Pop 'Em One (Bubbles in Space Book 3)

by S. C. Jensen

  I said, “Price’s pets. The failed experiments Patti told us about.”

  “Is this what is happening to Rae?”

  Bile burned in the back of my throat. I shook my head like it was a chunk of granite. “Not if I have anything to say about it.”

  We crept slowly between the cells, eyes darting between the creatures. The corridor stretched on, branched into more of the same. Hundreds of the creatures had been imprisoned here. But none of them made a move. They just watched us with their pinprick eyes and panted, like simply existing was an effort for them. If I was right, each of them carried a rider like Rae and Patti. Except these people hadn’t been able to fight the program. Their minds were being cannibalized. Their bodies destroyed.

  The bile dried up into a bitter paste that coated my tongue and made it impossible for me to swallow.

  “Doors,” Dickie said as we rounded another corner.

  This corridor was different. No cells. No biolanterns. We stepped into the cool, white glow of hospital-grade, overhead lighting. The walls and ceilings and floors were still made of the smooth black material, but under the bright lights, veins of greenish yellow were visible in the stone. At the end of the corridor, crisp stairs carved out of the same stuff rose to meet a massive set of sliding security doors.

  And they were open. Nothing moved in the darkness beyond.

  Before we went through the doors, I wanted to check my map, to see where below the Creep Stacks we were in case we needed to come back on the surface. I reached into my pocket and pulled out Hammett’s sphere, but when I pressed my thumb on the security scanner nothing happened. Its battery was completely drained. I cursed and shoved the sphere back into my pocket. I tried my tattler, but it was the same. My nerve operated functions were still working but all connections to the feeds or satellites were useless.

  “It’s like being in the Burn,” I said. “What is this stuff?”

  Dickie ran a finger along one of the greenish-yellow lines and shrugged. “Better not shrink my testicles, whatever it is. Or next time you engage in anti-corp warfare I’m gonna have to take a sick day.”

  “Who needs testicles?” I patted Dickie on the butt and made for the stairs with my gun drawn.

  Dickie crossed his arms and stayed put. “Not all of us have a sweet, pink-power fist of doom to compensate for our shortcomings, you know.”

  I stood at the base of the stairs and looked over my shoulder at him. “How short are we talking?”

  “Yours or mine?” he said, grumbling, and dragged his feet along the floor until he was standing beside me. He groaned. “I really don’t want to have to go up there.”

  I squeezed him against my side with the upgrade, careful to keep myself out of the way of his zapper. I said, “I know. Thank you.”

  “Do you really think Tom is in there?”

  All the anger I’d built up seized in my veins and pooled in my legs. They quivered and for a moment I thought I’d fall forward onto the stairs, crushed beneath the weight of all the things I wished I’d said to Tom before this happened. I’d give anything to reel back time and let him take me on that date he’d been pestering me about. To reel it back far enough to take back all of the hurtful things I’d said to him when we were fighting. Even the ones I’d really meant. Life was too short to hang onto that stuff. I wished I’d let it go sooner.

  “He has to be,” I whispered, my voice catching in my throat. I closed my eyes.

  But I still saw his face. Bruised and swollen. His lips struggling against the words.

  Let me die.

  If Tom died, a part of me would go with him. I’d never be whole again. I couldn’t let it happen.

  But I let the words in this time. Let them settle into my bones and harden into shards of broken glass. Shards that dug into the soft parts under my skin and in the muscles of my chest and brought back the delicious burn of rage.

  Price would pay for every mark on Tom’s body. I would take that payment myself, piece by piece, until there was nothing left of him but a pile of broken bones and bits of torn flesh and the blackened heart of corruption that had created him.

  “When we find him,” I said. “I want you to try to get him out.”

  Dickie’s shoulders shook as he sucked in deep breaths, steeling himself for what we might find up there. “What about you?”

  “I’m going hunting,” I said.

  And I took the first heavy step onto the staircase.

