Manticore Reborn

by Peter J Evans

  The world went dark. Red snapped around to see Grota bearing down on her, his face a mask of rage.

  She took a step back, giving herself some room, and dropped into a fighting crouch. The iron cuffs on her wrists and ankles were heavy, threatening to spoil her balance. In the few instants before Grota reached her, she bounced lightly on her bare toes, assessing the metal's weight, compensating with a fractional change of stance, before she whirled around to send her foot into the side of his head.

  The force of that kick should have shattered the man's skull, but he barely seemed to notice it. Instead Red found herself staggering back, her toes hot with pain, and the giant mutant reaching down to her head with both hands, thumbs eager for her eyes.

  She dropped and leapt forward between his legs, coming up on the other side of him and shoving him hard. He toppled into the wall, his head breaking more tile.

  It didn't even slow him. He spun on his heels and came after her again, pain and anger lending him speed. She put two punches into his belly and another up into his nose, but she had misjudged his height a fraction. She realised that the last blow had made her overreach herself just as Grota backhanded her across the chamber.

  There was a split second of smeared green in her vision, and then the far wall crashed into her back. Her head went up with the speed of her impact, slapping through the tiles and into the concrete behind. For an awful moment, the wreckage held her against the wall, and then she toppled forward to hit the floor in a rain of green ceramic and sea water.

  A shadow fell across her. Without even seeing what caused it, she darted aside, and Grota's foot put a crater into the floor next to her head. Red rolled over and over across the tiles, splashing, fetching up against something dark that groaned when she hit it.

  Grota was almost on her again. He was too strong to take down hand to hand, Red realised, too fast to escape. She needed a new tactic.

  Beside her, Loman was trying to get up. Red rammed him back down onto the tiles, then shoved her hand into his robe, reaching in the way he had been when her slab of flung debris had stunned him. She felt the warmth of his hand against hers, then the metallic coolness of the object he had been reaching for. As Grota charged towards her she gripped it, brought it up without freeing it from the man's clothes and tugged the trigger, blowing a hole clear through the fabric.

  Above her there was a wet explosion and the sound of damp matter hitting the ceiling. Grota took one more step towards her, his boot coming down against her shoulder, and then stopped. His hands fluttered as he dropped, with the agonising slowness of a felled tree, onto his knees.

  Red got up, taking the gun with her. Grota's knees had locked, leaving him frozen in a kneeling stance. Even in this position, his face, had he still possessed one, would have been level with Red's, but the bolt from Loman's plasma derringer had hit him right in the nose. Now there was nothing above his lower jaw but a ring of bone, the sides and top of his thick skull still upright, but robbed of all contents and drooling tissue down his chest.

  Blood began to soak down onto the tiles, spiralling into the rusted drains.

  Red straightened herself up, stretching the kinks out of her neck and back, shaking the flashing lights out of her vision. She'd hit that wall really hard. Grota's backhanded blow had caught her across the ribs, which at least meant that her disguise was still on. It didn't stop her sternum feeling as though it was knocking loose against her spine, though.

  Loman was trying to get up again, his hands slipping in bloody sea water. Red glared down at him, then realised that something important was missing from the chamber.

  "Remuel," she muttered. "Sneck."

  The knifeman had scampered off somewhere while she and Grota had been fighting. That was a surprise, and a pity. For one thing it meant that the man was a lot more resilient than she had expected. For another, she'd be forced to keep Loman around for longer than she'd like.

  She reached down and hauled the security man to his feet. "Get up, you bastard," she snarled, kicking him hard. He yelped and struggled to his feet, an action that brought him up level with the wreckage of Grota's head, a sight that tore a cry of horror from him. Red felt him trying to squirm away, but she had too good a grip on his robes.

  "Oh no you don't," she whispered, bringing her mouth close to his ear. "You take a good look at that, okay? And then imagine what I'm going to do to you."

  He twisted in her grip. "Please..."

