing more," said Pippa.
She stepped forward. On the door was small, white lettering. It read: GUN Workshop.
"A GUN workshop? They make guns here?"
"No," said her clone. "Genetic Urban Necrolatry."
Pippa frowned. "What's Necrolatry?"
"Worship of the dead."
"Sounds... unnecessary. And awful."
The clone blinked. "I suppose it's what gangers do - our ability to change. To die, and live again. Only, it's not really like death. It's like a snake shedding a skin. Death bringing about life. That's what this whole place represents. The Slush Pits are about rebirth."
Pippa gritted her teeth hard, and shut her mouth. Sometimes, it was just better that way.
She reached forward and pushed open the door. In the gloom, there was lots of movement. The room was long, with a high ceiling, and crates stacked high around the walls. Conveyor belts ran the length of the room, and between four sets of thick, wide, armoured conveyors was a machine - an industrial robot, to be exact. It was a ball, about the size of a large groundcar, maybe eight metres in diameter and made from dull, silver metal. It was plain to the eye, no fancy lights or markings other than an industrial stencilled stamp: Thumper mkIV, in dark grey lettering. From the casing emerged four arms of steel, each with a different appendage for carrying out jobs in the workshop, and as crates came along different conveyors, the Thumper, mounted on four large bubble tyres, rolled around at the heart of the conveyors carrying out various tasks. One pincered arm lifted the lids onto the crates and smacked them into place. Its second arm, a nail-gun, punched nails through the lids at high speed, rat-a-tat-tat. The third arm was a hammer, and occasional crates were selected - to Pippa's eyes, apparently at random - and placed to one side on a huge metal plate, where they were smashed into oblivion (hence Thumper, thought Pippa; oh, how those industry types like their onomatopoeias!). Once firewood, the square would flip down and the offending tinder swallowed by a big black tube. The final appendage was a large polished cone; the Thumper didn't ably demonstrate a use for that one.