  The smell of the place hit me first. Acerbic. Chemical. Like undiluted alcohol condensed into foul liver juices and the disinfectants used to clean up after a binge. The room was pitch black and had the hollow feel of an abandoned warehouse. The sound of the door sliding closed behind us, the lock engaging, our tiny shuffling movements as we came together, back-to-back—each sound scurried away into the blackness and scattered, rushing back at us on little feet like an army of ghosts, multiplying.

  Energy thrummed through my limbs as I inched farther into the room. Dickie shuffled to stay close.

  “The door,” he said. His ragged breathing obscured any other sounds that might be creeping around the edges. “Was that—?”

  “Not me,” I said. “Shh.”

  I held my pistol with my flesh hand and felt around in front of me as I moved forward. Something cool and smooth brushed against my metal fingertips. My nerves flared and I jumped back. No sound. No movement. I reached out again. Nothing.

  “I’m turning on my torch,” I said. “Be ready.”

  “Ready for what?” His shoulder trembled where it touched mine.

  “Anything.”

  I turned on the finger flash and kept the beam trained on the floor. Clean, bare cement stretched out in front of us in every direction. Suspended shapes hung a couple of feet above the floor, swaying slightly, as if in a breeze. I shone the light higher. Clear, shiny plastic reflected the beam back at me, obscuring my vision.

  “What are they?” Dickie asked.

  I swung the light around to where I had felt the thing in front of me. Whatever it was had moved. It hung about a metre to the right of where I thought I’d been reaching in the darkness. But I hadn’t felt it move. Hadn’t heard anything. I raised the beam, trying to make sense of the shiny, oblong bag. Fluid moved beneath the transparent surface, yellowish in the light of the beam, as if it were being sucked upward by a straw. As I watched, the bag slid sideways again, and the shadow of another bag emerged from the darkness.

  “I need a better light,” I said.

  As if by command, overhead lights flared to life, searing my eyeballs.

  “Aargh.” Dickie threw up an arm to protect his eyes.

  I squinted through the aching glare. Hundreds of bags, maybe thousands, hung from tracks around the room, like garment bags at an industrial cleaning facility. The tracks coiled in wide S-shapes over the main floor of what appeared to be a gutted apartment building. At the far end of the room, the lobby elevator remained intact where everything else had been stripped away to the foundation. Next to the lift, on the ceiling, a hole opened to a black void beyond where the track carried the bags in smooth lunges, one at a time, into the next level. There were no windows. We must still have been below ground.

  A bag swung toward me, full of the yellowish ooze and lumps of pulsing flesh. I backed away quickly, my stomach doing its best to crawl up the back of my throat, and I collided with another bag. Dickie spun around, sweat beading on his forehead. Pale knuckles wrapped around the zapper as he held it aloft. His black irises seemed to shrink inside the whites of his eyes as they bulged over his cheeks. He stared at the bag behind me. He said, “Uh, Bubs?”

  Slowly, I turned. The bits inside this bag had more substance than the indistinguishable lumps of the others. These had an undeniable shape. Fingers curled into fists. The crease inside an elbow, a soft belly and sagging breasts. Bits of bone p
oked through the fleshy legs, pink and raw. Eyeballs sank inside empty sockets and the jaw hung open as if the woman had been screaming when she’d died. The plastic had been shrink-wrapped against her face so that it sucked against the bones of her skull and squished the flesh into a misshapen halo around her head.

  I took a deep breath and sidestepped as the bag lurched forward, another smooth, silent step toward the hole in the ceiling. All around us, bodies hung in bags, some whole and others disintegrated, each swimming in the murky yellow fluid which moved as if with a life of its own.

  “Welcome.” The familiar voice seemed to come from above us and below us at once. From the right? The nerves in my shoulder screamed with a desire to pummel the face that belonged with that voice. “We’ve been waiting ever so long for you to find us.”

  “Price.” His name tore from my throat like a growl, and I dodged another bag as I moved toward where I thought the voice was coming from.