  Red barked out an incredulous, humourless laugh. "You've got to be kidding. 'Please?' How many times have you heard that in this room, Loman? How many times have you watched that muscle-bound psycho raping some poor snecker to death, and listened to them screaming that word at you?" She threw him back against the wall, then followed him, grabbing him again before he could fall. "How many times did you join in, Loman?"

  "It wasn't like that!" He'd stopped pulling now. He must have finally realised how strong she was. "There were security issues, discipline-"

  Red snarled, shaking him hard. "Security issues? Slavery's a security issue? Systematic rape and torture?" Suddenly, being in the tiled chamber sickened her. She dragged Loman away from the wall, past Grota's still kneeling carcass and out into the tunnel. "Get out here, you little shit. We're going to have a chat about your security."

  The tunnel opened out into a long hallway, the walls bare concrete, the floor more of the same green ceramic. Rusted metal tables were bolted to the floor at regular intervals. Red took Loman over to one and shoved him against it. "Okay, Loman, here's the deal. You're going to tell me everything I need to know, and you're going to do it quickly, or bad things are going to happen to you. Do you understand?"

  "I don't know anything." His face was white with shock, his eyes wide. "I'm just a sub-director-"

  Red slapped him, hard, a vicious blow that slewed his head around. "Don't even try," she said flatly. "I'll tell you this just once more, Loman. Grota died really quickly back there. His brains were all over the ceiling so fast they still don't know they're not in his skull. But you?" She shook her head. "Ask yourself how much of your own skin you'll be able to eat before you choke on it, and then decide whether you really want to bullshit me again."

  He nodded, or perhaps it was a spasm of his neck muscles. Red felt her forearm starting to itch again, and decided it was a nod. "Good lad. Now, cast your mind back. I'm not the first inquisitive soul to come checking out your 'revolutionary manufacturing techniques', am I?"

  There was no answer. Red frowned at him. "Let me jog your memory for you. Five mutants: two men, three women? They got into the mine complex itself before you caught up with them, remember?"

  "Yes. I remember."

  "You killed three on the spot, shot them right there in the mine. One looked stronger than the others, so you put him to work as an example. And one was pretty, so you gave her to Grota. Ring any bells?"

  He nodded again, eyes empty.

  Red grinned at him as nastily as she could. "Well, here's the part of the story you don't know. The pretty one survived that bastard's attentions, for a while. When Remuel took her back to the mine she escaped. She managed to get all the way up the hoist tower hidden in a mineral shipment, and she sent a signal before she died of her injuries. Some friends of hers picked it up, and asked me to help them out." She punctuated the words with another slap to his face, not as hard this time. She didn't want his head coming off, not yet. "So here I am."

  "Yes," he breathed. "Here you are."

  Red didn't like the way he said that at all. She spun around and took Remuel's knife right in the face.

  It was a vicious, backhanded slash, sweeping across her from jaw to cheek, aimed perfectly to open her up in the most painful, disfiguring way possible. Red didn't have time to jerk back more than a millimetre or two before the blade met her skin. She felt it part, a sudden coolness in the wake of the knife.

  Loman had seen him coming up behind her. She'd been so engrossed in the security man that she'd not
sensed the mutant readying his blade, hadn't heard his soft footfalls as he brought the knife into range. He'd gotten the drop on her, plain and simple.

  On any other day the wound he dealt her would have had her open, agonised, an easy target for the next fatal slice. Today, however, most of the skin on Red's face wasn't even hers.

  She snapped a fist out and grabbed Remuel's wrist. "Hi," she smiled.

  The mutant howled in fear, realising that he'd sliced into bio-gel, not flesh. He tried to drag his arm free, yanking fruitlessly against Red's grip.

  Behind her, Loman was trying to edge away. Red punched him, without taking her eyes from Remuel, sending him flying over the table, then reached over and ripped the blade from the terrified knifeman's hand. "Naughty."

  "Bitch!" he screamed, a last moment of defiance.

  Red bared her fangs at him. "Oh, you have no idea," she snarled, then flipped him down onto the tabletop, smashing his face with stunning force into the metal. The sound of the impact echoed deafeningly around the hall, almost as loud as Remuel's scream when Red plunged his own knife through his shoulder blade and into the steel below, pinning him solidly to the table.