  “Dear Detective Weiland was beginning to lose hope,” he said. Then he laughed with a dry hiss, like the sound of a piece of garbage scraping along the pavement in the wind.

  I ground my teeth and bit back a scream.

  “Tom?” I said. “Can you hear me?”

  I whirled around, but neither Price nor Tom was anywhere that I could see in the forest of shrink-wrapped corpses.

  “He’s a little beyond that kind of thing,” Price said, with another dry chuckle. “But I think he’d still like to see you, for old time’s sake.”

  “You said I had a week, Price.” My throat strangled the words, and they came out weak and pathetic. “If you’ve hurt him, I’ll—”

  The elevator doors pinged and slid open like a mouth, waiting. Price said, “Why don’t you come and tell me all about it. To my face.”

  A little orange arrow lit up above the door and pointed at the ceiling. The bags lurched and swung silently past, cutting off the view of the doors and then opening again like a macabre game of peekaboo.

  “He was waiting for us.” Dickie swallowed loudly and took a step toward the elevator. He cleared his throat. “I suppose it’s redundant at this point to tell you I don’t think we should go up there.”

  “Tom’s up there.” Blood raged through my head like a runaway slug ripping through the tunnels. A haze of red fogged in my vision. I shoved bags aside with my upgrade, no longer trying to avoid them, just needing to get to the elevator as fast as I could.

  Let me die.

  No. I couldn’t. I would rip Price to pieces before I gave up looking for Tom.

  “Maybe,” Dickie said. “Or maybe by ‘us’ he meant him and his army of twisted henchmen. He wants us to think Tom is up there.”

  “I have to check,” I said. “I won’t make you go up with me if you don’t want to.”

  “I’m going up,” Dickie said, with a little carbon fibre in his voice. He eyeballed the body bags and swapped his zapper for the pistol. “I just wanted to take a moment to register a complaint with the planning committee, that’s all.”

  “Received,” I said. “Let’s go.”

  We ducked and swerved our way between the bags, and if one got in my way, I flung it aside. I let them blur together into a smear of yellow, not caring to focus on the faces shrink-wrapped inside the bags.

  And then we were in the lift, with the doors closing shut behind us, and the ground receding beneath our feet. My stomach sank into my boots as we climbed, faster and faster, and the lights inside the lift blinked past floor after floor. Who knew what kind of atrocities Price was committing on the other levels?

  When the doors chimed and slid open, the stench of blood and bodily fluids smacked me in the face like an open palm. I reeled back.

  “Holy Origin.” Dickie whispered something under his breath that might have been a prayer.

  I stepped out into a room that looked like a cross between a laboratory and a morgue, and I gagged. Stainless steel slabs covered in chunks of human flesh lined one wall. So much blood spattered the sterile silver-and-white surfaces, it looked like a bad horror-reel set. A woman in a white lab coat with long, blonde hair fussed over one of the bodies.

  She looked up as we entered, and a chill crept over my flesh. I knew that face, though I’d never met her in person.

  “You’re here.” Lorena Valentia smiled at me with perfectly straight white teeth, but the lips curled away from the teeth as if they didn’t want to touch the things. “I told Price you’d come. And you’ve brought a friend. How lovely.”

  I steeled my stomach and scanned the room for signs of Tom. But the masticated flesh on the tables was unrecognizable and the rest of the room was filled with machines and computers and blinking holograms. We appeared to be on the top floor of one of the apartment buildings in the Creep Stacks. A film covered the windows, something which must create the illusion of broken, boarded windows on the outside, but which allowed those inside to see everything clearly. The world outside was a sea of buildings just like this one. All filled with horrors just like this one. My saliva thickened into a bitter paste, and I swallowed hard.

  “What are you doing here?” I said.

  “Well, there’s nowhere else I’d rather be.”

  “I put you in jail,” I said, forcing the words through clenched teeth. “Theft of intellectual property. They sentenced you to—”

  “You didn’t really think I would serve my sentence, did you?” She tsked at me. “I own a multi-billion-cred business, sweetie. People like me don’t go to jail. Though it was a convenient cover.”