  "Dinner is served," Red hissed, and sank her teeth into the side of his neck.

  His howls reached a new pitch. He certainly had energy, this one: she had to hold him still while she drank, for fear that his kicks and his clawing would dislodge them both from the steel. It was a long minute, maybe two, before the lack of blood began to shut his brain down.

  Finally, his kicks became jerks, and then random shivers. Red let him free as his heart went into final arrest, the last dribbles of blood from his neck pooling on the steel. There was no pressure left in him to send it further.

  She straightened, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand. His blood had been unpleasant, thin and sour, but a meal was a meal, and the effect on Loman had been worth the whole sorry farce.

  Red went over to where he lay, slumped against the wall, his face as white as Remuel's. She crouched. "So now you know who you're dealing with, and what I'll do to you if you don't help me."

  He nodded spasmodically, beyond words. Red got up, pulling the rest of the bio-gel off her face. She wouldn't be needing it any more.

  The hall and the chamber were part of a much larger complex of rooms, which used to be one of the refinery's food preparation areas. Meat had been processed there at one time; butchered and hung on hooks and carried in bloody slabs to the kitchens. Muscle had been carved away from bone amidst all that green tile, loops of gut freed to slap down onto the shining floor; the glistening, shivering workings of animal life separated from the meat they had once powered and kept alive.

  That had been a long time ago, before the refinery's kitchen had been closed down and replaced by regular shipments of low-grade rations packs. But despite the constant rain of sea water leaking in through the ill maintained walls, the place still stank of the cleaver and the saw. Years of butchery - of more kinds than merely the animal variety - had impregnated the tiles. Just being there made Red's stomach roil, her fangs itch.

  Despite Remuel's blood in her belly, it was all she could do to keep her teeth from his throat, as she dragged Loman between the racks and the tables.

  Awful as the thought was, though, she needed him in one piece. The last of the infiltrator squad was alive when his female companion had made her escape bid, and there was every chance he was still working down in the pit. Loman had already told her in which one - if he still lived, she could find him.

  Getting into the mine itself would be a lot easier if she had a member of its security team at her side.

  The pressure tunnels joined the refinery at the base of the hoist tower. Loman took her there without event and, with her features hidden under a stolen cowl, got her through the first checkpoint. He didn't hold out much hope for the second.

  "You might as well kill me now, monster," he told her, as they made their way through the passenger section of the transit array. "This won't work."

  "If it doesn't, I'll do worse than kill you." Red peered around, keeping her face well under the cowl's hood. She wasn't the only person to be wearing one, which made her feel a little more comfortable. There were hundreds of other travellers in the array, mostly technicians or security personnel, and several were cloaked in the same way. Probably something to do with protecting the clothes beneath, she guessed, if the processing chamber's state of repair had been anything to go by.

  "Threats will only get you so far," Loman replied. "Believe me, I know. And I also know that the guards at the other end of the tunnel will want to know exactly who you are, why you want to go into the mine and what you are doing with shreds of bio-gel all over your face."

  "I'll worry about that. You just make sure we get into an empty car."

  The pressure tunnels were a lot bigger up close than they had seemed from inside the submersible, big enough to contain a number of interior tubes. In the centre were two vast ducts, one set above the other, where rock hewn from the mine walls was transported back to the refinery by the tonne. The passenger transits occupied several smaller channels to either side.

  Loman found an unoccupied car, and Red dragged him inside. Only when it was on its way, internal thrusters sending it along a frictionless rail set into the tunnel roof, did she throw the hood back.

  "This," she said quietly, "is the bit I've really not been looking forward to."

  The security man kept quiet, sitting uneasily across the car from her. Red heard him start when he saw her take Remuel's knife out of her belt, and she gave him a warning glance. "Don't fret," she muttered. "It's not for you."

  "What are you going to do?"