  My blood boiled in my veins. She’d sabotaged Cosmo. She’d set the Feeding Frenzy on me when Rae and I were trying to escape Libra. She’d harassed Sal and destroyed his business for helping me. There was nothing likeable about the woman. But what the hell was a cosmetics magnate doing working for an organ-harvesting ring? Rae had said Libra was funding her attacks, but I never guessed they’d bail her out. Or hire her. The scant framework of my understanding crumbled.

  I said, “Where’s Price?”

  Valentia wiped the blood and tissue off her scalpel on the sleeve of her lab coat, leaving a garish smear like an X above her wrist. She said, “That’s Mr. Price to you, my dear. And you’ll see him. Once you’re prepared.”

  She advanced on me with the scalpel raised. Dickie pressed in close to my side, breathing hard. His pistol hand trembled.

  I raised my gun. “Don’t come any closer.”

  She grinned wider, with too many teeth in her fashionably narrow face. She said, “I don’t intend to. I can smell you from here. And don’t get any ideas about those little guns, either. If anything were to happen to me, Price would be very upset. There’s no telling what he might do to lover boy.”

  “What have you done to Tom?” I asked.

  “The question you should be asking yourself,” she said, and her heels clicked against the polished white floor as she stepped toward one of the holoscreens on the opposite side of the room, “is what have you done to him?”

  Each step seemed to drive a knife into my heart. Dread pumped through my veins, heavier than the blood, weighing me down. I whispered, “What do you mean?”

  “Here you are—and I knew you’d come, you can’t seem to help yourself, can you? Always have to be the saviour. What an awful compulsion.” She swung her pale-blond hair over her shoulder and brought up a holographic keyboard. Long, thin fingers swept over the keys. Again, she said, “Here you are.”

  I searched the room for any sign that Tom was here, my guts churning. The back wall held tall cylinders filled with yellowish fluid, similar to the sludge preserving the bodies downstairs. Shadowy shapes floated in the murk, impossible to see through. It could be more bodies. But it could be anything for all I could discern from a distance. The ceiling was domed with solar glass which, during the day, would have flooded the room with natural light. But now, it, too, was a
murky blur. Raindrops reflected the lights of the lab against a purple-black night sky, giving the illusion of stars.

  Galaxies, like the hoary breath of long-dead gods,

  Breathe.

  The mantra of the Old Earth scientists who’d first developed artificial intelligence came back to me.

  And human kind struggles against extinction,

  Futilely.

  My gaze just kissed the bloody masses of flesh on the steel slabs.

  Of stars and stardust, both.

  The immortal death.

  Those scientists had thought their machines would be the next step in human evolution. That man and machine would join to become the next iteration of Terran life. But we’d found a way to corrupt that relationship too. Just as we had the symbiosis with the planet. With the universe.

  Maybe Hammett was right. Humanity needed a good purge in order to save itself.

  Maybe it should start with Lorena Valentia. I swallowed and tightened my finger on the trigger. If they’d hurt Tom, I would destroy them both.

  From the corner of my eye, I could see Dickie’s chest heaving. His eyes darted around the room in a panic. The gun shook so hard in his hand I was afraid his fingers would let go.

  “Deep breaths, Dickie,” I said, and I pressed my shoulder closer to his.

  Valentia brought up a screen and splayed her fingers to project it against the wall. Black towers, barely visible against the night sky. Libra’s R&D compound. My stomach twisted sickeningly. Had I been wrong? Was Tom still inside Libra? A little clock displayed in the top right corner. The seconds ticked away, counting nothing.

  “Your friends are in there,” she said. “Aren’t they? Good little gophers, stealing big bad company secrets to sell to another big bad company. You probably think you’ve done something special by getting inside. But it happens all the time, doesn’t it? Your friends at SecurIntel make a business of it, the data hungry little scavengers.”