  "Shut up." She dragged in a deep breath, and pulled back her left sleeve. The long scar down the back of her forearm felt more itchy and uncomfortable than ever. When she put the tip of the knife to it, she winced.

  "Oh crap, here we go." And with that, she drew the knife along the scar, slicing deep into the skin of her forearm.

  It hurt, a lot. Red clamped her teeth together to avoid swearing, as blood surged out of the wound. The painkillers she had used there had worn off hours ago.

  Luckily for her, the first cut had been deep enough. She pushed the knife back into the wound, digging painfully under the skin, and then tugged it back. The long, slim tube of plastic hidden there popped into view, slick with blood and fluid. She reached down and pulled it free.

  Loman was looking at her in absolute horror. "Oh, shut your jaw," she snarled at him shakily. "How else was I going to get anything past the scans?"

  She set the tube aside, then used the knife to cut a couple of long strips from the cowl, binding them carefully around her arm before pulling the sleeve back down. The wound would heal quickly - Red's rate of self-repair was phenomenal, even to her - but it still burned.

  The tube looked worryingly big, now that she had it free. Damn, had she really been carrying that around inside her arm since Thaetia? No wonder she was itchy.

  She cleaned it off on the seat, and then stripped the seal, pulling the coating away from the strip of technology beneath. A couple of tiny lumes, blinking away at one end, told her the device was active and awaiting its final command. Red glanced up, judging the speed of the car. "How far along are we, do you think?"

  "More than half way."

  "That's what I thought." She lifted the device and pressed the "send" key. "I'd find something to hold on to, if I were you."

  "What do you mean?" He scrambled up from the seat, his eyes roving wildly. "What have you done?"

  "Me? I just pressed this little button. But when my friends get the signal this thing sends out-"

  The car jolted, cutting her off. Her last sight of Loman before the lights went out was a face white with sudden terror, eyes and mouth open like holes in a plaster wall. Then sparks surrounded him, showering down from the car's ceiling lumes as every one of them exploded.

  Voltage cracked and sparked around
the car for a few moments. Red yelped and snatched her hands back as the rail she was holding onto went live. "Bloody hell."

  When the sparks died, there was no light in the car at all. Unlike the monorail in the Ulai fin, this was a utilitarian piece of equipment, welded together out of sheet metal and braced with steel frames. There were no windows, because inside the tunnel there was nothing to see. Red was trapped in a metal box, hurtling along its rail, in a mining complex suddenly devoid of all electrical power.

  Something had gone badly wrong.

  Red got up and made her way to the rear of the car, working by feel, then found a couple of metal braces and held on tight. That rush of voltage through the metalwork had been quite unexpected. She had planned on the lights going out, but not for an electromagnetic pulse to rip through the refinery.

  If that had happened, then all bets were off. "Loman? Remember I said that bad things would happen if you didn't help me?"

  "I remember."

  "Well, bad things are going to happen anyway. Sorry."

  That, more or less, was when the car reached the end of the track.

  If the power had been on, or indeed any backup battery systems working at all, a series of magnetic brakes would have slowed the car to a halt just as it reached the platform at the entrance to the mine. But the EMP had put paid to that. The car went through the platform, the guard post and the buffers at something close to two hundred kilometres an hour.

  Loman didn't even have time to scream, and perhaps that was a kindness he didn't deserve. With her eyes shut, Red didn't see exactly what happened to him, but she could guess.

  There was a series of impacts, each one worse than the one before. The first was when the car went through the armoured barriers at the guard post, and Loman probably died then. Everything loose crashed forwards to slam into the forward wall of the car. The entire vehicle compressed by about a metre, the walls and floor buckling horribly.

  The second impact was the buffers, which ripped through into the car itself and sent half the seats spinning forward. Red just about kept her grip during that one, but the final crash, as the remnants of the car erupted through the security doors at the end of the tunnel and into the mine's entry hall, tore away the very braces she had her hands locked around. Every part of the car's interior, Durham Red included, went bowling forward in a hail of debris, shattering and bouncing, and rolling to a halt in the darkness, finally silent and still.